The Weakness of
the World A N D R EW W I L L A R D J O N E S
T
he 21st century will be the century
of the Digital Revolution, as the 19th
century was that of the Industrial
Revolution.1 Through the Industrial
Revolution, the machine came to dominate eco-
nomics as ideologies came to dominate thought.
Ideologies are mechanical thought-worlds that
imagine human dominance over reality; they
then attempt to force the natural world to fit into
their molds in fact. This way of thinking and
acting resulted in the shocking violence of the
20th century, as men attempted to conquer nature,
including human nature. These attempts failed
because the real world always ultimately escapes
man’s total domination; it always resists man’s
self-deification because creation is necessarily
ordered toward the true God. Man’s proper—and
so only truly possible—dominion is always an
analogical mediation of and participation in God’s
final dominion. Man can know the truth, but he
is not the source of truth. The violence of the 20th
century was man’s futile and yet relentless and so
horribly bloody rebellion against this reality.
The Digital Revolution is a different, more
ambitious attempt at the same sort of project.
Here, man is building a virtual world, a world
where he is the sole creator. In this world things
do not have natures through which they partici-
pate in the ideas of God, but are rather, merely, the
ideas of men. It is a perfectly nominalist world in
which man holds the potentia absoluta: the abso-
lute power of God. In this virtual world, the logic
of human sovereignty can be totalized because
there is nothing pre-given, nothing resisting the
virtual world’s closed “order” that descends from
1
This essay is excerpted from the final chapter of Andrew
Willard Jones’s forthcoming book on the history of the Church,
The Two Cities.
man. It can be a world, for example, of complete
and seamless juridically-defined private property,
where every interaction is transactional, where all
“places” are under the unilateral control of fewer
and fewer owners. It is a world in which every
individual is nothing more than the “deal” he has
made with the owners of the property on which
he is allowed to move and act—renting from
them his participation in the world they own.
“Rights” vanish here because rights were always
based on the predicament of human beings
sharing a truth-bearing reality that was prior
to them and their ideologies, a reality that they
had to somehow negotiate together, and which
no single person could quite completely dom-
inate. Such difficulties evaporate in the virtual
world. Here, the owners are exaggerated kings of
the ancient variety, sons of gods. They create the
world, order it, and, according to their own inter-
ests, manipulate the fate of those who inhabit it.
The Industrial Revolution began first in a
traditional world that was ordered by custom
and lingering medieval social forms. It steadily
extended the logic of mass politics and mass eco-
nomics into that world, steadily replacing the old
order with a commercial, mechanized order, often
subtly through the shifting of the meaning of
words and the purposes of institutions, until the
vast majority of people came to accept this new
world as social reality itself. Politics shifted to the
fight between liberals, socialists, and nationalists,
a fight that occurred within and never against the
new social “reality.” People came to believe that
anything that resisted the new order was odd
and backwards—even immoral and unjust. This
habituation became so complete that people in
our own day have largely lost the ability to even
imagine a different order. Similar to the peasants,
1
 the weakness of the world
unaware that the sand had shifted beneath their
feet, futilely advancing their traditional customs
and privileges against the burgeoning mass powers
of the Industrial Revolution, we, in the face of
the contemporary politico-economic revolution,
naively advance the protection of “constitutions,”
“rights,” and the public-private distinction upon
which the modern order was based. Now, under
the cover of that waning order, steadily more and
more of reality is being read through the virtual
world. Steadily, the virtual world is becoming,
to more and more people, more real; the virtual
is becoming the measure of the real, the archi-
tecture within which people live. It is becoming
the structure that forms and organizes the world
that they experience.
Within the confines of the virtual, the help-
less individual—who “owns” next to nothing—is
facing alone the creators of the world’s very struc-
ture, those who manage what is true and false, just
and unjust, right and wrong, good and evil, and
who control its rewards and punishments. The
builders of the virtual world need not violently
conquer the physical, truth-bearing world of real
relations. They need only shift social life into
their domain—and allow reality to either assimi-
late into the structures of their control or simply
fall out of view, simply be pushed outside the new
world. Unlike the ideological totalitarians, they
need not physically destroy rival centers of human
solidarity—networks of friends, for example.
They need only shift friendship onto their “plat-
forms,” where it becomes an extension of their
power rather than a mitigation of it. They need
not attack the family directly, removing children
from the care of their parents, as did the totalitar-
ians; they need only let parental authority decay
in disuse as both children and parents increas-
ingly live in the world of the screen. And this is
indeed the path that the postmodern order seems
to be taking. It is the most formidable strategy
for victory that the City of Man has yet devised.
It is a strategy of making mankind anxious and
uncomfortable in the real, natural world—the
world of human-to-human and human-to-nature
contact, where bottom-up power can emerge and
be maintained—and of making us desire instead
the stability, the seamless order, the safety, of the
virtual world: the “peace” of slavery.
Here, then, the final eclipse of the modern
2
political architecture is occurring. The days of the
dominance of the nation state—of ultimate power
being the direct, political ability to marshal the
physical and human resources of large geographi-
cal areas—are passing. Increasingly, these physical
things are read through and ordered by virtual
things that transcend them and connect them in
new power structures: structures that stand above
the persisting, but now demoted, political and
economic forms. The old forms are not simply
annihilated. That is not how history works.
Armies, factories, farms, churches, courts—all
continue. They are just re-ordered as pieces of
something new, as they have been time and again
through history. The deconstruction of old social
architectures is the simultaneous construction of
new social architectures: the inhabitants of old
cities slowly disassemble the structures of their
past to gain materials with which to build the
structures of their future. This is a subtle process
that mostly goes unnoticed unless it finally
explodes in violence. (The Thirty Years’ War, the
Napoleonic Wars, and the First World War seem
to be examples of such accelerationist conflicts,
conflicts that finished in a flash what had been
developing over long periods of time.)
It is fitting then, that the old ideologies them-
selves have become hollow trappings: bits and
pieces of the old structure, now serving differ-
ent purposes in the new structure. It seems clear,
for example, that the “liberal” West, “nationalist”
Russia, and “Communist” China are all converging
with only slight modifications on this same tech-
nocratic order—within which the old divisions
between private and public, between corpora-
tions and states, between the marketplace and
the home, between economic and political action,
between national and international, even between
entertainment and news, are losing their old struc-
tural significance. It is quite clear that the various
dimensions of social life are no longer under the
umbrella of order provided by old-fashioned
national “politics.” Indeed, who could be so foolish
as to mistake our politicians for the ones actually
“in charge” of our social, political, or economic
world? The rulers of the virtual world cut across
all these old lines; and their rule is potentially
more complete, more seamless, and more pro-
found than anything the 20th-century totalitarians
could manage with their propaganda, bureaucra-
 andrew willard jones
cies, and armies. It remains to be seen whether
this postmodern transition can be accomplished
without the type of blood-letting that has accom-
panied similar changes throughout history.
Contemporary Christians are being forced
into a fundamental decision. Will they allow the
Church’s already well-advanced integration into
the postmodern world to become complete, or
will they launch a reform? Will they extract them-
selves from a corrupt system so that they might
turn and convert that system? Will they start to
build again the City of God?
This is not, I think, some sort of hopeless
endeavor. It seems to me that the power of the
postmodern world is ironically being built on its
weakness, on a foundation that rests on sand. The
Church has encountered this before. Power that
is not a mediation of the power of God, power
that is not “undermined” through the humble
recognition of a source that lies beyond its com-
prehension, becomes closed in on itself, justifying
itself through its mere exercise. It becomes a
god. This is all the gods of the pagan world ever
were—man’s own alienated power. The power
of such gods is real, but it is always secondhand,
always based upon a promise to give something
that they did not create or to take something that
they did not give. It is parasitic on reality because
it is not a participation in the divine power that
actually holds things in being.
Because of this, it is never seamless. It always
has a weakness, a gap, a backdoor—a place to
attack and to undo it. This is a constant problem
for the priests and kings of the gods of power. The
goodness in man, wherever it thrives, is a constant
threat to their power, a constant potential rival,
welling up from below as a participation in what
is far above. And yet at the same time the power
of these false rulers flows from the continuing
presence of the good, because the good is what all
desire, and without this desire their redirection
and manipulation of the good could have no force.
What they must do is this: try to control man’s
pursuit of the good, contain it, limit it, funnel it
into particular outlets, particular places that they
have surrounded and that they thus dominate.
But they can’t finally dominate even these places,
because they cannot finally give men what they are
looking for. If they try to, if, that is, they kill good-
ness, they destroy the source of their strength.
Men fight, for example, for the love of their
families. Tyrants throughout history have used
this love to build their power; and yet this love
of family can as easily turn against the tyrant—
and repeatedly throughout history, it has. Love of
truth can motivate violent revolution; and yet as
soon as the revolution settles into rule, the true
believers are the most dangerous, the first to be
purged. The powers of the world are, therefore,
always engaged in a struggle of maintenance, of
shifting love from one place to another, of coun-
tering its attempts to break free without finally
killing it. Such worldly power is always fraught,
always anxious, always paranoid. Such power is
always the master of a half-restive population.
Ultimately, men serve the gods because at a deeper
level they still serve God.
The gods are therefore in their nature cruel.
They hurt without finally killing. And they must
maintain the pain. For example, the mass anxiety
that underwrites the liberal drive for wealth is the
precondition for the power of the men who placate
and manipulate the market. They must maintain
the festering of this wound in society in order
to provide the masses salve and bandages. Such
power tends the wound even as it subtly tears it
open again, maybe in a slightly different direction,
maybe letting the wound heal in one place even as
it cuts it deep in another direction. Such power
demands that new desires be continuously created
even as the old ones are relentlessly indulged, that
relative abundance be played off an ever-deepen-
ing scarcity. This is a downward spiral.
Such power is ultimately self-defeating. The
pagan priests and kings could amass power only
because they too served the gods, whose power
was, of course, nothing other than that of the
people themselves. For the rulers to become more
powerful, the combined power of the people must
become more alienated, more unmoored from
nature, more fanatical because less moderated by
the real, more capable of centralization because
less embedded in time and place. In order to max-
imize the rulers’ power, the mass of people must
be united in an ever more simple, ever greater
and yet ever more false, fear. But this collapses
the free action of the rulers into a single possi-
ble course. The manipulation, the propaganda
(and now marketing), that creates the power of
the mob becomes, in the end, indistinguishable
3
 the weakness of the world
from pandering to it, from placating its hollow
demands. At some point the rule of mass society
becomes indistinguishable from obeisance to it.
Unmediated power is extended in efficacy only as
its freedom of scope is limited: such power gains
more and more control over less and less until it
controls everything of nothing. Absolute rulers
emerge at the very moment when they can do
nothing but serve the mass society that they have
created, bound by the lie that holds it in being.
This is the great paradox of so-called sovereign
power. Its construction is its undoing. In the final
analysis, sovereignty is held by the corporate thing,
the Leviathan, which answers to no persons, and
which devours everyone it encounters. In the end,
power without God, power closed in on itself,
would enslave everyone. But such an end is not
possible.
This is why the move to the virtual is both
the most ambitious and the most foolish bid yet
made for unmitigated human power. The domi-
nation that it advances is the most complete yet
devised, and yet it is the least real. People can
just turn away, just look at each other and at the
world around them, just free themselves from the
power of this most unreal of idolatrous systems.
As the prophets of the Old Testament repeatedly
declared, people need only realize the emptiness
of these works of human hands, they need only
stop and ask “Shall I fall down before a block of
wood?” (Isaiah 44:15).
And this liberation is easier than we realize.
Real people, in their real lives, love their families.
They care about their friends. They want to have
meaningful work that helps society as a whole.
They want to experience true freedom in harmony
with the real world and not over against it. Real
people are not as bad, as shallow or selfish, as
political parties, global corporations, the media,
academia, or Hollywood make them seem. Real
people, in their real lives, like all people through-
out all history, are pursuing happiness and have
a great deal of goodness in their lives. They are
good in their nature. As I have asserted, it is this
goodness that evil preys upon, but it is also this
goodness that provides an opening for the Gospel.
This has been the situation since the beginning.
This is the situation that the Church was made
for. As with the ancient pagan regimes, the power
of the burgeoning postmodern regime rests on
4
slavery to sin, on consumerism, on the perversion
of the truth and the goodness that it cannot itself
provide. Converting people from sin through the
Gospel is today, as it was in the ancient world, the
undermining of the concrete power of the City of
Man, especially in its current iteration.
But the Church must first reform. Could it
be that providence has allowed the Church to fall
into the profound worldliness in which it currently
finds itself so that the reform movement that will
emerge will be a reform not only of the Church but
of the postmodern world itself? Has the Church
been exiled into the City of Man so that when she
is called back, she can bring the goodness that is
spread out in that City with her? The Israelites
were left in Egypt for over four hundred years so
that when God moved to save them, the society
that they built could be a light to the nations
because it had been pulled out of the nations. Its
law, its cult, and its philosophy were wholly just
and true, and yet they clearly bore the life of the
pagans within them and so were intelligible to
the world. Similarly, in the early Middle Ages, as
society descended into violent feudalism it dragged
the Church with it. The papacy itself was mired
in corruption, fully integrated into the world of
feudal power. The reform movement that emerged
did not create something totally new; it was not
a total reversal of the ways of this world. Rather,
it built a reformed feudal society, a society that
brought with it the world out of which it was born.
The Church suffers the sins of the world so
that she can redeem the world. And the City of
God is the redemption of the City of Man, not its
annihilation. The City of God is constantly pulled
into the City of Man, as we see over and over
again, because it shares in its humanity, because it
is always looking at the world, always risking the
world—because the City of God is for the world.
Sometimes, the Heavenly City seems all but lost.
But it isn’t. The Church has already won the war,
and tactical retreats are revealed to be part of a
larger strategy. This is the Exodus story, the story
of the Passover, of fall and redemption, that has
been repeated throughout history and in the indi-
vidual life of every believer. The reform that will
come to the postmodern Church will no doubt be
another chapter in this story. It will not be a return
to an older form. The Church will not return to
the 13th century, or to the Alliance of Throne and
 andrew willard jones
Altar, or to the 1950s. The coming reform will with the beauty of her countenance.
have the opportunity to bring the postmodern ( Judith 16:6–7)
world with it because it will be born out of that
world, and the Church that emerges will not be This is, perhaps, how the New Evangelization
oriented backwards but forwards, driven not by will finally come to pass, how the Church can
nostalgia but by hope. shine out again as the Light of the Nations, con-
Nevertheless, we can learn from previous verting the desperate masses from fear to peace,
reforms. When the medieval reform came in the from slavery to freedom. This is how it has hap-
11th century, it did not come first from above. It pened before.
did not come from kings, bishops, or popes. It
came first from the religious orders, from those
Christians whose lives anticipated most perfectly
the true City of God. High Medieval Christen-
dom was built because the laity founded, purified,
and populated thousands of monasteries. The
religious men and women of these foundations
pursued perfection through grace. Not only was
their example profound, but their prayer was also
efficacious. The cloisters changed the world. The
reform came pouring out of the monasteries as
a vision of an integral life of peace and charity
became a real thing, as grace became once again
credible. If the monks can find peace in Christ,
why can’t all of us? The religious life has col-
lapsed in the Catholic Church. In 1970, there
were 172,000 religious brothers and sisters in the
United States; now there are 45,000, and most of
them are elderly. Perhaps, then, it is not to the
heights of political or ecclesial power that Catho-
lics should be looking for reform, but rather, like
the laity of the 11th century, maybe they should
be building monasteries for their sons and daugh-
ters to populate. Perhaps the Church won’t break
free from the world’s domination until the faith-
ful stop thinking of the Church as merely a little
corner of the world and allow themselves to be led
not by the powerful, but by the religious, by the
meek. Israel defeated Nebuchadnezzar, “the king
of all the earth,” under whose power lived not only
all men “but also the beasts of the field and the
cattle and the birds of the air,” only through the
action of the weakest, of a widow ( Judith 11:7):

... the Lord Almighty has foiled them

by the hand of a woman.
For their mighty one did not fall by the
hands of the young men,
nor did the sons of the Titans smite him,
nor did tall giants set upon him;
but Judith the daughter of Merari undid him

5
 Politics as a
Sketch for the
Church
E D MU N D WA L D S T E I N, O.C I S T.

Fr. Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist, of The Josias, responds to New

Polity’s D. C. Schindler—
  Hans Urs von Balthasar rightly says that every natural reality
is related to the Church as “a sketch for her, an analogy to her.”
All are modeled on and fulfilled in Christ, Christ is not simply
imposed on them “from above.” But Balthasar doesn’t draw out
the implication of this principle correctly in regard to politics.
It is only in Christ present in the life of the Church that natural
political societies become truly themselves, and the authority
the Church has over them serves to keep them true not just to
the Faith but even to what they confusedly know by nature. The
“temporal” and “spiritual” societies are not simply separate, nor is
one a mere means to the other; rather, they regard distinct ful-
fillments, one of which is a participation in the other. Indeed, all
creatures are participations in the Creator, and have their own
creaturely good only through order to His good. This allows us
to explain the relation of teleology and ontology (in response to
Marcia Pally), of practical and speculative virtue (to Schindler),
and of the family and political society (to Andrew Jones). Also
addressed is the nature of authority and coercion. (— Editor)

1. D. C . S chindler, et al . one of the most probing and helpful critics of

the work of my father, Michael Waldstein.2 I too
D. C. Schindler can be said to be following family would like to follow family tradition by respond-
tradition in his essay “Societas Perfecta.”1 D. C. ing in the same spirit as my father3—taking
Schindler’s father, David L. Schindler, has been Schindler’s criticism as an aid to articulating a

1
D. C. Schindler, “Societas Perfecta: Neither Integralism nor
Disintegralism,” New Polity 1.3 (2020): 24-45. [editor: This
essay was abridged from Chapter Eight of D. C. Schindler’s The
Politics of the Real: The Church Between Liberalism and Integral-
ism (Steubenville, OH: New Polity Press, 2021), available in
March.]
2
See, for example, David L. Schindler, “ The Embodied Person
as Gift and the Cultural Task in America: Status Quaestionis,”
Communio 35.3 (2008): 397-431.
3
See Michael Maria Waldstein, “‘Constitutive Relations’: A
Response to David L. Schindler,” Communio 37.3 (2010):
496–518.

