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If the Papacy, after the manner of the Divine Fatherhood, must beget a second social authority, it is not that of the bishops who are fathers themselves, but an essentially filial authority, the representative of which is in no way and in no degree a spiritual father; just as in the Trinity the eternal Son is Son in the absolute sense and in no sense possesses fatherhood. The second Messianic power is Christian kingship. The Christian king, prince or emperor is pre-eminently the spiritual son of the supreme pontiff. If the unity of the Church1 is centered and realized in the supreme pontiff, and if there is a relation of sonship between the Christian State as such and the Church, this relationship must exist really and, so to speak, hypostatically between the head of the State and the head of the Church. It belongs to the science of history to examine in the past, and to the opportunism of politics to decide for the present, the relations between the Church and the pagan State. But as regards the Christian State, it is unquestionable that it represents the second Messianic power, the Kingship of Christ, and that it is, as such, begotten in principle by the first, the universal fatherhood.
The positive mission of the Christian State is to incarnate the principles of the true religion in the social and political order. These principles are represented and preserved by the Church (in the narrower sense of the word), the religious society based upon that spiritual fatherhood which is centered in the Pope, organized in the episcopate and priesthood, and recognized by the piety of the body of the faithful. The Church in this sense is the fundamental religious fact and the one way of salvation opened to mankind by Christ. But Christ in His work, as in His Person, makes no distinction between the way, the truth and the life. And if for us the truth is based upon the teaching of the Church and the spiritual life upon the sacraments, it must not be forgotten that the foundations exist not for themselves, but for the whole structure. True and living religion is not a speciality, a separate domain, a secluded corner of human existence. Religion, being the direct revelation of the Absolute, cannot be one thing among many: it is all or nothing. The recognition of it implies its introduction into every sphere of intellectual and practical life as the supreme controlling principle, and the subordination to it of all political and social interests.
For Christ is not only Priest, but also King; and His Church must combine a royal authority with her priestly character. While reconciling fallen human nature to God through the perpetual Sacrifice, while regenerating and raising men by the ministry of spiritual fatherhood, the Church must also prove the fruitfulness of this fatherhood by bringing the entire collective life of man into fellowship with God.
In order to save the world which “lieth in the evil one,” Christianity must mingle with the world; but in order that the human representatives of the divine fact, the earthly guardians and instruments of transcendent truth and absolute holiness, may not compromise their sacred dignity in the practical struggle against evil, nor forget Heaven in their desire to save the Earth, their political action must be indirect. As the divine Father acts and manifests Himself in creation through the Son, His Word, so too the Church of God, the spiritual fatherhood, the universal Papacy, must act and manifest itself externally by means of the Christian State, through the Kingship of the Son. The State must be the political organ of the Church; the temporal sovereign must be the “Word” of the spiritual sovereign. In this way, the question of supremacy between the two powers is solved: for the more each is what it should be, the greater is their mutual equality and freedom. When the State, confining itself to the exercise of secular power, asks and receives its moral sanction from the Church, and the latter, while asserting its own supreme spiritual authority, entrusts its external action to the State, there is an intimate bond between the two, a mutual dependence, and at the same time all conflict and oppression of the one by the other is excluded. When the Church guards and expounds the law of God, and the State devotes itself to the carrying out of that law by the transformation of the social order in accordance with the Christian ideal and the creation of practical conditions and external means for realizing the divine-human life in the whole range of earthly existence, then it is clear that all conflict of principles and interests must vanish to give place to a peaceful division of labor in the common task.
But if this mutual dependence of Church and State, in which stands their true freedom, is an essential condition of realizing the Christian ideal upon Earth, it surely becomes clear that this very condition of harmony and unity between the two powers exists only in idea and is unrealized in positive religion or in practical politics. The hierarchical Church, resting principally upon sacred tradition, regards religious truth mainly as an accomplished fact and stresses chiefly the primary datum of revelation. From this point of view the incarnation of Christ, the reality of the God-Man, the fundamental principle of the true religion, is primarily an historic event, a fact of the past linked to the present, so to speak, sub specie præteriti by a series of other religious facts regularly produced in an unchangeable order established from the beginning once for all, the traditional teaching reproducing the depositum fidei, the apostolic succession being transmitted in a uniform manner, Baptism and the other sacraments being signified by invariable formulæ, and so on.2 This traditional principle, this unchanging and determinate character, is absolutely essential to the Church in the narrower sense; it is her native element. But if she confines herself to this element alone and, resting satisfied with her superior origin, refuses to take account of anything outside it, she makes way for that absolutism of the State which regards religion as a thing of the past, venerable but irrelevant, and so thinks itself justified in absorbing all the living present in the politics of temporal interests.
“I am unity,” says the Church, “I embrace all nations in a single universal family.” “Well and good,” replies the State, “let all the nations of the Earth be united in the mystical and invisible order; I am not opposed to the communion of saints nor to the unity of Christian souls in a single faith, a single hope, a single love. But real life is not like that. There the sovereign nation is supreme; its own self-interest is the ultimate goal, its principle is material power, and war is its instrument. Therefore, divide Christian souls into hostile armies, and they have only to slaughter one another upon Earth in order to realize the more speedily their mystical union in Heaven.”
“I represent the unchangeable truth of the absolute past,” says the Church. “Exactly,” replies the semi-Christian State, “I only ask for the relative and shifting sphere of practical life. I venerate sacred archæology; I reverence the past so long as it is content to be past for good and all. I do not lay a finger on dogmas or sacraments, provided that there is no meddling with the secular matters of the moment which are my undisputed sphere: the schools, science, social education, domestic and foreign affairs. I stand for justice: suum cuique. A divine institution has nothing to do with all these purely human things. The heavens to God, the temple to the priest — and all the rest to Cæsar!”