6
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
fuller account of the human good and of how
authority is derived from it.
Recently, I was impressed by the example
of such a spirit shown by Marcia Pally in her
response to my criticism of her book Common-
wealth and Covenant.4 “It is my strong desire,” she
wrote, “to avoid an agonistic structure, where it
might appear that I’m challenging Waldstein in an
academic ‘contest’ and where he would quite natu-
rally defend his position.” She wanted instead “to
broaden an understanding of shared issues, prior-
ities, and values.”5 It is in this way that I want to
respond to Schindler.
While doing so, I would like to show how the
fuller account of the good that I will, with Schin-
dler’s help, try to give can respond to the questions
that Marcia Pally herself raised about my account
of the relation of teleology and ontology. This
will in turn help me to clarify a disagreement that
Andrew Willard Jones sees among contemporary
Catholic “postliberals” on “what aspect of politics
is the most important.”6
2. Balthasar, the Analogy of
Politics, and the R evival of
Integralism
In A Theology of History Hans Urs von Balthasar
formulates one of the key insights of his theolog-
ical work: “Everything else in the world is related
to [the Church] as a copy of her, a sketch for
her, an analogy to her.”7 I can still remember my
excitement when I first read that line as one of
the epigraphs to David L. Schindler’s Heart of the
World, Center of the Church.8 I saw in it a key to
responding to the arid rationalism of early-mod-
ern political philosophy, with its lack of analogical
depth. I used the quote as the epigraph to my
4
Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., review of Commonwealth and
Covenant: Economics, Politics, and Theologies of Relationality by
Marcia Pally, Studies in Christian Ethics 31.3 (2018): 354-357.
5
Marcia Pally, “Relational Views of Humanness: The Reciproc-
ity of Ontos and Telos,” Studies in Christian Ethics 33.2 (2020):
224–234, at 225-226.
6
Andrew Willard Jones, “What States Can’t Do,” New Polity
(blog), July 24, 2020, newpolity.com/blog/what-states-cant-do.
7
Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Theology of History (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1994), 152.
8
David L. Schindler, Heart of the World, Center of the Church
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996).
undergraduate thesis, my first attempt at formu-
lating a Catholic vision of the nature of politics.9
In many ways I have of course moved on from
my undergraduate position. But my appreciation
for Balthasar’s insight has only deepened. In the
order of providence that God has established, the
whole natural universe, with all its interdepend-
ent grades of being and activity, is for the sake of
the order of grace, in which created persons are
elevated to participate in the innermost life of the
blessed Trinity. The context in which Balthasar
makes his claim is a reflection on the relation of
particular and universal. It is worth quoting him
at some length:
Just as the Son of Man, in God’s plan, is
not one man among others, an ‘instance of
man,’ but the man, for whose sake there
exist other men, his brothers; so too the
Church is not a community among other
communities, subject to the same laws;
and the sin which acquires its peculiar
heinousness by being the guilt of Chris-
tians is not just one sin among other sins.
Neither is the holiness of the Church, the
holiness conferred by Baptism and the
Eucharist, by the mission of the Chris-
tian, by the indwelling of the Word of
God, just one kind of sanctity among
other sanctities. All that happens in the
Church stands in the closest proximity to
the central uniqueness of Christ; in the
Bride, in the Mystical Body, it has a share
in him, the archetype. The Church is built
on disciples, and even Judas is an apostle.
Everything else in the world is related to her
as a copy of her, a sketch for her, an analogy
to her. It might well be the experimentum
crucis of a theology of history to under-
stand this: to perceive what we described
at the beginning of this book, the culmi-
nation of what is universal, and governed
by essentiality, in the universality of the
unique, which is unique through the
9
Thomas Waldstein, “Unity, Order, and Peace: On the Supe-
riority of Traditional Hereditary Monarchy Over Modern
Liberal Democracy” (bachelor’s thesis, Thomas Aquinas
College, 2006), www.scribd.com/document/32460739/Mon-
archy-Bachelor-Thesis-2006. (Thomas was my name before I
was received into the monastic life.)
7
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
entering in of God’s own uniqueness. And
because this entering in takes the inti-
mate form of the Incarnation, the Church
appertains to that absolute uniqueness,
and the relationship between Christ and
the Church, which is one of distinction
within unity, becomes the measure of
all historical situations in their relative
uniqueness, of every approach or aliena-
tion between man and God.10
I found the same truth that Balthasar is getting at
here—the universality of Christ, and therefore of
the Church—explicated in a very profound way
by Charles De Koninck in his book on Mariology,
Ego Sapientia. The universality of Christ (and of
the Church as His body, and of the Blessed Virgin
as exemplar of the Church) is a universality of
causality. Christ is indeed a particular man, an
“instance of man” in the order of predication. The
universal predicate “man” is said of Christ just as
it is said of all other men. But in the order of cau-
sality, He is the universal man for the sake of whom
others are created (final cause) and after the pattern
of whom they are formed (exemplar cause). In the
order of material causality Christ—as man—is
posterior to the universe (a part dependent on the
whole), but in the orders of final and exemplar
causality He—even as man—is prior to the uni-
verse. De Koninck quotes a crucial text from the
Baroque scholastic exegete Cornelius a Lapide,
S.J. (1567-1637) on this “reciprocal dependency
between the creation of the universe and the birth
of Christ.” God created the Universe in order that
Christ might be born out of it, and He created it
after the pattern that was set by the predestina-
tion of Christ. Christ is “the idea and exemplar
according to which God created and disposed the
order of nature and of all the universe.” In other
words, “the order of nature was created and insti-
tuted for the order of grace.”11
I cited that text from a Lapide in my 2014
essay “Integralism,” in which I first began to use
that term for the school of Catholic political
10
Balthasar, A Theology of History, 151-152, emphasis added.
11
Cornelius a Lapide, In Ecclesiasticum, 24:1, 2 (t. 9, p. 608a);
quoted in Charles De Koninck, Ego Sapientia, in Ralph McIn-
erny (ed. and trans.), The Writings of Charles De Koninck, vol. 2
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 19.
8
thought that had already begun to emerge.12 The
political life to which we are ordered by nature,
and in which alone the happiness of human virtue
can be achieved, is a sign and a sketch of the true
political life of the Heavenly Jerusalem, in which
supernatural happiness is given.
This truth is indeed so central to Christian-
ity that is clearly expressed in the New Testament
itself. The Book of Revelation presents all the
natural elements of politics as being fulfilled in
the Heavenly Jerusalem. The Heavenly City is
therefore described not only as the fulfillment of
all the Messianic prophecies given to Israel (of her
salvation and the salvation of the gentiles through
her), but also as the fulfillment of the vague and
confused political hopes of the gentiles them-
selves. The Eagle of Patmos was well aware that
many of his readers in the Greek-speaking cities
of Asia Minor were torn between their patriotic
desire to participate in the civic life of their own
cities, with their Greek traditions of civic partic-
ipation and their close ties to the imperial power
of Rome, on the one hand, and their desire to
abandon the darkness of paganism for the light
of Christ on the other. As Richard Bauckham put
it, “most citizens of the great cities of the prov-
ince of Asia would have thought it possible to be
fully human only in the public life of a city.”13 And
they were quite correct. For this reason, Revela-
tion shows them that the truest civic life was only
possible in the city of God. The Heavenly Jeru-
12
Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Integralism,” Sancrucensis,
January 16, 2014, sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/
integralism. I had used the term “integralism” (or its variant
“integrism”) a few times in passing since 2010, but the 2014
essay was my first sustained use of it as a term for the emerg-
ing school. Two years previously (in June of 2012) there had
been a conference at the International Theological Institute
in Trumau, Austria on “ The Idea of Christendom.” Convened
by Prof. Alan Fimister, the conference included talks by me on
“Empire in Virgil, Augustine, and Dante,” by the Rev. Johannes
Schwarz on “The Kingship of Christ,” the Rev. Thomas Crean,
O.P., on “Maritain, Journet and the New Christendom,” and by
Prof. Thomas Pink on “Church and State in the Counter-Ref-
ormation,” as well as several talks by historians on the idea
of Christendom in the Middle Ages. That conference—and
particularly Prof. Pink’s talk, with its brilliant solution to the
problem of the continuity of Dignitatis humanae with the Tra-
dition—convinced me that a revived integralism, which fully
integrated the teachings of Vatican II with the previous tradi-
tion, was possible, and indeed already emerging.
13
Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 128.
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
salem fulfils the ancient idea of the sacred city as
the center of the world and the place where the
divine and the human meet: “Jerusalem is the true
Bab-El, the true gate of God, the city that does
in fact construct a tower that stretches between
earth and heaven.”14 Moreover, in the New Jerusa-
lem the ideal of a universal empire of justice and
peace which Rome wished to realize (as Babylon
and Persia had earlier) is truly fulfilled. The lamb/
lion put to death under an official of the Roman
Empire is now the truly universal emperor, who
deals out justice to all the nations.15 And the New
Jerusalem fully realizes, as well, the Greek ideal of
citizen participation in the polis. Early Christian
writers used the word ekklesia, the word used for
the assembly of citizens in Greek cities, to signify
the churches as assemblies of God.16 The Heav-
enly Jerusalem thus combines the imperial/royal
perfections of monarchy and hierarchy that we
associate with Rome with the democratic/aris-
tocratic perfections of participation and political
equality that we associate with ancient Athens.
The “citizens” of the Heavenly City adore their
King-God, but they are also themselves kings
who reign with him: “And the throne of God and
the Lamb shall be in it, and his slaves shall serve
him … and they shall be kings forever and ever”
(Rev 22:3-5).17
Integralism is largely concerned with expli-
cating the implications that the teleological and
formal ordering of temporal politics to the Heav-
enly Jerusalem has for the practice and Gestaltung
of politics in the here and now.
3. Integralism and Theological
Epistemolo gy
I fully agree with Balthasar on the universal sig-
nificance of Christ and the Church for earthly
reality. But I disagree with him about the impli-
14
Peter J. Leithart, Revelation 12–22 (London: Bloomsbury T&T
Clark, 2018), 171.
15
Peter J. Leithart, Revelation 1–11 (London: Bloomsbury T&T
Clark, 2018), 114-116.
16
See George H. van Kooten, “’Εκκλησία τοῦ θεοῦ: The ‘Church
of God’ and the Civic Assemblies (ἐκκλησίαι) of the Greek
Cities in the Roman Empire: A Response to Paul Trebilco
and Richard A. Horsley,” New Testament Studies 58.4 (2012):
522-548.
17
See Leithart, Revelation 12–22, 395-400.
cations of that significance, because I think that
he was not consistent enough in drawing them
out. In his Integralismus essay, this inconsistency
shows itself above all in the counter-intuitive
conclusions that he draws from his theology of
revelation. Schindler summarizes how Balthasar’s
critique of integralism follows from his theology
of revelation thus:
Balthasar attempts to stake out a genuinely
Catholic approach to the political order,
one that navigates between the Charybdis
of modern liberalism, which would reduce
religion to sentiment and the Church to
an “option,” privately chosen from many,
and the Scylla of integralism, which
would impose the truth of the Church on
society “from above,” through the instru-
ments of political power. In a nutshell,
Balthasar criticized this latter monster for
conceiving of Christian existence as some-
thing that can be imposed from without,
ironically falling into a modernist ration-
alism that would reduce the faith to a set
of propositions to which one need only
give assent (and which would inevitably
amount to the mere show of assent).18
This point, he argues, I misunderstood in my
essay “Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Critique of
Integralism”:
Waldstein responds by observing that, if
faith cannot be reduced to an assent to
propositions, we nevertheless cannot let
go of the importance of the explicit, objec-
tive dimension of the Church and simply
advocate a “solidarity with the dynamic
movement of the peoples of the world”
generally in the direction of God. Now,
Balthasar himself made this very point
constantly, perhaps more emphatically
than Waldstein does, but our purpose
here is not [...] to defend Balthasar from
Waldstein’s misreading of him.19
18
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 25.
19
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 25. He also lists various other
ways in which he thinks I misread Balthasar (p. 25, footnote 6)
without, however, elaborating on them.
9
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
Now, I fully agree that Balthasar emphasized the
objective dimension of the Church and revelation
throughout his writings. As I wrote in the essay
that Schindler was criticizing:
Certainly, Balthasar always vehemently
rejected modernism in the strict sense.
He did not reduce Christianity to one
among many manifestations of religious
experience. On the contrary, he put great
emphasis on the historical singularity of
the drama of salvation—the eternal Word
became flesh as a particular human being,
and His death on the cross is the objective
revelation of God. And he was even quite
sharp in his critique of Rahner’s theory of
“anonymous Christians,” which he rightly
saw as emptying the cross of its power, by
seeing the Incarnation as merely making
explicit what is already implicit in human
striving for the good.20
What I failed to make sufficiently clear in my
essay is that when Balthasar speaks of acting in
solidarity with the dynamic movement of the
times, he is not simply describing his own posi-
tion, but rather summarizing one of the two kinds
of Catholicism described by Maurice Blondel in a
series of articles published under the pseudonym
“Testis” (witness). Balthasar writes as follows:
At the foundation of the difference
[between the two camps] Blondel sees
two epistemological theories. Among
those Christians open to the times [zeit-
aufgeschlossenen Christen] there is an
awareness of the interweaving of all histor-
ical reality, from which arises the demand
to take the risk of entering into it through
action in solidarity in order to experi-
ence it in its inner movement. Among the
integralists, on the other hand, there is
the view that reality can be exhausted in
abstract, fixed, and unalterable terms, so
that it is sufficient to act in view of the
right terms in order to move the world
20
Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Hans Urs von Balthasar’s
Critique of Integralism,” The Josias, February 27, 2018,
thejosias.com/2018/02/27/hans-urs-von-balthasars-critique-
of-integralism.
10
in the right direction. Among the first it
follows from their approach that the rela-
tionship between nature and revelation is
also interwoven; there are paths of God’s
grace that move from below upwards,
paths that lead men of good will even
outside the visible Church into realm of
divine love through decisions for the good.
Among the second, revelation is primarily
a system of doctrinal concepts which, by
definition, cannot be found anywhere in
the human world, and can therefore only
be presented by Church authority acting
only from above on a laity which can only
passively accept them.21
Schindler is quite right that in my essay I identi-
fied Balthasar’s own position too much with the
“Christians open to the times.” In fact, as Schindler
points out, Balthasar (following Blondel) sees both
of the positions sketched there as too one-sided.
Nevertheless, I think that Balthasar concedes too
much to the “Christians open to the times.”
“Integralism reigns,” Balthasar writes, “wher-
ever revelation is conceived of primarily as a
system of true propositions given to believers from
above.”22 Balthasar is right to see that one cannot
simply identify revelation with a system of true
propositions, and that some (though by no means
all) integralists fell into that error. But properly
understood, the notion of revelation that Vatican
II enunciated in Dei verbum—to which Balthasar’s
own theology of revelation made important con-
tributions—is not a mean between the objectivism
of those who identify revelation with a system of
propositions and the subjectivism of modernism:
it is, rather, a more objective understanding of rev-
elation. That is, even more is given in Revelation
than reductively propositionalist accounts hold.
Therefore, a deeper understanding of revelation
should not imply less integralist conclusions, but
rather even more integralist conclusions.
In his theological aesthetics, Balthasar refers
to the following lines from the Christmas Preface:
Because through the mystery of the
21
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Integralismus,” Wort und Wahrheit
18.5 (May 1963), 737-744, at 738 (translation my own).
22
Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Integralismus,” Wort und Wahrheit
18.5 (May 1963), 737-744, at 739 (translation my own).
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
incarnate Word the new light of your
brightness has shone onto the eyes of our
mind; that knowing God visibly, we might
be snatched up [rapiamur] by this into the
love of invisible things.23
Balthasar emphasizes the objectivity of revelation
implied in these words:
In the first point, the emphasis is given
to a certain seeing, looking, or ‘behold-
ing,’ and not to any ‘hearing’ or ‘believing.’
‘Hearing’ is present only implicitly in the
reference to the ‘Word’ become man, just
as ‘believing’ is implied in that what is seen
is the mystery that points to the invisible
God. But the all-encompassing act that
contains within itself the hearing and the
believing is a perception (Wahrnehmung),
in the strong sense of a ‘taking to oneself ’
(nehmen) of something true (Wahres)
which is offering itself. For this particular
perception of truth, of course, a ‘new light’
is expressly required which illumines this
particular form, a light which at the same
time breaks forth from within the form
itself. In this way, the ‘new light’ will at the
same time make seeing the form possible
and be itself seen along with the form.
The splendour of the mystery which offers
itself in such a way cannot, for this reason,
be equated with the other kinds of aes-
thetic radiance which we encounter in the
world. This does not mean, however, that
that mysterious splendour and this aes-
thetic radiance are beyond any and every
comparison. That we are at all able to
speak here of ‘seeing’ (and not exclusively
and categorically of ‘hearing’) shows that,
in spite of all concealment, there is none-
theless something to be seen and grasped
(cognoscimus). It shows, therefore, that man
is not merely addressed in a total mystery,
as if he were compelled to accept obedi-
ently in blind and naked faith something
23
Christmas Preface of the Roman Rite, quoted and translated in
Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological
Aesthetics, vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Meri-
kakis, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002), 117,
footnote 50.
hidden from him, but that something is
‘offered’ to man by God, indeed offered
in such a way that man can see it, under-
stand it, make it his own, and live from it
in keeping with his human nature.24
To see the glory of Christ is to be moved by His
light to love the invisible realities of God, and
to believe in them with an overwhelming certi-
tude.25 Such certitude exceeds the natural power
of reason, but it is not therefore irrational: rather,
it is the pinnacle of reason in this earthly life and
a faint inchoatio of the eternal vision of God in
beatitude.26 The glory of Christ is “visible” to
those who encounter Him in His Church: both
through the written testimony of Scripture, and
even more through the unwritten reflection of
His glory in the Church’s life, preaching, and sac-
raments. As Dei verbum puts it:
Therefore Christ the Lord in whom the
full revelation of the supreme God is
brought to completion (see Cor. 1:20;
3:13; 4:6), commissioned the Apostles
to preach to all men that Gospel which is
the source of all saving truth and moral
teaching, and to impart to them heavenly
gifts. […] This commission was faithfully
fulfilled by the Apostles who, by their
oral preaching, by example, and by obser-
vances handed on what they had received
from the lips of Christ, from living with
Him, and from what He did, or what they
had learned through the prompting of the
Holy Spirit. (no. 7)
“ The full revelation of the supreme God” cannot
be fully expressed in written words, because it is
Christ Himself. But tradition—as a form of life
including preaching but also habits of life and
rituals—is able to hand on that revelation in a
more complete way than any explicit formulation
could. The deep impression of the Word that the
24
Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, 117-118.
25
See Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “We Have Seen His Glory: a
Response to a Certain Philosophical Rejection of the Christian
Faith,” Sancrucensis, February 4, 2016, sancrucensis.wordpress.
com/2016/02/04/we-have-seen-his-glory-a-response-to-a-
certain-philosophical-rejection-of-the-christian-faith.
26
See Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, Q. 14, A. 2.
11
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
Church hands down through her life and mys-
teries is not a system of distinct propositions,
exactly defined; but it contains in an implicit
mode an immense wealth of understanding. The
definitions of doctrine that the Church makes
in order to protect the deposit of faith from
heresy make more explicit what is contained in
that deposit, but they never exhaust it. There is
always an Überhang, an overhanging, of revela-
tion that goes beyond what can be expressed in
explicit definitions.27
This account of revelation, which Balthasar
defends so emphatically passim, is by no means
a concession or approach toward modernism.
Schindler summarizes Balthasar as criticizing
integralism for falling into “a modernist ration-
alism that would reduce the faith to a set of
propositions.”28 But this is to misunderstand in
what sense modernism is “rationalistic” (or to
confuse the relevant kind of theological mod-
ernism with modern rationalistic philosophy
à la Descartes). Theological modernism stems
ultimately from Kant, as mediated through
romanticism and pragmatism. Kant’s basic move
with regard to religion was to separate it from the
sphere of pure reason, basing it rather on postu-
lates of practical reason. In other words, religion
has nothing to say about objective reality, but only
about how we are to act. The romantics developed
this subjectivist understanding of religion into an
idea of religion as an ineffable feeling, welling up
within the soul. William James, in his pragmatist
psychology of religion, gives a quasi-empirical
description of this “religious sense” which can
be found in all world religions. It was William
James’s work that had the most decisive influence
on modernist Catholics in France.29
It was this subjectivism that St. Pius X con-
demned in the encyclical Pascendi Dominici gregis:
For Modernism finds in this sentiment
not faith only, but with and in faith, as
they understand it, revelation, they say,
27
Cf. Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Unwritten Tradition,” Sancru-
censis, August 20, 2013, sancrucensis.wordpress.com/2013/08/
30/unwritten-tradition.
28
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 25.
29
See David G. Schultenover, S.J. (ed.), The Reception of Prag-
matism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism,
1890-1914 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of
America Press, 2009).
12
abides. For what more can one require for
revelation? Is not that religious sentiment
which is perceptible in the consciousness
revelation, or at least the beginning of rev-
elation? Nay, is not God Himself, as He
manifests Himself to the soul, indistinctly
it is true, in this same religious sense, rev-
elation? And they add: Since God is both
the object and the cause of faith, this reve-
lation is at the same time of God and from
God; that is, God is both the revealer and
the revealed. Hence, Venerable Brethren,
springs that ridiculous proposition of the
Modernists, that every religion, accord-
ing to the different aspect under which
it is viewed, must be considered as both
natural and supernatural. Hence it is that
they make consciousness and revelation
synonymous. Hence the law, according to
which religious consciousness is given as
the universal rule, to be put on an equal
footing with revelation, and to which all
must submit, even the supreme author-
ity of the Church, whether in its teaching
capacity, or in that of legislator in the
province of sacred liturgy or discipline.30
In the Oath Against Modernism St. Pius X
excludes that error by the following formula:
Fifthly, I hold with certainty and sincerely
confess that faith is not a blind sentiment
of religion welling up from the depths of
the subconscious under the impulse of the
heart and the motion of a will trained to
morality; but faith is a genuine assent of
the intellect to truth received by hearing
from an external source. By this assent,
because of the authority of the supremely
truthful God, we believe to be true that
which has been revealed and attested to
by a personal God, our creator and lord.31
I do not believe that Pius X thereby meant to
identify revelation with a system of explicit prop-
30
Pope St. Pius X, Pascendi Dominici gregis (1907), www.
vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_
enc_19070908_pascendi-dominici-gregis.html, no. 8.
31
The Oath Against Modernism (1910), www.papalencyclicals.
net/pius10/p10moath.htm (accessed January 20, 2021).
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
ositions, but rather to teach that faith is indeed
an assent to an objective truth, whether revealed
in the written word of God, or in the unwritten
tradition of the Church. Assenting to that truth
allows us to “see” the light of Christ in the mys-
teries of His Church. Our assent to explicitly
formulated doctrines is what safeguards and pre-
serves the integrity of that vision.
Blondel shows in his third Testis article that
certain integralists did indeed have a reductive
theological epistemology, founded on rational-
istic philosophical epistemology. He quotes Fr.
Heinrich Schaaf, S.J., a professor at the Grego-
rian University as follows:
Scholastic philosophy can be called the
philosophy of immediate transcendence.
For according to the scholastics theoretical
reason immediately knows the ontologi-
cal order. For consciousness immediately
knows one’s own existence; the external
senses immediately know the existence of
other bodies; and, reliant on this percep-
tion of consciousness and the senses, the
intellect makes analytic judgments that
are immediately known, and are moreover
immediately known as having objective
value in the real order; and, by the aid of
the principle of causality, reason is able
to proceed to investigate the real order
further.32
Blondel is quite right to criticize this, not
only on account of the Cartesian claim about
self-knowledge, but also because of its implied
misunderstanding of the way in which the intel-
lect abstracts from the senses. Blondel’s own
epistemology is, however, no better—since he
tends toward the errors of pragmatism.33 The real
solution is to see that the first beginnings of intel-
lectual knowledge, which our intellects abstract
from our sense-experience, are indistinct, con-
taining many things in a “confused” way. They are
themselves infallible, but the attempt to draw out
32
H. Schaaf, S.J., Institutiones Theologiae naturalis, quoted in
“ The Third ‘Testis’ Article,” trans. Peter J. Bernardi, S.J., Com-
munio 26.4 (1999): 846–874, at 852.
33
See Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., Reality: A Synthesis
of Thomistic Thought, trans. Patrick Cummings, O.S.B. (St.
Louis: Herder, 1950), 389-381.
explicit propositions from them is prone to error.
No one recognized this better than certain prom-
inent 20th-century integralists such as Réginald
Garrigou-Lagrange and Charles De Koninck.
Thus, Garrigou-Lagrange writes:
[F]irst philosophy first grasps its most
universal object—the real as real or
the intelligible being of sensible things
insofar as it is being. At first very vague,
this intellectual knowledge passes unno-
ticed; however, it nonetheless exists, and
without it, no other knowledge would be
possible afterwards. Then, it passes from
being vague to being distinct—from being
in potency to being in act. […] [I]t follows
that our intellect knows directly and
vaguely the intelligible being of sensible
things before it makes a reflexive judgment
concerning the value of sensation and its
own unique character, although sensation
is required (in us humans) for all intel-
lectual knowledge. Likewise, our intellect
grasps directly and vaguely the intelligible
being of sensible things before judging
by reflexion that these ideas come from
the senses by means of abstraction. The
intellect instinctually is a realist; it is the
faculty of the real before being occupied
with beings of reason, which are objects of
reflexive knowledge. Therefore, it carries
in it the sense of mystery hidden under
the phenomena and within the real, which
is rich in a different way than is the being
of reason on which logic speculates.34
Similarly, De Koninck argues that philosophy
is rooted in the “common conceptions” which
human reason forms “prior to any deliberate and
constructive endeavour to learn.” These common
conceptions are the most certain knowledge, but
they are vague, indistinct, “confused.” As Aristotle
puts it at the beginning of the Physics, “But the
things which are first obvious and certain to us
are rather confused, and from these, the elements
and principles become known later by dividing
34
Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., The Sense of Mystery:
Clarity and Obscurity in the Intellectual Life, trans. Matthew K.
Minerd (Steubenville: Emmaus Academic, 2018), 153.
13
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
them.”35 The role of philosophy, then, is to make
clear what is already contained in common con-
ceptions. This is done through the construction
of “proper conceptions,” which only have meaning
to the extent that they remain rooted in common
conceptions. On the basis of these truths, De
Koninck explains what it means to build a phil-
osophical “system,” a practice to which he is
thoroughly opposed:
The distinction between common and
proper conceptions allows us to define
what a philosophical ‘system’ is and,
accordingly, how to construct one. As
Spinoza and Hegel understood it, a phil-
osophical system is one that starts from
proper conceptions as if they could be sub-
stituted for common ones. This approach
has the apparent advantage of a freedom
to which we may never lay claim so long as
we must insist on the priority of common
conceptions. But, after committing our-
selves to the wrong sort of beginning we
can indulge in endless acrobatics within
our heads, regardless of awkward fact.
Definitions now become arbitrary. We
choose our definitions and follow through
by assuming the reality of the definita
we have posited by defining. Now, once
something second is taken as first, we can
fabricate as many philosophical systems as
we please. If, for instance, we substituted
Aristotle’s definition of motion for what
the definition defines and then forgot all
about the definiendum, we would at once
have materials for a system.36
This is, in the philosophical order, precisely anal-
ogous to the sort of “system of propositions” in
the theological order that Balthasar claims is at
the root of integralism:
Integralism reigns wherever revelation
is conceived of primarily as a system of
true propositions given to believers from
35
Aristotle, Physics, 184a20; trans. R. Glen Coughlin (South
Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2005).
36
Charles De Koninck, “ Three Sources of Philosophy,” Pro-
ceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 38
(1964): 13-22, at 16.
14
above, and where therefore form becomes
more important than content, and power
more important than the cross.37
The first part of this claim is a false generaliza-
tion: not every integralist thinks of revelation in
that way. The middle part, the opposition between
form and content, seems like a puzzling appeal
to precisely the sort of Kantian aesthetics that
Balthasar rejects in other places. In reality, form
is what is contained by matter, it is what is most
interior to a thing.38 As Heidegger put it, “Genuine
form is the only true content.”39 Balthasar was
quite aware of this, but for the purposes of his
attack on integralism he chose to forget it.40 But
the worst claim is the last: that integralists think
“power more important than the cross.” No one
can honestly read such integralists as Cardinal
Merry del Val, Cardinal Billot, and Garrigou-La-
grange (or some of the so-called “integralists” to
whom Balthasar idiosyncratically extends the
name, such as St. Josemaría Escrivá) and think
that they thought power more important than
the cross.41 Rather, they saw that the superabun-
dance of truth that the Church communicates to
her members implies the authority to keep them
faithful to that truth, including (when necessary)
use of coercion.
Schindler, to his great credit, is in agreement
with integralism on this point:
Our argument is that the official, juridical,
public, and objective form of the Church is
37
Balthasar, “Integralismus,” 739.
38
See Aristotle, Physics, 210a21.
39
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David Farell Krell (San
Francisco: Harper, 1991), 120.
40
Cf. Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, vol. 1, 451: “Christ, by con-
trast, is the form because he is the content.”
41
The exceptions among the “integralists” whom Balthasar men-
tions would be Ludwig Derleth and Charles Maurras, but
neither of them were integralists by any reasonable definition.
Certainly, Maurras was supported for a time by some integral-
ists for tactical reasons, and certain other political Catholics
(including—briefly—a young Balthasar) were for a time
captivated by Derleth, but no one seriously considered them
integralists in the conflict between integralism and modernism.
On Maurras, see Nathan Pinkoski, “How Not to Challenge the
Integralists,” Law and Liberty, April 30, 2020, lawliberty.org/
how-not-to-challenge-the-integralists. On Derleth, see Paul
Silas Peterson, The Early Hans Urs von Balthasar: Historical
Contexts and Intellectual Formation (Berlin/Boston: Walter de
Gruyter, 2015), 120-135.
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
absolutely essential, and this will inevita-
bly require the exercise of coercive power
in some respects, but this form is neverthe-
less rooted more basically and essentially
in what we might call the martyriological
relation to truth and the reality of instrin-
sic goodness.42
Indeed, Schindler agrees that Balthasar “does not
think through the specifically political implica-
tions” of his understanding of the objectivity of
revelation.43 Where, then, does Schindler’s disa-
greement with me lie?
4. The Essence of Authority
The heart of Balthasar’s objection to what he
calls “integralism” is the violent imposition of
the truth from without, in such a way that, as
Schindler puts it, the one coerced into the truth
can give only “the mere show of assent.”44 This
is not an adequate interpretation of integralists
such as Merry del Val or Garrigou-Lagrange. It
is based on a misunderstanding. And Schindler
unfortunately extends this misunderstanding of
Balthasar’s to my own work. It is worth quoting
Schindler at length:
On the one hand, [Waldstein] affirms,
as fundamental for everything else,
Aquinas’s notion that desire is naturally
ordered to the common good, beyond
one’s proper good, and indeed ultimately
to God as constitutive of creaturely being.
On the other hand, he tends to collapse
the authority that directs to the common
good (and by extension that directs to
man’s supernatural end) into coercive
power. Thus, when he says that the subor-
dination of the state to the Church needs
to take juridical form (which we wholly
affirm in the proper context), he interprets
this simply, and without qualification, to
mean the subordination has to be a matter
of coercive power. The problem with this
conception is not its affirmation of the
42
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 45, note 94.
43
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 25, note 6.
44
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 25.
need for coercion (which we maintain as
well); it is rather its simple identification
of the juridical order with coercive power.
This represents a reduction of authority
to power, and so appears to assume an
essentially negative notion of law, which
is the very hallmark of liberalism. Stick-
ing with the common good for a moment
(because the supernatural good is admit-
tedly a more complex matter), we need to
say that, precisely to the extent that man
is naturally ordered to the common good,
and indeed to God, his being directed
to that good and to God is not coercive.
Coercion, according to Aquinas, is strictly
speaking the imposition of an extrin-
sic end contra naturam. To be sure, man
is fallen, and his sinful inclination goes
to the core of his nature. But it does not
destroy that nature. Therefore, coercive
force will always be necessary in this life
and as a matter of course part of the exer-
cise of authority, and so political authority,
enshrined in law, will always have a coer-
cive dimension. But to define political
authority as the legitimate use of coercive
power is to take the terms set by liberal-
ism as absolute, no matter how much one
goes on subsequently to insist on the sub-
ordination of such power to the Church’s
own. By extension, to think of the order-
ing to grace principally in terms of coercive
power is to define nature precisely and
positively as not ordered to grace, which
is to say as essentially indifferent to it and
to that extent closed to it by definition.
To reduce authority to power is thus to
fall into the immanentism of modernism.45
Now, it seems to me that there are few things that
I have stressed more in my work than the positive
account of law, law as ultimately liberating, an aid
to achieving the common end that we all, deep
down, desire. As I wrote in 2014:
To be ruled by law is to be ruled by
reason, since law is a decision based on
reason. And this will become the Greek
45
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 29-30.
15
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
notion of freedom: the rule of reason.
To be ruled by reason means to be free,
because it means understanding what is
really good, what is really desirable, not
being moved by a passing feeling toward
an action which one knows does not really
lead to anything good. The achievement
of the true good is happiness, and since
everyone wants to be happy, a law which
“forces” one to do good and to avoid evil
does not limit freedom, but rather makes
the one who follows it free; able to achieve
what he really, deep down, wants.46
And again in 2015:
Law aids in attaining the end. […] A little
boy does not know very distinctly what
his final end is, and so he can be easily
deceived about what contributes to it.
His parents therefore command him to
do certain things that help him begin to
attain his good. The rules that his parents
set up are therefore means useful for
attaining what Clarence really wants. […]
Something similar holds for the laws of
human society, which are an aid to attain-
ing its perfection, and the law of God
which [H]e gives all of creation in order
to help it attain its end.47
And again in 2016:
Moral freedom is the freedom from such
error: the ability to know what means
really lead to happiness and the ability to
make use of them. To attain such freedom
man has a need for law, which is “a fixed
rule of teaching” in which “reason pre-
scribes to the will what it should seek
after or shun, in order to the eventual
attainment of man’s last end” [Leo XIII,
46
Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “ The Politics of Nostal-
gia,” Sancrucensis, April 29, 2014, sancrucensis.wordpress.
com/2014/04/29/the-politics-of-nostalgia.
47
Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “The Good, the Highest Good,
and the Common Good,” The Josias, February 3, 2015,
thejosias.com/2015/02/03/the-good-the-highest-good-
and-the-common-good.
16
Libertas 7]. Law is thus not contrary to
freedom, but a great help in attaining it.
The most important kind of law is natural
law, which is “our reason, commanding us
to do right and forbidding sin” [Libertas
8]. This voice of reason has the force of
an obligatory law, because it is given to us
by God, the author of our nature. Politi-
cal freedom is attained when the laws of
a society correspond to the natural law.
In such a case the laws do not enslave the
people by ordering them to someone else’s
good, but rather help them to attain what
is really good for them—the common
good in which their happiness lies—[the
laws] help them to be morally free.48
And yet, the fact that such a sympathetic and
careful reader as Schindler has misread me here
(and he is not the only one49) suggests that I have
not been as clear as I should have been. In a foot-
note Schindler gives evidence for my supposed
identification of coercion as the essence of author-
ity as follows: “The coercive authority of temporal
rule derives from the primacy of the common good,
from the fact that the common good is more divine
than any good of an individual as an individual.”50
The difficulty here seems to be that I name this
kind of authority from coercion: “coercive author-
ity.” But a thing can be named from a property as
well as from its essence, and this indeed is reason-
able when the property is an easy way of telling
whether the essence is present. For example, we
name a certain animal “rhinoceros” meaning “nose-
horned.” Having a horn on its nose is not the
essence of a rhinoceros, rather this is a property
that flows from the essence of a rhinoceros. It is,
however, reasonable to call these creatures by their
property, since this is what is most apparent to the
senses—it is the easiest way of telling whether this
particular animal has the essence of the rhinoc-
48
Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Contrasting Concepts of
Freedom,” in Stefan Gugerel, Christian Machek and Clemens
Egger (eds.), Ordnungskonzeptionen für die Zukunft: Impulse aus
schiitischer, orthodoxer und katholischer Tradition (Vienna: Insti-
tut für Religion und Frieden, 2018), 125-146, at 136.
49
Michael Hanby, “For and Against Integralism,” First Things
(March 2020): 43-50.
50
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 29, footnote 26, citing my “Inte-
gralism and Gelasian Dyarchy,” The Josias, March 3, 2016,
thejosias.com/2016/03/03/integralism-and-gelasian-dyarchy.
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
eros or not. Similarly, the power of coercion is not
the essence of authority, but rather a property that
flows from that essence. As I argued in “The Good,
the Highest Good, and the Common Good” it
is essential to the kind of perfect authority that
belongs to the ruler of a perfect society that it is
ordered to a perfect good: the common good of
human life. It is, however, not always easy to dis-
tinguish where such authority is present. Hence
one of the properties of that authority, namely the
power of imposing the death penalty, is used as a
means of knowing when it is present:
The bewildering variety of forms that
polities can take sometimes makes it
difficult to distinguish between a polity
and a village, between a complete and
an incomplete society. How can one tell
whether a community is able to achieve
all the goals of human society? […] I have
argued that a sign that can be used to dis-
tinguish them is this: the complete society
has the authority to make coercive laws
enforceable by the sword.51
Coercing through the sword is a sign that a
perfect authority is present, but a sign is never
the essence, it is something more known quoad
nos, which tells us that the essence is present.
The more successful authority is in ordering its
subjects to the common good, the more those
subjects will obey willingly and with delight, and
the less need there will be to coerce them through
punishment. Such coercion as there is, when sub-
jects resist authority, is not directed to compelling
a “mere show of assent” but rather to a transfor-
mation of the heart. As Thomas Pink put it in his
profound exposition of the nature of authority:
The state is a teacher on behalf of nor-
mative power and the values constitutive
of that power, and [is] a facilitator of that
power’s proper influence on us, directing
us not just to perform right voluntary
actions but to form right attitudes, such
as true beliefs.52
51
Waldstein, “ The Good,” emphasis added.
52
Thomas Pink, “Suarez on Authority as Coercive Teacher,”
Quaestio 18 (2018): 451-486, at 467.
What, then, is the essence of authority, if coercion
is merely a property that flows from that essence?
The most general notion of authority is of the
relation that follows on being a principle, origin,
or source (an auctor). Since what flows from a
source depends on it in some way, the source is in
this respect superior and the one originated infe-
rior. This relation of superiority and inferiority is
“authority” (auctoritas) in the broadest sense. Now,
there are three main ways in which one person
can relate as a principle or origin to another, and
therefore three main kinds of authority: natural
authority, which follows from efficient causality
(as God is the cause of His creatures); intellec-
tual authority, which follows from one leading the
mind of another to a knowledge of the truth (and
thus being the principle of their knowledge); and,
finally, moral authority, when one moves the will
of another to choose a certain good as an end.53
It is the third sense, moral authority, which
is only relevant sense of authority here. Moral
authority is a relation between persons. It is, to
use the traditional juridical language, a relation of
a ruler to a subject. This relation is totally derived
from the nature of the good. It is only the attrac-
tive power of the good that can move the free will.
A ruler can only “move” the will of a subject by
turning the subject’s attention toward the good,
or by removing obstacles, so that the intrinsic
attraction of the good can attract the will. If the
good did not have any intrinsic power of attrac-
tion no one could move the will of anyone else
toward it. They could only give an extrinsic motive
for pursuing the good (desire of reward or fear
of punishment).54 But, in reality, what the ruler
does is command the subject to turn toward the
good, so that the subject’s own heart is affected
by the intrinsic desirability of the good. This is
why authority, properly speaking, must be a rela-
tion between persons. Only a person can know
the good as good, because it is the good known
as good that is the cause of elicited desire. There-
53
See Henri Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy, vol. III, Moral Phi-
losophy, trans. J. P. E. O’Hanley (Charlottetown: St. Dunstan’s
University, 1949), §1037.
54
This is the Hobbesian view, which Michael Hanby unjustly
attributes to integralists. In fact, as Thomas Pink shows at great
length, Hobbes’s view is the direct opposite of the scholastic
view (which integralists follow), and was developed in polem-
ical opposition to the scholastic view. See Pink, “Suarez on
Authority.”
17
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
fore, one cannot have authority in the strict sense
over animals and other sub-rational beings, but
only dominion.55
Since the relation of ruler to subject is a rela-
tion of a superior to an inferior, the good from
which a ruler derives authority must be a common
good, a good common to the ruler and the subject.
If it were merely the private good of the ruler, the
relation would be tyrannical. If it were merely the
private good of the subject the ruler would not
be superior to the subject with respect to it. Only
a common good, a good that is shared without
being divided or diminished, and which both
ruler and subject pursue as an end, can be the
source of the relation of authority. It can be this
source because while it is a fully personal good,
a good of those who participate in it, it is not
ordered to them as though they were its end, but
they, rather, are ordered to it. Those who share in
a common good relate to it in a way similar to the
way a part relates to a whole. The common good
is therefore superior to any merely private good,
and all merely private goods are ordered to it.
Therefore, the ruler, who is charged with order-
ing all the subordinate ends in a complex society
to the overarching common good, is superior to
the subjects whom he orders.
I am fully in agreement with Schindler here,
who in his brilliant essay “Liberalism, Religious
Freedom, and the Common Good” shows the pri-
ority and superiority of the common good from
the axiom that what is in potency can only be
reduced to actuality by what is already in actuality:
In classical thought, it is the prior reality
of an actual common good that enables
the joining together of two or more agents
into a genuine community, as a whole
greater than the sum of its parts. It is met-
aphysically impossible for the common
good, and therefore the community,
simply to result from the coming together
of individual agents with their particu-
lar interests, because, as Aquinas puts it,
“nothing can be reduced from potentiality
to actuality, except by something in a state
of actuality.” The individuals can have a
real potential for community only if the
55
See Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy, vol. III, §§1039, 1037.
18
good that brings them together precedes
them in reality as already given.56
The common good is a universal cause in the
order of final causality. It cannot therefore simply
result from the particular causality of particular
participants—however much their commitment
to it is a sine qua non of its realization. The cau-
sality of the common good is rather derived from
God, who is the ultimate common good, in which
all other goods participate. The relation of supe-
riority that a ruler has over subjects is therefore
derived from the fact that the common good is
“more divine” than the particular goods that are
ordered to it. The authority of the ruler is there-
fore derived from God.
Authority is primarily a relation of persons.
But it follows from the essence of this relation
that the ruler has a certain power over the subject,
a faculty of moving the subject by commands.57
This power can itself be called “authority” by an
analogy of attribution. Authority in this analo-
gous sense is the faculty of commanding subjects,
so that they are obliged in conscience to obey.58
Such an obligation can only come from God, since
only God can bind consciences. So, again, we can
see that authority (even in the analogous sense of
a faculty of command) is derived from God.
The power of command that rulers have over
subjects is a power of liberating them, so that they
can attain their end. As Augusto Del Noce puts it:
[T]he etymology of authority includes
the idea that humanitas is fulfilled in man
when a principle of non-empirical nature
frees him from a state of subjection and
leads him to his proper end, as a rational
and moral being. Man’s freedom, as power
of attention and not of creation, consists in
his capacity to subordinate himself to this
higher principle of liberation and be freed
56
D. C. Schindler, “Liberalism, Religious Freedom, and the
Common Good: The Totalitarian Logic of Self-Limitation,”
Communio 40.2 (2013): 577-615, at 592.
57
See Ricardo Calleja, “Imperare aude! Dare to command!” Ius
& Iustitium, October 20, 2020, iusetiustitium.com/imperare-
aude-dare-to-command.
58
Cf. Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister, Integralism: A Manual of
Catholic Philosophy (Neunkirchen-Seelscheid: Editiones Scho-
lasticae, 2020), 32-33.
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
from the pressures from below.59
There is however a difficulty involved in liberation
from “the pressures below.” Because of the com-
plexity of human nature, which attains to spiritual
knowledge only through sense-knowledge, which
can make lesser goods appear greater because
they are (as it were) “closer,” and on account of the
wound of original sin, human beings often resist
being liberated from disordered attachment to
lesser ends. To quote Charles De Koninck’s mas-
terful exposition of the problem:
The union of the intellectual nature and
sensible nature makes man subject to a
certain contrariety. Our sensible nature
bears us toward the sensible and private
good, our intellectual nature has for its
object the universal and the good under
the very notion of good, which is found
principally in the common good. But, in
us, the sensitive life is primary; we can
only attain the acts of reason by passing
through the senses which, in this respect,
play the role of principles. So long as a man
is not rectified by the cardinal virtues, he
is principally drawn toward the sensible
good against the good of intelligence. […]
Most men follow the inclination to the
sensible good and allow themselves to be
led by it against the order of reason.60
The cardinal virtues can only be acquired by
habituation. Therefore, the ruler must coerce
those subjects who resist his commands by
inflicting punishment on them at the level of sen-
sible goods. If he did not, most of his subjects
would not attain to a full participation in their
common good. Hence the power of coercion is a
property of authority that flows from its essence.
An authority that did not have this power would
be imperfect, and inefficacious in attaining its
end. Just as a rhinoceros that did not have a horn
would be an imperfect rhinoceros, or a man who
did not have the power of ridicule, which flows
from the rational essence of humanity, would be
59
Augusto Del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, trans. Carlo Lan-
cellotti (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014),
189-190.
60
De Koninck, Ego Sapientia, 25.
suffering from an imperfection.61
Authority can only exist when there is a ruler
who has the care of a common good and a subject
who is capable of participating in that common
good. Thomas Pink’s great breakthrough in the
interpretation of Dignitatis humanæ came from
seeing how the teaching of that document follows
from this truth. The temporal power does not
have immediate care of the supernatural common
good of grace. It cannot, therefore, coerce its sub-
jects to acts that are directly concerned with that
supernatural common good—acts of faith, hope,
and supernatural love, for instance—unless it
is acting as an agent of the spiritual power. The
spiritual power can coerce its own subjects with
respect to the supernatural good (handing here-
tics over to the temporal power to be burned, etc.),
but it cannot compel those who do not already
share in the supernatural common good. It cannot
compel the unbaptized. The unbaptized cannot be
coerced into Baptism, because there is no princi-
ple in them that would already make them capable
of participating in the common good of grace.
The attempt to force someone to accept Baptism
would therefore be violent rather than liberating.62
5. Temp oral and Spiritual
Schindler takes issue with my use of the tradi-
tional terminology of “temporal” and “spiritual”
to talk about the two authorities. “Is nature not
spiritual?” he asks, rhetorically. Obviously, it is.
To call temporal authority “temporal” is not to
deny that it is spiritual, but rather to point to the
fact that it belongs to the saeculum, this passing
age. Temporal authorities are temporary, they will
be superseded by the Second Coming of Christ.
61
And this is not at all contrary to saying that in Heaven there
will be no coercion even though there will be the fullest perfec-
tion of authority. In Heaven there will also be no ridicule, for
there will be nothing ridiculous, and this is precisely because
reason (of which the ability to ridicule is a property) will have
reached its fullest perfection in everyone at once. (On the con-
tribution of the power of ridicule to human happiess in this life,
see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1128a.)
62
See Thomas Pink, “What is the Catholic doctrine of religious
liberty?,” www.academia.edu/639061/What_is_the_Catholic_
doctrine_of_religious_liberty (accessed January 24th, 2021).
See also Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Religious Liberty
and Tradition II,” The Josias, January 1, 2015, thejosias.
com/2015/01/01/vatican-ii-and-religious-liberty-ii.
19
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
The traditional terminology can be confusing
because it is not disjunctive. One would expect
the distinction to be either “temporal vs. eternal”
or “corporeal vs. spiritual.” But neither of those
disjunctive distinctions would be as adequate as
the traditional, non-disjunctive terminology to
describe the dynamic relation of the two authori-
ties in this strange interim between the Ascension
and the Second Coming.
The problem of the relation of temporal and
spiritual goes back to the beginning of Christi-
anity.63 As St. Paul writes to the Corinthians,
the Gospel of the Cross is “a scandal to the Jews
and folly to the pagans” (1 Cor 1:23). The Jews
were expecting the Christ to restore the Davidic
Kingdom, overthrow the Romans and Herodi-
ans, and establish a universal kingdom of peace.
Even with the prophecies of the suffering servant,
a new David executed as a criminal is a stum-
bling block. In accusing Jesus before Pilate, the
Jews say “anyone who makes himself out to be a
king is challenging Caesar” ( John 19:12). If Jesus
were really the new David, would He not indeed
challenge and defeat Caesar? But to Pilate, the
pagan official, Jesus’s wisdom is unintelligible.
“My Kingdom is not of this world,” says Jesus
( John 18:36), and Pilate is puzzled, “ Then you
are a king?” he asks ( John 18:37). To the Romans
there was no distinction between “religion” and
“politics” (such as moderns would make) nor
between “spiritual” and “temporal” power (such as
the Catholic tradition would make); the worship
of the gods was one of the main elements of the
common good, and like others of its elements was
directed by the ruler. Indeed, as Schindler rightly
points out, it was the primary thing that the ruler
ordered: “the very establishment and living out of
the daily life of the polis in Greece and Rome was
essentially and thoroughly what one would today
call ‘religious’ activity.”64
In the following centuries, Christians contin-
ued to be a puzzle to the Roman authorities, who
could not understand why they were unwilling to
63
The following three paragraphs are adapted from my essay
“Spiritual Ends and Temporal Power: An Integralist Reading
of The City of God,” in Boleslaw Z. Kabala, Ashleen Mencha-
ca-Bagnulo, and Nathan Pinkowski (eds.), Augustine in a Time
of Crisis: Politics and Religion Contested (London: Palgrave Mac-
Millan, forthcoming).
64
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 32.
20
give divine honors to the Emperor, even though
they claimed to be obedient imperial subjects.65
After the conversion of Constantine, this puzzle
called for even more reflection. Would Christian-
ity be able to fulfill the function of traditional civil
religion, ensuring the prosperity of the Empire?
Some Christians (for example, Eusebius of Cae-
sarea) thought so.66 But the sack of Rome by the
Visigoths in the year 410 seemed to refute this idea.
Conservative pagan aristocrats argued that the
Christian God was clearly unable or unwilling to
protect the city in which he was now honored, and
therefore a return to the gods of their ancestors was
necessary.67 It was to this argument that Augustine
was responding in The City of God. The City of God
came to be the key authority in Christian reflection
about the relation of spiritual and temporal power.
In the Middle Ages this was the central political
debate. What does it mean to render unto Caesar
the things that are Caesar’s when rulers are Chris-
tians? And how do Christian temporal rulers relate
to the hierarchy of the Church that Christ founded
on the rock who is Peter?
From Pope St. Gelasius I (reigned 492-496)
to the popes of the High Middle Ages, an inter-
pretation of The City of God was developed into
a doctrine of a strong subordination of the tem-
poral to the spiritual, a doctrine to which Msgr.
Henri-Xavier Arquillière gave the name which
was the title of his famous 1933 book: Polit-
ical Augustinianism.68 In the introduction to
the second edition of Political Augustinianism,
Arquillière raises a problem of continuity that
he sees between the medieval doctrine and the
doctrine of modern popes such as Leo XIII. He
juxtaposes two quotations. The first is Pope St.
Gregory VII’s second excommunication of Henry
IV in the 11th century:
Proceed now, I beg, O fathers and most
holy princes [he is addressing the Apos-
65
See T. D. Barnes, “Legislation against the Christians,” The
Journal of Roman Studies 58 (1968): 32-50; W. H. C Frend, Mar-
tyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church: A Study of Conflict
from the Maccabees to Donatus (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2014).
66
See Eusebius, Life of Constantine, trans. Averil Cameron and
Stuart Hall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
67
See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2000), ch. 25.
68
H.-X. Arquillière, L’augustinisme politique: Essai sur la formation
des théories politiques du moyen âge (Paris: Vrin, 1975).
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
tles Peter and Paul], in such way that all
the world may learn and know that, if ye
can bind and loose in Heaven, so ye can
on earth take away empires, kingdoms,
principalities, duchies, margravates, coun-
ties and all possessions of men, and grant
them to any man ye please according to his
merits. For often have ye taken away patri-
archates, primateships, archbishoprics and
bishoprics from the wicked and unwor-
thy and given them to devout men. And
if ye judge spiritual offices what are we to
believe of your power in secular ones?69
The second is Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Immor-
tale Dei in the 19th century:
The Almighty, therefore, has given the
charge of the human race to two powers,
the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one
being set over divine, and the other over
human, things. Each in its kind is supreme,
each has fixed limits within which it is
contained, limits which are defined by the
nature and special object of the province
of each.70
Arquillière comments on these two texts as
follows:
On the one hand, the Pope seems to have
secular powers at his disposal. The natural
law of the State, which existed before the
Church, founded on the original demands
of human nature, independent and sov-
ereign in its domain, seems completely
unknown, absorbed into ecclesiastical
law. On the other hand, this fundamen-
tal law, upon which both ancient and
modern States rest, is asserted unequivo-
cally. Clearly between the two views of the
Papacy revealed by these essential state-
ments, there is a deep gulf, a discrepancy,
69
Erich Casper (ed.), Das Register Gregors VII., Monumenta Ger-
manica Historiae: Epistulae, vol. 2, fasc. 2 (Berlin: 1920), 487;
translation following Ernest F. Henderson, Select Historical
Documents of the Middle Ages (London: George Bell and Sons,
1896), 391; cf., Arquillière, L’augustinisme politique, 22-23.
70
Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, §13; Arquillière, L’augustinisme poli-
tique, 23.
and even an apparent contradiction.71
Indeed, Arquillière argues that the tension already
exists between St. Gelasius I, on the one hand,
and St. Gregory VII on the other:
The very term used by Gelasius is signif-
icant: mundus hic, this world as it appears
to him, a mixture of Catholic, Arian, and
pagan peoples. Later, we will only see the
Church: it will fill the whole horizon.
Kings and emperors will be in the Church.
It will no longer be a differentiated world,
subject to essentially different powers: it
will be the same society governed by often
competing powers, united in the same
faith and subordinated to the same reli-
gious end.72
But the opposition that Arquillière thinks he sees
between the various popes is entirely illusory. It
appears that Gregory VII sees one single commu-
nity, the Church or Christendom in which there
are two functionally distinct powers—whereas
Leo XIII sees two relatively complete communi-
ties, Church and state (and something analogous
is true, mutatis mutandis, of St. Gelasius I). But
what Arquillière misses is the dynamic relation
between temporal and spiritual that changes
the more the temporal is incorporated into the
spiritual. Leo XIII goes on to say that between
the two powers there ought to be “a certain orderly
connection, which may be compared to the union
of the soul and body in man.”73 The more this
soul-body union is realized—the more that the
Church incorporates all peoples in herself—the
less state and Church will relate to each other
as two relatively complete communities, and the
more there will simply be one community, the
Church, with two functionally distinct powers:
the auctoritas sacrata pontificum, and the regalis
potestas. Hence Boniface VIII can write: “We are
informed by the texts of the gospels that in this
Church and in its power are two swords; namely,
the spiritual and the temporal.”74
71
Arquillière, L’augustinisme politique, 23.
72
Arquillière, L’augustinisme politique, 121.
73
Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, §14.
74
Boniface VIII, Unam sanctam. I would therefore revise my crit-
icism of the Laval School Thomists in the second version of my
21
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
To the extent that the world remains unbap-
tized, the temporal power has an authority
(deriving from the natural common good) over
persons who are not subject to spiritual authority.
But to the extent that the Church is successful in
baptizing all nations, they are incorporated into
her as the true societas perfecta.75
Nevertheless, within this societas perfecta the
temporal power is not simply absorbed into the
spiritual power. Why not? Because of the wounds
of sin, it would be dangerous for spiritual rulers
to have such direct concern for temporal affairs.
Hence, St. Gelasius writes in Tractate IV:
It happened before the coming of Christ
that certain men, though still engaged in
carnal activities, were symbolically both
kings and priests, and sacred history
tells us that Melchizedek was such a
one (cf. Gen 14:18). The devil also imi-
tated this among his own people, for he
always strives in a spirit of tyranny to
claim for himself what pertains to divine
worship, and so pagan emperors were
called supreme pontiffs. But when he
came who was true King and true Priest,
the emperor no longer assumed the title
of priest, nor did the priest claim the
royal dignity—though the members of
him who was true King and true Priest,
through participation in his nature, may
be said to have received both qualities in
their sacred nobility so that they consti-
tute a race at once royal and priestly. For
Christ, mindful of human frailty, regu-
lated with an excellent disposition what
pertained to the salvation of his people.
Thus he distinguished between the offices
of both powers according to their own
“Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy” (see Schindler, “Societas
Perfecta,” 28). Grenier’s account of the relation of Church and
state is unproblematic, if one takes it not as a static account,
valid for all times, but rather as an account of the way in which
Church and state relate when the state has not yet been fully
incorporated into Christendom. De Koninck’s account in the
1940s is similarly unproblematic. The one problem comes in
De Koninck’s hasty and ill-considered response to Dignitatis
humanæ in a number of talks in the 1960s. In those talks he
lamentably abandoned some of the key integralist theses that
he had defended in On the Primacy of the Common Good.
75
See Crean and Fimister, Integralism, chs. 5, 6, 11.
22
proper activities and separate dignities,
wanting his people to be saved by health-
ful humility and not carried away again by
human pride, so that Christian emperors
would need priests for attaining eternal
life, and priests would avail themselves
of imperial regulations in the conduct of
temporal affairs. In this fashion spiritual
activity would be set apart from worldly
encroachments and the “soldier of God”
(2 Tim 2:4) would not be involved in
secular affairs, while on the other hand he
who was involved in secular affairs would
not seem to preside over divine matters.
Thus the humility of each order would
be preserved, neither being exalted by the
subservience of the other, and each pro-
fession would be especially fitted for its
appropriate functions.76
For fallen men, the administration of temporal
affairs is not only a burden, but also a tempta-
tion. The administration of material wealth and
power has a fatal attraction for fallen man’s libido
dominandi.
Schindler sees a paradox in the distinction
between the two powers:
[O]n the one hand, Waldstein affirms that
the division of orders […] is due to sin,
so that if man had not fallen “there would
be no need to distinguish them.” On the
other hand, he says that hierarchy, which
implies a lower and a higher, is essentially
good, and that there is a natural distinc-
tion, as it were, between the temporal and
the spiritual.77
But there is no real difficulty here. Distinction
and hierarchy of higher and lower are indeed
essentially good. Goodness, after all, consists in
mode, species, and order.78 But what is order?
Order is the relation of priority and posteriority
among many with respect to one principle or end.79
76
Gelasius, Tractate IV, in Hugo Rahner, S.J., Church and State
in Early Christianity, trans. Leo Donald Davis, S.J. (San Fran-
cisco: Ignatius Press, 1992), 177-178.
77
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 32.
78
Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiæ, Ia, Q. 5, A. 5.
79
Cf. Ian Bothur, “Is Man an Individual?” The Josias, February 26,
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
The beauty of order consists largely in its unity;
that is, that all are brought back to one beginning
or one end. So, for example, in a political commu-
nity there are painters, sculptors, etc. who make
beautiful works of art. Their art is good in itself
and it is subordinated to the common good of the
community. And precisely because it is subordi-
nated to that overarching good, the activities of
artists are subject to the authority of the rulers
of the community, who regulate and direct them.
It would be absurd to demand that there be a
supreme “artistic authority” subject to political
authority only ratione peccati. There is nothing
in the administration of artistic affairs that
poses a danger to the proper virtue of a temporal
ruler. Had there been no sin, there would have
been nothing in the administration of temporal
affairs dangerous to spiritual rulers: the king of
the world would simply be the high priest and
supreme spiritual ruler of the world. And, indeed,
in the Heavenly Jerusalem, there will be no divi-
sion between the powers: both will be united in
Christ. But in this life the administration of tem-
poral affairs has a dangerous tendency to distract
spiritual rulers from devoting themselves to the
supernatural common good.
Schindler objects to a vision of Christendom/
the Church as a single perfect society as follows:
It is not adequate to designate the Church
as the “new” societas perfecta, and make
the imperfect society of the state a part in
this whole, since this not only leaves the
properly political problem unresolved, it
also makes the Church a substitute for
the state, which simultaneously intro-
duces a non-political principle as the
ruling power in this world and calls
for something beyond the institutional
Church—perhaps the untethered Holy
Spirit?—now to direct man to his prop-
erly eschatological end.80
The confusion here is caused by Schindler sliding
back and forth between two meanings of the word
“Church.” “Church” can mean both the clerical
“estate” (the hierarchy of spiritual power) and also
2020, thejosias.com/2020/02/26/is-man-an-individual.
80
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 36.
“the City of God”—the whole body of Christ, the
whole community of those raised to the adoption
of sons by Baptism (this is indeed the prime analo-
gate). Understood this second way, the Church
has three estates: clerical, religious (i.e., monas-
tic81), and lay. If one takes Church in the first
sense, then obviously Schindler’s objection would
hold: the clerical estate cannot substitute for the
lay estate. But if we take “Church” in its primary
significance then there is no problem: within the
Church there are two powers, a lay power and
a clerical power, as well as the eschatological
witness of monasticism that serves as a prophetic
warning to both. The lay power is subordinate
to the clerical power, but not the way the art of
sword-making is subordinate to the art of war;
rather it is subordinate as a passing image, sketch,
and participation of Christ’s eternal Kingship to
another less passing and more real participation
of the same. One image is a not a direct means to
the other; they are in different orders of finality.
This account of spiritual and temporal raises a
great many questions about the relation of nature
and grace and about the good to which human
beings are ordered by nature. It is here that Schin-
dler’s questions are most trenchant and helpful.
6. Happiness
Let us return to the insight of Balthasar’s with
which I began this essay: “Everything else in the
world is related to [the Church] as a copy of her,
a sketch for her, an analogy to her.”82 Schindler
very perceptively sees this insight at work in St.
Thomas’s account of the relation of natural and
supernatural happiness:
Aquinas describes natural happiness [or,
“felicity”] as a relative participation in beati-
tude, which renders it a likeness (similitudo)
of that beatitude. In this respect, there is
a certain legitimacy to speaking of natural
happiness as “imperfect” with respect to
final beatitude, which brings the former to
81
There are obviously various kinds of religious in the Church—
monks, canons regular, mendicant friars, Jesuits, etc. But the
monastic life, being first, is the one through which the others
are understood.
82
Balthasar, A Theology of History, 152.
23
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
completion, by being the reality of which
felicity is the likeness. But it has to be rec-
ognized that this is an analogous use of the
adjective. In the strict sense,“imperfect hap-
piness” is an oxymoron: to the extent that it
is imperfect it is not in fact happiness, since
happiness just means fulfillment. Is there
such a thing as “incomplete completeness”?
Only loosely speaking. And such a thing,
in any event, cannot be an actual principle
that defines an order. If we are to desig-
nate natural happiness as a real principle
of the political order, it must be conceived
in principle as a perfect likeness of beati-
tude—perfect in its own order.83
I believe this is the deepest insight of Schindler’s
essay, and I fully agree with it. I would, however,
press Schindler’s point even further. The perfec-
tion of created things is always an “incomplete
completeness.” This is because the being of crea-
tures is essentially a participation in the Creator.
In a question on whether man is bound to
love God more than himself, St. Thomas raises
the following objection:84
One loves a thing in so far as it is one’s own
good. Now the reason for loving a thing is
more loved than the thing itself which is
loved for that reason[. …] Therefore man
loves himself more than any other good
loved by him. Therefore he does not love
God more than himself.85
In his reply to the objection Thomas refers to the
relation of part and whole: “ The part does indeed
love the good of the whole, as becomes a part, not
however so as to order the good of the whole to
itself, but rather so as to order itself to the good
of the whole.”86 Why does Thomas refer to part
and whole here? Is God a whole of which man is
a part? No, not exactly. In the body of the article
83
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 36
84
The following paragraphs are adapted from my forthcoming
essay “Martin Luther’s Critique of Aristotelian Eudemonism,”
in Joshua Madden and Taylor Patrick O’Neill (eds.), She Orders
All Things Sweetly: Sacra Doctrina and the Sapiential Unity of
Theology (under review with Cluny Media).
85
IIa-IIae, Q. 26, A. 3, arg. 2.
86
Ibid. ad 2.
24
Thomas writes:
The fellowship of natural goods bestowed
on us by God is the foundation of natural
love, in virtue of which not only man, so
long as his nature remains unimpaired,
loves God above all things and more
than himself, but also every single crea-
ture, each in its own way, i.e. either by
an intellectual, or by a rational, or by an
animal, or at least by a natural love, as
stones do, for instance, and other things
bereft of knowledge, because each part
naturally loves the common good of the
whole more than its own particular good.
This is evidenced by its operation, since
the principal inclination of each part is
towards common action conducive to the
good of the whole. It may also be seen in
civic virtues whereby sometimes the cit-
izens suffer damage even to their own
property and persons for the sake of the
common good. Wherefore much more is
this realized with regard to the friendship
of charity which is based on the fellow-
ship of the gifts of grace. Therefore man
ought, out of charity, to love God, Who is
the common good of all, more than himself:
since happiness is in God as in the univer-
sal and fountain principle of all who are
able to have a share of that happiness.87
The good is that which each thing seeks, insofar
as it seeks its own perfection. But, as Charles De
Koninck argued in his classic exposition of the
Thomistic doctrine, “its own perfection” does not
mean only a thing’s perfection as an individual,
but rather a more universal perfection to which it
is ordered. De Koninck shows that Thomas dis-
tinguishes four levels of a thing’s “own perfection”:
The first level is the good of the individual as
individual. This is the good that an animal seeks
when it seeks nourishment.
The second level is the good of a thing that
belongs to it on account of its species. This is the
good that animals seek in reproduction. Is this
really a thing’s “own perfection”? Is it not the per-
fection of another? No, says De Koninck:
87
Ibid. corpus.
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
The singular animal 'naturally'—i.e., in
virtue of the inclination which is in it by
nature (ratio indita rebus ab arte divina)
[—]prefers the good of its species to its
singular good. […] For the good of the
species is a greater good for the singular
than its singular good.”88
The context of the text to which De Koninck is
here referring is a passage where Thomas argues
that a natural part always loves the whole more
than itself. In natural things, Thomas argues,
everything that belongs to something greater loves
that greater thing to which it belongs. Thus, a part
of the body naturally exposes itself for the sake of
the whole body. Without deliberating, by natural
instinct, a hand is raised to protect the body from
a blow. And similarly, a virtuous citizen is willing
to suffer death for the sake of his city.89
In other words, a part should always prefer
the good of the whole to which it belongs to its
good as a part. But “part” seems to have several
meanings here. A hand is not a substance: it exists
only as a part. A citizen on the other hand is not
only a part—he is also a whole substance with a
private good all his own. “Part” seems to have yet a
third meaning when applied to an individual with
respect to a species. And yet Thomas claims that
in all of these cases of “part” the good of the whole
is more desirable for the part itself.
The third level, discussed by De Koninck, is
the perfection that belongs to a thing on account of
its genus. What is meant is the good of “equivocal
causes”—that is, of causes that cause something of
a different species from themselves. The perfec-
tion of an effect is found in its equivocal cause, but
in a more eminent mode. In Aristotelian physics,
for example, the heavenly bodies are the equivocal
causes of natural forms, and any perfection found
in sublunary things is found in a more eminent
way in the things above. It may be difficult for us
to conceive of what it would mean for sublunary
things to love the good of the heavenly bodies more
than their own private good. But this becomes
much clearer when we think of the highest equiv-
ocal cause, where the fourth level of a thing’s “own
88
Charles De Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good:
Against the Personalists, trans. Sean Collins, The Aquinas
Review 4 (1997): 10-71, at 18.
89
Ia, Q. 60, A. 5, corpus.
perfection” is found: namely God Himself, who
causes all things but entirely transcends them. God
is each creature’s “own” perfection, its “own” good
on account of the likeness (analogy) that exists
between effects and their cause. Every perfection
found in created things is a reflection of the perfec-
tion of God, and therefore there is an “analogy” or
similitude between God and creatures.90
Creatures are not parts of their Creator, and
yet they are ordered to their Creator the way parts
are ordered to a whole. The perfection that they
have is a participation in His perfection. To partici-
pate is to take part in something without removing
a part from it. My reflection in a mirror partakes of
my form, without depriving me of any part of my
form. God does not have parts, but creatures share
in Him in an incomplete—that is, a partial—way.
Therefore, Thomas can consider the love of crea-
tures for the Creator as love of parts for a whole:
Consequently, since God is the universal
good, and this contains the good of man
and angel and all creatures, because every
creature in regard to its entire being natu-
rally belongs to God, it follows that from
natural love angel and man alike love God
before themselves and with a greater love.
Otherwise, if either of them loved self
more than God, it would follow that natural
love would be perverse, and that it would
not be perfected but destroyed by charity.91
Each creature “belongs to” God on account of
what it is. That means that each creature is for the
sake of God in the way a part of a substance is for
the sake of the whole substance. Created perfec-
tion just is a participation in and imitation of the
Divine Perfection. As Thomas explains:
The perfection of each and every effect con-
sists in this, that it is made like to its cause,
for that which according to its nature is
something generated is then perfect, when
it reaches the likeness of its generator.
Artifacts are likewise made perfect when
they achieve the form of the art.92
90
De Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good, 19.
91
Ia, Q. 60, A. 5, corpus.
92
De substantiis separatis, c. 12
25
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
The perfection that each creature desires consists
in an ever-greater likeness to the Creator. But that
means that the perfection that they desire only
ever exists in a secondary way in themselves. It
exists fully only in God. Thus to love one’s “own”
perfection—loving oneself—means to love God
more than oneself. This is a “self-centered” love
only in the sense that it is centered on the good
in Whom one participates—God is, as it were,
the “true self ” of His creatures.93 But in another
sense this is a thoroughly ecstatic love, in which
one transcends oneself toward a good infinitely
better than one’s individuality, a beloved to whom
one can give oneself without reserve.94 The incli-
nation to the divine good is within created nature
before an act of choice is elicited in the will. As
93
Cf. John of St. Thomas on God’s will as the radical will of crea-
tures: “We say that the divine assistance is not in our power to
produce, or with respect to its origin (effective et originative)[,]
i.e. as caused by us and derived from us, but it is in our power
with respect to its terminus and its use, because both that
motion and the divine efficacy terminate in the same thing, and
this thing is taken for a terminus and end, so that our will has
the power and modality of an actual free being. Although not
arising from our power [liberty] nevertheless arises from God,
who is the root and cause of the power, and who acts causatively
and not destructively in us. So from both God and ourselves
there is, in one and the same way, the causation of a free effect
and not its destruction, because God is our will eminently or
radically [Deus est ipsa nostra voluntas eminenter vel radical-
iter], because he is the principle or root causing it from within
the will itself (intime causans)[. …] For just as if the substance
of the soul were to have some influx into the power of the will
it would not destroy its liberty but constitute it, since it is the
root of the power and has for its very effect the act of the will
as free, so also God, who is the root of the soul and the life
of its life in the manner of a principal agent, does not destroy
liberty through his influx but builds it up [astruit][.] … And
so his influx is in my power in the manner of a term but not as
to its origin [terminative non originative]; or it is in my power
eminently and radically, because it is in the power of God, who
is eminently and radically my will, and that what is in the causa-
tive and concurrent power of God with respect to my free will is
likewise in my power” (Cursus Theologicus, In Primam Partem,
Disputatio V, art. 6 para. 39, trans. James Chastek, “JOST on
the De Auxiliis,” Just Thomism, January 19, 2021, thomism.
wordpress.com/2021/01/19/jost-on-the-de-auxiliis).
94
For Thomas’s teaching on the ecstatic nature of the love of
God, see Peter Kwasniewski, “The Foundations of Christian
Ethics and Social Order: Egoism and Altruism vs. Love for
the Common Good,” The Josias, February 23, 2015, thejosias.
com/2015/02/23/the-foundations-of-christian-ethics-and-so-
cial-order-egoism-and-altruism-vs-love-for-the-common-good;
see also Rochus Leonhardt, Glück als Vollendung des Menschseins:
Die beatitudo-Lehre des Thomas von Aquin im Horizont des Eudä-
monismus-Problems (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), section 2.4.3.
26
Peter Kwasniewski writes:
As a being that is and is good by participa-
tion, man depends upon and is naturally
ordered to the simple Good; he is inclined,
already before choice, to live more truly
in and for God than in and for himself.
The many conscious manifestations of
extasis follow upon this innate extasis of
created being to uncreated being, finite
good to infinite Good, likeness to exem-
plar, imperfect image to perfect Image.
Ontological extasis precedes and sustains
psychological extasis as nature precedes
power and power precedes activity.95
It follows, then, that the completion of creatures
is always in some way incomplete, because no
creature is absolutely identical to God. Even in
the beatific vision itself, when God becomes the
form of the created intellect, entirely fulfilling
and completing its potential, and communicating
to the creature an unlimited happiness, in which
all the desires of the creature come to complete
rest, there remains something which can still be
called (in a sense) “imperfection.” A creature does
not comprehend God, it does not know him as well
as He knows Himself (for His self-knowledge is
His own infinite essence), and therefore no crea-
ture can be as absolutely and perfectly happy as
God Himself is.96
But this already shows that something can be
called “perfect” even if it is not the absolute per-
fection, simply speaking. The natural perfection
of creatures is twofold: it is found first in the
relations among them (order), and second in the
proper perfection of each (their form, virtue, and
activity). These two dimensions correspond to
the elements of the beauty of creation identified
by Pseudo-Dionysius. Order corresponds to what
Pseudo-Dionysius calls harmony, consonance, or
proportion (Gr. euarmostia; Lt. consonantia); form
and virtue and activity correspond to what he
calls brightness or splendour (Gr. aglaïa; Lt. clari-
tas). As Dionysius puts it:
But the Super-Essential Beautiful is called
95
Kwasniewski, “ The Foundations of Christian Ethics and Social
Order.”
96
See St. Thomas, Summa theologiæ, Ia, Q. 12, A. 7.
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
“Beauty” because of that quality which It
imparts to all things severally according to
their nature, and because It is the Cause of
the harmony and splendour in all things,
flashing forth upon them all, like light, the
beautifying communications of Its origi-
nating ray; and because It summons all
things to fare unto Itself (from whence It
hath the name of “Fairness”), and because
It draws all things together in a state of
mutual inter penetration. […] From this
Beautiful all things possess their exist-
ence, each kind being beautiful in its own
manner, and the Beautiful causes the har-
monies and sympathies and communities
of all things. […] This One Good and
Beautiful is in Its oneness the Cause of all
the many beautiful and good things. Hence
comes the bare existence of all things,
and hence their unions, their differenti-
ations, their identities, their differences,
their similarities, their dissimilarities,
their communions of opposite things, the
unconfused distinctions of their inter-
penetrating elements; the providences of
the Superiors, the interdependence of the
Co-ordinates, the responses of the Infe-
riors, the states of permanence wherein
all keep their own identity. And hence
again the intercommunion of all things
according to the power of each; their har-
monies and sympathies (which do not
merge them) and the co-ordinations of
the whole universe.97
The perfection of created reality consists in
that twofold beauty of splendour and harmony.
Hence, human community too is ordered to
that twofold beauty. As Henri Grenier puts it:
“Peace as signifying the tranquility of order[—]
i.e., well-ordered harmony among men, which
obtains when each one is given his due[—]is the
intrinsic end of civil society, whereas happiness
is its extrinsic end.”98 This point could easily be
misunderstood. Grenier is not making the liberal
point that society is ordered to conditions that
allow men to reach happiness, rather than to
97
Dionysius the Areopagite, The Divine Names and the Mystical
Theology, trans. C. E. Rolt (London: SPCK, 1920), 96-98.
98
Grenier, Thomistic Philosophy, vol. III, §1085.
happiness itself. Instead, what he means is that
the perfection of man in society is twofold. It is
first the personal relations among citizens/sub-
jects with respect to the common end (which is
what constitutes society and is therefore most
“intrinsic”), that is: the friendship that they have
in the common pursuit of the good. And second
it is the virtuous activities of those citizens/sub-
jects themselves, which are directed to the end. It
is those virtuous actions that are most properly
called happiness. They are the “proper work,” the
ergon, of human beings—the activity that only
human beings can do, done in accord with human
virtue.99 Those virtuous activities are in turn the
principle of the relations that the members of a
society have amongst themselves. In other words,
harmony is a result of splendour.
7. Teleology and Ontology
In responding to my critique of her work, Marcia
Pally raises the following concern about how I
relate ontology and teleology:
Waldstein notes that we must “not put the
basic question of political ethics in terms
of the being of persons and societies, but
rather in terms of the private and common
goods in which persons find their perfec-
tion.” […] I quite agree. I would add only
that, in my understanding of the Aristo-
telian-Thomist tradition, ontology and
teleology are not a binary or even clearly
distinguishable, as Waldstein too says.
Rather, ontology is teleology, and telos
informs us of ontology. “The nature of a
thing,” Aristotle writes in Book I of Politics,
“is its end.” To understand the nature of a
thing (or person) is to understand its end,
what counts as its specific form of flourish-
ing and perfection. And an understanding
of its end informs us of its nature.100
I think that what I have just indicated about the
common good of human life helps to address her
concern. Yes, teleology is written into ontology.
99
See Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, I, 7.
100
Pally, “Relational Views of Humanness,” 226.
27
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
The nature of a thing is a principle of motion
and rest that is ordered to an end. But the end of
a thing is not merely its existence, its substantial
being, rather it is the splendor of its proper activ-
ity, done well. The end of a thing is not found in
the category of substance, but rather in the acci-
dents that complete substance: relation (order),
quality (virtue), and above all action (happiness).
The difficulty with the identification of ontology
and teleology is that it confuses these categories,
and therefore runs into metaphysical contra-
dictions. Pally (if I read her aright) thinks that
relation gives us esse.101 The impossibility of such
a position has been well-demonstrated by my
father (Michael Waldstein) in his response to
Schindler’s father (David L. Schindler).102
Clarifying this point also helps to answer the
questions that D. C. Schindler raises about the
relation of practical to speculative virtue.103 The
activities of the moral virtues are not merely a
means to intellectual virtue. The activities of
moral virtues are themselves perfections of human
beings as such, brightness and splendor commu-
nicated to human beings by God. These actions
are actions in which reason governs the bodily
passions; they are therefore in one sense the most
human actions, since human beings are composed
of body and rational soul. As Schindler very beau-
tifully shows, the activities of the moral virtues are
suffused by the spiritual light of reason.104
If man were his own highest end, the moral
virtues would be the whole of happiness. St.
Thomas shows this in a response to an objec-
tion against contemplation being happiness. The
objector argues as follows:
Happiness is a good of man himself. But
the speculative intellect is more con-
cerned with things outside man; whereas
the practical intellect is concerned with
things belonging to man himself, viz. his
operations and passions. Therefore man’s
101
“From the reciprocal constitution of ontology and teleology,
I’ll continue with the specific conception of ontology (and thus
teleology) that I—with MacIntyre and I believe Waldstein—
hold: that is, relationality. It is our foundational relation to
God and others that allows for our existence” (Pally, “Relational
Views of Humanness,” 228).
102
Waldstein, “Constitutive Relations.”
103
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 33-34.
104
Schindler, “Societas Perfecta,” 34-35.
28
happiness consists in an operation of
the practical intellect rather than of the
speculative.105
Thomas responds as follows:
This argument would hold, if man himself
were his own last end; for then the con-
sideration and direction of his actions and
passions would be his happiness. But since
man’s last end is something outside of
him, to wit, God, to Whom we reach out
by an operation of the speculative intel-
lect; therefore, man’s happiness consists
in an operation of the speculative intellect
rather than of the practical intellect.106
That is, the activities of moral virtue are indeed
perfections of man as such, a likeness of God in
man, and can therefore truly be called “happi-
ness,” but man’s highest activity is an ecstatic one,
in which he acts not as man, but as a quasi-god.
Hence Aristotle says at the end of the Ethics:
But such a life would be too high for man;
for it is not in so far as he is man that he
will live so, but in so far as something
divine is present in him; and by so much
as this is superior to our composite nature
is its activity superior to that which is
the exercise of the other kind of virtue.
If intellect is divine, then, in compari-
son with man, the life according to it is
divine in comparison with human life. But
we must not follow those who advise us,
being men, to think of human things, and,
being mortal, of mortal things, but must,
so far as we can, make ourselves immortal,
and strain every nerve to live in accord-
ance with the best thing in us.107
This is the key to solving the difficulties that
Schindler raises about the relation of the practical
and the speculative in political life. Is the political
common good found principally in the activities
of the moral virtues or those of the speculative
virtues? The answer is both, but in different ways.
105
Thomas, Summa theologiæ, Ia-IIae, Q. 3, A. 5, arg. 3.
106
Thomas, Summa theologiæ, Ia-IIae, Q. 3, A. 5, arg. 3.
107
Nicomachean Ethics, X, 7, 1177b, trans. W. D. Ross.
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
Political rulers are primarily concerned with the
achievement of moral virtue in the sense that
this is what most of their actions are ordered to.
This is because moral virtue is most proper to
embodied spirits, and most dependent on human
society: “Like a drowning man, the finite being
reaches out to grasp the assistance of its fellow
creatures.”108 But political life is primarily ordered
to the contemplation of God, because this is the
highest activity that political rulers direct. It is
clear that political authority directs the teaching of
metaphysics, etc., and in this sense it is ordered to
it. But political authority is unable to bring about
metaphysical contemplation as directly as it brings
about moral virtue. This is not because contem-
plation is about a less common good, but because
it is about a more common good. God, the object
of contemplation, is not merely the common good
of one human society: He is the common good
of the entire universe, visible and invisible. The
society of which God is the common good is a
super-human society. Even in the natural contem-
plation of God, human beings are assisted more
by angels than they are by human rulers.109
This insight in turn helps me to address recent
controversies among integralists about the
primary locus of politics. Andrew Willard Jones,
in a recent blog post, writes as follows:
Politics is about the formation of virtue.
Its problem is this: how does one man
lead another man into virtue? Subsidiar-
ity is the assertion that this happens most
efficaciously at the most personal level pos-
sible. The relationship between a parent
and child is archetypical. No one can lead
a boy into virtue more efficaciously than
his father. This is so because their rela-
tionship is profoundly intimate, ordered
first and foremost by love and character-
ized by inequality. A father’s law is the
most effective law for attaining virtue, and
this is not because the father has the most
coercive power. As a singular man, he has
the least coercive power that a society can
bring to bear. Rather, his power is in his
moral authority. This moral authority is
108
Crean and Fimister, Integralism, 14.
109
See Thomas, Summa theologiæ, Ia, Q. 111, A. 1.
so profound that his physical weakness
is of little account. This smallest thing, a
father’s love, is the most powerful force in
the attainment of virtue, the true end of
politics. This means that the fullest human
happiness (which is the fruit of virtue) is
possible only through the smallest level of
social interaction; at the level of family and
friends and at the level of personal love. We
all know this to be true.110
This account contains a very subtle but very grave
error. Far from being found primarily at the small-
est level of society (the family), the fullest human
happiness can only be found at the most universal
of all levels (the common good of the universe).
The highest human friendship is not famil-
ial friendship—the friendship founded on the
common good of the family—but rather philo-
sophical friendship (founded on the common good
of the universe) and political friendship (founded
on the common good of the complete human
society). The education in virtue that a father
gives his son is extremely necessary, but it is not
the highest virtue, and its activities are therefore
not the highest happiness. Rather, the education
in virtue that domestic life gives is a preparation
for higher virtue. As Charles De Koninck puts it:
[T]he good which the family pursues
for the child is the status of causa sui,
of being a free man: but this is precisely
the primary condition of citizenship.
The term of education is at the same
time the very principle of civil society,
which is an association of free men who
seek their greatest good qua men in the
common weal. It is therefore in the inter-
est of civil society that its members be free
men in the strict sense of the word: that
they possess the education and learning
essential to citizenship. That is why the
common good of civil society must extend
to the cradle of citizenship.111
That is, the parents educate their children in
110
Jones, “What States Can’t Do.”
111
Charles De Koninck,“The End of the Family and the End of Civil
Society,” The Josias, June 15, 2015, thejosias.com/2015/06/15/
the-end-of-the-family-and-the-end-of-civil-society.
29
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
moral virtue in order that they might take part
in common goods greater than the common good
of the family.112 This is why friendships based on
family ties rather than on the civic common good are
a source of corruption in political life. The long
history of “patrimonialism” in human politics gives
ample proof of this.113 And the same is true of any
other private friendship. As De Koninck argues:
[I]n the political order, any civic friendship
which is anterior to the common good is a
principle of corruption; it is a conspiracy
against the common good, as one sees in
politicians who favor their private friends
under pretext of civic friendship.114
To the extent that a father leads his son to a partic-
ipation in common goods that are higher than the
proper common good of the family, he is already
initiating a civic, or philosophical, or ecclesiasti-
cal friendship with his son. In other words, he is
no longer relating to his son as a father, but as a
fellow member of a higher society.
Jones’s error on this point leads him to a wrong
understanding of the principle of subsidiarity.
Properly understood, the principle of subsidiarity
does not imply that higher societies should not
usurp the functions of lower societies because
the lower societies achieve better goods (as Jones
claims). Rather, it is precisely the opposite; the
lower societies achieve lower goods that are pre-
requisite to the higher goods achieved by higher
societies. Thus, political society must respect the
functioning of the family, because the good func-
tioning of the family is necessary to form persons
who are capable of achieving the much greater
common good of the political society.
This difference has practical consequences.
112
See Beatrice Freccia, “Understanding Aristotle’s Account of the
Relationship of the Household to the State,” The Josias, February
2, 2015, thejosias.com/2015/02/10/understanding-aristotles-
account-of-the-relationship-of-the-household-to-the-state;
Jacques de Monléon, “Short Notes on the Family and the City,”
The Josias, November 18, 2020, thejosias.com/2020/11/18/
short-notes-on-the-family-and-the-city.
113
See Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From
Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 2011). Fukuyama’s own understanding of
politics is seriously defective, but he is very good at showing the
corrupting influence of family ties.
114
De Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good, 56.
30
I am convinced that an integral restoration of
society requires efforts at all levels—both small
and great. It requires the laity to restore all of
temporal life—from the family to international
politics. It requires all Christians—lay, religious,
and clerical—to fulfil their prophetic, priestly,
and kingly missions, each according to its own
mode. And in this I believe Jones (and Schindler)
and I are in agreement. But one element on which
I would indeed put more emphasis is the use
of the highest temporal authorities to promote
virtue. “Imperare Aude! Dare to Command!” as
Ricardo Calleja has put it.115 Hence I am much
more favorable to the practical suggestions of
such integralists as Gladden Pappin and Adrian
Vermeule than Jones seems to be.116
8. Nature and Grace
To understand natural happiness as a partici-
pation in supernatural happiness is the key to
understanding the relation of nature and grace.
The human intellect is a spiritual potency, an
openness to all being. It can therefore be fully
actualized only by union with Being Himself:
God. It can never be wholly satisfied by the
knowledge of created forms. In this sense, we can
say that the intellect has a “natural desire to see
God.”117 This desire is not an elicited desire in the
rational appetite (the will), but rather, simply, an
unsatisfied lack in the intellect itself. Neverthe-
less, since all beings are participations of God, the
intellect does have some satisfaction in knowing
them, and even more in the indirect knowledge
of their cause. God, as known indirectly through
His effects, is the object of philosophical contem-
plation. When man realizes that there is a first
cause of all things, a desire is elicited in the will
to know God insofar as is possible. As Jacob Wood
has shown, this proviso “insofar as is possible” is
the key to moving beyond the impasse between
115
Calleja, “Imperare aude!”
116
See Gladden Pappin, “Toward a Party of the State,” American
Affairs 3.1 (2019): 149-160; Adrian Vermeule, “Integration
from Within,” American Affairs 2.1 (2018): 202-213; cf. Jona-
than Culbreath’s essay in this issue of New Polity.
117
See Kevin Keiser, “ The Natural Desire to See God as an Innate
Appetite of the Intellect and Its Implications for the Moral Life
and the Relationship Between the Natural and Supernatural
Orders” (Dissertation, Angelicum, 2017).
 edmund waldstein, o.cist.
the followers of Cajetan and the followers of de
Lubac on the problem of nature and grace:
We can affirm, with de Lubac, man’s orien-
tation toward the vision of God as a final
end, but acknowledge, with the commenta-
tors, that a natural end for man is possible.
We can affirm, with de Lubac, that human
nature as such is open to the vision of
God and that this openness need not be
considered as an obediential potency, but
acknowledge, with the commentators,
that our receptivity to the vision of God
is purely passive. We can affirm, with de
Lubac, that a natural desire for the vision
of God does not make the vision of God
owed to nature, but we can acknowledge,
with the commentators, that one reason
why the vision of God is not owed to
nature is that God could reasonably with-
hold it. When confronted with the basic
question “what does the human heart long
for?” the Christian can answer with Augus-
tine, “happiness.” When confronted with
the Aristotelian question of nature’s end,
the Christian can answer with Thomas:
human natural desire seeks the fulfill-
ment of human natural appetite insofar as
is possible. Left unaided, our natural desire
comes to rest in the analogical knowledge
of God as first cause; but raised by grace,
that same desire comes to rest in the vision
of the divine essence. This answer pro-
tects the integrity of nature by allowing its
active principle to come to rest in a natu-
rally achievable teleological act; it protects
the gratuity of grace by ensuring that God
could reasonably withhold it; it protects
nature’s openness to grace by showing how
and in what way human nature can be said
to have a natural desire for the vision of
God; and it protects nature’s need for grace
because it is a subjective desire for self-ful-
fillment, rather than an objective desire
that can claim any right before God.118
118
Jacob Wood, To Stir a Restless Heart: Thomas Aquinas and
Henri de Lubac on Nature, Grace, and the Desire for God (Wash-
ington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2019),
431, emphasis added.
On the political level, this solution shows why
integralism is both possible and necessary. The
temporal and supernatural common goods are
distinct (since natural happiness is not the same
as supernatural happiness), and yet the natural is
ordered to the supernatural in which it participates.
I want to close by returning once again to
the insight of Balthasar’s with which I began this
essay. In Section 2, I argued that the political life
to which we are ordered by nature is a sign and
a sketch of the true political life of the Heavenly
Jerusalem. At that point I gave some indications
of how that true political life fulfils the hopes of
the gentiles. But, of course, the book of Revela-
tion is even more concerned with how it fulfils the
hopes of the chosen people of Israel: the Heav-
enly Jerusalem is the restoration of the Garden
of Eden in which the waters of life and the tree of
life grows (Rev 22), and it is decorated with all the
jewels of Paradise (Rev 21).119 And the Heavenly
Jerusalem is not only a garden but a city. Adam’s
mission to rule over creation has been realized
here in a city which achieves “that harmony of
nature and human culture to which ancient cities
once aspired.”120 Adam was meant to reign over
creation as the representative of the God whose
image he was. This kingly mission was revived by
David, the anointed. And now the Christ, the true
David, reigns. Through Him God’s reign is fully
revealed: “The Lord our God the almighty is king.
Let us rejoice and be glad” (Rev 19:6-7). Each one
of his servants will reign with Him as king, fulfill-
ing the mission of Adam: “and they shall be kings
forever and ever” (Rev 22:5).
The long series of covenants between God
and His people, meant to bind Him to them, and
to make of them His bride, have now come to
fruition. The most intimate union of love takes
place. The longing to see the Lord’s face (see
Psalm 27:8), to reach His immediate presence, is
fully satisfied: “they shall see his face” (Rev 22:4).
They will know Him in the full nuptial sense that
the Scriptures give to “know.” And they will be
fully known by the One whom they love: “To the
victor I will give … a white stone, and upon the
stone will be written his new name, which no one
knows, only he who receives it” (Rev 2:17). The
119
Richard Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 133-135.
120
Bauckham, The Theology of the Book of Revelation, 135.
31
 p olitics as a sketch for the church
fulfillment of the covenant is both entirely corpo-
rate and intimately personal.
The Heavenly Jerusalem is also the new
temple. All the desires of Israel that centered on
the Temple, as the place of God’s dwelling on
earth are here fulfilled. “One thing do I ask of
the Lord, it is this that I seek—that I dwell in
the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to
behold the Lord’s sweetness and to gaze on His
palace” (Psalm 27:4, Robert Alter). The whole
of Revelation describes a heavenly liturgy, and
when Jerusalem comes down from Heaven, the
whole world is taken into that liturgy. It is the
longed-for return of the Divine presence to the
temple from which God had departed at the Bab-
ylonian exile.121 “Behold, the tabernacle of God
among men, and he shall dwell with them, and
they shall be his people, and God himself shall
be among them” (Rev 21:3). But God does not
dwell among them as He once dwelt in the Tab-
ernacle of the desert or the Temple of Jerusalem:
“I saw no temple in it; for the Lord God almighty
is its temple; and the Lamb” (Rev 21:22). Peter
Leithart points out what an astonishing claim
this is: “The end comes when men dwell in God,
when God becomes the holy space for his image,
created and glorified into his Bridal image.”122 In
the Incarnation God pitched His tent among us,
becoming like us in order to be close to us, but in
the Heavenly Jerusalem the opposite occurs: God
makes us like Himself so that we can be united
to Him. “God has finally tabernacled among men
when we pitch our tent in him, when he becomes
the temple that houses us, made in the image of
God to become human gods.”123
In his Gospel,124 St. John had written “in my
father’s house there are many rooms” ( John 14:2).
St. Thomas Aquinas in commenting on this text
121
See N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, Christian
Origins and the Question of God, vol. 2 (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1996), 204-206.
122
Peter J. Leithart, Revelation 12–22 (London: Bloomsbury T&T
Clark, 2018), 388.
123
Leithart, Revelation 12–22, 388.
124
Pace Eusebius of Caesarea, I think that there are strong argu-
ments that the author of the Fourth Gospel and of the Book
of Revelation are one and the same. Warren Austin Gage has
given impressive textual arguments for common authorship
(Gage, “St. John’s Vision of the Heavenly City,” 30-89); for the
witness of the Church Fathers, see Donald Guthrie, New Testa-
ment Introduction, 4th ed. (Leicester: Apollos, 1990), 929-935.
32
notes that it can be understood in a double sense:
the saints are the rooms in which God dwells, but
God is also the house in which the saints dwell.
God is both an intimately personal good, united to
each one of the saints, and a truly common good,
a good that is shared by all of them without being
diminished.125 As Charles De Koninck puts it:
Both Peter and John know that it is better
that He be present to both together. They
see the infinite greatness of God is such
that, in truth, it can never be fully mani-
fested either to one nor the other, nor to
both, nor even to all those whom He has
chosen. Nor would they see God if they
did not see that this goodness is incom-
prehensible, illimitable. They see that
His indwelling in the house which is the
Church, is, absolutely speaking, “eligi-
bilior” [more worthy of choice], because
their viewpoint is truly divine. In seeing
God, Peter sees what is greater than any-
thing which could be his proper good for
he knows that he is only Peter; he sees
that God is infinitely more communicable
than He is to Peter himself, and it is this
infinity of goodness Peter loves, because
he loves God in Himself and in that
bounty which, of its very nature is diffu-
sive of itself.126
The gathering and unifying of Israel foretold by
the prophets is accomplished by this common
sharing in one infinitely communicable good.
As St. Gregory of Nyssa puts it, “they would all
become one by their growing together with the
one and only Good.”127
That is the hope of the Heavenly Jerusalem.
“Everything else in the world is related to her as
a copy of her, a sketch for her, an analogy to her.”128
125
St. Thomas Aquinas, In Ioan., cap. 14, lect. 1., 1853.
126
Charles De Koninck, “In Defence of St. Thomas: A Reply
to Father Eschmann’s Attack on The Primacy of the Common
Good,” in The Writings of Charles de Koninck, ed. Ralph McIn-
erny, vol. 2 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
2009), 314.
127
St. Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Song of Songs, Homily
15, trans. Richard A. Norris, Jr. (Atlanta: Society of Biblical
Literature, 2012), 495.
128
Balthasar, A Theology of History, 152.
 Asymmetrical
Powers
B ibl i c a l Pe r s p e c t i v e s o n Ch u r c h a n d S ta t e 1
P ET E R J. L E I T H A RT

Reformed theologian Peter Leithart examines how the relation between

church and state (to use inadequate terms as shorthand) is enacted
throughout the Bible. The living-out of this relationship in Israel and
the archetype-church of the New Testament should evidence how God
intends to be lived, especially when one notes how the relationship grows
and how it stays the same across the covenantal development. In Israel, the
kings and priests plainly have different roles: the kings govern the land, and
the priests conduct the people’s worship in the Tabernacle and Temple. Yet
the priestly work of protecting and cultivating holiness is a model of the
work of kings—and the advice of priests and prophets is necessary for the
right fulfillment of the king’s work. This separation of function with an
asymmetrical overlap (of the priestly work into that of the kings) persists:
during the exile, Israel guides even pagan kings into acting for holiness;
and this role is taken up even more fully by the church. Prescriptions are
offered for what this may mean for the present day. (— Editor)

I
t is misleading to use historically-condi-
tioned categories like “church” and “state” to
describe institutions and patterns of life in
the Bible.1 “State” is anachronistic even when
applied to medieval political systems;2 how much
more so applied to ancient Israel’s? And the dis-
tinction these terms imply between “religion” and
1
An earlier version of this essay was prepared for a December
2020 meeting of Evangelicals and Catholics Together. Scrip-
ture quotations are taken from the (NASB®) New American
Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The
Lockman Foundation, with occasional alterations. Used by per-
mission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org.
2
See Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State: A Study
of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX
(Steubenville, OH: Emmaus Press, 2017); Rees Davies, “ The
Medieval State: The Tyranny of a Concept?” Journal of Histori-
cal Sociology 16.2 (2003): 280-300.
“politics” is equally out of place here.3 Pre-mod-
ern societies certainly demarcated boundaries
between the “sacred” and “profane,” and medieval
Christianity developed an idea of the saeculum,
but these categories don’t correspond neatly to
contemporary uses of these concepts or terms.4 So
for the sake of accuracy and to defamiliarize the
biblical outlook, in this essay I generally charac-
terize the relationship in other terms. In the Old
Testament, the zones of operation are “sanctuary”
vs. “land”; the officials are “priest” or “prophet” vs.
3
See William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence:
Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), ch. 2.
4
“Once, there was no ‘secular’ ” is the opening sentence of John
Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell,
1990), 1.

33
 asymmetrical p owers
“elder,” “judge,” or “king”; the characteristic activi-
ties are “purification” vs. “punishment,” “sacrifice”
vs. “war.”
The Bible doesn’t present just a single model
of the relationships between priest and king,
sanctuary and land, sacrifice and war. As head
of a peripatetic clan, Abraham builds altars and
presumably leads worship (Gen 12:7-8; 13:4,
18; 22:9), fulfilling what would later be associ-
ated with priesthood; yet, when Chedorlaomer
and his allies capture Lot, Abraham turns “royal”
as he leads his three hundred and eighteen fight-
ing men in a surprise attack to rescue his nephew
(Gen 14:1-16). And priest-kings appear occa-
sionally among Gentile peoples (Melchizedek in
Gen 14:18; Jethro in Exod 2:16). Over the course
of biblical history, more differentiated models
emerge. Under the Mosaic order, priesthood is
lodged in a single clan within the tribe of Levi,
while tribal elders govern local communities.
During the monarchy, priestly and royal institu-
tions expand and become more complex. In exile,
when Israel is scattered through the eastern Med-
iterranean, neither priestly nor royal functions
remain intact. Finally, the church that emerges
initially within Palestinian and diaspora Judaism
is a modified form of the exilic community.
Despite these variations, some features
remain more or less constant. Throughout the
Bible, priestly and political institutions are sep-
arate but overlapping—and their overlap is
asymmetrical. Priests share in the governance of
the land, and they and the prophets hold kings
and their officials to account. On the other hand,
however, elders and kings are never permitted to
carry out specifically priestly activities. In Jeffer-
sonian terms, the wall of separation is permeable
from the side of the church, impermeable from
the side of the state.
Separation
Let us look first at the ways they are separated.
My survey begins with the Mosaic order,
where the distinction of sanctuary and land first
emerges with clarity. The Mosaic system is inno-
vative. Prior to Sinai, Israel had no sanctuary, no
priestly class, and a much simpler and less explicit
sacrificial and purity system. But now Aaron and
34
his sons are ordained as priests (Exod 29; Lev 8-9),
with exclusive access to the altar and the Taber-
nacle (see Exod 29:37). Priests participate in every
sacrificial rite at the Tabernacle, the daily ascen-
sion offerings, the offerings brought by individual
Israelite worshipers, and the massive sacrifices on
feast days. In particular, priests perform the blood
rites and turn dismembered animals to smoke on
the altar (e.g., Lev 1:5, 8). These privileges are not
extended even to all of Aaron’s sons—physically
deformed descendants are disallowed from service
at the altar and in the Tabernacle (Lev 21:16-24).
Certainly no lay Israelite, not even elders, are per-
mitted to perform these rites.
The key innovation is the sanctuary, the
moveable palace of King YHWH. As YHWH’s
household servants, priests have regular duties
within the Tabernacle. They trim the wicks of the
lamps each day (Lev 24:1-4), offer incense on the
golden altar (Exod 30:1-10), and every week change
out the showbread that is spread out on the golden
table (Lev 24:5-9). On the Day of Atonement,
the presiding High Priest enters the Most Holy
Place to purify it from Israel’s sins and unclean-
nesses (Lev 16). By contrast, every lay Israelite is
excluded from the Tabernacle; the “stranger”—
any non-Levite—who attempts to enter is to be
executed (Num 1:51; 3:10, 38).5 Once YHWH
consecrates the Tabernacle with His glory, not
even Moses is allowed to enter (Exod 40:34-38).
A polluted person may not even enter the Tab-
ernacle court, and the priests inspect worshipers
and perform rites of cleansing. Priests determine
whether or not an outbreak on the skin qualifies
as “skin disease” (Lev 13, and passim), offer sacri-
fices to cleanse a woman after childbirth (Lev 12),
purify men and women who recover from long-
term genital discharges (Lev 15:13-15, 25-30),
and concoct and apply the water of purification
that cleanses from corpse defilement (Num 19).
These tasks may be carried out only by members
of the tribe of Levi, and specifically descendants of
Aaron. Priests are butlers at the Lord’s altar-table,
guardians at the doorway of His house, courtiers
who care for the palace of YHWH.
The political system of the Mosaic order is
not so explicitly laid out. In response to a sug-
5
On these passages from Numbers, see Jacob Milgrom, Studies
in Levitical Terminology: The Encroacher and the Levite (Eugene,
OR: Wipf & Stock, 2016).
 peter j. leithart
gestion from his father-in-law, Moses organizes
elder-judges to adjudicate disputes. These govern
thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens, with
only the most difficult cases ascending through
appeals to Moses (Exod 18:13-27). Israel already
had elders before the Exodus (Exod 3:16, 18;
4:29; 12:21), most likely recognized heads of
clans and families among the various tribes; and
Moses selects the officers of his “courts of appeal”
from this traditional body of rulers. This system
functions at Sinai and presumably continues
throughout Israel’s wilderness sojourn. In some
passages, the “congregation” (‘edah) of Israel acts
in unison (Lev 8:3-5), possibly a reference to an
assembly of representatives. The book of Judges
refers to a group known as the “elders of the
congregation” ( Judg 21:16), which is perhaps a
national body, a “senate” or “Sanhedrin” of elders:
a continuation of the wilderness system (compare
with Exod 16:22; 34:31; Lev 4:15).
Once Israel enters the land, it is ruled by local
“elders in the gates,” who receive a written copy
of the law (Deut 31:9) and hear it from Moses
himself (Deut 31:28). These elders handle mar-
riage and family cases such as juvenile delinquency
(Deut 21:18-21), pre-marital promiscuity (Deut
22:13-21), and levirate marriage (Deut 25:5-
10). The elders also decide criminal cases. City
elders deliver convicted murderers to the avenger
of blood (Deut 19:11-13) and perform a ritual
of expiation in cases of unsolved killings (Deut
21:1-9). These elders are the “gods” (‘elohim) who
pass judgments in cases of crimes against prop-
erty (Exod 22:7-9). These local and tribal elders
rule Israel throughout the period of the judges
( Judg 2:7; 8:14-16; 11:1-11).
Priests and elders operate in different zones.
Priests and priests alone do the work of the
sanctuary; elders are responsible for the main-
tenance of order in the holy land and the towns
and cities. Priests pass judgment concerning who
is given access to the sanctuary court, excluding
the defiled and carrying out rites of purgation.
Rulers, on the other hand, judge who is permitted
to remain in the land, and have the authority to
execute in order to “purge the wicked thing from
among you” (Deut 13:5; 17:7, 12; 21:21; 22:21).
Under the monarchy the separation of sanctu-
ary and land personnel and responsibilities persists.
Priests continue to serve at the altar and in the
sanctuary, but they are reorganized—by David, the
king—for more specialized service. The descend-
ants of Aaron are divided by lot into twenty-four
groups, who serve at the Temple on a rotation basis
(1 Chr 24:1-19). In addition to carrying out their
traditional sanctuary duties, clans of Levites are
designated to sing and play musical instruments
during Temple worship (1 Chr 25:1-31); Levites
are also designated as gatekeepers (1 Chr 26:1-19)
and keepers of the Temple treasury (1 Chr 26:20-
32). These too are divided into rotations.
The changes in the political system at this time
are more notable. Elders continue to govern local
villages and towns throughout the period of the
monarchy, and tribes continue to have their tra-
ditional “heads” (1 Kgs 8:1-3; 20:7-8; 21:8, 11; 2
Kgs 10:1, 5; 23:1). But power is centralized in the
capital, first Hebron and then Jerusalem. David
has a only a fairly small court, consisting of mili-
tary leaders, a bodyguard, secretaries, and priests
(2 Sam 8:15-18; 20:23-26), as well as overseers
of his lands and storehouses (1 Chr 27:25-31);
Hushai, Ahitophel, and others serve as counse-
lors to the king (1 Chr 27:32-34). In addition
to court officials, Solomon introduces admin-
istrators in each tribe who manage the “forced
labor” that builds the Temple and his own palace
complex (1 Kgs 4:6; 11:28; 12:1-4). He organizes
the whole land into twelve districts, each led by a
deputy who, one month a year, gathers produce to
supply the palace court (1 Kgs 4:7-19). Though
there are twelve districts, Solomon’s territories do
not match traditional tribal areas: two maps are
superimposed on one another, one radiating from
Jerusalem and the other more fully decentralized.
The abundance and elegant choreography of Sol-
omon’s court is enough to take the breath away
from a monarch like Queen Sheba (1 Kgs 10:4-5).
David reorganizes the priests and Solomon
builds the Temple, yet the old Mosaic separa-
tion of priestly and royal responsibility remains
in force. This is dramatically illustrated when
King Uzziah attempts to offer incense at the
altar inside the Temple. Ahaziah the high priest
warns him to leave the sanctuary: “It is not for
you, Uzziah, to burn incense to YHWH, but
for the priests, the sons of Aaron who are conse-
crated to burn incense” (2 Chr 26:18). As Uzziah
rages at the priests, the Lord strikes his forehead
with leprosy, and he remains in isolation for the
35
 asymmetrical p owers
remainder of his life (2 Chr 26:20-21). Whatever
liturgical role the king plays, he is not allowed to
usurp priestly prerogatives.
In modern polities, a state is often defined as
a set of institutions with a monopoly on the use
of violence. That doesn’t fit ancient Israel. Elders
and kings judge capital cases and thus exercise
the “power of the sword,” but priestly labor isn’t
limited to a “spiritual sword.” In fact, if violence
against animals is included, the work of priests
is far more violent than that of political rulers.
Priests slaughter animals every morning and
evening; kings do not carry out a capital sentence
every day. Besides, Levitical guards are authorized
to kill “strangers” who attempt to enter the sanc-
tuary (Num 1:53). The distinction of priest and
king does not have to do with the use of force,
but with zones of operation and characteristic
responsibilities.
O verlapping
The separation between priests and political
authorities is not, of course, absolute. Priests are
entangled with civil governance and, at certain
times in Israel’s history, rulers assume liturgi-
cal or sacrificial roles. And above all, they are
joined in that both king and priest are subject to
YHWH. By modern standards, both are “sacred”
or “religious” officials, accountable to the High
King who resides in His Temple-palace.
Let us look at how these “overlappings” mani-
fest across time.
Before the monarchy, under the Mosaic
system, the political role of the priests is more
extensive than any sanctuary role for elders.
Difficult criminal cases might be brought to a
priest (Deut 17:8-13), who inquires of YHWH,
perhaps using the Urim and Thummim, part
of the priestly equipment. Whatever the priest
decides is carried out: “According to the mouth
of the law which they teach you, and according
to the verdict which they tell you, you shall do”
(Deut 17:11). Whoever refuses a priest’s verdict
is put to death (Deut 17:12). Before Israel goes
to war, the (high?) priest warns them not to fear
or panic, because YHWH gives victory (Deut
20:2-4), and priests take the lead in the army at
Jericho ( Josh 6). The elders of the nearest city
36
carry out the rite of purgation for an unsolved
killing, but they do so under the guidance of the
priests (Deut 21:1-9). Moses generalizes: “Every
dispute and every stroke shall be according to
[the priests’] mouth” (Deut 21:5). When Deu-
teronomy 17 anticipates a future monarchy, it is
a monarchy under priestly oversight. The future
king is instructed to write out his own copy of
the Torah in the presence of the priests, and is
required to read it regularly throughout his life
(Deut 17:18-20). Priests are the teachers of
Israel (Lev 10:11), not least teachers of elders
and kings. It’s not surprising that priests are later
included in listings of royal officials (e.g., 2 Sam
8:15-18).
During the monarchy, as prophets begin to
appear, this strong predominance continues and
expands. While the earliest prophets (Nathan,
Elijah, Elisha) are independent of the priestly
institutions, several later prophets are descend-
ants of Aaron (Isa 6:1-5; Jer 1:1; Ezek 1:3).
Prophets assume a prominent role in the gov-
ernance of life in the land. Samuel sets the pattern.
He anoints Saul and David, confronts Saul for his
various infractions, and guides David as he makes
his way to the throne. Nathan, David’s court
prophet, condemns David for seizing Bath-sheba
and killing her husband, Uriah (2 Sam 12:1-15).
Ahab has his own court prophets, who advise him
about his planned military excursion to Ramoth-
gilead (1 Kgs 22:1-6). Though Elijah and Elisha
are at odds with Ahab and his descendants, they
engage frequently and directly with them. Elijah
organizes a power contest with Ahab’s prophets
at Mount Carmel (1 Kgs 18:16-46) and confronts
him about his murder of Naboth (1 Kgs 21:17-
29). Another prophet rebukes Ahab for sparing
the Aramean king, Ben-hadad (1 Kgs 20:26-43).
Despite antagonism with the dynasty of Ahab,
Elisha is in the entourage of Jehoram as the king
goes to suppress a Moabite rebellion (2 Kgs 3:4-
20). Elisha gives a favorable prophecy about the
deliverance of Samaria from an Aramean siege (2
Kgs 7:1), and his servant Gehazi has access to the
king’s court (2 Kgs 8:1-6).
Prophets not only confront evil rulers within
Israel, but are involved in transitions of power.
After Saul sins against the Lord three times,
Samuel tells him the kingdom has been taken
from him (1 Sam 15:10-31), and, soon after, he
 peter j. leithart
anoints David as Saul’s successor (1 Sam 16:1-
13). When Solomon violates the laws of kingship
by multiplying wives and serving other gods (1
Kgs 11:1-8), the prophet Ahijah hands ten tribes
to Jeroboam, chief of the forced labor Solomon
had apportioned to the tribe of Joseph (1 Kgs
11:26-40). Elisha anoints one of Jehoram’s com-
manders, Jehu, to conspire against and destroy the
house of Ahab (2 Kgs 9:1-10). Elisha even inter-
venes in a Gentile nation to facilitate a transition
from one dynasty to another; YHWH sends him
to appoint Hazael to succeed Ben-hadad as king
of Aram (2 Kgs 8:7-15).
In the books of Samuel and Kings, prophets
confront kings mainly for their personal sins and
failings. For example, Samuel rebukes Saul for
not waiting to sacrifice and for failing to carry out
the ban against the Amalekites (1 Sam 13, 15),
and Nathan confronts David about his adultery
and murdering. The writing prophets, in contrast,
engage in something like prophetic punditry,
judging kings, lesser rulers, and the entire nation
for “policy” failures and their rebellion against
the Lord’s standards of justice. Isaiah condemns
Judah’s rulers for failure to protect orphans and
widows from exploitation (Isa 1:16-17) and for
widespread bribery (Isa 1:21-23), and he delivers
“Woes” against those who were greedy for land
(Isa 5:8-10), who confuse standards of good and
evil (Isa 5:20), and who enact evil statutes (Isa
10:1-4). Jeremiah counsels King Zedekiah to
submit to Nebuchadnezzar and warns that the
nation will face sword, famine, and pestilence if he
resists ( Jer 27:1-15). Ezekiel prophesies against
the “shepherds of Israel” (Ezek 34:2)—and at the
time, this was a royal rather than a priestly meta-
phor. Israel’s shepherds, he says, fatten themselves
on the flock, fail to care for the sick, diseased,
and broken; the flock of Israel has been scattered
for lack of shepherding (Ezek 34:3-6). Amos
rebukes Israel for rejecting the laws of YHWH
and rebukes Israel for abuse of the poor, sexual
promiscuity, and cruel treatment of wage laborers
(Amos 2:4-8). Micah condemns not only proph-
ets, seers, and priests but also the cannibal kings
who rip their subjects in pieces and cook their
flesh (Mic 3:1-12). These references, of course,
represent only a few of many similar passages in
the prophetic writings.
In sum, under both the Mosaic and the
Davidic order, priests and prophets had impor-
tant responsibilities for Israel’s life in the land,
both in judging cases, correcting rulers, and culti-
vating righteousness among the people. Yes, they
lead Israel’s worship, but Israel’s entire common life
is within their purview.
During the monarchy, there is also considera-
ble overlap in the other direction, as kings take on
a prominent liturgical role.
Moses receives the pattern of the Tabernacle
on Mount Sinai (Exod 25:9, 40); David receives
the pattern for the Temple, its furnishings, and
its personnel (1 Chr 28:19).6 Throughout 1-2
Kings, the Davidic kings are judged by their faith-
fulness in maintaining the physical condition of
the Temple. As noted above, David reorganizes
the Levites and priests and formulates the duty
rosters for Temple personnel. In this, David serves
as a model for later reforming kings. Joash repairs
the Temple and establishes a system to collect
funds for ongoing repair (2 Chr 24:1-14). After
the idolatries of his father Ahaz, Hezekiah opens
the door of the Temple (2 Chr 29:3), then gathers
Levites and priests and exhorts them to re-conse-
crate the house (2 Chr 29:4-19). During Josiah’s
reign, Hilkiah the priest discovers the forgotten
book of the law in the Temple, which becomes the
guide for Josiah’s renewal of the covenant (2 Chr
34:1-33). The Chronicler is careful to distinguish
the roles of kings and priests: kings organize
and provide material support for the restoration
of Temple operations, but the priests carry out
the rituals of purification and consecration. Yet
there is mutual accountability: kings demand that
priests perform their liturgical functions, while
priests and prophets remind kings that they are
subordinate to King YHWH and His law.
At times, however, kings seem to take a more
direct role in festivals and sacrifices. David leads
the ark procession into Jerusalem (2 Sam 6:1-
19), and we’re informed that “David offered burnt
offerings and peace offerings before YHWH” (2
Sam 6:18). Solomon presides at the dedication
of the Temple. He prays a long prayer of dedica-
6
The distribution of responsibility for the sanctuary works this
way: prophets (such as Moses, David, Ezekiel, or John) receive
a vision of the pattern for a new sanctuary; they are sacred
architects. Kings build temples and maintain the physical integ-
rity of the house. Once the house is built, priests carry out the
regular services of the temple.
37
 asymmetrical p owers
tion (1 Kgs 8:12-53), pronounces a benediction
(1 Kgs 8:55-61), and offers 22,000 oxen and
120,000 sheep as peace offerings, after conse-
crating the court of the Temple as an expanded
altar (1 Kgs 8:62-64). So, certainly, the books of
Samuel and Kings emphasize the kings’ role in
sacrificial celebrations; but presumably these con-
secrating offerings were nonetheless performed
according to Levitical law: that is, priests perform
the blood rites and turn animal flesh to smoke,
under the direction of the kings. It seems that, to
the end, the Chronicler preserves the distinction
of royal and priestly roles: in his description of
Hezekiah’s rededication of the Temple, Hezekiah
brings animals for sacrifice, but priests slaughter
the animals, sprinkle blood, and offer the animal
parts on the altar (2 Chr 29:20-28).
This intertwining and distinction of priestly
and kingly roles may be clarified by contrast with
the “church-state” arrangements of the northern
kingdom. When he takes ten tribes out from the
Davidic dynasty, Jeroboam I sets up new liturgical
forms, ordains a non-Aaronic priesthood, builds
golden calf shrines at Dan and Bethel (1 Kgs
12:28-29), and organizes a different liturgical cal-
endar (1 Kgs 12:32). Unlike the Aaronic priests,
the priests of the north are political appointees,
therefore beholden to the king (1 Kgs 12:31).
Jeroboam himself ascends to the altar to offer
incense (1 Kgs 12:33–13:1). We aren’t surprised
to learn that the northern kings also have their
sycophantic court prophets (1 Kgs 22). In the
north, priests and prophets are subordinated to
what appear to be sacral priest-kings.
A few conclusions follow from all this data.
First, there are certainly interstitial areas that
are not explicitly or wholly assigned to either
priest or king. Over time, the Temple expands
to encompass a large proportion of the holy city.
Who’s in charge of, say, dormitories for visiting
priests? These interstitial regions are regions of
cooperation, negotiation, and, no doubt, conflict.
Second, though, where priestly and political
responsibilities overlap, the overlap is nearly always
to the advantage of priests. Priests not only carry
out their responsibilities in the Temple, but also
often, by teaching Torah and prophesying, share
in ruling the land. Priests are consulted for diffi-
cult judicial cases, and within the Temple courts
are permitted to kill. What’s more, their role in
38
the rule of the land is indispensable. Kings, on the
other hand, are absolutely forbidden to carry out
priestly duties at the altar or in the Temple. No
wall of separation prevents priests from political
activity; but an impenetrable wall of separation
blocks rulers, including kings, from usurping
priestly tasks. To translate this into modern terms:
the rights of the church are inviolable; but states
are never free from pastoral and prophetic “inter-
ference” from the church. The scope of state action
is limited by the church, but the church has a uni-
versal, catholic reach. The church is Christ’s Bride,
and speaks to kings as a Queen Mother to her
sons. Kings must hear; and resist the unnatural
urge to seize the Bride of Another.
One final, more subtle overlap deepens this
point. The Tabernacle and Temple are “sacred”
areas, and the priests are called to protect the holi-
ness of God’s house. But the land is also sacred.
As Jonathan Klawans has noted, the Torah rec-
ognizes two forms of holiness and two forms of
pollution: ritual and moral.7 Forms of ritual impu-
rity (childbirth, skin disease, genital emissions,
corpse defilement) exclude those who are unclean
from the sanctuary court. Sins, especially idolatry,
sexual sin, and the shedding of innocent blood,
pollute the land. Ritual impurity is removed by
rites of purification. Moral or land pollution is
removed by imposing punishments, particularly
the death penalty, against those who pollute the
land. Thus the Deuteronomic phrase: “Purge
[Heb. ba’ar, “burn”] the evil from among you”
(Deut 13:5; 17:7, 12; 19:13, 19; 22:21-24; 24:7).
There is, in other words, an analogy between the
operations of the sanctuary and the governance of
the land. The sanctuary is made after the pattern
of a heavenly sanctuary (Exod 25:9, 40), and as
“heaven-on-earth” it sets the pattern for the gov-
ernance of the land. Thus, the liturgical work of
the sanctuary is a model for the political work of
kings in the land: protecting holiness. This lends
a “sacramental” character to both sanctuary and
land, to both priest and king. Because the sanctu-
ary is the palace of the divine King, it provides a
living, incarnate model for the palace and domain
of the Davidic kings.
7
Klawans, Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism (OUP, 2000).
 peter j. leithart
Israel and Gentiles in Exile
Israel’s exile brought major changes to the institu-
tional arrangements of Israel.
Perhaps traditional local leaders, though sub-
ordinate now to an imperial governor, continued to
rule those who remained in the land after the major-
ity either were taken to Babylon or fled to Egypt
(see 2 Kings 25). But there was no longer a king
nor a court. The Israelite “state” was dismantled.
Yet the Israelite “church” persists. Of course,
with the Temple demolished, the religious life
of common Israelites and the responsibilities of
priests are dramatically altered. Synagogue-like
gatherings predate the exile (see Lev 23:1-3), but
they take on a new prominence in the diaspora.
Synagogues serve as both community centers
and places of worship, and their complex and
obscure forms of leadership have both “priestly”
and “political” dimensions.8 After the Maccabean
Revolt, priests function as civil rulers, occasion-
ally taking on the title “king” (see the coins of
Alexander Jannaeus). Exilic Jewish communities
aren’t simply “religious” institutions, but outposts
of Israel within foreign lands.
Jeremiah instructs the exiles how to conduct
themselves while outside the land. In contrast to
the false prophets, Jeremiah predicts a lengthy
exile of seventy years. The exiles therefore are not
to expect a quick return to normal but to plan for
the long haul. Jeremiah tells them to build houses,
plant gardens, marry off their children, encour-
age their children to bear children. As the sons of
Jacob did in Egypt, the exiles in Babylon should
multiply and not diminish ( Jer 29:4-6). Babylon
is YHWH’s instrument for disciplining His
people, and so Babylonians aren’t to be treated as
enemies. No matter how harshly they’re treated,
the Jews aren’t to retaliate but to do good and love
their enemies: “Seek the peace of the city where I
have sent you into exile,” Jeremiah says, “and pray
to YHWH on its behalf; for in its peace you will
have peace” ( Jer 29:7). The exiles are sustained
by hope for return. After seventy years, YHWH
promises, “I will restore your fortunes and will
gather you from all the nations and from all the
places where I have driven you . . . and I will bring
8
On the organizational structure of diaspora synagogues, see
Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years,
2nd edition (New Haven: Yale, 2005), 303-304 and 412-453.
you back to the place from which I sent you into
exile” ( Jer 29:14). Israel is to maintain its identity
and grow as a people even after they lose the insti-
tutional forms of sanctuary and court.
Jews seek the “peace of the city” in part by
occupying high positions within the imperial
administration. Joseph, of course, is the prece-
dent. Sold by his brothers to Midianite traders,
Joseph eventually became a ruler in Egypt, set
over Pharaoh’s house and “all the land of Egypt”
(Gen 41:41), and specifically over the famine
relief program of his own devising (Gen 41:33-
40). When his brothers came to Egypt to buy
grain, YHWH had already prepared a place for
them. The pattern is repeated during the exile.
In the second year of Nebuchadnezzar (Dan
2:1), Daniel, another Joseph, interprets the king’s
dream and is elevated to become “ruler over the
whole province of Babylon” and “chief prefect
over all the wise men of Babylon.” At Daniel’s
suggestion, his three friends are placed over the
administration of the province (Dan 2:48-49). By
the time Jerusalem falls in the nineteenth year of
Nebuchadnezzar (2 Kgs 25:8), Daniel has been
a high imperial official for almost two decades.9
Jeremiah is confident the people of Jerusalem
can safely surrender to Nebuchadnezzar because
Daniel is well-placed to shield them.
Many of the stories of Israel’s exile are
Joseph-like narratives about the elevation of Jews
to high positions. After Persia conquers Babylon,
Daniel, now an old man, becomes one of the three
commissioners governing the 120 satraps of the
Persian empire (Dan 6:1-3). Esther ascends to
become queen of Persia; and by the end of the
book of Esther, Mordecai, too, has been elevated
to be “second only to King Ahasuerus and great
among the Jews” (Est 10:3). Nehemiah is cup-
bearer to the king of Persia (Neh 1:11), a trusted
courtier who has the king’s ear, and Ezra is well-
known enough to the Persian rulers to receive
a commission to return to Jerusalem to teach
Torah (Ezra 7:6-26).
For the most part, these well-placed Jewish
courtiers act to protect Jews and their interests.
Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s dream to
9
Nebuchadnezzar attacked Jerusalem and removed some of the
residents some years prior to his final capture and destruction
of the city and the Temple: see Daniel 1:1, 2 Chr 36:6, and 2
Kings 24:1.
39
 asymmetrical p owers
protect himself and his friends. Esther and Mor-
decai conspire to take down Haman, who plots to
wipe out the entire exilic community, and Nehe-
miah tells the king about the ruin of Jerusalem
and receives permission to lead the reconstruction
project. At times, high-profile Jews play a role
more like that of earlier prophets, correcting kings
for their personal failures and their unjust rule.
Daniel discerns that Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of
a great tree cut down is meant as a rebuke for his
pride and a call to repentance. He advises the king:
“break away now from your sins by doing justice,
and from your iniquities by showing mercy to the
poor, in case there may be a prolonging of your
prosperity” (Dan 4:27). In other words, Daniel
holds a Gentile king to the standards of justice
and mercy YHWH requires of the Davidic kings
(cf. 2 Sam 8:15; 1 Chr 18:14; Psa 72).
Remarkably, the Gentile rulers respond. After
Daniel interprets Nebuchadnezzar’s vision of the
statue, the king confesses, “Surely your God is a
God of gods and a Lord of kings and a revealer
of mysteries” (Dan 2:47). When he’s restored to
sanity, Nebuchadnezzar blesses the Most High
whose “dominion is an everlasting dominion” and
whose “kingdom endures from generation to gen-
eration” (Dan 4:34). Darius, because the Lord
protects Daniel from the lions, decrees that every-
one in his empire is “to fear and tremble before the
God of Daniel” (Dan 6:25-27). Cyrus, sending
the exiles back to Jerusalem, acknowledges that
“YHWH, the God of heaven, has given me all the
kingdoms of the earth, and He has appointed me
to build Him a house in Jerusalem” (Ezra 1:2).
Whatever we conclude about the historical
accuracy of these testimonies (I take them at face
value), they are extremely significant canonically.
Israel begins its national history in Egyptian exile,
where they are treated as slaves and forbidden to
leave. Pharaoh doesn’t release YHWH’s first-
born (Exod 4:23) until YHWH takes Pharaoh’s
firstborn. Israel leaves Egypt enriched, but only
because they “plunder” the Egyptians. As the Old
Testament history ends, however, Israel’s situa-
tion is quite different. Neither Babylon nor Persia
enslaves the exiles. When the prophesied seventy
years are fulfilled, YHWH stirs up Cyrus so that
he freely allows the Jews to return to their land,
and he self-plunders by supplying Israel with
materials to rebuild the Temple and the city. The
40
Abrahamic promise is being realized: nations are
being blessed through Abraham’s seed.
In the absence of a monarch and of its land,
Israel continues to carry out its priestly and pro-
phetic functions, including those functions that
pertain to the rule of land. Even when Israel is
ruled by pagan kings, the overlap of priestly and
royal authority is tilted to the advantage of priestly
authority. When emperors command faithful
Jews in the areas of worship and prayer, the Jews
defy them. But Jews advise Gentile rulers, both to
protect the Jewish people and to pursue justice.
Thick boundaries protect the “church,” but the
church has the right to speak YHWH’s word
even to a non-Jewish “state.” Finally, the merger
of civic and liturgical responsibilities in the Has-
monean priesthood, as well as the combination of
authority over the community and its worship in
the synagogue, suggests that Jewish communities
see themselves as, in significant ways, independ-
ent of the Gentile state. Though embedded in the
empire, they form quasi-polities unto themselves.
New Testament
The church emerges from Judaism, both in Judea
and in the diaspora. For several centuries, the
church’s political and legal situation is similar to,
though more tenuous than, that of Judaism. Like
exilic Jewish communities, the church is a people
without land or recognized political rulers. Yet,
like the exilic Jewish communities, the church is
a self-governing community, as well as a center of
worship, teaching, and prayer. The church relates
to the Roman empire as exilic Jewish communi-
ties did. Jeremiah instructed the exiles to seek the
peace of Babylon, and the apostles regularly issue
similar instructions to the early Christians. Paul
tells the Romans to submit to the powers, which
are established for their good. Christians are to
pay taxes and to render honor and fear to govern-
ing authorities (Rom 13:1-7). Paul urges prayer
for kings and authorities, so Christians can go
about their business leading quiet and peaceable
lives (1 Tim 2:1-2). Peter echoes Paul’s instruc-
tions: “Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to
every human institution,” including kings and
governors. Submission, he says, has an apologetic
function: by doing right, Christians will “silence
 peter j. leithart
the ignorance of foolish men.” Peter concludes,
“Honor all people, love the brotherhood, fear
God, honor the king” (1 Pet 2:13-17).
Throughout the book of Acts, the church’s
peaceable stance toward public authorities pays
off. Yes, the church’s opponents, both Jews and
Gentiles, are driven to savage mob violence, but
the interventions of Roman authorities, whether
by intention or not, often protect Christians.
When Jews in Corinth bring Paul before Gallio,
the Roman proconsul refuses to make a judgment
about matters of Jewish law and turns the other
way when a mob beats Sosthenes, the ruler of the
synagogue (Acts 18:12-17). At Ephesus, Deme-
trius the silversmith stirs up the members of his
guild—and then the whole city—against Paul,
but the town clerk calms the crowd and tells them
to file charges in an orderly way (Acts 19:23-41).
After Paul is arrested in Jerusalem, a band of Jews
vows to kill him. Informed of the plot, Claudius
Lysias transfers Paul at night to the Roman gov-
ernor Felix (Acts 23:12-35).
Romans sometimes beat or imprison the
apostles, but God turns these occasions into
opportunities to witness (as with the Philippian
jailer in Acts 16).10 More significantly for my pur-
poses, Paul turns these situations to his overall
missional and political advantage. In Philippi,
Paul expels a spirit of divination from a slave girl.
Deprived of their livelihood, the girl’s owners drag
Paul and Silas to the magistrates, charging them
with attacking the customs of the proudly-Ro-
man colony of Philippi. Mob and magistrates
strip the missionaries and beat them with rods,
and the city leaders throw them into prison (Acts
16:16-24). Overnight, an earthquake shakes the
prison open, which leads to the conversion of the
jailer and his household. The next morning, the
humbled magistrates offer to let Paul and Silas
leave town quietly, but Paul refuses. The magis-
trates have permitted Roman citizens to be beaten
and imprisoned without trial, and Paul wants the
magistrates to admit their error in person (Acts
16:35-39). That is, Paul demands a vindication
as public as the violation. That vindication has
long-term effects. If the magistrates allow Paul
and Silas to preach openly in Philippi, they’ll also
10
The next several paragraphs originally appeared, in a slightly
different form, in my “The Church as a Political Force,” First-
Things.com, September 25, 2020.
tolerate the group of believers gathered at Lydia’s
house (Acts 16:40). Paul wins a legal and politi-
cal skirmish, but he achieves far more. He leaves
behind a new Philippi, which now permits the
church to teach a subversive Way that, by the Phi-
lippians’ own assessment, “it is not lawful for us to
accept or to observe, being Romans” (Acts 16:21).
The sheer existence of a Christian community in
Philippi forces the city to alter public norms.
This incident in Philippi is the only occasion
in Acts where Roman authorities (as opposed
to mobs) punish the apostles for preaching the
gospel. Roman officials never order the apostles
to stop preaching; they never disperse Christian
assemblies or try to force them to offer incense to
the emperor. Yet we can surmise from Acts that the
apostles’ response to Roman pressure would have
been identical to their response when the Sanhedrin
gives them “strict orders not to continue teaching
in this name”: that is, “We must obey God rather
than men” (Acts 5:28-29). The book of Revelation
confirms this suspicion: the sea beast, representing
Rome, makes war on the saints because they refuse
to worship the beast or his image (Rev 13:1-18),
and overcomes them. Finally, the martyrs are vin-
dicated and enthroned (Rev 20:1-4).
In the light of the Jewish history of exile,
Paul’s confrontation with Bar-Jesus at Salamis is
of particular note. At the beginning of the story,
Bar-Jesus is “with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus”
(Acts 13:6-7) as a court magician and prophet, a
distorted latter-day Daniel. When Paul rebukes
Bar-Jesus as a “son of the devil” and blinds him,
Sergius Paulus is impressed: “the proconsul
believed . . . being amazed at the teaching of
the Lord” (Acts 13:12). So a Roman proconsul
named Paulus stops taking advice from one Jew in
order to listen to his namesake, Paul. The place-
ment of this episode in the narrative of Acts is
noteworthy. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus’s first sermon
at Nazareth anticipates his entire mission as Isai-
ah’s Spirit-anointed “Servant of YHWH” (Luke
4:14-30). Set at the beginning of Luke’s narra-
tive of Paul’s first missionary journey, the story of
Bar-Jesus and Sergius Paulus has programmatic
force. This, Luke implies, is what Paul’s mission
is all about. The apostle to the Gentiles prevails
over false teachers so Roman officials will submit
to the teaching of the Lord. Paul doesn’t end up in
the same position as Daniel, Mordecai, or Nehe-
41
 asymmetrical p owers
miah, but his elevation is reminiscent of theirs.
In important respects, the “church-state”
pattern of ancient Israel persists into the early
church. The church preaches the gospel even in
defiance of traditional religious authorities, as
they will later preach and practice in the face
of Roman opposition. The church proclaims
to rulers the message of the kingdom, the king-
ship of Jesus, righteousness, self-control, and the
judgment to come. The church is protected by an
impermeable wall of separation; but states must
be receptive to the church’s guidance and instruc-
tion. If they are not, they defy the Lord of the
church Himself and take their place among the
murmuring nations that Jesus threatens to shatter
with a rod of iron (Psa 2).
There are important differences between Israel
and the church, however. Beginning with the exile,
Israel lives under de-sacralized kings.11 Outside
the holy land, the sacramental link between sanc-
tuary and land is broken. Eventually the church,
in both East and West, restores sacral forms of
kingship, but the partial “secularization” of rule
is permanent. Neither exilic Israel nor the church
depends on sacramental kingship for its existence.
Yet, the primary innovation of the new cov-
enant doesn’t have to do with kingship but with
the character of the church. In a sense, the church
makes exile permanent. The church will always be
a religio-political reality scattered among states
and societies that are more or less responsive to
the gospel. By welcoming Gentiles on equal terms
with Jews, the church becomes a cosmopolitan
communion, an ethnically and geographically
catholic church without inherent links to any
particular land, race, or political order. This only
reinforces the independence of the people of God.
The churches are outposts of a heavenly kingdom,
akin to foreign embassies among the nations, gov-
erned always by the high King, Jesus.12 Yet the
11
Within the Babylonian system, the emperor is a representative
of the gods, but Jews regard this claim as idolatry. See Henri
Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1948); Francis Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of
Enchantment (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006).
12
The model of church-state relations offered here is compati-
ble with patristic readings of Jesus’ “Render to Caesar” axiom.
Ambrose writes, “ Taxation is a matter for Caesar, that is
beyond question; but the church is God’s, and so it ought not
to be given over to Caesar, because Caesar’s sway cannot extend
over the temple of God” (Sermon against Auxentius, 35). John
42
church takes over Israel’s priestly-prophetic role
of teaching and correcting rulers. Kings should
submit to the Lord Jesus, for they are His serv-
ants, and they submit by listening to the voice of
Jesus as it comes through the mouth of His Bride,
the church.
Conclusion: Examining
Particular Cases
How might this model apply in particular circum-
stances? To give this biblical survey some practical
weight, I close with a series of brief reflections on
a handful of historical or contemporary scenarios.
1. Constantine and the bishops.
Was Constantine within his rights to convene
the Council of Nicaea? I believe he was. Con-
stantine, in my understanding, did not dictate to
the church but urged the bishops to resolve the
Arian crisis and facilitated their meeting.13 If, as
the myth has it, Constantine actually controlled
the outcome, he would have breached the wall of
separation. The church teaches, and determines
orthodoxy and heresy for itself.
2. Establishme nt.
Are state establishments consistent with the bib-
lical model I have outlined? Much depends on
details. On the one hand, a state establishment
rightly acknowledges the church and the truth of
of Damascus makes a similar point: “We defer to you, O king,
in the affairs of life, in tax and revenues and privileges, and in
all our affairs that are your responsibility. In the management
of the church we have pastors who have spoken the word of
God to us, and have given form to the law of the church. We
do not move the ancient landmarks that our ancestors have set
up (Prov 22:28) but retain the traditions as we have received
them. If even in small ways we begin to pull down the building
of the church, by degrees the whole will be demolished” (Second
Speech against Those Who Reject Images, 14). (Both quotations
from Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, From
Irenaeus to Grotius [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999], 75 and
214, respectively.) The pattern I’m advocating is very similar to
Calvin’s. He fought strenuously against magisterial interference
with the church’s preaching, selection of pastors, and liturgy.
At the same time, he exercised considerable influence over the
political life of Geneva.
13
See my Defending Constantine (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2010).
 peter j. leithart
the gospel. On the other hand, state establish-
ments often seduce the church into becoming
“court priests” and obsequious prophets. State
establishments also tend to nationalize churches.
Though this has its benefits (national culture
is infused with Christian symbols and truth), it
can also erode the church’s primary identity as
the body of Christ. No matter how ingrained
into national life, the church is always— first and
foremost—one and catholic, a nation to itself and
not a national Bureau of Religious Services. The
medieval model is closer to the biblical picture
than that of the Reformation is: churches weren’t
attached to nations; rather, Christian nations
were within the one church, their rulers (ideally)
sons of the church.
5. Pande mics.
Does the state have authority to force a church to
stop worshiping because of a public health crisis?
Within the biblical model, this is just the kind of
thing the state may not do. The state can appeal to
churches to take precautions—including ceasing
public worship for a time—and in severe crises
the church should agree. But it’s not for the state
to decide whether or not the church worships.
Jesus already decided we should. Churches should
imitate Daniel: open the window, pray, and let the
Dariuses of the world do their worst.

3. Tax support.
Is it legitimate for states to collect taxes to fund
the church? Throughout Israel’s history, the
Temple was funded by tithes and offerings from
the people, though in times of crisis kings funded
repairs and reforms. In the main, churches should
be self-supporting. What about tax exemp-
tion? The church should take advantage of legal
arrangements that facilitate her mission, but
these must be held loosely. Churches that depend
on tax exemption are likely to buckle when their
tax exemption is threatened.

4. War.
May the church judge wars to be unjust? Yes. Isra-
el’s prophets condemn Israel’s kings for unjust or
brutal warring, and military decisions are within
the scope of the church’s moral teaching. May the
church release members from the obligation to
fight in an unjust war? I don’t believe there is any
biblical precedent, but there is certainly historical
precedent, and it is based on a church-state para-
digm similar to the one I’ve developed here.14 To
say the church has this authority is not, of course,
to say the church has always used its authority
wisely.

14
Huguccio (Hugh of Pisa), for instance, argued that Christians
commanded to fight other Christians by a non-Christian ruler
should refuse to fight (Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the
Middle Ages [Cambridge: CUP, 1975], 121).

43
 The Modern State
is a Good—May It
Be Christian
J O N AT H A N C U L B R E AT H

Jonathan Culbreath, of The Josias, responds to New Polity’s Andrew Willard

Jones—
  The dispute between “Statist” integralists and “anti-Statist” postlib-
erals revolves around the question of how Catholics ought to approach
the modern state: should they attempt to work from within it, in an
attempt to turn it toward the truly common good? Or should they
seek to abandon and discard it altogether? The integralist approach
to this question is rooted in the tradition of the papal magisterium,
which teaches both that the principles of Catholic politics are eternal
and unchanging, and that they are incarnated in the changeable condi-
tions of each historical period. Accordingly, it is not out of the question
for the Church to approach the modern form of the state as a poten-
tial ally, if it is turned to the ends defined by Catholic social teaching.
Indeed, the Church recognizes that the peculiar conditions of global
modernity, where advanced economies and technologies have expanded
the possibilities of human interconnection, make a modern form of the
state especially desirable. Integralists and postliberals agree, however,
that this state must be fundamentally transformed, though what such
a transformation will look like is less securely agreed upon. Integralism
affirms that there is no greater transformation of the modern state than
to bring it into subordination to the authority of the Church, as the
body is subordinated to its soul.

A
ndrew Willard Jones has published a
thought-provoking response1 to my
own critique2 of the “anti-Statist” posi-
tion taken by New Polity.3 I am grateful
1
Jones, “ The State Will Be Transformed,” New Polity, December
18, 2020, https://newpolity.com/blog/the-christian-form.
2
Made in the Twitter thread beginning here (December 17, 2020):
https://twitter.com/maestrojmc/status/1339794209117650948.
3
The immediate statement of it to which I replied is in the
that the editors of New Polity have given me this
opportunity to unpack my stance on this issue at
greater length, with some reflection on the chal-
lenges made to “statist integralism” by Jones.
The conflict between so-called “Statist”
integralists and “anti-Statist” postliberals is fun-
damentally over the question of how Christians
Twitter thread beginning here (December 17, 2020): https://
twitter.com/PostliberalTho1/status/1339676207181393920.

44
 jonathan culbreath
ought to approach the modern state, with a view
to establishing a truly Christian social and polit-
ical order. By the “modern state,” I take Andrew
Jones to mean the “centralized, unitary, bureau-
cratic, administrative, and militaristic” state.4
Certain integralists, such as Professor Adrian
Vermeule of Harvard University, claim that it
is possible and desirable to “integrate” the given
structures of the modern state “from within,”5
with a special focus6 on the bureaucratic struc-
tures of the administrative State, as distinct from
parliamentary democratic institutions. By con-
trast, the postliberals claim that the modern State
is “fundamentally anti-Christian,” and that it is
precisely this modern form that must be disman-
tled in a truly Christian political order.7
I will address this issue in three parts. First, I
will present what I consider to be the most impor-
tant and persuasive argument for the integralist
position, namely the argument from the authority
of the Magisterium. Second, I will briefly address
the issue of force or violence, and the rights of
Church and State with respect to the use of force.
Finally, I will address Andrew’s hypothesis on the
relation of ends and forms, and the application of
these concepts to political form and to political
liberalism.
I. The Magisterial Case for
the State
At the outset, it should be noted that in Latin,
the popes often use the terms civitas or res publica,
which can mean “polity,” “body politic,” “republic.”
It can also mean specifically the ruling institu-
tion or public authority of a polity, in which case
it is generally translated as “state.” This double
meaning of the Latin is no accident. The ruling
institution legitimately bears the name of the
polity through analogy, given that it represents
the whole polity, being its chief part.
4
See Jones, “The State Will Be Transformed.”
5
Vermeule, “Integration from Within,” American Affairs 2.1
(Spring 2018): 202–13. Online here: https://americanaffairs-
journal.org/2018/02/integration-from-within/.
6
Adrian Vermeule, “Ralliement: Two Distinctions,” The
Josias, March 16, 2018, https://thejosias.com/2018/03/16/
ralliement-two-distinctions/.
7
Jones, “ The State Will Be Transformed.”
There can be little doubt from the context of
their writings that—however the word may be
translated—the popes are often referring to pre-
cisely this ruling institution, not only the body
politic as a whole. In my previous response,8 I
observed that the modern papal magisterium
expressly directs the Christian faithful to occupy
the structures of the modern State, so as to infuse
it with the spirit of the Gospel and the soul of
Catholic teaching. As Pope Leo XIII writes in
Immortale Dei (promulgated 1885), the vocation
of the faithful is to “infuse, as it were, into all the
veins of the [s]tate the healthy sap and blood of
Christian wisdom and virtue” (Immortale 45).9
In this respect, Leo imagines modern Christians
imitating the lofty example of the early Chris-
tians under the pagan Roman empire. In the same
paragraph, he cites Tertullian: “We are but of
yesterday, yet we swarm in all your institutions,
we crowd your cities, islands, villages, towns,
assemblies, the army itself, your wards and corpo-
rations, the palace, the senate, and the law courts.”
In pagan Rome, it can be said that Christians
swarmed the Roman and pagan institutions of
the state, its entire bureaucratic and administra-
tive apparatus (among many other institutions),
and converted those institutions from within.
Leo XIII thus imagines a Christian politi-
cal strategy explicitly within the context of the
integralist model he adopts as the ideal model
of Church-state relations: “There must, accord-
ingly, exist between these two powers [Church
and state] a certain orderly connection, which may
be compared to the union of the soul and body in
man” (Immortale 14).10 What can Leo be speaking
of, other than the “modern state,” i.e. the con-
temporary institutions available to any aspirants
to political rule? Leo is not merely using a word,
“state,” to describe an as yet non-existent ideal; nor
is it merely a convenient placeholder for whatever
political institutions happen to exist. Rather, Leo
is making a substantive exhortation to Christians
to occupy the real, existing, historically specific
political institutions of his day, in order to convert
them from within. In other words, Leo has in his
sights none other than the “modern state.”
This is yet more evident from Leo’s famous
8
See footnote 2 above.
9
22 in the Latin text.
10
6 in the Latin text.
45
 the modern state is a good —may it be christian
letter to French Catholics on the strategy that
became known as “ralliement”: Au Milieu des Sol-
licitudes (promulgated 1892). In this letter, even
more so than in Immortale Dei, Leo is speaking of
Christian political strategy in a modern context,
specifically with reference to the modern State.
He is not merely using modern words to describe
the Christian ideal; indeed, he is quite explicit that
that ideal itself may be instantiated differently in
different eras, according to the conditions of the
age. Leo is clear that Catholic teaching is agnos-
tic about the ideal “form” of political regimes, so
long as regimes are infused with the spirit of the
Gospel and properly subject to the authority of
the Church. The principles of Catholicism, while
they remain in themselves fixed and immutable,
are nonetheless “incarnated in facts”; as such,
“they are clothed with a contingent character,
determined by the centre in which their applica-
tion is produced” (Au Milieu 15).
In yet stronger words, Leo also adds that “all
individuals are bound to accept these governments
and not to attempt their overthrow or a change in
their form” (Au Milieu 16). In this context, Leo
is condemning the sort of revolutionary action
that produced the very government under which
Catholics found themselves in the French Repub-
lic, yet he is exhorting Catholics to accept that
government and abstain from similarly destruc-
tive action.
Of course, Leo does not mean to imply that
political forms are totally immutable: the needs
of specific eras, the changing circumstances of
the times, and so forth, may sometimes call for
incremental changes in the form of the state.
Furthermore, revolutions themselves often cause
a condition of violence and anarchy, one which
requires the establishment of some regime, so that
there may be a government able to quell the dis-
order. Leo thus describes the painful process that
gave birth to the modern state:
And how are these political changes of
which We speak produced? They some-
times follow in the wake of violent crises,
too often of a bloody character, in the
midst of which pre-existing governments
totally disappear; then anarchy holds
sway, and soon public order is shaken
to its very foundations and finally over-
46
thrown. From that time onward a social
need obtrudes itself upon the nation;
it must provide for itself without delay.
Is it not its privilege—or, better still, its
duty—to defend itself against a state of
affairs troubling it so deeply, and to re-es-
tablish public peace in the tranquillity of
order? Now, this social need justifies the
creation and the existence of new govern-
ments, whatever form they take; since, in
the hypothesis wherein we reason, these
new governments are a requisite to public
order, all public order being impossible
without a government. (18)
This very process which Leo XIII describes is the
same process that gave birth to the modern State,
with all its bureaucratic apparatuses, its central-
ized administration of social and economic affairs,
its massive powers of surveillance and control, its
advanced technological capabilities, and so forth.
(Karl Marx appears to observe the same process
at work in the final pages of The 18th Brumaire
of Napoleon Bonaparte.) The exhortations of Leo
XIII give us no reason to suppose that it is any-
thing other than this state, “the modern State,”
which he exhorts Catholics to turn toward truly
Christian purposes.
As I also indicated in my Twitter thread, the
same thesis can be deduced from the texts of the
Second Vatican Council—and, I propose, also in
the writings of the post-conciliar popes. Contrary
to the suspicions of many “traditionalists,” there is
no discontinuity between the pre- and post-con-
ciliar magisterium on this issue.
In Gaudium et Spes, the historically-specific
features of the “modern State” are not condemned
as inherently opposed to Christianity, but are wel-
comed as a potential boon to the Church and her
mission to the modern world. Gaudium et Spes
even recognizes that the size and centralization
of political institutions is a necessary response to
modern conditions, while also warning against the
overreach of government power or its extension to
totalitarian purposes. Thus, the Council teaches
that “the complex circumstances of our day make
it necessary for public authority to intervene more
often in social, economic, and cultural matters in
order to bring about favorable conditions which
will give more effective help to citizens and groups
 jonathan culbreath
in their free pursuit of man’s total well-being”
(GS 75). In this, the Council echoes the teach-
ing of Pope St. John XXIII in Mater et Magistra
(promulgated 1961) on the increasing role of the
state in the modern economy. Modern economic
conditions, according to John XXIII, explain “the
insistent demands on those in authority—since
they are responsible for the common good—to
increase the degree and scope of their activities
in the economic sphere, and to devise ways and
means and set the necessary machinery in motion
for the attainment of this end” (MM 54).
This also echoes the earlier corporatist teach-
ing of Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno,
according to which it is proper to the state to
oversee the constitution of syndicates and cor-
porations as juridical entities and to regulate
their economic activity. In that encyclical, Pius
XI anticipated an objection very much like that
which Dr. Jones has directed against the bureau-
cratic and administrative form of the modern
state. It is worth reading Pius XI’s response in
full, which amounts to nothing less than a reit-
eration of the integralist doctrine of Church and
state in a modern context:
95. ... Yet lest We neglect anything in
a matter of such great importance and
that all points treated may be properly
connected with the more general prin-
ciples which We mentioned above and
with those which We intend shortly to
add, We are compelled to say that to Our
certain knowledge there are not wanting
some who fear that the [s]tate, instead of
confining itself as it ought to the furnish-
ing of necessary and adequate assistance,
is substituting itself for free activity; that
the new syndical and corporative order
savors too much of an involved and politi-
cal system of administration; and that (in
spite of those more general advantages
mentioned above, which are of course fully
admitted) it rather serves particular polit-
ical ends than leads to the reconstruction
and promotion of a better social order.
96. To achieve this latter lofty aim, and in
particular to promote the common good
truly and permanently, We hold it is first
and above everything wholly necessary that
God bless it and, secondly, that all men of
good will work with united effort toward
that end. We are further convinced, as a
necessary consequence, that this end will
be attained the more certainly the larger
the number of those ready to contribute
toward it their technical, occupational,
and social knowledge and experience;
and also, what is more important, the
greater the contribution made thereto of
Catholic principles and their application,
not indeed by Catholic Action (which
excludes strictly syndical or political activ-
ities from its scope) but by those sons of
Ours whom Catholic Action imbues with
Catholic principles and trains for carry-
ing on an apostolate under the leadership
and teaching guidance of the Church—of
that Church which in this field also that
We have described, as in every other field
where moral questions are involved and
discussed, can never forget or neglect
through indifference its divinely imposed
mandate to be vigilant and to teach.
In other words, the very institutions that some
might fear will be reduced to systems of admin-
istrative control—the same institutions that have
taken shape in response to the many changes
ushered in by modern history—are those that,
Pius XI advises us, must be turned to Catholic
uses and informed by Catholic principles, under
the guidance of the Church.
In summary, what other “form of the state”
can the papal Magisterium be referring to when it
claims, in the words of Gaudium et Spes, that “the
Church praises and esteems the work of those
who for the good of men devote themselves to
the service of the state and take on the burdens
of this office” (GS 75)? What institution other
than the modern bureaucratic and administrative
apparatus does the Church beckon Christians
to infuse with Christian purpose? The Church
in her wisdom adopts a deeply pragmatic stance
with regard to political history. She does not
envision the ideal Christian order in any particu-
lar forms, resurrected in crystalline purity from
the 13th century; rather, she constantly seeks
to adapt a spiritual ideal to changing histori-
47
 the modern state is a good —may it be christian
cal conditions. Accordingly, she must work with
the institutions that exist in any given period;
her purpose is not to “destroy” them except in
a figurative and spiritual sense—as Pope Leo
XIII constantly reminds us, the Church did not
“destroy” the pagan Roman Empire, but baptized
and converted it. (We may allow for a spiritual
sense in which one who receives baptism “dies”
spiritually and is resurrected in a new form; but
this new form does not change the essence of the
man who receives the sacrament.) It is the voca-
tion of the Church in the modern world, aided by
the laity in the temporal sphere, to do likewise for
the modern regimes which they inhabit.
2. A Monop oly on Force?
There is no question for integralism that, in
normal circumstances, the state possesses a right
to use force which private citizens do not. In
extraordinary circumstances, such as the absence
of any established regime or in situations where
one’s rights are endangered, it is permissible for
the private citizen to use force in defense of his
rights. But otherwise, according to the doctrine
of St. Thomas, the right to use force belongs prin-
cipally to the public authority and not to private
persons. The popes repeat this doctrine whenever
they condemn sedition and violence among the
citizenry, while reserving to the state the author-
ity to enforce penal sanctions.
There is also no question that, among the
various instances of public authority, the Church
too possesses this right to use force. The current
Code of Canon Law, promulgated in 1983 by Pope
St. John Paul II, is consistent with longstand-
ing teaching when it claims that “the Church has
the innate and proper right to coerce offending
members of the Christian faithful with penal sanc-
tions” (c. 1311). Likewise, “the law can establish
other expiatory penalties which deprive a member
of the Christian faithful of some spiritual or tem-
poral good and which are consistent with the
supernatural purpose of the Church” (c. 1312, §2).
Canon law here is simply repeating the doc-
trine of Pope Boniface VIII in Unam Sanctam
Catholicam (issued 1302) that the Church
possesses the fullness of both spiritual and tem-
poral power, and that while the spiritual power
48
is wielded by the priests, the temporal power is
wielded by kings “at the will and sufferance of the
priest.” Likewise, St. Thomas teaches that the
pope “holds the summit of both powers, namely
the spiritual and the secular” (In II Sent., dist. 44,
q. 2, a. 3).11
Is this a “monopoly on legitimate violence”?
First, it should be noted that “violence” in the
technical sense used by St. Thomas connotes an
act against the natural order, whereas force may be
something which restores the natural order. With
this distinction in mind, it must be conceded that
the state, and in another sense the Church, does
possess a monopoly on the use of coercion or force.
In the teaching of St. Thomas, which reflects the
magisterial and canon law traditions, it is only
the public authority or the “sovereign”—in Latin,
princeps—who may legitimately use coercion as a
means of teaching virtue and leading people to the
common good. This authority does not belong to
any private person:
A private person cannot lead another to
virtue efficaciously: for he can only advise,
and if his advice be not taken, it has no coer-
cive power, such as the law should have, in
order to prove an efficacious inducement
to virtue, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. x,
9). But this coercive power is vested in the
whole people or in some public personage,
to whom it belongs to inflict penalties[.]
(ST I–II, q. 90, a. 3, ad 2)
St. Thomas does of course allow for exceptions
when private persons may employ violence, e.g.
when the public power is not available (say, before
the constitution of the regime) or in self-defense.
Nonetheless, in general it is true to claim that the
right to use coercion belongs principally to the
public authority, and above all to the Church. It
would not be inaccurate to describe this right as
a “monopoly”—yet, in contrast to the Hobbesian
concept of the State, it is not this monopoly which
grounds the legitimacy of the public authority,
but the reverse.
11
See the excerpt from Gerardus Maiella published as “St. Thomas
on the Two Powers” (translated by Timothy Wilson), The
Josias, August 10, 2020, https://thejosias.com/2020/08/10/
st-thomas-on-the-two-powers/. It contains the passage from
the Sentences Commentary cited here.
 jonathan culbreath
From this perspective, it is questionable to
adhere to a political theology which, “when it
comes to violence, is really about more people
using force more directly” (in Dr. Jones’ words).12
This would seem to be a rather unorthodox
political theology, given the strong insistence in
the theological and magisterial tradition on the
exclusive rights of the public authority—such as
the Church or the state—to use such force. Of
course, there is nothing wrong with a political
project that seeks to exhort more people to politi-
cal action and participation; nor is there anything
wrong with a decentralized or pluralistic system
of authority per se, as existed in 13th-century
France. But if the objection to a “monopoly on
legitimate violence” is in fact motivated by the
desire to expand to more people the right to use
violence, then perhaps it is not quietism or ana-
baptism that is to be feared, but the proliferation
of anarchic violence.
3. Ends, Forms, and the
Aesthetics of Bureaucracy
In his article, Dr. Jones writes the following:
However, in aiming this state toward
our supernatural end, we will transform
it—not embellish it or correct it here
and there, but give it a new form. This
form will not be the modern, centralized,
unitary, bureaucratic, administrative, and
militaristic form. (I call this form “the
State” because that is what the people
who built it called it and they were the
first ones to use the term. I think I am
being historically accurate, but I’ll give on
that point. Let’s call it, instead, “the sover-
eign state.”) This form was explicitly built
in order to remove the spiritual power
from political life—in order to render the
attainment of true virtue irrelevant to its
power. It was and still is built and main-
tained as an anti-Church for the purpose
of destroying the social significance of the
Catholic Church. Its form is irredeema-
ble because it is the form of slavery. It is
12
Jones, “The State Will Be Transformed.”
incapable of leading men to virtue. What
it calls “law” is not law at all but tyranny.
Its power is rooted in the fostering of vice,
the extension of vice ever deeper into the
life of men. The form that a Christian
[s]tate would take would bear very little
resemblance to this monstrosity. I have
to repeat: The form is not independent
of the end. To believe that is to remain a
liberal—one who asserts that the political
is neutral towards ends.13
I take this paragraph to be the crux of Jones’ argu-
ment, and the position generally represented at
New Polity. There are several points to unpack
here:
1. The language of ends and forms is, I
presume, borrowed from Aristotelian natural
philosophy. The assertion that “the form is not
independent of the end” is true as far as it goes,
but in order to appreciate the full extent of its
meaning and application, it would be necessary to
revisit the tenets of Aristotelian natural philos-
ophy and metaphysics, especially as interpreted
by St. Thomas Aquinas. An adequate summary
of this philosophy is not possible here, so I will
simply state a few key points:
There are many degrees of “form,” according
to the original Aristotelian meaning of this word.
Some forms are substantial forms; some are acci-
dental forms. When a material thing undergoes
a substantial transformation—literally becoming
something else—it undergoes a transition from
one substantial form to another substantial form.
Now, this type of change is certainly a total trans-
formation; yet even a substantial change is limited
by the pre-existing accidental forms which inhere
in the transformed matter. For example, when
a living animal dies, it undergoes a substantial
change; yet it does not undergo just any substan-
tial change, but one limited by the pre-existing
accidental forms of the animal. The corpse retains
such-and-such a size, shape, color, material organ-
ization, etc., at least for a time. Conversely, only
certain types of material beings can be assimi-
lated into a living body, i.e. become the living body,
by way of digestion. The pre-existing attributes
of certain types of plants, minerals, etc., dispose
13
Jones, “The State Will Be Transformed.”
49
 the modern state is a good —may it be christian
those entities to the type of transformation that
occurs when they are eaten and digested; and the
type of transformation which they then undergo
is limited by those attributes in turn.
To put it more simply: when I eat a salad, that
salad becomes my very substance, in some way;
it takes on my form, it is transformed. Likewise,
when I eat a steak, that steak becomes my very sub-
stance; it receives my form. Yet a salad and a steak
are not the same, nor do they become my very own
substance in exactly the same way: the accidental
properties of a salad contribute something differ-
ent to my substance than what the properties of
the steak contribute. In other words, “that which
is received is received in the mode of the receiv-
er”—a central tenet of Thomistic-Aristotelian
philosophy. In this example, the receiver of a new
form is not me, the eater, but the salad or the steak
eaten: it receives a new form, it is transformed, it
becomes me—which is its whole purpose, its end.
So while it is true to say that the form is not
independent of the end, it is also necessary to
recall that the pre-existing forms of a thing con-
tribute to that thing’s particular mode of achieving
its end. This is in essence what Pope Leo XIII
claimed with regard to the instantiation of the
Christian political ideal in various political forms
throughout history: “incarnated in facts, they are
clothed with a contingent character, determined by
the centre in which their application is produced”
(Au Milieu 15). The Christian political ideal is
received into different political contexts according
to the mode of the receiver. A transformation of
existing political regimes, by their re-ordering to
Christian purposes, does not automatically entail
the destruction of the pre-existing forms which
condition the mode of their transformation.
In a different time and place, where the
pre-existing social fabric was characterized by
localism, decentralization, smaller jurisdictions,
etc., it would make sense for the Christian ideal
to be instantiated then and there in such a way. As
history progresses, however, and as the develop-
ment of economies and technologies make it more
necessary for diffused peoples to become more
connected, it is natural to see the social structures
progress toward greater centralization—and this
trend has been observed by the popes themselves,
in the passages cited above. (Indeed, Pope St.
John Paul II, apparently drawing on the thought
50
of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, seems to insinuate
that history is guided by natural laws which direct
society toward ever greater unification and uni-
versality, rather than dispersion and insulation.14)
Accordingly, it is not unfitting for the Christian
ideal to be instantiated in precisely such a context.
2. Dr. Jones’ appeal to the notion of form and
the urgency of transformation does not prove as
much as he would like it to prove. Integralists may
very well grant that a fundamental transforma-
tion of the state is in order, yet it is by no means
clear on the basis of this alone that the “central-
ized, unitary, bureaucratic, administrative, and
militaristic form” of the State must be discarded.
Nor is it clear what logic lies behind Jones’ asser-
tions that this form of government is inherently
ordered to slavery, vice, tyranny, etc. No doubt,
such a form of government could be used for such
purposes, and often is so used. But it can be, and
often has been, used for genuine good. One is left
with the distinct impression that Dr. Jones’ objec-
tion rests more on a merely aesthetic distaste for
bureaucracy than on the more substantive—but
also more abstract—concepts of ends and forms
to which he appeals. There is no clear line to be
drawn from these abstractions to the blanket
condemnation of a centralized, bureaucratic, and
administrative form of the state.
Moreover, there is a case to be made that it is
not bureaucracy as such but parliamentary democ-
racy that is the peculiarly “modern” form of the
state. Granted, modern states have typically seen
these two types of institutions develop in tandem,
often with a kind of dialectical give-and-take
between their respective degrees of prominence in
society; yet it can hardly be denied that of the two
types of institutions, it is the latter which came
to prominence with the advent of modernity.
Indeed, arguably it is just these institutions which
were crafted in order to uphold the ideology of
a neutral liberalism, wherein divergent opinions
are arbitrated by the invisible hand which over-
sees public discourse and parliamentary debate.
Of the two institutions, it is not parliamentary
democracy, but bureaucracy, that appears the
more capable of being directly and intentionally
14
“Letter of His Holiness John Paul II to Reverend George V.
Coyne, S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory,” June 1, 1988,
http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/letters/1988/
documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19880601_padre-coyne.html.
 jonathan culbreath
ordered to right ends and the common good.
By the same token, it is bureaucracy, and not
parliamentary democracy, that is truly premod-
ern. It is not difficult to list off the top of one’s
head several great regimes and empires through-
out history that have functioned as well-ordered
bureaucracies: the papal bureaucracy described
by Innocent III at Lateran IV; the Holy Roman
imperial bureaucracy of Emperor Frederick II;
the bureaucracy of the Chinese Han dynasty; the
administrative bureaucracy of imperial Spain;
and so forth. These were not only highly efficient
bureaucracies, but also were highly effective in the
pursuit of their noble goals: proof of the marve-
lous capabilities which such a form of governance
has for the pursuit of the true common good.
Perhaps, then, a transformation of the modern
state would require not the abandonment of
bureaucracy, but the abandonment or curtailing
of parliamentary institutions such as the Con-
gress.15 Whether such a formal change is feasible
or desirable is not possible to determine here; the
point is that the possibilities of transformation
are surely more diverse than those imagined by
Dr. Jones or the editors of New Polity. (Though I
will be honest, it is not entirely clear to me what
concrete possibilities for such a transformation
are imagined by New Polity; whereas integral-
ists have written much about possible avenues
of reform in areas of law,16 administrative law,17
political economy,18 family policy,19 and a host of
other issues.)
3. The Hobbesian “sovereign state” is char-
acterized, not by its size, bureaucratization, or
15
See Adrian Vermeule’s January 11, 2016 opinion piece in the
Washington Post, “Imagine There’s No Congress”: https://
www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2016/01/11/
imagine-theres-no-congress/.
16
See, for example, the website Ius & Iustitium: https://iuseti-
ustitium.com/.
17
See Adrian Vermeule and Cass Sunstein, “Is the Modern
Administrative State Irredeemable?,” Church Life Journal,
October 27, 2020, https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/
is-the-modern-administrative-state-beyond-redemption/.
18
See Gladden Pappin, “Corporatism for the Twenty-First
Century,” American Affairs 4.1 (Spring 2020): 89–113.
Online here: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/02/
corporatism-for-the-twenty-first-century/.
19
See Gladden Pappin and Maria Molla, “Affirming the Amer-
ican Family,” American Affairs 3.3 (Fall 2019): 67–81.
Online here: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/08/
affirming-the-american-family/.
centralization, but by its agnosticism on the
political question of any substantive common
good: “For there is no such Finis Ultimus, (utmost
ayme,) nor Summum Bonum, (greatest good,) as is
spoken of in the Books of the old Morall Philoso-
phers” (Leviathan II.11). Consequently, as soon as
any institutional apparatus is directed to the true
supreme good, it ceases de facto to be the Hobbe-
sian sovereign state.
As Charles De Koninck writes, the true mark
of totalitarianism is not simply size, but the nature
of the end pursued by the state. The totalitarian
state makes its end not any truly common good,
but a merely private or personal good—and in
this way it is no different from modern liberalism:
In fact, personalism adopts as its own
the totalitarian notion of the State. In
totalitarian regimes, the common good is
singularised, and it is opposed as a more
powerful singular to singulars which are
purely and simply subjected. The common
good loses its distinctive character; it
becomes alien. It becomes subordinate to
this monster of modern invention which
is called the State, not the state taken as
synonym of civil society or of city, but
the State which signifies a city set up as a
sort of physical person. For note that the
person, “individual substance of a rational
nature” can be said of civil society by a
metaphor only, not by analogy. In this
reduction of the moral person to a phys-
ical personality, the city loses its reason
for being called a community. That which
is owed to the common good becomes
something owed to the singular good,
to a singular which orders everything to
self. Legal justice is destroyed. For having
turned away from the community of the
common good, the State acquires the
status of the personalist's person. It loses
any ordination to a superior common
good, “so that one considers the common
reason of being a state as the end, which
is the ruin of a well ordered republic” [as
John of St. Thomas puts it.]20
20
Charles De Koninck, On the Primacy of the Common Good
Against the Personalists and The Principle of the New Order.
Translated by Sean Collins. Aquinas Review 4 (1997): 10–131,
51
 the modern state is a good —may it be christian
It is this—and not size, scope, or degree of central-
ization—that causes modern totalitarian states
to become violent and suppressive. A merely sin-
gular good can only be exalted into the good of
the whole (a counterfeit “common good”) by the
absolute suppression of other competing singular
goods. Thus, in both capitalist and communist
regimes, where “material wealth”—or, alternately,
the wealth of one social class as opposed to the
good of others—is somehow held up as the good
of the whole, other goods are necessarily sup-
pressed for its sake. The state in such a regime
is no more than the instrument of private inter-
ests, whether the interests of a separate class, or
the “private interests” of the whole society exalted
into a kind of person.
By contrast, the true common good is uni-
versal; it is not competitive with other goods, but
it is itself their fulfilment and their final cause.
Consequently, its pursuit does not automatically
entail the violent suppression of other goods.
Rather, the state which pursues the true common
good transcends purely private interests, ordering
them all (without suppressing them) to their true
and universal end. Whoever fails to see a differ-
ence in form here—where such a state does not
serve merely private ends, excluding others by
violence—does not understand the real connec-
tion between ends and forms. It is truly the form
of the regime as a whole—for example (among
other things), its class relations and hierarchies—
that changes when the ruling apparatus serves no
mere private goods, but the common good of all.
4. Dr. Jones insinuates that “statist integral-
ists” are the real liberals, since they believe that
the administrative apparatus of the modern state
is neutral with respect to ends. He writes: “It
seems to us that the statist integralists either dis-
agree with us on the nature of the Christian form
of politics; or they are still liberals, and believe
that the political form is neutral towards its par-
ticular end.” Yet I think this accusation rests on a
confused idea of what liberalism is. In the first of
the “three sentences” where integralism is defined
at The Josias,21 liberalism is described as a polit-
at 66. Online here: https://thomasaquinas.edu/pdfs/aqui-
nas-review/1997/1997-dekoninck-common-good.pdf.
Fr. Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist., “Integralism in Three Sen-
tences,” The Josias, October 17, 2016, https://thejosias.
com/2016/10/17/integralism-in-three-sentences/.
52
ical philosophy that “[separates] politics from
concern with the end of human life.” By this defi-
nition, liberalism does not equate to the inherent
neutrality of a given institution; rather, liberal-
ism is the neutrality of the ruler who governs by
means of any institution. Politics is the science of
governing; thus, if liberalism describes the sep-
aration of politics from concern with the end of
human life, it is not merely structures and insti-
tutions that are “inherently liberal,” but the people
who rule by means of them. (Not even parlia-
mentary structures are inherently liberal, though
it is fairly easy to see why liberalism favors them.
This is not to undermine John Paul II’s observa-
tion about “structures of sin”: some structures do
perpetuate sin, but John Paul II also insists that
those structures themselves are perpetuated by
someone’s personal sin.)
On this definition of liberalism, it is by no
means a concession to liberalism to seek to utilize
the technical (neutral) apparatus of the modern
state for the sake of the true ends of human life.
On the contrary, the whole point of integralism
is to assert, contrary to liberalism, that the rulers
of the state must intend the true common good,
which is both natural and supernatural, and use
the legitimate instruments provided by the state.
Indeed, it may be argued that a centralized, ener-
getic, and powerful administrative state is the
most preferable form of government from a stra-
tegic point of view, since it is more easily utilized
for the intentions of the ruler than (for example)
a more parliamentarian, or a more decentralized,
form of government. On this question, of course,
the Church makes no pronouncement, as we saw
above; yet neither does Catholic teaching provide
any warrant for judging the modern, centralized
form of government to be inherently at odds with
Christian purposes.
Conclusion
I will conclude by noting that, of all possible
formal changes to the modern State, the most
important change is none other than the jurid-
ical subordination of the State to the Church.
Juridical subordination entails the recognition
of the Church’s special rights, and thus the sub-
mission and obedience due to her by the State.
 jonathan culbreath
Accordingly, “anti-Statist” critics of integralism
should recognize that there is no greater check
on the rights of the State than the authority of
the Church. Much ink has been spilled over how
to limit the power of the State either “internally”
or “from below”—a concern shared both by the
editors of New Polity and by various conservatives
and right-libertarians. Yet this question largely
evaporates in the face of Catholic social teaching,
or integralism, which circumscribes the rights of
the state within its duties toward the Church.
Thus, the question of the juridical relation of the
State to the Church is a formal question of the
highest order, for it is a question of its rights and
the limits of those rights. The rights of the State
are never more clearly defined and delimited than
when put in their proper place beneath the rights
of the Church.
In conclusion, it may be helpful to draw an
analogy to philosophical biology, in imitation of
Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei: if the soul is
truly the form of the body, and if the Church is
truly the soul of the state, then there can be no
greater change in form than to bring the state—
yes, even the modern State—under the mantle of
the Church.

53
 The Birth of
Liberal Order and
the Death of God
A Reply to Robert Reilly’s America on Trial
M I C H A E L H A N BY

Robert Reilly maintains that the American Founding was based upon
natural law principles rooted in the premodern Catholic tradition. He
argues that this tradition, and not the authoritarianism of Hobbes,
guided the Founders’ interpretation of John Locke; and that the wor-
risome trajectory of present-day America stems not from a flaw in her
Founding principles, but a later corruption of them. Reilly’s argument
rests upon a questionable methodology and upon ignoring the pro-
found transformations to the meaning of “nature,” “reason,” “God,” and
“Christianity” in early modern mechanistic philosophy. This mecha-
nistic ontology underlay the politics of both Hobbes and Locke; and
Locke works out its implications more thoroughly, partly by paving
the way toward a Baconian technological society. Erasing the Christian
God from the intellectual horizon, Locke helps establish liberal order
with its exaltation of individual and scientific/technical power as the
new all-encompassing horizon, an absolutism more extensive than
Hobbes’ for being internalized and invisible. America is more than the
political incarnation of Lockean philosophy, but the great reconcep-
tion he represents was axiomatic by the time of the Founding, and
Locke points towards its ineluctable destiny. The question for us living
within this horizon is not whether we will hate our home (why should
we?) or overthrow liberal order (we cannot) but whether—as Reilly’s
Whig Catholicism unintentionally entails—we will acquiesce in the
Death of God that liberal order presupposes and demands.

tendency itself mark and set bounds to the con-

i. The Political Conquest of templative part.”1 The inversion and subsequent
the Catholic Mind conflation of theory and practice, and the cor-

O
ne of the defining characteristics of
the modern age, and also one of the
most subtle, is its subordination of
theoretical to practical reason: the
tendency, as Francis Bacon put it, to let “the active
responding reduction of truth to possibility or
functional success, has had vast consequences not
only in the scientific and technical spheres but in
1
Bacon, The New Organon, ed. by Lisa Jardine, trans. Michael
Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000),
II.4.

54
 michael hanby
the political sphere as well. The subordination of
questions of truth to the political common good
is a system requirement for what has come to be
known as “liberal public reason,” where “the polit-
ical common good” turns out to be nothing other
than the eternal perpetuation of liberal order
itself as the condition of possibility for all other
goods permitted to appear within it, such as reli-
gious liberty.2
This arrangement has long been legitimated
by what I have elsewhere called the “civic project
of American Christianity,”3 a project that in its
Catholic form—now at least a century and a half
old—parallels in the intellectual sphere the socio-
logical assimilation of Catholics into the American
mainstream. The “civic project” spans both the
theological and philosophical differences histor-
ically dividing Protestants and Catholics and the
political differences dividing the American left
and right.4 That the flagship journals spawned
by this enterprise—Commonweal and America on
the one side, First Things on the other—have at
least until recently appeared as mirror images of
one another is evidence of this underlying unity.5
2
I frequently use the term “liberal order” instead of “Ameri-
can Constitutional order” or similar terms because I mean to
indicate by it something more comprehensive than the strictly
political order founded upon and instituted to protect so-called
“natural rights,” something that includes it. Rather I mean to
indicate by this phrase both the ontological order—the phi-
losophy of nature—necessarily presupposed and advanced by
this conception of politics and also the social form to which
it gives rise. Both, as I have argued elsewhere and will explain
again below, are essentially “technological.” See Michael Hanby,
“Before and After Politics: The Technocratic Fate of Liberal
Order,” Political Science Reviewer 43.2 (2020): 511-30; Hanby,
“What Comes Next,” New Polity: A Journal of Postliberal
Thought 1.3 (November 2020): 77-87.
3
See Michael Hanby, “ The Civic Project of American Chris-
tianity,” First Things (February 2015), available at https://
www.firstthings.com/article/2015/02/the-civic-project-of-
american-christianity.
4
For a recent article that illustrates precisely this point, and
shows the dependence of the left and right iterations of this
project on the thought of John Courtney Murray, see Massimo
Faggioli, “What Joe Biden (and All American Catholics) Owe
Jesuit John Courtney Murray,” America, January 19, 2021,
https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2021/01/19/
joe-biden-john-courtney-murray-who-was-239757.
5
I rather doubt whether my 2015 First Things article (see
footnote 3, above) that effectively pronounced an end to the
traditional First Things project and which apparently helped
catalyze Robert Reilly’s defense of American first principles,
would have been published prior to the arrival of Rusty Reno
as editor—especially given the 1980s controversy, an important
Simply put, the “civic project” in its Catholic
form is the attempt to harmonize liberal order
and Catholicism—whether liberalism be “classi-
cally” or “progressively” conceived—by arguing or
at least assuming that the former is the highest
political expression of the latter.6 The insinuation
that the Founding of America is the inevitable,
even providential, outworking of these ancient
Catholic principles is more than a little ironic,
given the right’s avowed aversion to historicism.
The “cunning of history” whereby, in the words of
the late Peter Lawler, “the combination of Amer-
ican Lockeanism and American Puritanism/
Calvinism produced something like an acciden-
tal American Thomism,” surely involves a magic
exceeding anything dreamt of by Hegel or Marx.7
The strength of this project and the ardor
of its devotees explain why American Catho-
lic thought tends overwhelmingly to be political
thought, often taking an empirical or sociological
rather than a speculative form, even when pre-
sented in the guise of history, theology, natural
precursor to today’s debate, between Fr. Neuhaus and David L.
Schindler, dean emeritus at the John Paul II Institute where I
teach. I regard Reno, with whom I share something of a “Yale
School” formation in our distant pasts, as a friend. But we do
not necessarily see eye to eye on everything, including, proba-
bly, both the first principles of the American Founding and the
proper response of Catholics to our present political predica-
ment. Indeed, I see his recent piece on “Practical Integralism,”
with its focus on policy outcomes, as almost an inversion of
my article “For and Against Integralism,” which First Things
published in March 2020. Perhaps Reno’s piece is an attempt
to advance something of the original First Things project in a
new form. But I gratefully regard the willingness of First Things
to publish a piece so critical of the assumptions animating its
original project, as well as the pieces of Patrick Deneen and
other critics of liberalism, as an important acknowledgment
that the dramatic changes in America since the 1980s call for
a critical re-examination of those principles and commitments.
What the outcome of this reassessment may eventually be in
terms of the journal’s editorial stance, and whether there is a
similar self-examination taking place among the younger gen-
eration staffing the traditional media organs of the American
Catholic left, I cannot say. See Rusty Reno, “Integralism Prac-
tical, not Theoretical,” Theopolis, January 14, 2021, https://
theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/integralism-practi-
cal-not-theoretical/; Hanby, “For and Against Integralism,”
First Things (March 2020), available at https://www.firstth-
ings.com/article/2020/03/for-and-against-integralism.
6
See Hanby, “ The Civic Project of American Christianity.”
7
See Lawler, “Better than They Knew: A Response
to Patrick Deneen,” First Things, January 25, 2013,
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2013/01/
better-than-they-knew-a-response-to-patrick-deneen.
55
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
philosophy, or ethical theory. Liberal order, as we
shall discuss, has been spectacularly successful in
eliminating all theoretical and practical alterna-
tives to itself, establishing itself as the ultimate
horizon of thought and its principles as first, even
the only possible, philosophy. All real—that is
to say, public—thought in American life finally is
political. The “civic project” makes the principles
of this order the ultimus finis of Catholic think-
ing. It compels its protagonists to stop thinking
at the boundary of liberal horizons and to settle
for truths that are just “true enough” to undergird
this order or to achieve this or that political end
within it. The problem is that “true enough” is
rarely true enough.8
The cost to the Catholic mind has been incal-
culable. The voluntary limit on how far we are
willing to think has become an involuntarily limit
on how far we are able to see. The “eclipse of the
sense of God and man” that so concerned John
Paul II and Benedict XVI and is coextensive with
the modern secular—an immanent field of power
relations and an ontological tabula rasa that forms
the all-encompassing domain within which the
drama of history is thought to unfold—casts its
shadow within the Church as well as without,
depriving us of the light even to recognize our
own irreligion.9 The Christian imagination is
8
An example of this can be seen in the debate over same-sex
marriage leading up to Obergefell, notable for the speed with
which it was “resolved” and for the thoughtlessness that accom-
panied such a profound and far-reaching decision. Conservative
Catholics generally contested this proposed change on the
grounds permitted by liberal public reason: that judicial fiat
would violate democratic norms and the rightful powers of the
legislature, that it would lead to the curtailment of religious
freedom, or that it would have negative social consequences.
What was most fundamentally at issue, however, was the
truth of the human being, the redefinition of the fundamental
realities of human life—of man, woman, mother, father, and
child—and the presumption of the state to assume authority
over the meaning of nature. Having largely failed to recognize
this, it is unsurprising that they were then caught flatfooted
when, within months, this victory had morphed into the full-
blown sexual-orientation and gender-identity revolution we are
now undergoing. See Michael Hanby, “ The Brave New World
After Obergefell,” December, 2019, https://papers.ssrn.com/
sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3501246.
9
The concept of “irreligion” is from Augusto Del Noce and sig-
nifies something worse than atheism, which is still an inverse
kind of theology and a form of engagement with God. It indi-
cates the muting of the religious sense and the elimination of
God as a real question from the horizon of thought. See Del
Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, trans. Carlo Lancellotti (Mon-
56
thus left bereft in the face of our historical predic-
ament, and the Church often seems to have little
more than platitudes, moralistic or therapeutic
echoes of the zeitgeist, to offer to a civilization
that is rapidly consuming itself.
Robert Reilly’s Ame rica on Trial
This project is now dying, though it is unclear
what, if anything, will replace it. It is obvious to all
but its most trenchant defenders that the “self-ev-
ident” truths upon which American order rests
are no longer true or evident enough to prevent
liberal order from realizing itself in its totalitar-
ian opposite.10 Among the stalwart devotees to
this dying project, but determined nevertheless to
press on, is Robert R. Reilly. His book, America
on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, which has
been met with great acclaim from the American
Catholic right, is an exemplary instance of the
intellectual tendencies that I have just described.
Reilly names me, along with Patrick Deneen,
as one of the chief prosecutors of the case against
the American Founding— though the choice of
the “trial” metaphor is his, not mine. His, too, is
the book’s presentation of the central question
between us. What I regard as a philosophical ques-
tion about the essence and logic of American liberal
order, Reilly regards as a historical question about
the Founders’ sources and a psychological question
about the sincerity of their intentions. A great deal
of incomprehension is generated in the translation
from the one conception to the other. Adjudicat-
ing the American Founding is at best an ancillary
concern of mine, necessitated to a great degree
by the insistence of people such as Reilly that an
(impossible) return to a more pristine form of the
Founding principles would save America from a
nihilistic fate and and by their refusal even to con-
sider that this fate might have been set in motion
by the revolutionary transformation in metaphys-
ics, theology, and natural philosophy that underlay
the Founders’ eighteenth-century articulation.
treal: McGill-Queen’s, 2014), 132-3.
10
Del Noce calls this simultaneity of collapse and fulfillment the
“suicide of the revolution” in the case of Marxism. For a thor-
ough and profound explanation of why the logic of modern
freedom is essentially and necessarily self-subverting, see D. C.
Schindler, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of
Modern Liberty (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 2017).
 michael hanby
This difference in framing says something
important about the genre of Reilly’s work. The
argument of the book is not philosophical but
political, though it is not obvious that Reilly
grasps the difference. Its primary aim is not really
to understand the true essence of American order,
the meaning of our moment in history, or even
the arguments of his interlocutors. Had under-
standing been Reilly’s goal, he would have posed
a different sort of question. What differenti-
ates the modern age from its predecessors, for
example, and how might America exemplify this
difference? Is there anything truly novel about
the “American experiment”? Alexander Hamil-
ton certainly thought so.11 What can religion be
within American liberal order? Does this order
place any structural constraints upon it, and if so,
upon what metaphysical and theological basis? Is
there any correlation between “the Laws of Nature
and of Nature’s God” appealed to by the Declara-
tion and early modern conceptions of law, God,
and nature?12 Do these underlying metaphysical
and theological presuppositions have any bearing
on the subsequent shape of the American project
and American self-understanding? Are there any
flaws in this conception, and how might they
11
“ The science of politics, however, like most other sciences, has
received great improvement. The efficacy of various principles
is now well understood, which were either not known at all, or
imperfectly known to the ancients. The regular introduction of
legislative balances and checks; the institution of courts com-
posed of justices holding their offices during good behavior; the
representation of the people in the legislature by deputies of
their own election: these are wholly new discoveries, or have
made their principal progress towards perfection in modern
times. They are means, and powerful means, by which the
excellencies of republican government may be retained and its
imperfections lessened or avoided. To this catalogue of circum-
stances that tend to the amelioration of popular systems of civil
government, I shall venture, however novel it may appear to
some, to add one more, on a principle which has been made the
foundation of an objection to the new Constitution; I mean the
Enlargement of the Orbit within which such systems are
made to revolve” (Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist 9,” in Ham-
ilton, Madison, Jay, The Federalist [New York: Signet, 1961],
72-3).
12
Reviewers who praise Reilly for having returned the Founders
to their proper historical context never seem to have this context
in mind. They uniformly distort the debate by repeating Reilly’s
own error of artificially separating political philosophy from its
necessary basis in natural philosophy. Among the many exam-
ples, see D. Q. McInerny, “ The Same Adorable Source,” The
New Criterion 39.5 ( January 2021), available at https://new-
criterion.com/issues/2020/10/the-same-adorable-source.
manifest themselves in the social order? There
are many other questions of this kind; Reilly con-
siders none of them. If he were really interested
in determining whether recent criticisms have any
basis in truth, he would have consulted a broader
cross-section of liberalism’s Christian critics,
people such as David L. and D. C. Schindler, John
Milbank, Adrian Pabst, Pierre Manent, Adrian
Vermeule, William Cavanaugh, and Stanley Hau-
erwas, among numerous others—to say nothing
of Leo XIII—, to determine whether there is
more to this critique than the reductio to Locke
and Hobbes that he imputes to Deneen and me.
Were he genuinely interested in understanding
rather than simply refuting my own line of criti-
cism, he might have consulted my work in natural
philosophy and metaphysics to learn more about
how I understand the relationship between early
modern natural and political philosophy, a rela-
tionship that was not lost on seventeenth- and
eighteenth century-thinkers themselves.13 At
the very least, he would have actually engaged
with the essay that seems to have so provoked
him. Reilly announces in his introduction that
vindicating the American Founding against the
supposed “trial” prosecuted by Deneen and me
is a central purpose of the book. The formula-
tion “Deneen and Hanby” appears repeatedly,
fusing our distinct arguments into one position
of his own creation. And yet he cites me exactly
twice: once from a 2015 article for First Things,
a second time from my reply to his letter to the
editor objecting to that same article. I now wish I
had taken the time then to write a less dismissive
response to what I thought were his uncompre-
hending objections. I might have saved us both a
lot of trouble.
Though I am flattered that Reilly could work
himself into a book-length lather on such a slim
basis, a genuine attempt at understanding might
have saved him from numerous errors, oversim-
plifications, and misunderstandings—and even
brought some real light to the debate.14
13
See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-
Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985), 80-109.
14
See Patrick Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2019). Patrick Deneen has already defended
himself against an earlier version of Reilly’s charge, made in
The Claremont Review of Books. Though Deneen’s project and
mine are mostly complementary, they are nevertheless quite
57
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
He charges me with Hegelianism, a dog
whistle guaranteed to elicit the approval of com-
mentators on the American Catholic right who
give little evidence of having actually read him.
Yet anyone familiar with my thought would know
that Hegel plays virtually no part in it (the same
can be said for Strauss), and that I am in fact a
critic of nineteenth-century historicism, whose
emergence in the English-speaking world I take
to be partly a function of eighteenth-century
mechanical philosophy.15
Reilly also imputes to me a simplistic reduc-
tion of the Founding to Locke and Hobbes, in
order to have something to refute. He treats the
Hobbesian dimension of liberalism principally
as a question of intent, as if the charge were that
the Founders contrived to use Locke as a mask
for their Hobbesian designs. Locke rejected
Hobbes, leaving ample evidence that he was a
“natural law realist” rather than a nominalist,
and so “The Founders took Locke to be in the
tradition of Hooker” rather than Hobbes. This
suffices for Reilly’s purposes. For “the question
at issue is not whether [Locke’s] teachings could
be put to disparate uses, but rather to what use
the Founders put them. What matters is how the
Founders understood him and to what purposes
they applied their understanding.”16 Reilly simply
disregards the mechanistic philosophy of the era
that achieved apotheosis in Newton and the cor-
responding reconception of reason that would
launch the entire “critical project” of modern phi-
losophy as though they had no political relevance,
a relevance not lost on seventeenth- and eight-
eenth-century thinkers themselves.17 (Thus Reilly
distinct, despite the tendency of critics like Reilly to lump
them together. To avoid this confusion, and to avoid imputing
to Patrick my own understanding of the issues, I will let his
defense stand on its own. See Deneen, “Corrupting the Youth?
A Response to Reilly,” Public Discourse, September 19, 2017,
https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/09/20087/.
15
This emergence is particularly apparent in the transition from
William Paley to Darwin. See Michael Hanby, No God, No
Science? Theology, Cosmology, Biology (Chichester: Wiley-Black-
well, 2013), 105-249.
16
Reilly, America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding, (San Fran-
cisco: Ignatius Press, 2020), 226.
17
Consider, for example, Christopher Wren’s late-seven-
teenth-century draft of the Royal Society charter:
“ The Way to so happy a Government, we are sensible is
in no matter more facilitated than by the promoting of
useful Arts and Sciences, which, upon mature Inspec-
58
would probably be surprised to learn that I regard
neither the Leviathan, nor the Second Treatise,
nor even The Federalist Papers as best expressing
the essence of the novus ordo seclorum, but would,
if such an award must be given, bestow that
honor to Bacon’s New Atlantis.) Failing to com-
prehend this reconception of nature and reason,
Reilly fails to see that the contrasts upon which
he builds his entire case—reason vs. will, natural
law realism vs. nominalism—are not entirely to
the point, or that his appeals to Locke’s theolog-
ical positivism and moralism restate rather than
solve the fundamental problem, which cannot be
resolved simply by cataloging Locke’s references
to “the judicious Hooker.” He fails to consider also
that the Framers’ perception of an urgent need for
the new American state to limit itself by dividing
and diffusing sovereignty might already attest to
the “Hobbesian” absolutization of politics and to
the elimination of the Church as a “limiting prin-
ciple” transcending political order. Nor does he
see how the negative rights intended to limit the
state actually increase the scope and power of its
enforcement.18
tion, are found to be the basis of civil Communities,
and free Governments, and which gather multitudes,
by an Orphean charm, into Cities, and connect them in
Companies, that so, by laying in a Stock, as it were, of
several Arts, and Methods of industry, the whole body
may be supplied by a mutual Commerce of each others
peculiar faculties; and consequently that the various
Miseries and toils of this frail Life, may, by the Wealth
and Plenty be diffused in just Proportion to every one’s
Industry, that is, to every one’s Deserts.”
The text of this draft, given in Stephen Wren’s Parentalia, is cited
in Stephen Gaukroger, The Emergence of a Scientific Culture:
Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210-1685 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 39.
18
Bernard Bailyn, whose authority Reilly does recognize, seems
to see this paradoxical problem when he writes of the Framers’
desire “to reconcile the need for a powerful, coercive public
authority with the preservation of the private liberties for
which the Revolution had been fought” (p. 2); their discovery
that “absolute power need not be indivisible but can be shared
among stages within a state and among branches of government
(p. 4); and that the Constitution’s basic proposition was “that
power could be created and constrained at the same time” (p.
54) (To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of
the American Founders [New York: Random House, 2003]; see
also pp. 1-36, 100-130). For a further critique of the inher-
ent “totalitarianism” of this attempt at self-limitation, see D.
C. Schindler, “Liberalism, Religious Freedom, and the Totali-
tarian Logic of Self-Limitation,” Communio 40.2 (Fall 2013),
577-631. Though I wish ultimately to maintain that only the
 michael hanby
Once again, Reilly’s is not the modus operandi
of a philosopher, but that of a defense attorney.
Indeed, his principle for interpreting the Found-
ers precludes any real philosophical analysis.
Reilly insists that the meaning of the Founders’
words and deeds is exhausted by what they meant
in writing and committing them—neither more
nor less. “To understand [the Founders] in a way
other than they understood themselves would
mean they were in the grip of forces beyond their
own comprehension.”19 This principle is histori-
cally naïve and philosophically incoherent; so it
is little wonder that Reilly himself does not con-
sistently adhere to it. It should be noted, first of
all, that the plausibility of his argument for a nat-
ural-law foundation to American order hangs not
on the intention and motivation of the Founders’
Church can limit and prevent the absolutization of political
order, I recognize that talk of the Church as a “limiting prin-
ciple” risks an essentially modern and anachronistic conception
of politics and its problematic, insofar as it suggests that eccle-
sial and political order are by nature extrinsic to one another
and not mutually interpenetrating and overlapping “spheres” of
the one natural and supernatural reality.
19
Reilly, America on Trial, 249. Reilly is taking sides on one of
the more important methodological controversies of twen-
tieth-century American historiography. Gordon S. Wood
describes it thus: “I have never thought that one could explain
anything fully by referring only to the beliefs of people. In
writing the article [“Rhetoric and Reality in the American
Revolution”] I was well aware of the powerful implications of
Bernard Bailyn’s introduction to his Pamphlets of the American
Revolution, which had just been published in 1965 and which
would eventually become The Ideological Origins of the Amer-
ican Revolution (1967). As shatteringly important as I knew
Bailyn’s work to be, I nevertheless thought it tried to explain
the Revolution too much in terms of the professed beliefs of the
participants. Thus I wrote the ‘Rhetoric and Reality’ article as a
corrective to the idealist tendency I saw in the neo-Whig liter-
ature of the 1950s and early 1960s that I believe had climaxed
with Bailyn’s stunning work” (Gordon S. Wood, The Idea of
America: Reflections on the Birth of the United States [New York:
Penguin, 2011], 54; see pp. 1-55). Wood’s own method is inter-
esting because it makes ample space for the “way of ideas” while
neither equating their significance with the beliefs of those who
held them or succumbing to the “the traditional assumptions
of neo-Progressive social history” and what Wood considers
its crude “polarities of ideas versus behavior, rhetoric versus
reality” (54). While Wood is not a philosopher, his acknowl-
edgment of the causal efficacy of ideas and the importance of
broader context for determining their implications leaves room
for the kind of philosophical interpretation Reilly disdains. It is
not clear whether Reilly is conscious that he is taking sides in a
much larger battle over the principles of American historiogra-
phy, but he does cite Wood (p. 2) so he is presumably aware of
the issue.
expressed in the Constitution itself, but on the
Declaration of Independence—and thus relies on
acceptance of Harry Jaffa’s questionable theory
that the Declaration of Independence functions,
in Patrick O’Neil’s words, as a kind of “Ur-Con-
stitution,” the ‘why’ to the Constitution’s ‘how.’20 I
have no wish myself to contest this theory—in
fact, I am inclined to accept it—but it is neces-
sary to point out that the Constitution’s own
silence on the matter and its omission of any
reference to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s
God” as allegedly undergirding its separation of
powers and enumeration of rights makes this
unspoken axiom far from self-evident. Reilly’s
principle is contradicted historically, moreover, by
the discrepancy, apparent even within their own
lifetimes, between what the Founders intended
and what they created, which leads the eminent
historian Gordon S. Wood to suggest that they
were in the grip of forces they did not fully com-
prehend.21 Reilly’s adherence to this principle is
selective. He certainly does not extend it to his
opponents; neither does it seem to rule out the
“better than they knew” defense of the Founding
advanced by John Courtney Murray and his dis-
ciples. Rather it seems only to apply to my “worse
than they knew” rejoinder. And Reilly’s attempts
to transmute “Nature’s God” into the Chris-
20
Patrick M. O'Neil, "The Declaration as Ur-Constitution: The
Bizarre Jurisprudential Philosophy of Professor Harry V. Jaffa,"
Akron Law Review 28.2 (1995): 237-252, available at https://
core.ac.uk/download/pdf/232682197.pdf. See also Thomas
G. West, “Jaffa versus Mansfield: Does America Have a Consti-
tutional or a ‘Declaration of Independence’ Soul?,” Perspectives
on Political Science 31.4 (Fall 2002): 235-46.
21
As Gordon Wood puts it, “ The American leaders may have
begun their Revolution trying to recover an idealized and van-
ished Roman republic, but they soon realized that they had
unleashed forces that were carrying them and their society
much further than they had anticipated. Instead of becoming a
new and grand incarnation of ancient Rome, a land of virtuous
and contented farmers, America within decades of the Decla-
ration of Independence had become a sprawling, materialistic,
and licentious popular democracy unlike any state that had
ever existed. Buying and selling things were celebrated as never
before, and the antique meaning of virtue was transformed.
Ordinary people who know no Latin and had few qualms
about disinterestedness began asserting themselves with new
vigor in the economy and in politics. Far from sacrificing their
private desires for the good of the whole, Americans of the early
Republic came to see that the individual’s pursuit of wealth or
happiness (the two were now interchangeable) was not only
inevitable but justifiable as the only proper basis for a free state”
(Wood, The Idea of America, 75).
59
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
tian logos or transmute the medieval distinction
between spiritual and temporal power into the
modern distinction between church and state in
anticipation of the liberalism of Locke or Murray
are simply historically naïve and anachronistic.
What concerns me at present, however, are
the philosophical implications of Reilly’s inter-
pretive principle. If the meaning of every idea is
exhausted by the intentions of its thinkers then
not only do ideas never derive from others of
which we are unaware, but there is also no pos-
sibility of them having causal effects unintended
by their originators. Since the meaning of every
idea would lie self-evidently on its surface, there
could be no question of unexamined presupposi-
tions or unanticipated logical implications. It’s a
principle that seems to be borrowed straight from
Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word,” says the
great egg-man, “it means just what I choose it to
mean—neither more nor less.”22 Reilly’s principle
denies ideas any philosophical meaning independ-
ent of an author’s intent and thus precludes any
real philosophical analysis, for it leaves nothing left
to analyze but historical influences and psycholog-
ical motivations and intentions: that is, whether
the Founders “really meant” what they said about
God, freedom, morality, and the rest of it. This is
really all that Reilly’s method comes down to—
reflecting, perhaps, the Founding generation’s own
“whiggish” assumptions about historical causality,
and the reduction of English-speaking philosophy
to a sort of empirical psychology in the aftermath
of Locke and Hume. It is not an approach likely
to deepen our understanding, but it is a method
well-suited to its task. For Reilly’s aim is not to get
to the bottom of things—there can be no bottom
of things from his methodological vantage—but
to exonerate his client. And this aim guides his
framing of the point of contention and his selec-
tion and arrangement of the evidence, determining
how and what he presents and—perhaps even
more importantly—what he does not.
Reilly’s trial gambit raises a question about
the identity of the jury. Just who is he trying
to convince, and what further end is served if
his client goes free? Reilly’s is not an argument
designed to win over progressives, Catholic or
secular, who openly embrace the historicism he
22
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found
There (New York: William Morrow, 1993), 124.
60
deplores. Nor does it seem to be aimed even at
a majority of conservatives, long accustomed to
grounding their preference for negative rights
and limited government within the closed world
of legal positivism and “originalism”—a process
that began within the Founders’ own lifetime
and is perhaps an inevitable consequence of the
state’s self-contradictory attempt at self-limita-
tion.23 Reilly cannot concede that the myth of the
“civic project” has been falsified by events, but he
can see that this project is in peril. He worries for
its future and for the future of Christians in the
public square. He seems particularly solicitous
toward the young—for students influenced by the
likes of Deneen and me—, worried that “they will
feel they no longer have a country they can love and
wish to serve” and thus will decline to follow their
forebears down the “path of guardianship.”24 In
one inadvertently telling remark, Reilly says that
those who “denigrate the Founding” as Deneen
and I do “exclude themselves from the public arena
by conceding it to their opponents.”25 And what
if our “denigrating” conclusions happen to be true?
The implication is that one should stop thinking
at the point where understanding the truth ceases
to be useful in the “public arena” or risks sacrific-
ing political influence. One could hardly ask for
a clearer illustration of the difference between a
political and a philosophical argument—or of
the high cost of the “civic project.” Nor could one
ask for a better explanation of why Fr. Neuhaus’s
“Catholic Moment” passed without ever arriving,
despite the fact that Catholics are now poised to
take the reins of American power in every branch
of government. There is no barrier to the advance-
23
This is evident in the competing conceptions of judicial review
in evidence in the Supreme Court case Calder v. Bull (1798)
which has remainedan on-going battle, despite the apparent
victory of legal positivism. The fundamental question was
whether judicial review would be anchored to the Constitution
and legislative acts, or whether the judiciary could strike down
positive law on the basis of natural law—albeit a natural law
that has undergone a “dissolution [...] into the natural rights
of the individual—the rights of ‘life, liberty, and estate’—[that
has been achieved] through the agency of the Social Compact.”
These last words are quoted from the locus classicus on this
question, Edwin Corwin, “ The Debt of American Constitu-
tional Law to Natural Law Concepts,” Notre Dame Law Review
25.2 (1950): 258-84, at 262, available at https://scholarship.
law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3789&context=ndlr.
24
Reilly, American on Trial, 319, 6.
25
Ibid., 318.
 michael hanby
ment of Catholics in American public life provided
that Catholic truth is irrelevant to the discharge of
their public duties.26 One is free to believe what-
ever one likes in America so long as it’s false.
From Reilly’s vantage along the guardian’s
path, then, arguments like Deneen’s and mine
are “fraught with danger.” “If Christians come to
believe that America is congenitally their enemy,”
he writes, “they will cease to defend it and join in
its destruction for their own reasons.”27 Of course
it is preposterous to think, as Deneen observed
the first time Reilly leveled such accusations, that
America needs our help in destroying itself.28 And
the line of reasoning that leads from the attempt
to understand the truth, to the declaration of
enmity, to complicity in the destruction of the
country is as illogical as it is calumnious, rather
like accusing someone of patricide for admitting
that his father is an alcoholic. I have treated this
curious, quintessentially American understand-
ing of patriotism elsewhere.29 It regards America
26
Marc Barnes puts it very well: “This is simply what it means to
be a judge within a liberal society — to administrate a justice
which is not directly related to truth and falsity, good and evil,
but to the past decisions of that same liberal society. A fancy
way of putting this is that, within liberal societies, the faculty
of judgement is ordered, not towards principles of justice, but
towards the will of the sovereign. The judiciary does not make
laws, it receives them from legislators, interprets them, and
judges particular human actions to be in or out of accord with
them. The judge exists within a closed world. The ceiling of her
judgment is the political power which makes the laws, whether
expressed in the Constitution and past cases, or as pushed by
the people and their politicians” (“Judges without Justice: What
Liberalism Means for ACB,” New Polity, October 6, 2020,
https://newpolity.com/blog/judges-without-justice).
27
Reilly, America on Trial, 4.
28
See Deneen, “Corrupting the Youth?” op cit.
29
Hanby, “What Comes Next.” American patriotism could never
ultimately mean the traditional piety toward one’s patria: the
“love of peace, and quiet and good tilled earth” that bound the
Hobbits to the Shire or the devotion to people and place that
forbade Lee from taking up arms against his beloved Virginia.
It is doubtful whether such archaic forms of love could ever
have been sustained in a relentlessly expansive nation bent
upon the continual subjugation of its own continent, but the
priority of local attachments over abstract principles was per-
manently discredited in the United States by the shameful
legacy of slavery and the American Civil War and was, in any
case, destined to be undermined by the inherent rootlessness of
an American populace carried along by the ever-forward thrust
of advanced capitalism in the twentieth century. People from
nowhere with no real home can have no real place to love. Even
now, ask any middle-aged American adult in what parcel of
“good tilled earth” he intends to be buried, and there is a good
not as a place, but as an idea, and patriotism not
as devotion to one’s patria—one’s home, hearth,
and kin—but as adherence to a philosophy. If this
philosophy happens to be false, then so much the
worse for truth.
Just-so Stories: Answers that
Miss the Question
Reilly builds his case nonetheless. He mines the
legacies of Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem in their
Christian synthesis, so essential to the subsequent
history of the West, to establish the historical and
intellectual preconditions without which America
would not be. From Athens, the West inherited
the ideas of a rational universe governed by a
divine intellect, of the primacy of reason in the
moral life, of an immutable human nature (and
thus of natural law), and of the immortal soul.
Jerusalem contributed monotheism, the doctrines
of creation ex nihilo and the essential goodness
of the world, the imago dei, and salvation history.
Christian Rome universalized these truths,
when salvation history came to its culmination
in Christ: it recognized the inviolability of the
human person and de-divinized the world. This
made the separation of sacred and secular spheres
to be a Christian necessity and eventually led, “by
a long road,” to religious freedom, as paradigmat-
ically understood by John Courtney Murray, one
of the principal architects of Dignitatis Humanae.30
The bedrock conditions are now in place from
which constitutionalism could develop.
The impressive collection of texts Reilly assem-
bles in support of his claim of continuity is easily
the best part of the book. He draws on a pleth-
ora of sources from the Middle Ages to argue that
essential characteristics of the American Found-
ing thought to be products of the Enlightenment
chance he does not know—especially if he belongs to the meri-
tocratic class. This unsettling fact, which is surely unique in the
history of the world, is cause for wonder. See Hanby, “What
Comes Next,” op cit.
30
Reilly, America on Trial, 52. For a documentary history of the
composition of Dignitatis Humanae and a powerful critique
of Murray and the still dominant Murrayite interpretation
of its meaning, see David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy,
Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican
Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom: A New Translation,
Redaction History, and Interpretation of “Dignitatis Humanae”
(Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2015).
61
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
derive in fact from medieval natural law origins:
the principle of equality, the rule of law founded
in reason, the “dual sovereignty” of the sacred and
secular, government by consent of the governed,
and the right to resist tyranny. (He says nothing
of the sacramental order of reality, reflected in
the rites of coronation, that underlay and united
the secular and spiritual powers in one ecclesial
order.)31 Reilly then looks to the familiar story of
the voluntarism and nominalism that arose in the
High Middle Ages, with a view to their political
implications. At the foundation of these philo-
sophical developments is the elevation of the will
to primacy over the intellect, which annihilates
the natural law—rooted in the divine logos and
based on human reason—and thus ushers in an
era of absolutist thinking foreign to the older tra-
dition: secular in the case of Hobbes, theocratic
in the case of Martin Luther, James I, and Robert
Filmer. Against this, Reilly employs his method of
assembling like-sounding references from diverse
authors and citing the Founders’ self-attesta-
tions that their universal principles are those of
the tradition to establish a genealogy connecting
the Americans to their medieval forebears in the
natural-law tradition, a lineage that passes from
Aristotle and Aquinas to Hooker and Sidney—
with cameo appearances by Bellarmine and
Suarez—and ultimately to Locke and the Amer-
icans. The American Revolution thus appears at
the conclusion of this reconstruction not as the
radical institution of a new world order, à la the
French Revolution, but as a conservative restora-
tion of the Christian natural law tradition.
Those already versed in the mythology of the
31
“I have described thirteenth-century France as sacramental and
incarnational. What I hope I have made clear is that the secular
power and the spiritual power were not operating in different
realms. Rather, the spiritual power was a power precisely inas-
much as it operated in the secular world, and the secular power
was a power precisely inasmuch as it worked toward a spiritual
end. What made them ‘powers’ and not just violence on the
secular side or ritual functions or preaching on the spiritual
side was the combination of their spiritual legitimacy and their
efficacy in the temporal society: both were the Church, cleri-
cal and lay, in action. The Church in action both constituted
the kingdom and pointed beyond it to the unity of Christen-
dom and, ultimately, of humanity itself ” (Andrew Jones, Before
Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental
Kingdom of St. Louis IX [Steubenville: Emmaus Academic
Press, 2017], 145-6). A serious appraisal of Jones’ work would
reveal the anachronistic character of Reilly’s analysis.
62
“civic project” will recognize these as common-
places in the conservative telling of that mythology.
Equally familiar is the cast of villains who shoulder
the blame for America’s “fall,” thereby absolving
the conservative wing of a critical examination of
first principles. German historicism, Darwinism,
John Dewey, Woodrow Wilson—perennial foils
in the ongoing battle against political progressiv-
ism—all make their predictable appearance. The
story is Whig Catholic history at its finest.32 At
several points, Reilly even implies that Catholic
natural law principles are fully realized in the
political sphere for the first time in Protestant
America, though it takes a few “just-so” stories to
pull this off.33 He equates “Nature’s God” of the
32
The notion of “Whig history” originates with Herbert Butter-
field’s famous 1931 volume, The Whig Interpretation of History.
It has come to be a pejorative designation for an anachronistic
form of historiography, whether political, scientific, or religious,
that views history from the vantage of an “enlightened” present
toward which history is thought progressively and inevitably to
tend, and that selects its relevant elements on that basis. The
term “Whig Thomism” was first coined by Lord Acton, and
later appropriated by Michael Novak to describe what we could
call the “proto-Enlightenment” or “proto-American” elements in
the thought of St. Thomas, abstracted (so I would argue) from
the historical and ontological setting that originally made them
intelligible. This misreading of St. Thomas is used by the “con-
servative” devotees of the “civic project” to synthesise Catholicism
and liberal order. This inevitably involves the construction
of a historical narrative (exemplified here by Reilly)—whose
basic elements have become recognizable to anyone familiar
with such attempts—that answers to the description of Whig
history. See Michael Novak, The Hemisphere of Liberty: A Phi-
losophy of the Americas (Washington: AEI Press, 1992), 107-23
and Novak, “The Return of the Catholic Whig,” First Things
(March 1990), available at https://www.firstthings.com/
article/1990/03/the-return-of-the-catholic-whig.
33
See e.g., p. 13: “As John Quincy Adams would later say, their
‘theory of government had been working itself into the mind
of man for many ages.’ But the Founding was also something
new. What was revolutionary about it was that, for the first
time in history, the effort was made to found a regime on these
truths, for as Adams remarked, they ‘had never before been
adopted by a great nation in practice.” Or p. 52: “ The secular
is not antithetical to Christianity; it is a product of it. Chris-
tianity created the secular. It insists on it.… This was the
ultimate basis for the constitutional principle of separation of
ecclesiastical and secular authority. By a long road, it eventu-
ally led to religious freedom—something that would have been
inconceivable unless the political order had been secularized.
(Ultimately, it was the basis for the First Amendment.) … Jesus’
words, Lord Acton said, gave to the civil power ‘bounds it had
never acknowledged, and they were the repudiation of absolut-
ism and the integration of Freedom.… The new law, the new
spirit, the new authority, gave to liberty a meaning and a value
it had not possessed in the philosophy or in the constitution of
 michael hanby
Declaration with the “Judeo-Christian God”—
which is itself notably a sociological abstraction
rather than a theological description—“for the
simple reason that there is no other revelation
(or cult, if you will) at the base of a culture that
supports the Declaration’s principles to the extent
that they could have originated within it.”34 And
there was no need to embed specifically Christian
principles in the Constitution both because it was
necessary for these principles to be “independent
of the validity of any particular religious beliefs”
and because colonial America was apparently so
Christian that the colonists would simply know
that the philosophical appeals to Nature’s God on
which it rested “were vindicated by and sustained
by the God who reveals himself as the divine
Logos.”35 Just so. Why it was necessary for such a
deeply Christian nation to transmute its God into
a philosophical abstraction belonging to no actual
religious tradition and its faith into these ‘inde-
pendently valid’ philosophical terms, only so that
each individual could then translate them back,
he does not say.
Still, it might surprise Reilly to learn that I
find nothing particularly objectionable about
most of these claims, stated at this level of gen-
erality. I certainly see nothing in them fatal to my
own view. Obviously, the American Founding is
an event in a Western and Christian history that
includes the discovery of the New World, the
Protestant Reformation, the disintegration of
Christendom, the English Civil War, and the Sci-
entific Revolution. It could not but be informed
by the tradition from which European civiliza-
tion drew its breath, just as it could not fail to
be affected by these transformations. I have never
Greece or Rome before the knowledge of the truth that makes
us free.’” Or p. 248: “We have emphasized that liberty and con-
stitutional order are not the products of just any conception of
the universe, but only one—that of the Judeo-Christian and
natural law tradition. And so we come around at last to what
this genealogy made possible. The Founders not only declared
the inherited principles of human equality, popular sovereignty,
the requirement of consent, and the moral right to revolution
that we have been following since the Middle Ages, but for the
first time in history, instantiated them, put them into practice,
producing a constitutional republic that was the product of
deliberation and free choice.… The Founders accomplished
this in the form of an extended federal republic the likes of
which the world had never seen.”
34
Ibid., 264.
35
Ibid., 266.
regarded the Founding merely as the incarnation
of Lockean philosophy, despite Locke’s obvious
influence upon the thought of Jefferson and other
Founders. Nor have I regarded Lockean philoso-
phy in quite so reductive and simplistic a fashion as
Reilly supposes.36 The whole of modern political
philosophy unfolds in the shadow of Hobbes, and
the question of Locke’s literary and philosophical
relationship to him is a complex one that does not
turn, in my view, either on the simple question
of acceptance or rejection or on Locke’s attitude
toward absolutism, the natural law, and moral-
ity. Certainly, the invocation of Locke’s moralism
or his appeal to the law of nature in the Second
Treatise is not the objection to my position that
Reilly imagines, though in acknowledging these
aspects of Locke’s thought it should be noted
that the nature and function of “natural law” in
his philosophy remains a vexed question among
Locke scholars.37 I have always understood the
36
Garry Wills famously denied virtually any Lockean influence
upon Jefferson, but Ronald Hamowy and Allen Jayne, among
others, pretty much demolish this view. See Wills, Inventing
America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York:
Doubleday, 1978); Ronald Hamowy, “Jefferson and the Scottish
Enlightenment: A Critique of Garry Wills’s Inventing America:
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence,” The William and Mary
Quarterly, Third Series, 36.4 (October 1970): 503-23; Allen
Jayne, Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Lexington: The
University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 41-61.
37
Questions abound concerning both the function and the
actual content of the law of nature—which Locke leaves unde-
veloped in the Second Treatise—as well as its compatibility
with the doctrine of the Essay. Peter Laslett, who edited the
Cambridge edition of the Two Treatises, writes the following
in his long introductory essay to that work. “So sharp here is
the contrast between two almost contemporaneous works by
the same author that in one passage in Two Treatises, perhaps
in a second passage also, Locke uses language on the subject
of natural law which seems inconsistent with his own state-
ments about innate ideas in the Essay. Questioning on this
point cannot be pressed too far, for we are told that ‘it would
be besides my present purpose, to enter here into particulars
of the Law of nature, or its measure of punishment, yet, it is
certain that there is such a Law, and that too, as intelligible
and plain to a rational Creature, and a Studier of that Law, as
the positive Laws of Commonwealths, nay possibly plainer’ (II,
§ 12). It seems that it was always ‘beside his present purpose’
for Locke to demonstrate the existence and content of natural
law. He did not do that in his Essay, even in the 2nd edition
where the passage in the second book which Tyrrell had com-
plained of was rewritten. He would not do so by bringing out
his early Essays on the Law of Nature, which Tyrrell asked him
to do in the course of their exchange. As Dr Von Leyden has
shown, these earlier essays would not have provided a doctrine
of natural law capable of reconciling the theory of knowledge
63
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
thought of the Founders as a complex amalgam
of Protestant Christianity, Scottish Enlighten-
ment moral philosophy, Baconian and Newtonian
natural philosophy, and the Renaissance tradition
of civic humanism. It is hardly an accident that
we have a senate and a capitol, or that the young
nation filled its new Rome along the banks of the
Potomac with Greek and Roman temples. Nor
is it an accident that the Founders did not build
in Gothic; this fact alone ought to call into ques-
tion Reilly’s inordinate stress on the medieval
Christian origins of the American Founding. “If
any one cultural source lay behind the republican
revolutions of the eighteenth century,” Gordon
Wood writes, “it was ancient Rome—republi-
can Rome—and the values that flowed from its
history.”38 If anything, Reilly’s account of the
Founding’s Christian, natural law origins under-
states the Founders’ neo-classicism in forming
their republican imagination. The warnings of
of Cicero, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus against the
corrosive effects of luxury and decadence fueled
the Founders’ own suspicions of the corrupting
effects of “interest”—defined, in Madison’s words,
as “the immediate augmentation of property and
wealth.”39 Roman history would also provide the
archetypes after which they patterned themselves:
Cato, sacrificing his life for his country; Cincin-
natus, laying aside his commission to return to his
farm.40 Jefferson hoped, rather romantically, that
the yeoman farmers he imagined would populate
his empire of liberty would be such high-minded,
disinterested men.” “ ‘Ours,’ he informed Creve-
coeur in 1787, ‘are the only farmers who can read
Homer.’ ”41 Though the radical liberty advanced
by Jefferson and Thomas Paine would contribute
to the dissolution of this republican vision even
within the Founders’ lifetimes, in their minds it
in Locke’s Essay with the ethical doctrine of that work and of
Two Treatises. This, it is suggested, may have been one of the
reasons why Locke was unwilling to be known as the author
of both books.” See Laslett’s “Introduction” in John Locke,
Two Treatises of Government, ed. by Peter Laslett (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 81-82, referred to hereaf-
ter as Two Treatises. Laslett’s introduction will be cited by page
number, Locke’s own text by its internal numbering. For a pro-
found critique of the “impotence” of Locke’s conception of law,
see D. C. Schindler, Freedom from Reality, 66-87.
38
Wood, The Idea of America, 59.
39
Quoted in Wood, The Idea of America, 140.
40
Ibid., 57-80.
41
Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew, 44.
64
also served as the precondition for any possible
realization of that disinterested ideal.42 “ ‘Interest,’
many of them said, ‘is the greatest tie man one man
can have on another’ ”;43 by contrast, the “classical
ideal of disinterestedness was based on independ-
ence and liberty. Only autonomous individuals,
free of interested ties and paid by no masters,
were capable of such virtue.”44 The demise of this
neoclassical vision and the dramatic transforma-
tion of the new nation into “a scrambling business
society dominated by the pecuniary interests of
ordinary people” prior even to the adoption of
the Constitution, raises the enduring question
of whether the Founders’ republican ideal could
survive the corrosive effects of Lockean liberty
and its metaphysical underpinnings.45 That it has
not survived is beyond debate.
Reilly’s Whig philosophical history ultimately
fails, however, for the same reason that it is super-
ficially plausible, because it is neither philosophy
nor history in any rigorous sense. Reilly valorizes
ideas like eternal truth, but he never moves beyond
assembling similar sounding texts to analyze how
these ideas function differently in their disparate
literary and philosophical contexts, much less
does he enter into philosophical speculation about
what God, nature, freedom, reason, law, are.46
Reilly’s historical naïveté is at least the equal to his
philosophical incomprehension and finally insep-
arable from it. For example, his grand genealogy
of the classical and Christian roots of American
civilization concludes with the blithe assertion
that Christianity requires “the secular”—thus
obviously preparing the way for religious freedom
and the First Amendment as the realization of
that requirement—, while paying no heed to the
difference between ancient and modern senses of
the term, or to the work of people such as Andrew
Willard Jones or John Milbank which should have
made such easy elisions impossible.47 It is there-
42
Wood, The Idea of America, 127-69.
43
Ibid., 140.
44
Ibid., 143.
45
Ibid., 139.
46
A number of these texts and ideas are not quite so similar as
they seem, for example the implicit equation of the medieval
doctrine of the two swords, which Reilly calls “dual sovereignty,”
and the separation of the church and state, or the comparison of
Suarez, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, and the Declaration
of Independence on pp. 215-17.
47
See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Black-
 michael hanby
fore unsurprising that the real significance of
the early-modern revolution in metaphysics and
natural philosophy, of the loss of a sacramental
order of reality, and of the Protestant Reforma-
tion—ingredients all in the new conception of
political order—completely escapes him. In the
same way, Reilly’s generic references to “Christi-
anity” and the abstract “Judeo-Christian heritage”
conceal the historical fact that “Christianity” and
“God” were highly contested terms everywhere in
the eighteenth century and especially in colonial
America, refuge to a vast assortment of British
non-conformists and religious misfits from north-
ern Europe. Perhaps Matthew Stewart’s Nature’s
God is too invested in contemporary polemics to
be a reliable historical guide; nevertheless, it must
be conceded to Stewart that the mere existence
of a text like Reason, the Only Oracle of Man, a
weirdly Spinozistic tome attributed at the time to
Ethan Allen—“prophet of Ticonderoga,” “Philos-
opher of the Green Mountains,” and leader of the
Green Mountain Boys—“testifies to the presence
in the remotest regions of revolutionary America
of modes of thought that have been almost uni-
versally regarded as too old, too radical, and too
continental to have played a role in the founding of
the American republic.”48 Yet Reilly needn’t have
consulted Stewart or the Green Mountain Phi-
losopher. Ben Franklin’s Autobiography would’ve
done, or Jefferson’s Bible, which he hoped would
“prepare the euthanasia for Platonic Christiani-
ty.”49 Apparently, Jefferson forgot that “Nature’s
well, 1990); Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social
Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (Steubenville:
Emmaus Academic Press, 2017).
48
Stewart notes that what is most striking about the book, what
makes it most worthy of his attention, “is its lack of originality.”
“From the serenity of his mountain lair, Ethan Allen appears to
have rediscovered an infinite, centerless, and eternal universe; a
nearly pantheistic deity coeval, coeternal, and coextensive with
this unending cosmos; a human body composed of the con-
stant flux and reflux of material particles, a natural world of
constant transformation in which nothing is ever truly created
or destroyed; and a host of other speculative visions that seem
both older and more profound than the best-of-all-possible-
worlds of watchmaker Gods and providential blandishments
with which deism has long been identified.” Stewart, Nature’s
God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2014), 14, 15.
49
Jefferson, “ To John Adams” (October 12, 1813), in Merrill D.
Peterson (ed.), Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: The
Library of America, 1984), 1301-2. Anti-Platonism is some-
thing of a theme in Jefferson’s letters. In addition to the letter to
God” “reveals himself as the divine Logos.”
In extracting the pure principles which
[ Jesus] taught, we should have to strip
off the artificial vestments in which they
have been muffled by priests, who have
travestied them into various forms, as
instruments of riches and power to them.
We must dismiss the Platonists and
Plotinists, the Stagyrites, and the Game-
lielites, the Eclectics the Gnostics and
Scholastics, their essences and emana-
tions, their Logos and Demi-urgos, Aeons
and Daemons male and female with a long
train of Etc. Etc. Etc. or, shall I say at once,
of Nonsense.50
History Inside the Great
Transformation
Because the Whig historian always sees history
tending inevitably toward his own present—
historicism for me but not for thee—the past is
always perfectly comprehensible to him. Just so,
Reilly views this vast swath of philosophy and
history from the pre-philosophical Egyptians to
the Progressive era from the comfortable vantage
of his own untroubled present and its unspo-
ken assumptions. This, presumably, is why he
has not really comprehended my position and
indeed remade it in the image of his own polit-
ical preoccupations—that, and the fact that his
self-appointed role of defense attorney absolves
him of understanding it. He simply does not see
what he does not see. And it is why, from my point
of view, he consistently poses the wrong ques-
tions: “Was the American Founding rooted in the
Judeo-Christian heritage and natural law, or was
it infused with notions of the radical autonomy
and the perfectibility of man and, therefore, inim-
ical to the Christian and natural law conception
of reality?”51 “Was Locke a nominalist and a vol-
Adams, see also “ To Peter Carr” (August 10, 1787), in Thomas
Jefferson: Writings, 900-901; “ To Benjamin Waterhouse” ( June
20, 1822), in Writings, 1458-9.
50
Jefferson, “ To John Adams” (October 12, 1813), in Writings,
1301.
51
Reilly, America on Trial, 2.
65
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
untarist, or was he a natural law realist?”52 “Were
those ‘rights’ ordered to any natural end, or were
they autonomous, to be exercised at the will and
complete discretion of their possessor? In other
words, was the enterprise primarily an exercise of
pure will, or was it grounded in reason?”53 Like
his challenge to Deneen and me to “prove that the
Founders had a non-teleological or anti-teleolog-
ical view of nature along the lines of Hobbes,” the
questions are empty and beside the point.54
Even Hobbes did not simply reject Chris-
tianity, though the atheistic implications of his
philosophy were immediately sniffed out. He
reinvented Christianity as an instrument of his
politics. So too did Locke, albeit more subtly, and
Jefferson also, with “Nature’s God” and a de-Pla-
tonized Jesus forming the two poles of the new
enlightened Unitarian faith he prophesied for
America’s religious destiny.55 Seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century titans such as Bacon, Newton,
and Locke were not simply voluntarists who
exalted will over reason.56 They were also ration-
alists bent on redefining and regulating reason as
the counterpart to the physics of force that was
supplanting the Aristotelian physics of form. The
result was not a simple rejection of natural law but
a transformation of the meaning of both law and
nature: so that natural law became the Laws of
Nature, which are not exactly the same thing.57 As
Amos Funkenstein once said, the “laws of nature”
enjoyed their finest hour in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, as a replacement for the
substantial form abolished by the mechanical
52
Ibid., 225.
53
Ibid., 289.
54
Ibid., 310.
55
Jefferson famously remarks in his 1822 letter to Benjamin
Waterhouse (Writings, 1458-9), “I rejoice that in this blessed
country of free inquiry and belief, which has surrendered its
creed and conscience to neither kings nor priests, the genuine
doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I trust that there is
not a young man now living in the United States who will not
die an Unitarian.” Jefferson’s letter to Waterhouse deserves to be
read in its entirety.
56
Jefferson, “ To John Trumbull” (February 15, 1789), in Writings,
939-40.
57
On the provenance of the “Laws of Nature” (plural) in the
Founding Fathers, and their distinction from the traditional
sense of natural law discussed by Reilly, see the work of the
great Newton scholar, I. Bernard Cohen, Science and the Found-
ing Fathers: Science in the Political Thought of Thomas Jefferson,
Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and James Madison (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1995), 108-34.
66
philosophy of the seventeenth century.58 The par-
adigmatic example is Newton’s laws, which would
define the scientific ideal for the English-speak-
ing world deep into the nineteenth century.59
Final causality was not thereby eliminated, but
rather transformed from an immanent quality
of substantial form—the “sake” that expresses
a thing’s unity, denotes its ontological identity,
and grounds the distinction between natural and
violent motion—to an extrinsic purpose, a design,
extrinsically imposed on extended matter from
without by a contriving God.60 Hobbes will echo
this in launching his Leviathan.61 This extrinsic
teleology would persist in British natural theol-
ogy through William Paley and the Bridgewater
Treatises right up to the time of Darwin, and it
is still by and large what English-speaking Dar-
winians like Richard Dawkins take teleology to
be when they reject it.62
What I have always meant by the “conflation of
nature and artifice” is this mechanistic reconcep-
tion of nature, the theologia naturalis presupposed
and implied by it, and the corresponding con-
flations of contemplation and action, truth and
function—not endless self-creation or “the per-
fectibility of man” as Reilly seems to think, though
58
Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the
Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986), 123. After offering a hypothetical defi-
nition of bodies as determined quantities of extension that are
mobile, impenetrable, capable of exciting sense perception, and
subordinate in their motions to certain laws, Newton writes,
“ That for the existence of these beings it is not necessary that
we suppose some unintelligible substance to exist in which as
subject there may be an inherent substantial form; extension
and an act of the divine will are enough” (“De Gravitatione
et Aequipondio et Fluidorum,” in A. R. Hall and M. B. Hall
(eds.), Unpublished Scientific Papers of Isaac Newton [Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962], 140).
59
For more on Newton’s paradigmatic role in defining the British
scientific ideal, see Depew and Weber, Darwinism Evolving:
Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 1997), 85-140.
60
See Hanby, No God, No Science?, 107-85.
61
“Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governs the
world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this
also imitated, that it can make an artificial animal” (Hobbes,
Leviathan, praef., 1).
62
The locus classicus of the genre is William Paley, Natural Theol-
ogy: Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity from
the Appearances of Nature (New York: Sheldon & Company,
1854). However, Paley was a devotee of Locke and regularly
lectured on him, so there may have been some Lockean inspira-
tion for his argument.
 michael hanby
these mechanistic reductions probably make such
fantasies inevitable.63
The mechanization of nature and reason
commences in earnest in the seventeenth century
and underlies the new “science of politics” in a way
whose importance is sometimes overlooked. All
previous political philosophy accorded some role
to human construction in the foundation of the
polis, and the idea that the soul is a microcosm
of the city is at least as old as Plato. But Hobbes
was the first, as far as I know, to fuse the micro-
cosm and the macrocosm into an “artificial man”
and to make him into a “Mortall God” endowed
with divine attributes of unity, immutability, and
indivisibility. He was also the first political theo-
rist to conceive of the “life” of both soul and city as
a machine. This “artificial” conception of nature,
and a conception of knowledge as construction,
underlies an ambition that is every bit as techno-
logical as it is political.
Nature (the art whereby God hath made
and governs the world) is by the art of man,
as in many other things, so in this also imi-
tated, that it can make an artificial animal.
For seeing life is but a motion of limbs,
the beginning whereof is in some principal
part within, why may we not say, that all
automata (engines that move themselves
by springs and wheels as doth a watch)
have an artificial life? For what is the heart,
but a pump, and the nerves, but so many
strings, and the joints, but so many wheels,
giving motion to the whole body, such as
was intended by its artificer? Art goes yet
further, imitating that rational and most
excellent work of nature, man. For by art
is created that great Leviathan called a
Commonwealth or State, (In Latin,
Civitas) which is but an artificial man,
though of greater stature and strength
than the natural, for whose protection and
defence it was intended.…64
63
For a succinct and profound account of the modern transforma-
tion of the meaning of truth, see Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction
to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004), 57-66. For more
on the conflation of contemplation and action (or theory and
practice), see Hans Jonas’s essay “The Practical Uses of Theory”
in Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2001), 188-210.
64
Hobbes, Leviathan, praef., 1.
The ideal of “knowledge through construction”
inherent in the conflation of nature and arti-
fice played an important role in the emerging
sense of history as a human artifact and provided
enormous impetus, long before the arrival of
German historicism or American pragmatism,
to “cunning of history” arguments purporting to
offer a “science” of providence and a transcen-
dental logic for the outworking of history.65 John
Dewey regarded pragmatism not as one possible
school of philosophy, but as the real truth of what
thought had really always been.66 Nevertheless he
traces the dawning realization of this truth and
his own intellectual patronage to Francis Bacon,
whom he regarded as “the real founder of modern
thought.”67 Reilly, as we noted, predictably blames
the Whigs’ familiar cast of villains for American
decline. “German historicism” is the arch-vil-
lain, though Reilly—apparently forgetting that
Darwin, Wilson, and Dewey weren’t German—
also includes Woodrow Wilson’s replacement of
the Founder’s “Newtonian” Constitution with
his own “Darwinian” version, and Dewey’s aspi-
ration to “a control of human nature comparable
to our control of physical nature.”68 Dewey’s own
recognition of the essentially Baconian character
of pragmatism, not to mention his own avowed
distrust of German philosophy, suggests that
beneath the dichotomy of Newton and Darwin,
or classical and “renascent” liberalism, there lies a
common ontological substrate.69
65
See Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 38 ff. The “dismal
science” of political economy is in this tradition, and the
eighteenth-century preoccupation with the “life cycle” of
states—depicted visually (and romantically) in the nineteenth
century in Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire—probably
owes something to it as well. For more on how the new “science
of providence” transforms the meaning of providence itself, see
the important discussion of Funkenstein, Theology and the Sci-
entific Imagination, 202-345.
66
This pretense to unmask the truth claims of all preceding
philosophy merits Dewey a place among Ricoeur’s “masters of
suspicion.”
67
Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt,
1920), 28.
68
Reilly, America on Trial, 325-6. Interestingly, Reilly neglects
Dewey’s own criticism of Hegel’s thought as leading to abso-
lutism, which ought to complicate any attempt to lump Dewey
and “German historicism” together indiscriminately. Dewey,
Reconstruction in Philosophy, (London: Forgotten Books),
77-102, 187-213.
69
For a landmark account of the essentially Newtonian presup-
positions of Darwinian theory, mediated to Darwin by the
67
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
Early protagonists of the newly mecha-
nized nature did not reject God, at least not
explicitly. Rather their program was theologi-
cally warranted.70 As Funkenstein observes, the
seventeenth-century drive toward univocity in
language and method and toward homogene-
ity in nature transmuted the question of God’s
eternity and ubiquity into a straightforward
physical problem, an idea later echoed by Jeffer-
son.71 Newton would even conclude, remarkably,
“that the quantity of the existence of God was
eternal, in relation to duration, and infinite in
relation to the space in which he is present.”72
This signifies an utter loss of the analogical dif-
ference between God and the world—and a
mostly “quantitative” conception of the difference
between divine and creaturely attributes—and it
marks, for all intents and purposes, an end to the
“Platonic” metaphysics of participation in which
the doctrine of creation had been explicated and
which undergirded both the symbolic cosmos
and the sacramental order of the Middle Ages.73
British political-economists, see David J. Depew and Bruce H.
Weber, Darwinism Evolving, 57-139.
70
In addition to Funkenstein and my own work, see the fasci-
nating work of Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and
the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998); The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). See also
the magisterial three-volume history of Stephen Gaukroger,
The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping
of Modernity, 1210-1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009); The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility:
Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680-1760 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012); The Natural and the Human:
Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2018).
71
See Jefferson, “ To John Adams” (August 15, 1820), in Thomas
Jefferson: Writings, 1443, discussed below.
72
The entire passage is worth quoting: “Space is a disposition
of being qua being. No being exists or can exist which is not
related to space in some way. God is everywhere, created minds
are somewhere, and body is in the space it occupies, and what-
ever is neither everywhere or anywhere does not exist. And
hence it follows that space is an effect arising from the first
existence of being, because when any being is postulated, space
is postulated. And the same may be said of duration: for cer-
tainly both are dispositions of being or attributes according to
which we denominate the presence and duration of any individ-
ual thing” (Newton, “De Gravitatione,” 136).
73
In describing the matter this way, I am of course assuming that
Aristotle and the Christian Aristotelianism of the Middle Ages
are, in a fundamental sense, a form of Platonism. See Hanby,
No God, No Science?, 49-104. For more on the transmutation
of the divine attributes, see Funkenstein, Theology and the Sci-
68
In consequence of this reduced sense of both God
and nature held by the new “secular theologies,”
it was much more common in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries to invoke directly the
agency of a “contriving” God in order to explain
complex features of the world that seemingly
defied mechanical explanation—biological func-
tionality, language, human fellow-feeling and
sociality—than it had been in the thirteenth,
when a more radical sense of divine transcend-
ence and a metaphysics of participation sustained
a robust distinction between primary and sec-
ondary causality.74 Locke, in language that
entific Imagination, 3-25; Hanby, No God, No Science?, 107-49.
For more on the social and political implications of sacramental
order see Jones, Before Church and State, 161-2: “ The point of
this example is that within the sacramental cosmos, every social
function had, intrinsic to its very self-identity, elements that we
might be inclined to label ‘secular’ and elements we might be
inclined to label ‘religious.’ This is not to say that the monarchy
or its opponents justified itself with a Christian ideology—
such a conception preserves the division between the religious
and the secular by simply laying one on top of the other. Within
such a conception, this religious ideology could change while
the monarchy, for example, retains categorical integrity as itself
secular: the Christianity of the monarchy is seen as accidental
to its essence as the State. This is the conceptual framework
maintained by the proponents of the secularization thesis....
Rather, we must recognize that within a sacramental worldview
there is no fundamental conflict between the temporal and
the spiritual that needs to be dealt with through an ‘alliance’
of Crown and altar. To the contrary, the spiritual and the tem-
poral are united fundamentally—that is the very definition of
a sacrament.”
74
Funkenstein remarks on the significance of this new theol-
ogy: “A new and unique approach to matters divine, a secular
theology of sorts, emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries to a short career. It was secular in that it was con-
ceived by laymen for laymen. Galileo and Descartes, Leibniz
and Newton, Hobbes and Vico were either not clergymen at
all or did not acquire an advanced degree in divinity. They were
not professional theologians, and yet they treated theological
issues at length. Their theology was secular also in the sense
that it was oriented toward the world, ad saeculum. The new
sciences and scholarship, they believed, made the traditional
modes of theologizing obsolete; a good many professional the-
ologians agreed with them about that. Never before or after
were science, philosophy, and theology seen as almost one and
the same occupation.” Funkenstein goes on to note that the
new theology was neither theoretical in the traditional sense—
ordered to contemplation—nor practical, that is, moral, though
these thinkers often dealt with moral questions. It is rather that
a certain conception of matters divine formed an indispensable
part in the new system of natural knowledge. What Funken-
stein wrote in 1986 remains true: this is “a fact of fundamental
social and cultural importance,” and the definitive work explor-
ing this significance is yet to be written. Funkenstein, Theology
 michael hanby
foreshadows Paley’s natural theology, will fre-
quently write this way when he runs up against
a difficulty in the Essay, and Jefferson will later
echo what had by then become a commonplace
way of speaking.75 The problem is that this sort
of theology has a kind of built-in obsolescence.
God becomes redundant once experimental
reason discovers how the artifact works or once
an alternative mechanism such as history or
natural selection can be found to account for the
artifact’s first assembly.76 This is one reason why
the conservative contrast between the Newtoni-
anism of the Founders and the Darwinism of the
Progressives is overdrawn. Mechanism replaces
the inherent unity and intelligibility of form with
the formalism of law and eliminates the tran-
scendence conferred on things by Platonic and
Aristotelian form, effectively erasing the distinc-
tion between a transcendent order of being and
the order of temporal development. “What things
are” is now wholly resolved into how they came to
be and how they work. This terminates logically
in the conflation of being and history, the linear
series of causes and effects that construct the
present. Experimental knowledge reconstructs
this series and ascertains its regularities. Scien-
tific explanation thus becomes an explanation of
what Bacon called the “latent process” by which
the present comes to be; shifting attention away
from things properly speaking, and toward the
processes governing their assembly and interac-
tions.77 As Hannah Arendt put it, “ The shift from
the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ to the ‘how’ implies that
the actual objects of knowledge can no longer be
and the Scientific Imagination, 3-9.
75
See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(London: Penguin, 2004), II.23.12, III.1.1, III.5.39–III.6.40,
IV.10.1. See Jefferson, “ To Peter Carr” (August 10, 1787),
Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 901-5.
76
As Funkenstein puts it, “It is clear why a God describable in
unequivocal terms, or even given physical features and func-
tions, eventually became all the easier to discard. As a scientific
hypothesis, he was later shown to be superfluous, as a being, he
was shown to be a mere hypostatization of rational, social, or
psychological ideas and images.… Once God regained trans-
parency or even a body, he was all the easier to identify and kill”
(Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 116).
77
In the life sciences, this is reflected in the shift in attention
from ontogeny—the development of a living organism over the
course of its own lifetime—to phylogeny, the relation between
generations and the mechanisms by which heritable bits of data
are passed between them.
things or eternal motions but must be processes,
and that the object of science therefore is no
longer nature or the universe but the history, the
story of the coming into being, of nature or life or
the universe.”78
The point I wish to emphasize here is that
the new science of politics that commenced in the
seventeenth century and provided the intellectual
underpinnings for the republican revolutions of
the eighteenth was neither merely political, nor
simply a straightforward rejection of the anteced-
ent Christian tradition. Rather it was one aspect
of a radical transformation of that tradition at every
level—theological, metaphysical, natural, scien-
tific, ecclesiastical, cultural and sociological—a
transformation that cannot be papered over by
appeal to similar sounding texts separated by
centuries. Reilly simply adopts the perspective
one has from inside the transformation, perhaps
unconsciously, and then reads the whole tradition
from that vantage.
ii. Was Hobbes a L ockean?
It is in the light of this vast transformation in the
Western conception of God, nature, and reason
coinciding with the disintegration of Christen-
dom that we should take up the relation between
Hobbes and Locke that forms the central ques-
tion of Reilly’s pivotal eighth chapter. We can
then ascertain more clearly what it might mean
to speak of a “Hobbesian” dimension of American
order, if indeed such a description is useful.
Locke, Living within Hobbes’
Unreal World
“The continuous dialogue with Hobbes,” wrote
Funkenstein, “is the distinguishing mark of
modern political theories.”79 It is impossible to do
justice to the depth and complexity of this “dia-
78
We might reformulate this for the political sphere by saying
that the ontological premises of classical liberalism naturally
terminate—and have their practical outworking—in progres-
sive or “renascent” liberalism. Arendt, The Human Condition
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 296. See Hanby,
No God, No Science?, 107-249. On “renascent liberalism,” see
John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (Amherst: Pro-
metheus Books, 2000), 61-93.
79
Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, 327.
69
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
logue” when viewed simply as a binary choice to
accept or reject him. “The most important polit-
ical thinkers of the seventeenth century did not
reject him outright even if they were profoundly
irritated by his claims. Instead, they absorbed the
full force of his arguments before transforming
them into a different, sometimes even a contrary,
theory.”80 Peter Laslett, editor of the Cambridge
edition of Two Treatises and no simple adherent
to the “Hobbes with a smiley face” view of Locke’s
political philosophy, concurs: “If Locke wrote
his book as a refutation of Sir Robert Filmer,
then he cannot have written it as a refutation
of Thomas Hobbes.”81 Laslett continues, “Locke
rejected Hobbesian absolutism along with Film-
er’s, of course: the word ‘Leviathan’ occurs in his
Second Treatise, and there are phrases and whole
arguments which recall the Hobbesian position,
and must have been intended in some sense as
comments upon them. Moreover, the thinking of
Hobbes was of systematic importance to Locke
and enters into his doctrines in a way which
goes much deeper than a difference in political
opinion.”82
80
Ibid. He gives Giambattista Vico as a case in point. “He refused
to accept the paradigmatic role of mechanics precisely because
he endorsed the principle that truth and what is made are
identical, verum et factum convertuntur. Since we did not make
nature, we cannot hope to understand it properly, either; but
the science of humanity is entirely open to our investigation
because—here Vico agrees entirely with Hobbes—society is
a human artifact, because ‘we have made the commonwealth
ourselves.’ Our second, historical nature is entirely our own
making” (328).
81
Laslett, Two Treatises, 67. The observation complicates Reil-
ly’s classification of absolutisms. Laslett adds, “Locke certainly
absorbed something from patriarchalism. It has been shown
above that there had been a time when he went a very long way
with this traditional argument. But he did not learn enough,
not enough to understand such institutions as the family, the
nation, the community of a neighborhood, as we think they
should be understood. And Hobbes could do nothing with the
patriarchal attitude. To him patriarchal societies were those
‘the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust’, and that was
all. He was unwilling to distinguish the authority of a father
from the naked exercise of force. In all these respects, then,
Hobbes, Locke, Tyrrell, Sidney and others were on the one
side, with Filmer and the tradition he stood for on the other.
Leibniz apparently classed Two Treatises and Leviathan in con-
trast with Patriarchia, and Leibniz was in no doubt that Filmer
was Locke’s target throughout the book. A controversy between
Locke and Hobbes would have been within one party only, and
could never have given rise to the characteristic political atti-
tude of the modern world” (70).
82
Ibid., 67-8.
70
The precise literary relationship between
Hobbes and Locke is difficult to establish; the
formal similarities in their argumentation are
not. They are virtually identical. Each deduces
the social compact with Euclidean precision
from a highly abstract and counterfactual “state
of nature” reduced to its basic “mechanical” ele-
ments, thereby repeating in the “new science of
politics” the founding gesture of the new science
more generally: premising the actual world on
the basis of the counterfactual.83 Both the form
and content of this reasoning are mechanistic, as
basic elements are abstracted from the totality in
which they actually exist, treated as if they were
ontologically basic, and then become the basis for
reconstructing the whole from which they were
originally abstracted.84 Metaphysically speaking,
this reflects the elevation of possibility or power
over being-as-act in the aftermath of Aristotle’s
overthrow.85 Locke himself seems to hedge his
bets on whether his “state of nature” should be
regarded as a kind of ontological structure prior
to history, an identifiable historical condition—
or both at once.86 For both Hobbes and Locke,
83
See Funkenstein’s discussion of the history of this tendency and
the difference between the seventeenth- and fourteenth-cen-
tury versions of it (117-201). “Benedetti and Galileo, Huygens
and Descartes, Pascal and Newton used their imaginary exper-
iments in a definite way which differs toto caelo from their
medieval predecessors not in discipline and rigor, but in their
physical interpretation. Counterfactual states were imagined in
the Middle Ages—sometimes even, we saw, as limiting cases.
But they were never conceived as commensurable to any of the
factual states from which they were extrapolated. No number
or magnitude could be assigned to them, even if the schoolmen
were to give up their reluctance to measure due to their con-
viction that no measurement is absolutely precise. For Galileo,
the limiting case, even where it did not describe reality, was the
constitutive element in its explanation” (Funkenstein, Theology
and the Scientific Imagination, 177). See also Hanby, No God,
No Science?, 108-49.
84
This is so common that one is tempted to regard it as a formal
feature of modern thought. We see it, e.g., in Descartes’
mechanical reconstruction of the world after his epoché, or in
the Newtonian laws of motion, which presuppose the iner-
tial tendencies of bodies that never actually subsist in inertial
isolation.
85
D. C. Schindler’s devastating—and to my mind, decisive—cri-
tique of Locke is largely a critique of how all the fundamental
elements of Locke’s political philosophy are conceived in terms
of this primacy. My own work has traced out its effects in
natural philosophy and early-modern science up through
Darwin. Schindler, Freedom From Reality, 1-127. Hanby, No
God, No Science?, 107-249.
86
Locke acknowledges the objection in Second Treatise, II, 14.
 michael hanby
the characteristics that define the natural state
are not the multitude of relations characterizing
our actual existence (kinship, for example) or the
inclinations heretofore regarded as “built in” to
our creaturehood (a desire for the good, an obli-
gation to the flourishing of others, a supernatural
end)—but freedom and equality, albeit somewhat
differently conceived by each. For Hobbes, equal-
ity derives from our lethality: our capacity to kill
each other as we seek to act without hindrance
in preserving our lives.87 For Locke, equality
follows from the freedom of all men “to order
their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions,
and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds
of the Law of Nature, without asking leave or
depending upon the Will of any other Man.”88 In
the absence of a common authority, this entails an
equal right (and obligation) to execute the law of
nature. One can speak of a certain “individualism”
here, but the primary sense is not a moral one.
Rather it is that the indivisible unit, the singular,
is the foundational element in a mechanistical-
ly-conceived order.
This difference in the way each conceives
of equality underlies the material differences
in their respective conceptions of the state of
nature. Whereas Hobbes identities the funda-
mental condition as the “war of all against all,”
Locke differentiates between the state of nature
and the state of war, going beyond Hobbes and
expanding the Law of Nature to include not only
self-preservation, but an obligation not to “harm
another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Posses-
On the one hand, he extrapolates to the level of “Princes and
Rulers of Independent Governments throughout the world” to
argue that such a state has never been absent and calls on the
authority of the “Judicious Hooker” to suggest it as a historical
condition that precedes actual human society. This interpre-
tation would seem to be strengthened by Locke’s declaration,
“Thus in the beginning, all the world was America,” which tes-
tifies to the power that the New World exercised over Locke’s
imagination (and perhaps also to the influence of Hobbes:
Leviathan, I, 13, 11), to the point of being archetypal for the
origins of civil society rather than the other way around. On the
other hand, he affirms that “all Men are naturally in that State,
and remain so, till by their own consent they make themselves
Members of some Politick Society,” which seems to support an
ontological, or perhaps a “phenomenological,” interpretation,
especially when one takes into consideration Locke’s doctrine
of “tacit consent” (VIII, 119), which is given simply from being
born.
87
Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 13, 1; I, 14, 1-2.
88
Locke, Second Treatise, II, 4.
sions.”89 Hobbes never explains how the fact of
our natural striving confers a right and obliga-
tion to self-preservation: a difficulty that would
seem to be exacerbated by the fact that “justice”
and “injustice” are, for him, consequent upon the
erection of an authority who compels by fear. It
seems like pure positivism. The difficulty persists
in Locke, who nevertheless attempts to ground
his obligations on the conflation of nature and art
discussed above and on his “labor theory of prop-
erty” writ large, so to speak: that is, because we
are God’s “Workmanship,” we are God’s “Proper-
ty.”90 It is not clear, however, why this fact alone
should oblige. One must look beyond the Second
Treatise to the Essay and Locke’s reinvention of
reason and of the wellspring of human action
(changing it from the inclination toward the
Good to “unease”) to understand how this might
oblige and why it might be reasonable.
Locke’s state of nature, which he describes as
a state of perfect freedom, seems positively idyllic
in comparison with Hobbes’ grim view—but on
closer inspection, this begins to look like a dis-
89
Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 14, 3; Locke, Second Treatise, II, 6. This
contrast can be overdrawn. Even Hobbes, nemesis of the natural
law tradition in Reilly’s telling, asserts that it is “a precept, or
general rule of reason: that every man ought to endeavor peace,
as far as he has hope of obtaining it” (Leviathan, I, 14, 4).
90
The tradition is of course replete with references to God’s “art,”
but these references were always qualified by a) a strong under-
standing of the difference between things existing-by-nature
and artifacts, b) a strong sense of analogy whereby any simi-
larity of the creature to God was surpassed by an ever-greater
dissimilarity, and therefore c) a strong sense of the difference
between creation proper, which presupposes nothing but the
divine goodness, and every other form of making, which presup-
poses and modifies being. Because of the radicality of creation,
predicated on the transcendent otherness of God as ipsum esse
subsistens, Aquinas was able to say that in giving being to crea-
tures—the most interior of perfections presupposed in every
other qualification of the creature—God was “in all things,
innermostly.” Augustine was also keenly aware of the absolute
otherness of God the world. Thus he would likewise say that
God is more interior to me than I am to myself. See Aquinas,
ST I.8.1, resp.; Augustine, Conf., III.6.11. One can glimpse here
that a proper sense of divine transcendence, creation ex nihilo,
and a metaphysics of the participation of creaturely being in
the divine actuality all go hand-in-hand and imply a profound
sense of anterior order, whereas the conflation of nature and art
has as its theological root a loss of divine transcendence and a
reduction of creation to “manufacture,” presided over by a God
now extrinsically juxtaposed to creation and relating to it prin-
cipally through an equally extrinsic law. See Hanby, No God, No
Science?, 107-49, 301-74.
71
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
tinction without a difference.91 The right of each
person to enforce the Law of Nature proves to
be an impossible possibility, since the very quali-
ties of freedom and equality which constitute the
perfection of the state of nature incline it imme-
diately toward the state of war.92 “Even the least
difference,” Locke says, is apt to end in the state
of war, presumably because even the attempt to
enforce the law meets the defining condition for
the state of war: “it being understood as a Decla-
ration of a Design upon his life.”93 “Not only do
we lose a distinction between revenge and justice,”
writes D. C. Schindler, “we also lose a distinction
between justice and simple crime. Justice and
injustice are effectively the same thing in the state
of nature in which there is no common authority.
However different Locke is from Hobbes in prin-
ciple, he begins to appear quite close to him in
fact.”94 And so, as with Hobbes, the uncertainty
of the natural condition drives men to part from
this state of perfect freedom and erect a common
authority to protect them.95
It is beginning to appear that Locke has
premised his political edifice upon the unreality
of Nature and its Law, insofar as each is merely a
possibility of action or thought and not an actual
order antecedently binding its participants and
shaping their subjectivity and actions prior to
their choosing.96 Nevertheless, his difference
from Hobbes about the state of nature does
enable Locke to amend the basis and therefore
the end of government, and it thereby seems to
provide a fulcrum for leverage against an abso-
91
Many scholars have reached this conclusion, but I regard the
analysis of D. C. Schindler as decisive. See Schindler, Freedom
From Reality, 66-98.
92
Compare with Hobbes: “Nature hath made men so equal, in
the faculties of the body, and mind; as that though there be
found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of
quicker mind than another; yet when all is reckoned together,
the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable,
as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit,
to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the
strength of the body, the weakest has strength enough to kill
the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy
with others, that are in the same danger with himself ” (Hobbes,
Leviathan, I, 13, 1).
93
Locke, Second Treatise, III, 17.
94
Schindler, Freedom from Reality, 76.
95
Locke, Second Treatise, VII, 77; IX, 123.
96
We can suggest an analogy here to the way that inertial motion
provides the counterfactual basis for the movement of bodies
that never in reality exist in undisturbed inertial isolation.
72
lutism of the state in the form of natural rights.
Rights, as Locke conceives them, are strictly anal-
ogous to property. One might say that property
is the essential form of the right, or as Madison
will later put it, “[A]s a man is said to have a
right to his property, he may be equally said to
have a property in his rights.”97 The foundational
importance of property in Locke’s thought can be
seen in his declaration that “Man has a Property
in his own Person.”98 (This notion, too, will be
taken up and expanded by Madison.)99 Property
functions almost as a “principle of individuation.”
Its essential characteristic is exclusivity, as Locke
emphasizes in likening original appropriation
to the consumption of fruit or wild venison and
the enclosure of land.100 By its very nature, prop-
erty separates mine from thine—indeed me from
thee—and “excludes the common right of other
men.”101 A right in the form of property serves
to insulate one from the claims of others—those
“Designs upon his life” that Locke identifies with
the state of war. By negating these “designs,” rights
create what D. C. Schindler calls “an enclosure of
a field of power” outside of any real order, that
transforms the innumerable claims characterizing
our actual existence into possible objects of choice,
97
W. T. Hutchinson, et al. (eds.), The Papers of James Madison,
vol. 14 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977),
266-68, available at The Founders’ Constitution, http://press-
pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s23.html.
98
Locke, Second Treatise, V, 26.
99
“ This term in its particular application means ‘that dominion
which one man claims and exercises over the external things of
the world, in exclusion of every other individual.’ In its larger
and juster meaning, it embraces every thing to which a man
may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every
one else the like advantage. In the former sense, a man’s land, or
merchandise or money is called his property. In the latter sense,
a man has a property in his opinions and the free communica-
tion of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious
opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them.
He has a property very dear to him in the safety and liberty of
his person. He has an equal property in the free use of his facul-
ties and the free choice of the objects on which to employ them.
In a word, as a man is said to have a right to his property, he
may be equally said to have a property in his rights. Where an
excess of power prevails, property of no sort is duly respected.
No man is safe in his opinions, his person, his faculties, or his
possessions. Where there is an excess of liberty, the effect is
the same, tho’ from an opposite cause” (Madison, The Papers of
James Madison, vol. 14, 266).
100
Locke, Second Treatise, V, 26.
101
Ibid., V, 27.
 michael hanby
subordinate to our freedom.102 This is why Locke
re-conceives of all human relations, whether
natural, political, or religious, in voluntary or con-
tractual terms. A government instituted for the
protection of natural rights is thus a government
instituted to protect this “enclosure of a field of
power,” to preserve around each of us a zone of
pure possibility free from the claims of others. A
government that fails in this responsibility is not
really a government and can be dissolved.
Reilly is therefore correct that Locke differs
from Hobbes on this point—but this observa-
tion does not really apprehend the fundamental
change that had already taken place in Hobbes’
aftermath. Abstracting political order from the
natural and sacramental orders to which it had
previously belonged creates the problem of estab-
lishing internal limits to a political order that has
abolished all real “external” limits. This problem
persists through the Federalist Papers; and feder-
alism, the separation of powers, and the Bill of
Rights are all attempts to solve it. But the problem
of how to cope with the absolute power of a polit-
ical sphere comprehended by no real order greater
than itself is a problem bequeathed to the modern
world by Hobbes. Pious appeals to the Laws of
Nature, however sincerely intended, do not alter
what remains a fundamentally Hobbesian concep-
tion of political order, especially when the state
is the ultimate arbiter of those Laws’ meaning. In
Locke, moreover, the Laws of Nature are not an
actual order of efficacious truth present and deter-
mining the mind prior to its choosing—his denial
of innate ideas precludes this. Rather they too are
transformed into possible objects of reason or of
will, which is why they prove to be impotent even
in his imaginary State of Nature.
The attempt of modern liberal order to limit
itself was therefore destined to fail. Locke remarks
that “the end of Law is not to abolish or restrain,
but to preserve and enlarge freedom.”103 He does
not seem to recognize that the reverse is also true.
Rights, we said, enclose a “field of power” or pos-
sibility. A political order that exists principally to
protect this field of possibility inevitably becomes
the mediator of all human relations, insinuat-
102
Schindler, Freedom From Reality, 182. For an excellent expla-
nation of why this conception of freedom is a “deceptive and
self-destroying illusion” (188), see pp. 152-88.
103
Locke, Second Treatise, VI, 57.
ing itself between me and all claims upon the
property that is my person. This enclosure of pos-
sibility, moreover, is threatened by anything that
would define me prior to my choosing—even,
as it turns out, my own nature. Liberal freedom
thus initiates a war against every form of ante-
cedent order, eventually aided and abetted by
the new science and its conflation of truth and
technological possibility.104 Rights therefore must
proliferate—as indeed they have—producing in
actuality the denatured individuals that hereto-
fore existed only at the theoretical foundations of
liberal theory.105 But with every new right comes
an extension of the state’s power to enforce that
right. The state thus becomes absolute precisely
in the name of protecting freedom, arrogating to
itself, almost by accident, authority even over the
meaning of nature itself and a power beyond any-
thing Hobbes could imagine.
Liberal order is not “Hobbesian,” therefore,
because some petty tyrant arbitrarily commands
or prohibits every action of its citizens. Its abso-
lutism is a good deal more subtle. Liberal order
is absolute because it is the transcendent whole
within which social facts like churches or so-called
“intermediate associations” are allowed to appear
and beyond which there is nothing.106 Liberal
order is absolute because it is our mortal god.
Mechanism: The Ontological
Basis of Liberal Order
Part One of Leviathan provides an ontologi-
cal basis both for Hobbes’ state of nature and for
104
I have written about this in numerous places. See most recently,
Hanby, “What Comes Next,” New Polity, op cit.
105
Pierre Manent’s assessment of Hobbes is applicable here as
well: “One is tempted to say that Hobbes is absolutist in spite
of his individualism. But, on the contrary, Hobbes is absolutist
because he is so rigorously individualistic” (Manent, An Intel-
lectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994], 28).
106
Political order thus becomes “secular” in John Milbank’s and
Andrew Willard Jones’ sense: “Our own vision is secular. Even
when we acknowledge the importance of religion, we do so
from within the assumption of the secular: that reality itself is
ultimately free of the religious. Religions come and go; they are
relative. The secular is permanent; it is absolute and universal.
To us, the secular is the field on which the game of history—
including religious history—is played.... In such an approach,
“religion” is a category that functions within the secular” ( Jones,
Before Church and State, 3). See also Milbank, Theology and
Social Theory, 9-26.
73
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
his elimination of the “other sword” of ecclesial
authority. Hobbes rejected the notion of “incor-
poreal substance” in the concluding part on “The
Kingdom of Darkness,” for example, not only
because of what he saw as the absurdity of such
language, but because it was a tool of priestcraft.107
There is no parallel to these chapters in Locke’s
Two Treatises, no basis in metaphysics or natural
philosophy for Locke’s state of nature. For that
one must look to the Essay Concerning Human
Understanding. Reilly does not give much evi-
dence of having really studied the Essay, but he
knows, with what he calls its “tinge of voluntarism
and nominalism,” that it presents a problem for
his thesis.108 So he proposes simply to set it aside
as a work in “empiricist epistemology,” presuma-
bly irrelevant in its political implications.109 This
ignores the fact, noted by Peter Laslett, that “the
implications of Locke’s theory of knowledge for
politics and political thinking were very considera-
ble and acted quite independently of the influence
of Two Treatises.”110 It imposes an artificial sepa-
ration between natural and political philosophy
that is false to the real order of things and false
to the way seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
thinkers understood themselves. (Much better is
the proposal of Shapin and Schaffer to read Levi-
athan as a treatise in natural philosophy first.)111
It ignores any symbiosis between two texts that
Locke wrote almost contemporaneously. And
it leaves notions unexplained that are central to
the intelligibility of Two Treatises but undevel-
oped there—freedom and reason chief among
them. However, if one places the Essay Concern-
ing Human Understanding in the position of those
early chapters of Leviathan one can see the true
nature of his project. And if one reads the Essay
and the Two Treatises in this way side by side with
Hobbes’ work, then one begins to see an onto-
logical foundation shared by both their political
107
See Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 92 ff.
108
Reilly, America on Trial, 238.
109
Ibid., 233.
110
Laslett, Two Treatises, 84. He continues, “ The famous doctrine
of the tabula rasa, for example, the blank sheet of the mind on
which experience and experience alone can write, made men
begin to feel that the whole world is new for everyone and we
are all absolutely free of what has gone before. The political
results of such an attitude have been enormous. It was, perhaps,
the most effective solvent of the natural-law attitude.”
111
Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, 92.
74
philosophies, one with far-reaching implications
for the subsequent shape of liberal order. Indeed
when viewed from this more comprehensive
vantage as a unity of natural and political philoso-
phy, Locke’s work begins to appear as a significant
development of and expansion upon Hobbes.
Reilly’s question—was Locke really a Hobbe-
sian?—may thus be looking through the wrong
end of the telescope. The more fitting question
may be whether Hobbes was a proto-Lockean.
Let us examine this foundation.
Hobbes and Locke are united in their desire
to restrict and “regulate” the scope of thought. As
Locke put it, “It is therefore worthwhile, to search
out the bounds between opinion and knowledge,
and examine by what measures, in things whereof
we have no certain knowledge, we ought to regulate
our assent, and moderate our persuasion.”112 Locke
builds upon and makes infinitely more sophistical
Hobbes’ project of reconstructing thought and
speech from their basic elements, with the object,
in both their cases, of the policing of “abuses of
speech” or “insignificant speech”—remote ances-
tors, no doubt, of Jefferson’s capital-N “Nonsense.”
It comes as no surprise that most of these “abuses”
turn out to be illicit compounds of simple ideas or
hypostasizations, predicated on the naïve assump-
tion by traditional philosophy that our words
and ideas somehow give us access to the essences
of things.113 The religious and political implica-
tions are immediately obvious. If reason can be
understood in such a way that the intelligibility of
nature and all but the barest affirmation of God’s
existence fall outside of it, then neither priestcraft,
112
Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London:
Penguin, 1997), Intro.3; compare with Hobbes, Leviathan, I,
3, 3-4. Locke continues: “If by this inquiry into the nature of
understanding, I can discover the powers thereof, how far they
reach; to what things they are in any degree proportionate; and
where they fail us, I suppose it may be of use, to prevail with
the busy mind of man to be more cautious in meddling with
things exceeding its comprehension, to stop, when it is at the
utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet igno-
rance of those things, which upon examination, are found to be
beyond the reach of our capacities. We should not then perhaps
be so forward, out of an affectation of an universal knowledge,
to raise questions, and perplex ourselves and others with dis-
putes about things, to which our understandings are not suited,
and of which we cannot frame in our minds any clear or distinct
perceptions, or whereof (as it has perhaps too often happened)
we have not any notions at all.”
113
Compare Locke, Essay, II.32.13; III.10.1-34 and Hobbes, Levi-
athan, I, 5, 5-19; I, 7, 27; IV, 46.
 michael hanby
with its legitimating apparatus in “the schools,”
nor the “enthusiasm” roiling seventeenth-century
England can lay claim to political authority or
qualify human freedom prior to the exercise of
consent. The way is clear for the absolutization of
political order and the redefinition of the Church
in either Hobbesian terms (as an instrument of
the sovereign) or in Lockean terms (as a voluntary
association within civil society). It is Locke’s “con-
gregationalist” conception that has become the de
facto ecclesiology of American order.114 Another
equally fundamental result is that restriction of
the “certainty and extent of human knowledge”
will limit the range of things we can meaningfully
be said to think about. With one stroke, the whole
tradition of philosophical thinking about being
and nature, theological doctrines articulated with
categories borrowed from the tradition (e.g., the
Trinity, the Eucharist), and traditional activities
such as contemplation (and their monastic insti-
tution) heretofore regarded as the highest goal of
human existence will be rendered obsolete and
unintelligible, destined eventually to disappear
from anything publicly recognizable as reason or
knowledge.115
So both Hobbes and Locke begin with an
inquiry into the causal origins of our ideas, with
Locke famously declaring the mind a tabula rasa
and denying so-called innate ideas. It is impor-
tant to see, however, that the insurrection against
a metaphysics of participation is not the conclusion
of this inquiry, but its presupposition, built into
Locke’s notion of an “idea” and his formulation
of the question. (Indeed, a history of the chang-
ing meaning of “ideas” would capture much of this
metaphysical revolution.)116 Ideas no longer princi-
pally signify the exemplars in the divine mind that
determine the intelligible natures of things, which
114
One of the best explanations of this remains William T. Cava-
naugh, “A Fire Strong Enough to Consume the House: The
Wars of Religion and the Rise of the State,” Modern Theology
11.4 (October 1995): 397-420.
115
This is one reason, perhaps, why Locke’s Reasonableness of
Christianity conspicuously omits any mention of the Trinity
and why Locke was widely regarded (along with Newton) as
a Socinian. See Stephen D. Snobelen, “ ‘God of gods and Lord
of lords’: The Theology of Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to
the Principia,” Osiris 16 (2001): 169-208, at 194.
116
See Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, “Ideas, in and before
Descartes,” in Ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1999), 58-76.
the mind somehow participates in through Augus-
tinian illumination or the Aristotelian abstraction
of intelligible species. This was the metaphysical
basis of the traditional understanding of truth as
an adequatio rei ad intellectum. Absent this basis in
intelligible form (Platonic or Aristotelian), there
can be no adequation, only an opaque causal rela-
tion between a mind and a world that are utterly
heterogeneous.117 For this reason, Locke reduces
the “idea” from an ontological to a psychological
entity, defining it as “whatever is the object of the
understanding.”118 (This definition, strictly consid-
ered, leads to a radical conclusion heretofore only
implicit in Descartes’ bifurcation of reality, a con-
clusion that will catalyze the skepticism of Hume
and the critical project of Kant: that our knowl-
edge is not of the world, but of our ideas only.)119
Hobbes and Locke both sought to locate
the causal origins of thought in a newly mech-
anized conception of sense experience, caused
(in Hobbes’ case) by an “external body, or object,
which presseth the organ proper to each sense,”
either mediately or immediately, or (in Locke’s
case) by “impulse, the only way [which] we can
conceive bodies to operate in.”120 Locke will add
to ideas derived from sensation a second “original”
for our ideas: the so-called “ideas of reflection,”
derived from the mind’s attention to its own
117
What Gilson writes of Ockham is largely true of Hobbes and
Locke, and it anticipates the culmination of this line of thinking
in Hume. Gilson writes, “ There is no criticism of the notion of
causality in the doctrine of Ockham. To him, causality is given
in sense intuition together with substances and their qualities.
Only, for the same reason as above, this is all we know about
causality. Since no real thing participates in the nature of any
other real thing, the simple intuition of a thing cannot give us
any knowledge, either intuitive or abstractive, of the nature of
another thing which we have not perceived before by sensa-
tion or intellection. How do we know that a thing is a cause
of a certain effect? Simply by observing that when that thing
is present what we call its effect habitually follows” (Etienne
Gilson, Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages [London: Sheed
and Ward, 1955], 496). See also Funkenstein, Theology and the
Scientific Imagination, 144.
118
Locke, Essay, Intro.8. Locke’s entire argument against innate
speculative and practical principles presupposes and depends
upon this reduction. He denies, for example, that the principle
of noncontradiction is an innate principle on the grounds that
“children and idiots” (and presumably many in between) have
not thought of it (Essay, I.2.4-5). Whereas for Aristotle, it was
a “most certain principle of being” that one affirms in thinking
at all (Metaph., IV.3, 1005b10).
119
Locke, Essay, IV.1.1.
120
Hobbes, Leviathan, I, 1, 1; Locke, Essay, II.8.11.
75
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
activities.121 For him, all of our subsequent ideas,
their modes, and ultimately speech are built upon
this twin foundation and never depart from it.
Knowledge is of our ideas only. All the “abuses”
which Locke will later analyze come from illicit
combinations of these ideas or from thinking
that ideas and words refer beyond themselves
to give us knowledge of things. Hobbes’ mecha-
nistic reconfiguration of the senses—and the
corresponding reconception of appetite and
aversion that underlies the brutality of his state
of nature—has as its ontological foundation the
new theory of matter as some kind of dimensive
quantity liberated from its relation to form that
came to prominence in the seventeenth centu-
ry.122 This is the ontology that operates in the
Essay as well, though in a more complex way. For
Locke, the so-called “primary qualities” of bodies
produce in us the simple ideas “solidity, extension,
figure, motion or rest, and number,” which must
be regarded as “resemblances” of some real exist-
ence, since these belong to the very idea of body
and cannot be separated from it.123 Nevertheless,
the “secondary qualities” such as “red” and “cold”
that the primary qualities produce in us bear no
resemblance to anything. The mind is now sep-
arated by an ontological abyss from the world.
Knowledge has ceased to be a participation in
the self-communication of intelligible being. This
self-communication was the primitive basis of
the Platonic-Aristotelian understanding of cau-
sality. With being now emptied of its intrinsic
intelligibility, causality has been transformed into
a kind of force (Locke’s “impulse”) and will soon
121
Locke, Essay, II.1.2.
122
Descartes had identified the “essence” of matter with extension.
Newton disputed Descartes’ definition as part of his rejection
of Descartes’ vortex theory of planetary motion. Neverthe-
less, like Descartes, he invoked a methodological “principle of
annihilation” to destroy all those qualities without which body
could not be thought, separating the definition of body from
extension (so as to posit absolute space) but still conceiving
its “essence” as a kind of dimensive quantity: “that which fills
place…so completely that it wholly excludes other things of the
same kind or other bodies, as if it were impenetrable being”;
and alternatively: “determined quantities of extension which
omnipresent God has endowed with certain conditions.” These
conditions in brief, are 1) mobility, 2) impenetrability such
that two of the same kind cannot simultaneously occupy the
same place, and hence they interact according to law, and 3) the
power to excite certain kinds of perceptions in the mind and to
be moved by mind or will. Newton, De Gravitatione, 122, 149.
123
Locke, Essay, II.8.9-17.
76
cease to be intelligible. Reality is thus bifurcated
into a merely subjective sphere of meaning and
quality and an external realm, closed off to us
and unintelligible in itself, drained of the intrin-
sic form and finality conferred on it by Platonic
and Aristotelian form. This emptying necessitates
a profound transformation of what were tradi-
tionally regarded as transcendental attributes
of being. Both Locke and Hobbes reduce truth
to a property of propositions dependent upon
“the connexion and agreement, or disagreement
and repugnancy of any of our ideas,” an antici-
pation of the coherence theories of later analytic
philosophy.124 And both deny goodness any onto-
logical (and therefore causal) weight, rejecting
the summum bonum and redefining “what we call
good” as “what has an aptness to produce pleasure
in us.”125 This massive ontological transvaluation
leads Locke to reconceive the wellspring of action,
and it underlies his reinvention not only of the
political sphere but of Christianity as well.
Locke differs from Hobbes in holding out
eternal rewards and punishments as opposed to
the merely temporal punishments doled out by the
Leviathan. Reilly is correct about this, but he com-
pletely misunderstands why it is“most important.”126
It is not an indication that the traditional principles
of form and finality have been retained, but that
they have been overthrown, evacuated as intrinsic
principles of motion and rest and transposed into
the “designs” of the God whose “workmanship”
we were in the Second Treatise and whose laws
extrinsically govern nature in a fashion analogous
to Newton’s laws in the physical realm. The tradi-
tion understood the highest meaning of liberty as
the undivided love which fulfills my natural incli-
nation toward the good and which alone makes
124
Locke, Essay, IV.1.1; see also II.32.1. Compare Hobbes, Levia-
than, I, 4, 11.
125
Ibid., II.21.42, emphasis mine; see Hobbes, I, 6, 6, “For whatso-
ever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it, which
for his part he calleth good.” For his rejection of a summum
bonum or finis ultimus, see I, 11, 1. Correspondingly in Locke,
“moral goodness” is reconceived as “the conformity or disagree-
ment men’s voluntary actions have to a rule to which they are
referred, and by which they are judged” (Essay II.28.4), and
virtue is no longer a habit through which my given end is real-
ized and my nature perfected, but an action conforming to law,
or more fundamentally, “those actions, which amongst [men]
are judged praiseworthy” (II.28.10.).
126
Reilly, America on Trial, 246.
 michael hanby
my action an expression of my desires.127 This
differs radically from Locke’s conception of liberty,
though Locke takes some pains to disguise this
difference. With goodness emptied of ontological
weight, liberty can no longer consist in the purity
of an undivided will embracing a singular object
of affection that realizes an end antecedently given
along with my nature—freedom as an actuality,
not a potency. This loss is reflected in his reduction
of happiness from an objective fulfillment of my
nature to “the utmost pleasure we are capable of.”128
Instead, Locke redefines liberty as “the power to do
or to forebear any action,” a possibility foregone the
moment it is actualized, thereby transforming the
heretofore antecedent realities of God, nature, the
moral law, etc., from anterior sources of freedom
into possible objects of that power that I may or
may not choose to want.129 For Locke, the Laws
of Nature merely qualify the pursuit of pleasure
and the avoidance of pain by adding a cost-benefit
analysis regarding which actions might conduce to
eternal pleasure or pain. This answers our earlier
question of how the law obliges. Locke concedes
that “the greatest visible good does not always raise
men’s minds in proportion to the greatness,” but
the prospect that God, disposing of his “property”
as he sees fit, might reward our deeds with eternal
punishment appeals to the “unease,” the restless dis-
quiet that has, for Locke, replaced the inclination
toward the Good as the fundamental wellspring
of human action and that compelled perfectly free
man to abandon his imaginary State of Nature.130
From Leviathan to the New Atlantis
Locke draws out a radical implication of the het-
127
See, e.g., Augustine, De Civ., XIX.4, 10-12, 15. Michael Hanby,
Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003).
128
Locke, Essay, II.21.42.
129
Locke, Essay, II.21.8. For Schindler it is precisely Locke’s
reduction of freedom from an actuality to a mere power or pos-
sibility—that is, its separation of the agent from reality and its
reconfiguration of the given realities constitutive of the actual
world as simply objects of possible choice—that accounts for
its inherently “diabolical” and deceptive character, its tendency
to undermine and destroy the very thing it promises. This
deception derives from the fact that as mere possibility Lockean
freedom is fundamentally unreal. See Schindler, Freedom From
Reality, 13-192.
130
Locke, Essay, II.21.29. I would suggest that the role which
unease plays in Locke’s theory of volition is paralleled by the
role of fear—specifically fear of death—in Hobbes.
erogeneity of mind and world that Descartes
and Hobbes, two forebears in this bifurcated
reality, never quite reached.131 It is contained in
the radical conclusion, noted above, that knowl-
edge is of our ideas only. Locke proceeds as if the
simple ideas of solidity, figure, bulk, etc., were the
elemental building blocks of reality. And he gives
grounds for supposing that bodies are “really”
like that, certainly more “like that” than the sec-
ondary qualities which they occasion in us, ideas
such as colors, sounds, and flavors.132 But he does
not identify these “primary qualities” of bodies
with their corresponding ideas simply, nor with
the essence of matter—which he thought equally
unknowable as spirit.133 This would be to take
ideas for things. Rather he describes these quali-
ties as the power of bodies—note once again the
primacy of possibility—to produce those ideas in
us.134 And he likewise defines secondary qualities
as the properties of the object with the power to
produce the perceptions or ideas of color, sound,
etc. But the nature of this power as power, as the
mere capacity to affect, is unknowable in princi-
ple, as is the so-called “causal connection” binding
these powers to their effects.135 Why the extended
world of bulk and figure, or the world that pro-
duces such ideas in us, should also produce ideas
of color and sound—why it should produce
meaning at all—is and must remain unfathom-
able. There “is no conceivable connexion betwixt
the one and the other.”136 Anticipating Hume, he
will say that only experience—the “constant and
regular connexion” they have in “the ordinary
course of things”—can establish that the one
follows regularly from the other, and following
Bacon he will wish for a method by which experi-
ence “were more improved.”137
Locke thus provides a philosophical justifi-
cation for philosophical suicide. His operative
131
It is important to recognize that this “bifurcation” persists
inside of any attempt, whether materialist or idealist, to reduce
the whole of reality to one of its poles. See Hanby, No God, No
Science?, 107-49.
132
See, e.g., Essay, II.23.24, IV.5.8.
133
Ibid., IV.3.16.
134
Locke, Essay, II.8.7. As we saw previously, there is an echo of
this idea in Newton.
135
On the absence of a necessary (and intelligible) connection, see
Locke, Essay, II.8.25; IV.3.12–14.
136
Locke, Essay, IV.3.13.
137
Ibid., IV.3.28; IV.3.16.
77
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
ontology bars the way to further ontological spec-
ulation and precludes any philosophy of being,
its principles, and its elements that would qualify
as knowledge. Lockean “skepticism” is thus more
radical and more complete than anything explic-
itly stated by Descartes or Hobbes, though he,
like them, is quite certain of the limits of reason.
Neither the clarity and distinctness of our ideas
nor a proof that God is not a deceiver could, for
Locke, suffice to guarantee that ideas give us a
true representation of the world, since “true” now
refers merely to the relationship among our ideas
themselves.138 Mind and world remain eternally
separated by an abyss bridged only by “impulse,”
a “causal connexion” that we cannot understand.
The “bounds” and “extent” of our knowledge thus
turn out to be quite narrow, and yet it is this very
narrowness—the unintelligibility of being and
nature—that warrants Locke’s embrace of the
Baconian experimentalism that Hobbes, despite
his conflation of nature and art and his own con-
structivism, held in suspicion.139 The “Reason”
exalted by Reilly in Locke’s name is thus in one
sense a much more humble creature than Reilly
acknowledges. It is true that it still suffices “to
secure the great ends of morality and religion,” but
only because religion will henceforth be reduced
to a morality only arbitrarily related to our mech-
anistic reality. And yet, in another sense, reason’s
humility proves to be a false modesty, for its real
benefit is to increase our mastery over nature, to
attain “whatever is necessary for the conveniences
of life,” and to “put within the reach of [men’s]
discovery the comfortable provision for this life
and the way that leads to a better.”140 Metaphysics
becomes unintelligible in the wake of this philo-
sophical suicide; natural philosophy is absorbed
into the empirical and experimental sciences. The
mind is left with morality and technology; and
morality, as Alasdair MacIntyre explained over
thirty years ago, will soon afterward cease to be
regarded as a matter of reason at all.141 This partly
138
Of course the idea that knowledge is principally a matter of
“representation” already presupposes the Cartesian separation
of mind and world.
139
See once again Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-
Pump, 110-54.
140
Locke, Essay, IV.4.6; I.1.5.
141
MacIntyre, After Virtue (South Bend: Notre Dame Press,
1981).
78
explains the overwhelmingly moralistic character
of American religion, as well as Whig Catholi-
cism’s inability to see beyond a moral diagnosis of
America’s ills to the “technological” ontology har-
bored within animating principles.142 But it is this
technological ontology that has come to define
for us what it means to think—and what there is
to think about.
To speak then, of Locke as a Hobbesian or
Hobbes as a proto-Lockean, is not to allege a
malign esoteric intent on the part of Locke or that
of the Founders who numbered him among their
sources of inspiration. Neither is it to deny other
influences upon their work, or the possibility of
locating Locke with the Judicious Hooker within
an alternative tradition from which he and the
American Founders undoubtedly drew. To locate
him in that tradition in a way that completely
neglects the permanent effects of the Reformation
and the revolution in every branch of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century thought, however, is to
fail to detect the soldiers inside the horse. Finally,
to speak of the Hobbesian dimension of liberal
order is not to suggest that the fictional Lockean
commonwealth or the real American Republic is
a Hobbesian despot that dictates everything one
can and cannot do. To the contrary, atomization
and fragmentation are the logical consequences of
Lockean liberty, even in the state of nature, and
a society organized around the Lockean concep-
tion of natural rights will be a virtual factory for
the production of new factions. America’s pecu-
liar genius for birthing new religious sects surely
attest to this. It was the genius of Federalist 10
to perceive that atomization increases rather than
diminishes the power and stability of the state.
To propose that Hobbes might be a pro-
to-Lockean is to suggest, however, that Locke
succeeded, even beyond Hobbes, in fulfill-
ing Hobbes’ technological ambition to create a
“mortal God,” whose “divine” attributes of unity
and indivisibility mimic and indeed ultimately
142
See, e.g., Thomas G. West, The Political Theory of the American
Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Condi-
tions of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017). West’s book should be considered as belonging in the
same genre as Reilly’s—which is unsurprising, perhaps, since
each did his graduate work at Claremont—and it misses the
point in a similar way, treating the Founders’ commitment to
Christian morality as the key to the meaning of the American
Founding and as a sufficient rebuttal to its critics.
 michael hanby
replace those of the Immortal God.143 What do
I mean? I mean that liberal order is for us the
all-encompassing whole within which we live
and move and have our being, and beyond which
there is nothing at all. Within its transcendent
horizon, so-called “intermediate associations” are
permitted to appear like so many congregation-
alist polities as mere parts of this comprehensive
whole comprehended by nothing.144 I also mean
to suggest, moreover, that this artificial God
is predicated upon an “artificial” nature, whose
opaque and mechanical ontological-epistemolog-
ical premises define the limits of our intellectual
horizons and commence an interminable pursuit
of technical conquest that is increasingly our col-
lective raison d’etre. In which case the ultimate
import of Locke’s “Hobbesianism”—or Hobbes
“Lockeanism”—is as midwife to the establish-
ment of Bacon’s New Atlantis on the western
shores of the Atlantic.145
i i i . The American Atlantis
John Locke was a preeminent theorist of the
143
Liberal order thus perfects what Rousseau saw as the essence
of sovereignty. This essence lies near to the heart of what we
might call the metaphysics of the modern state. Rousseau had
criticized his liberal predecessors for “having no precise notion
of what sovereignty is” and “for taking mere manifestations of
authority for parts of the authority itself.” These manifestations,
he maintained, are divisible—into legislative and executive
functions, for example—and through them the state can even
limit itself to create a free space for the exercise of private
agency. But as mere manifestations, they are the expression
of a sovereignty which is unitary, inalienable, indivisible—in
essence, transcendent. If one recognizes the traditional divine
predicates in this description, I would suggest it is because
liberal order is, in effect, the mortal god which Hobbes had
sought to construct. As Pierre Manent puts it, “ The mystery of
the modern executive is the mystery of its unity” (Manent, An
Intellectual History of Liberalism, 49). See, Rousseau, The Social
Contract (London: Penguin Classics, 1968), II.8.
144
Obviously, then, I reject the premise behind these questions:
“If the American Founding was inspired by Hobbesian ontol-
ogy, why did it not look like it? The denial of formal and final
causality defines Hobbes’ thought and his unlimited Leviathan.
If they shared in a similar metaphysical rejection, why did the
Founders not replicate a Leviathan state?” (Reilly, America on
Trial, 310). The American Founding does look like Hobbes’
Leviathan, though it looks like it in its developed, Lockean-Ba-
conian mode, realizing Hobbes’ “technological ambition” on a
technological as well as a political plane.
145
For more on the technocratic fate of liberal order, see my arti-
cles cited in footnote 2 above.
emerging liberal order and an undoubted influ-
ence on the architects of the American Founding.
He is also a decisive figure for the fate of philos-
ophy in the English-speaking world. Even so, he
has assumed what is probably an outsized role in
the contemporary debate, with critics of Ameri-
can liberalism training their fire on its Lockean
presuppositions and defenders such as Reilly
assuming that they can deflect this criticism
either by minimizing the importance of Locke’s
influence or severing his widely-recognized rela-
tion to Hobbes. Reilly’s recourse to this strategy
is one reason we have had to dwell so long on
Locke and his relation to Hobbes. But a more
fundamental reason is that they are paradigmatic
representatives of a new vision of nature, knowl-
edge, religion, and political order whose general
contours were becoming axiomatic in the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries, even among
otherwise pious and orthodox Christians. They
were not the only such representatives, nor were
the details of this vision uncontested among
English-speaking Protestants. Scottish Enlight-
enment thinkers Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson,
and Dugald Stewart would advance a “common
sense” philosophy that qualified the social
atomism of the earlier mechanists and affirmed
empiricism while attempting to refute skepti-
cism. This may form part of the background
for Jefferson’s “self-evident truths” and may have
been lurking in the back of his mind years later
when he wrote that his purpose in writing the
Declaration was “not to find out new principles,
or new arguments, never before thought of,” but
to “place before mankind the common sense of
the subject.…”146 Adam Smith, Hutcheson, Lord
Kames, and Hume himself, taking up the difficult
task identified by Locke in his Essay of putting
“mechanism and morality together,” developed
new theories of the moral (and aesthetic) sense,
as a way of reconciling morality with Newtonian
nature and Baconian science. Jefferson subscribed
146
Quoted in Cohen, Science and the Founding Fathers, 111.
For more on the contested interpretation of Jeffersonian
self-evidence, see Cohen, 121-34. See also Scott Segrest,
“Common Sense Philosophy and American Political Theology:
Preliminary Considerations” (presented at the American Polit-
ical Science Association meeting, Philadelphia, September 1,
2006), available at https://sites01.lsu.edu/faculty/voegelin/
wp-content/uploads/sites/80/2015/09/Scott-Segrest3.pdf.
79
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
to a version of this philosophy as well.147 It would
be absurd to reduce a complex historical event like
the American Founding to a simple incarnation of
Lockean or Hobbesian philosophy; yet it would be
just as absurd to deny that the Founders assumed,
with varying degrees of self-consciousness, the
axiomatic ontological and epistemic judgments
of their age that these philosophies exemplify.
There were none other seriously on offer among
English-speaking Protestants of the eighteenth
century. Reilly seems to think, however, that in
order to harbor a “Hobbesian ontology” (his
term, as far as I can recall, not mine), the Found-
ers must either have self-consciously deduced
their political philosophy from Hobbes’ ontolog-
ical principles or be carried along blindly by the
force of history, a “determinism” that insults the
Founders “rectitude.”148 Neglected, so he argues,
is “the possibility that the change in metaphysics
altered the meaning of things only for those who
accepted the new metaphysics, and not for those
who did not.”149
We have seen that the eighteenth-century
emphasis on morality and natural law is as much
an expression of this mechanical ontology as it is
its antithesis. This fact alone is enough to call
Reilly’s false alternative into question. This alter-
native is useful, nevertheless, in showing once
again the naïveté of Reilly’s “Whiggish” equation
of meaning and intention, with its ham-fisted
understanding of the way meaning is transacted
in language and its failure to grasp how meta-
physical judgments operate tacitly within political
and scientific discourse: not as a “system” from
which political conclusions are explicitly deduced
but as something logically entailed in the basic
elements of the discourse itself, and often unar-
ticulated.150 Entailed in every conception of
political order is a conception of nature and the
147
See Jefferson, “ To Thomas Law” ( June 13, 1814), in Thomas
Jefferson: Writings, 1335-9. For a discussion of Jefferson’s phi-
losophy of the moral sense and its relation to the theories of
Hutcheson and especially Kames, see Jean M. Yarbrough, “ The
Moral Sense, Character Formation, and Virtue,” in Gary L.
McDowell and Sharon L. Noble (eds.), Reason and Republi-
canism: Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy of Liberty (Lanham: Rowman
and Littlefield, 1997), 271-303.
148
Reilly, America on Trial, 312.
149
Ibid., 310.
150
See my chapter “Discourse on Method” in Hanby, No God, No
Science?, 9-48.
80
human being, without which the nature and ends
of government—not to mention still more basic
notions like “entity,” “order,” and “truth”—would
be unintelligible. And every conception of nature
implies a corresponding conception of God—
what God must “be like” if the world is really like
this—irrespective of whether he is taken to exist.
Metaphysical judgments in this sense need not be
thought out loud and do not depend upon a con-
scious act of judging. They are built in, so to speak,
to the structure of concepts by which we judge,
and are implicated in our different ways of think-
ing and speaking about nature, the human being,
goodness, truth, or causality, often without our
being fully aware of it. Metaphysics in this sense
will be found to operate not only “within” these
terms, but in the interstices between them. This
means that metaphysical judgments are some-
times also evident in what is not said—indeed in
what cannot be said or conceived—within a given
discourse. One needn’t turn history into an occult
force to recognize this; one need only acknowl-
edge the truth of Michael Polanyi’s observation
that we know more than we can say, as well as
its converse, that sometimes we say more than we
know.151
The Republic of S cience and
Its Invisible Foundations
Thomas Jefferson, writing to John Turnbull from
Paris in 1789 to request that portraits be made
of Bacon, Locke, and Newton for his home at
Monticello, referred to them as “the three greatest
men that ever lived, without any exception, and
as having laid the foundation of those superstruc-
tures which have been raised in the Physical &
Moral sciences.”152 Among those superstructures,
we learn, are the great scientific societies like the
Agricultural Society of Paris, which Jefferson
praises in terms worthy of Dewey in an 1809
letter to John Hollins:
151
See Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Gloucester: Peter Smith,
1983), 6. By “say more than we know” I mean two things: first,
that sometimes we speak about things we do not properly
understand, and second—pace Reilly—that our thought and
speech entails assumptions and judgments of which we may not
be aware, and meanings and implications that we do not intend
or foresee. Both senses of the expression are true of Reilly.
152
Thomas Jefferson, “ To John Trumbull” (February 15, 1789),
Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 939-40.
 michael hanby
I mention these things, to show the nature
of the correspondence which is carried
on between societies instituted for the
benevolent purpose of communicating to
all parts of the world whatever useful is
discovered in any one of them. These soci-
eties are always in peace, however their
nations may be at war. Like the repub-
lic of letters, they form a great fraternity
spreading over the whole earth, and their
correspondence is never interrupted by
any civilized nation.153
We’ve already seen that Jefferson shared with
these “three greatest men” a disdain for Plato and
the scholastics. We can add to this disdain for
Platonism a devotion to “our master, Epicurus,” as
Jefforson put it, and to what Robert K. Faulkner
calls the “useful and active materialism” of Francis
Bacon.154 Jefferson expounds upon his “creed of
materialism” which he took to be the doctrine of
Locke, de Tracy, and Stewart, in an 1820 letter to
John Adams, confiding that he “cannot reason oth-
erwise” than that “to talk of immaterial existences
is to talk of nothings.”155 He gives his material-
153
Thomas Jefferson, “To John Hollins” (February 19, 1809),
Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 1201.
154
Faulkner, “Jefferson and the Enlightened Science of Liberty,”
in Gary L. McDowell and Sharon L. Noble (eds.), Reason and
Republicanism: Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy of Liberty (Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 31-52, at 43. Faulkner notes that
Jefferson’s dismissal of Plato as “one among the ‘genuine soph-
ists’” as well as his praise for Epicurus as containing “everything
rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left
us” echoes Bacon. See Jefferson, “ To William Short” (October
31, 1819), in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 1430-33.
155
“But enough of criticism: let me turn to your puzzling letter
of May 12, on matter, spirit, motion, etc. It’s croud of scepti-
cisms kept me from sleep. I read it, and laid it down: read it,
and laid it down, again and again: and to give rest to my mind,
I was obliged to recur immediately to my habitual anodyne, ‘I
feel, therefore, I exist.’ I feel bodies which are not myself: there
are other existences then. I call them matter. I feel them chang-
ing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of
matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis
of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of
all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive thought to
be an action of a particular organization of matter, formed for
that purpose by its creator, as well as that attraction in an action
of matter, or magnetism of loadstone. When he who denies
to the Creator the power of endowing matter with the mode
of action called thinking shall shew how he could endow the
Sun with the mode of action called attraction, which reins the
planets in the tract of their orbits, or how an absence of matter
can have a will, and, by that will, put matter in motion, then the
ism a particularly Baconian twist in another letter
written near the end of his life in 1825. “ The
business of life is with matter, that gives us tangi-
ble results,” he wrote. “Handling that, we arrive at
knowledge of the axe, the plough, the steam-boat,
and everything useful in life, but from metaphys-
ical speculations, I have never seen any useful
result.”156
In 1743, Benjamin Franklin founded the
American Philosophical Society in Philadel-
phia, patterned after the Royal Society, the latter
being the first such institution in the scientific
“superstructure,” dedicated to Bacon’s vision of
“useful knowledge” and promoting “all philosoph-
ical Experiments that let Light into the Nature
of Things, tend to increase the Power of Man
over Matter, and multiply the Conveniencies or
Pleasures of Life.”157 The Society would boast
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, Mar-
shall, and Paine among its members and officers.
Jefferson was elected president of the Society as
he ascended to the nation’s vice-presidency and
enjoyed it far more than government. He would
maintain an active presidency for the next eight-
een years.158 The promotion of “useful knowledge”
was so essential to the vision of the new nation,
it would be inscribed into Article I, section 8 of
the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the
power to “promote the Progress of Science and
the Useful Arts” through what came to be known
as the Copyright and Patent Provision. Madison
had advocated for this in Federalist 43.159
materialist may be lawfully required to explain the process by
which matter exercises the faculty of thinking. When once we
quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of imma-
terial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human
soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or
that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason oth-
erwise.…” ( Jefferson, “ To John Adams” [August 15, 1820], in
Thomas Jefferson: Writings, 1443).
156
Jefferson to anon., 1825, in Edwin T. Martin, Thomas Jeffer-
son: Scientist (New York: Henry Schuman, 1952), 36, quoted
in Faulkner, “Jefferson and the Enlightened Science of Liberty,”
43.
157
Benjamin Franklin, “A PROPOSAL for Promoting Useful
Knowledge among the British Plantations in America,“ (Phil-
adelphia, 1743), available at https://founders.archives.gov/
documents/Franklin/01-02-02-0092.
158
Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew, 41.
159
This prompts Leon Kass to say that “the American Republic is,
to my knowledge, “the first regime explicitly to embrace scien-
tific and technical progress and officially to claim its importance
for the public good.” He goes on to say that “the entire Consti-
81
 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
This “useful knowledge,” Franklin recognized,
was indispensable to the growth and unity of the
young nation and to humanity’s progress in mas-
tering nature.160 The “great fraternity” constituted
by the Royal Society, the American Philosophi-
cal Society, the Académie des sciences in Paris and
similar organs is a concrete, institutional bridge
between Bacon’s utopian vision in the New Atlan-
tis and its eventual realization in what Dewey
called “an intelligent administering of experience”:
“a State organized for collective inquiry” that
“attacks nature collectively” over generations.161 It
was Dewey’s genius to recognize that the “Ameri-
can experiment” was an experiment in the deepest
sense, a perpetual assault on the limits of possi-
bility, that was by nature interminable.
Did Jefferson understand the full depths of the
transformation—to our concepts of God, nature,
causality, even truth and reason itself—that had
to occur in order for his “great fraternity” of soci-
eties for the promotion of useful knowledge to
tution is a deliberate embodiment of balanced tensions between
science and law and between stability and novelty, inasmuch
as the Founders self-consciously sought to institutionalize the
improvements of the new ‘science of politics,’ and in such a way
that would stably perpetuate openness to further change.” Leon
R. Kass, Toward A More Natural Science: Biology and Human
Affairs (New York: The Free Press, 1985), 133-4.
160
See Franklin, “Proposal”:
“The English are possess’d of a long Tract of Continent,
from Nova Scotia to Georgia, extending North and
South thro’ different Climates, having different Soils,
producing different Plants, Mines and Minerals, and
capable of different Improvements, Manufactures, &c.
“ The first Drudgery of Settling new Colonies,
which confines the Attention of People to mere Nec-
essaries, is now pretty well over; and there are many
in every Province in Circumstances that set them at
Ease, and afford Leisure to cultivate the finer Arts, and
improve the common Stock of Knowledge. To such of
these who are Men of Speculation, many Hints must
from time to time arise, many Observations occur,
which if well-examined, pursued and improved, might
produce Discoveries to the Advantage of some or all of
the British Plantations, or to the Benefit of Mankind
in general.
“But as from the Extent of the Country such Persons
are widely separated, and seldom can see and converse
or be acquainted with each other, so that many useful
Particulars remain uncommunicated, die with the Dis-
coverers, and are lost to Mankind; it is, to remedy this
Inconvenience for the future, proposed…”
161
Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (London: Forgotten Books,
2005), 95, 37.
82
exist? Was he fully aware of the manifold meta-
physical judgments embodied in their existence?
Did he know of the radical transformation of the
metaphysical patrimony of the West, all the con-
troversies and changes to the meaning of “matter”
itself presupposed by his “creed of materialism”?
Was he aware of the earth-shattering conse-
quences of Descartes’ original version (cogito ergo
sum) of his “anodyne” or its role in transforming
the West’s understanding of nature, knowledge,
and God? Did he think upon all the histori-
cal and philosophical reasons why he “could not
reason otherwise,” when so many who had gone
before him could? Were Washington, Madison,
Hamilton, Marshall, and Paine aware of the pro-
found transformation of the notion of reason and
truth embodied in their Society? Did they intend
or even anticipate the subsequent train of causes
and effects set in motion by this transformation?
In the end, does it matter? Even without under-
standing the universe of philosophical judgments
presupposed in his “creed of materialism,” Jeffer-
son was able to profess it and to enact it even in
the small areas of life, such as his banter back and
forth with his old friend Adams. As Wittgenstein
once wrote, “When I give the description: ‘ The
ground was quite covered with plants’—do you
want to say I don't know what I am talking about
until I can give a definition of a plant?”162 
As it was with Jefferson and the other Found-
ers, so it is with the social order they helped to
create. The tacit metaphysics of a people and
an era, the sensus communis about the nature of
reality that marks them as belonging to a shared
world, is visible not only in what they think, or
what they say, but in what they cannot think
and say. We have seen that the new conception
of political order birthed in the seventeenth
and eighteenth century—the conception that
would determine the shape of the modern world
ever since and that finds its exemplary expres-
sion in America as the quintessentially modern
nation—was premised upon the destruction of
a symbolic and sacramental order that bound
spiritual and temporal power into a unity even in
their distinction, and upon a revolutionary trans-
formation of every sphere of thought (indeed in
the meaning of thought itself ) that had made
162
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans.
G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), §70.
 michael hanby
this unity intelligible. We have seen as a conse-
quence how liberal order recreates the preliberal
world in its own image, transforming anteced-
ent realities that comprehend us, define us, and
actuate our freedom—such as God, nature, and
the moral law—into possible objects of choice,
selected from a new Archimedean point outside
of nature occupied by every experimenter con-
fronting a field of technical possibilities.163 (This
is no doubt the deep root of the Whig sensibil-
ity and one reason why it is possible to imagine
that there is one unbroken “natural law” tradition,
unaffected by profound transformations in our
understanding of nature itself, that passes from
antiquity through to Aquinas, Bellarmine, and
Suarez in the Middle Ages, to Hooker, Sidney,
and Locke, before it terminates in us.)
If we wish to ask whether liberal order
embodies a metaphysics, or whether that meta-
physics is in some way “Hobbesian,” we should
not only look deeply into how it depicts nature,
freedom, God, and the good; we should ask what
one cannot see or say from within its conceptual
parameters. To say that liberal order recreates the
world in its own image is to say that its renuncia-
tion of competence in spiritual matters (Murray’s
so-called “articles of peace”) is a fiction.164 Con-
cealed within its alleged metaphysical and
religious neutrality is both an extrinsicist theol-
ogy that makes God incidental to the meaning
and intelligibility of nature and a quasi-official
ecclesiology whose main outlines are supplied by
Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration, that regards
a church as “a voluntary society of men, joining
themselves together of their own accord in order
to the public worshipping of God in such manner
as they judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to
the salvation of their souls.”165 In other words, as
the transcendental whole that comprehends all
things and is comprehended by none, liberal order
excludes God and even traditional metaphysics
163
Arendt, The Human Condition, 265. “In the experiment man
realized his newly won freedom from the shackles of earth-
bound experience; he placed nature under the conditions of
his own mind, that is, under conditions won from a universal,
astrophysical viewpoint, a cosmic standpoint outside nature
itself.”
164
See Murray, We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the
American Proposition (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield,
2005), 59-86.
165
Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration.
from its official form of rationality. And it requires
as a condition of appearance within its borders
that every religion be tacitly conceived as a species
of Protestant congregationalism. As modern lib-
erals, we “cannot reason otherwise.” To discover
whether American liberalism harbors a “Hobbe-
sian” metaphysics, we need only ask whether it is
possible for liberal order or the American state
to recognize what the Catholic Church is in its
true, theological nature as the sacrament of Christ
or whether, by contrast, this is “constitutionally”
impossible.
The Only Possible World and the
Other Country
What is true of the Founders is true of all of us
to some degree. We all know more than we can
say. And we all say more than we know. This is
certainly true of Reilly. He says more than he
actually knows, both about Deneen and me and
our work, and about the thought of the Found-
ers. And he says less than is actually operative
inside his own thought. He does not see what he
does not see. That Reilly could act as if a con-
tested and materially empty sense of natural
law could substitute for the living reality of the
Catholic Church in “limiting the political to
be itself,” that he could entertain the idea of “a
Catholic Founding” or imply that Catholic polit-
ical principles are realized for the first time in a
political order that is constitutively incapable of
acknowledging the true nature and authority of
the Catholic Church, raises the question about
what Reilly thinks Catholicism is and how deeply
his imagination of it is shaped by Lockean pre-
suppositions that are invisible to him.166 It is not
that Reilly would deny the Church’s sacramental
nature or universal authority as articles of faith.
Rather it is that neither these truths nor the met-
aphysical judgments necessary to sustain them
enter operationally into his basic conception of
natural or political order; there is no sense, in
other words, that the sacramental nature of the
Church has anything to do with the basic onto-
logical structure of the world. And again, what
is true of Reilly is true of all of us Americans to
some degree, and maybe of the contemporary
166
Reilly, America on Trial, 33, 214 ff.
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 the birth of liberal order and the death of god
Church as a whole. We accept “what the church
teaches”—or don’t—fideistically, perhaps even
living lives of moral rectitude, while otherwise
adopting “sociologism” as our unreflective mode
of thinking and perceiving the world.167 This is
why Lockean liberalism—with the mechanical
world it presupposes and the Baconian world it
sets in motion—more perfectly realizes Hobbes’
absolutist ambitions than Hobbes himself does.
Why repress the Church when you can entice
Catholics to think like Protestants, or even like
atheists, without knowing it?
The advent of liberalism and of liberal socie-
ties is a transitional moment in the death of God
in the modern West, a catastrophe from which
the Church is not exempt. The “priority of the
political” and the power that politics exercises
over our vision and imagination are among its
most acute symptoms. This is really the heart of
the matter, and why my thought, unlike Reilly’s,
is not in the first instance political. The overarch-
ing concern that has motivated all my thinking on
these matters is not the political concern to “pros-
ecute” the Founders or, conversely, to hypothesize
about the best regime. My concern is what John
Paul II and Benedict XVI called “the eclipse of
the sense of God and man” in the modern West
and, particularly, in the modern Church, the dark
167
Augusto Del Noce describes sociologism thus: “ The true clash
is between two conceptions of life. One could be described in
terms of the religious dimension or the presence of the divine
in us; it certainly achieves fullness in Christian thought, or in
fact in Catholic thought, though per se it is not specifically
Christian in the proper sense. Rather, it is the precondition that
makes it possible for the act of faith to germinate in man, inas-
much as it is man’s natural aptitude to apprehend the sacred.
(I cannot linger here on the definition of this dimension and
I must refer to the very beautiful pages by Fr. Danielou.) The
other is the conception that ultimately can be called sociolo-
gistic, in the sense that contemporary sociologism reduces all
conceptions of the world to ideologies, as expressions of the
historical situation of some groups, as spiritual superstructures
of forces that are not spiritual at all, such as class interests,
unconscious collective motivations, and concrete circumstances
of social life. So that the progress of the human sciences is sup-
posed to lead to social science as the full extension of scientific
reason to the human world, achieving a complete replacement
of philosophical discourse by scientific discourse and thus clar-
ifying the worldly, social, and historical origin of metaphysical
thought” (Augusto Del Noce, The Age of Secularization, trans.
Carlo Lancellotti [Montreal: McGill-Queens, 2017], 219). I
would wish to develop his definition further along the meta-
physical lines of thought indicated by this present article, but
as a placeholder for that project, the description suffices.
84
shadow of which has deprived us of the light even
to recognize our own atheism.
Reilly alleges that for Deneen and me, “repu-
diation of the Founding principles of the United
States is a necessary condition for Christian
revival, if not survival.”168 Perhaps this is fair if
by “repudiate” he means ceasing to pretend that a
false idea is true or refusing to conflate the “path
of guardianship”—or, let’s be honest, the victory
of Republican Party politics—with our Catholic
obligation to serve the common good. But other-
wise I think this is neither possible nor meaningful.
One might as well repudiate air. America is not
an idea, or at least not only an idea, but a place,
and in fact an empire whose power vastly exceeds
its direct political control. It is also my home—
which it inevitably remains whether that idea
be true or false. And since there is no “outside”
of liberal order—since the empire of liberty has
succeeded so spectacularly in eliminating all the-
oretical and practical alternatives to itself—, its
disintegration is likely to be interminable: always
falling, never collapsing. Liberal order may not be
the best of all possible worlds, but it is the only
possible world as far as the eye can see, and I
discern no path forward but to undergo whatever
fate is set in motion by the death of God within
the prison of this order’s immanent horizons.169
The presence of a tragic flaw in America’s Found-
ing principles or its history does not eliminate the
greatness of the American achievement in estab-
lishing this empire; nor is there any reason why
acknowledging the cracks in America’s founda-
tions should prevent any of us from loving our
home or deter us from working in every sphere
to make our country the least nihilistic version
of itself. Even if liberal order bars the way to a
common good that is truly common, we still have
a duty to mitigate the harm done to persons in
this order’s interminable disintegration.
But otherwise Reilly is half-right. The
Church is in crisis in the modern world, which
is very much the American world—beset from
without by a secular social order that systemati-
cally excludes God from its conception of reality,
beset from within by a pious atheism that does
not know itself. It is a measure of this crisis that
168
Reilly, America on Trial, 314.
169
For more on the technocratic shape of this fate, see Hanby,
“What Comes Next,” and “Before and After Politics,” op cit.
 michael hanby
the vision—the seeing—that once defined the
Christian life and the goal of human existence has
all but disappeared both from our apprehension
of the world and from our self-understand-
ing. The recovery of a truer and more profound
Catholicism and a properly Christian hope in
the abiding presence of the eternal God who fills
all things coincides with whatever capacity we
may muster and whatever grace is granted to us
to see beyond the immanent horizons of liberal
order and to transcend its fate from within. Given
its external power over our form of life and its
internal power over our imaginations, “seeing”
at present likely means discovering what we are
no longer able to see, just as we must experience
this truer Catholicism by enduring the wound
of its present impossibility and must hope in
God’s abiding presence by mourning his appar-
ent absence. At the heart of this vision and this
hope is the ancient Christian conviction that we
belong to another country more profoundly than
we belong to this one, and our only hope of tran-
scending our nihilistic fate is that this conviction
might yet again inform and transform our most
basic perception of the world. The alternative
represented by the civic project is to relinquish
the Catholic mind and to inadvertently baptize
the death of God and its ensuing fate, acquiescing
unawares in that suffocating immanentism and
concealing our hopeless unbelief behind a veneer
of pious optimism. Transcending this fate does
not require from us the impossible task of repu-
diating America or liberal order—as if there were
anywhere else to go—but it does require us to
repudiate the Whig Catholicism of Robert Reilly
and rediscover the abiding presence of that other
country that is our only true hope.

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