But what is to remain for Christ, both God and Man, Priest and King, the Lord of Heaven and Earth? This egoistic justice, this anti-Christian divorce between the two worlds, can only be justified by a logic which stops short at the relative and abstract duality of the spiritual and the secular, the sacred and the profane, and makes no mention of the third term, the absolute synthesis of the Infinite and the finite, eternally accomplished in God and finding its accomplishment in mankind through Christ. It is the very spirit of Christianity that is here ignored, that harmony of the whole, that union which is both necessary and free, unique and manifold, the true future which fulfils the present and brings the past to life.
The Church and the State, the pontiff and the prince, at present distinct from and hostile to one another, can find their true and final unity only in this prophetic future of which they themselves are the necessary premises and conditions. Two different powers, if they are to achieve unity, must have a single goal which they can reach only in co-operation, each acting in accordance with its own character and with the means at its disposal. Now, the common goal of the Church and the State, of the priesthood and the kingship, is not truly represented by either of the two powers taken alone or in its specific element. From this point of view each has its own peculiar goal, regardless of the other. If the Church’s only task is to maintain the religious tradition, she can carry it out alone without help from the State. If the State has only to defend its subjects against the enemy and to maintain external order through its law-courts and police, it is fully competent to do so without calling in the aid of the Christian Church. But Christ did not unite the Divine and human in His individual person, only to leave them disunited in His social body. As Priest, King and Prophet, He has given Christian society its absolute form in the trinitary monarchy. Having founded the Church upon His Priesthood and sanctioned the State by His Kingship, He has also provided for their unity and their unified progress by leaving to the world the free and living activity of His prophetic spirit. And as the Priesthood and the Kingship of the GodMan reveal His divine nature through the medium of human instruments, so it is with His prophetic office. A third principal ministry must therefore be admitted in the Christian world — the synthetic unity of the first two, offering to Church and State the perfect ideal of deified Humanity as the supreme goal of their common activity.
Nothing has succeeded in exhausting or stifling the spirit of prophecy in the universal Body of Christ. It blows where it lists, and speaks to the whole world, to priests, kings and peoples. To the guardians of tradition it says: “It is no dead and lifeless tradition that has been entrusted to you; the revelation of the living God and of His Christ cannot be a closed and sealed book. Christ is no mere fact of past history; He is, above all, the principle of the future, of free movement and true progress. You have the deposit of faith; is it so much capital to be locked in a chest or buried in the ground? If you are faithful ministers of the Lord, you will not imitate that too cautious servant of the Gospel parable; you will not reduce the teaching of Christ to a closed system. Remember that in that teaching, which is His truth, Christ is also the living principle and the cornerstone. Make Christian dogma, then, the firm but broad basis, the unchanging and yet living principle, of all philosophy and science; do not relegate it to some remote sphere, indifferent or hostile to human thought and knowledge.
Theology is indeed the science of God, but the God of Christian theology is united to mankind by an indissoluble union, and the theology of the God-Man cannot be separated from the philosophy and science of men. You are orthodox in your profession of faith, you repudiate both the heresy of Nestorius and that of Eutyches; be orthodox, then, in the application of your faith. Express the truth of Christ in terms of the Christian intellect, distinguish but do not separate His natures, preserve in your ideas and your teaching the interior, organic and living union between the Divine and the human, without confusion and without division. Beware of slipping into Nestorianism and admitting the existence of two sciences and two truths complete in themselves and independent of one another. Do not, on the other hand, attempt, in Monophysite fashion, to suppress human truth, philosophic reason and the facts of natural science and history; do not exaggerate their importance, but do not reject their decisive witness to Christian dogma; that is an unreasonable sacrifice which incarnate Reason does not ask of you and cannot accept.
“But it is not only the absolute principle of knowledge which is entrusted to you, the fathers of regenerate humanity, but also the principle of social order. And here again, as true Orthodox, you have the royal road to follow between two opposite heresies, the false liberalism of Nestorius and the false pietism of the Monophysites. The former would make a final separation between Church and State, sacred and profane, as Nestorius separated the humanity from the divinity in Christ. The latter would absorb the human soul in the contemplation of the Divine and would abandon the mundane world, its states and nations, to their fate; this is the application to society of Monophysitism, which merges the human nature of Christ into His divinity. But you, orthodox priests, who have in the true dogma of Christ’s Person the infallible expression of that free and perfect union, will always maintain the intimate bond which links the human State to the Church of God, just as the Manhood of Christ is in Him linked to the Word of God. To the absolutism of the State, which tends to paganism and godlessness, you will not oppose an absolute clericalism, self-contained and complacent in its isolation; you will not combat error with a half-truth, but you will uphold that absolute social truth which demands alongside the Church a Christian State, the Kingship of Christ, the image and instrument of the divine Sonship, as you yourselves are the image of the eternal Fatherhood. You will never submit to the secular power, for the Father cannot be subject to the Son; but neither will you attempt to enslave it, for the Son is free.
“Pontiffs and priests, you are the ministers of the sacraments of Christ. In revealed dogma, Christ is the principle of all truths or of the whole truth. For truth is fundamentally one, as it is infinitely manifold in its material content, and threefold in its constituent form — theological, philosophical and scientific — just as Christ is one in His hypostasis, infinitely manifold inasmuch as He contains and manifests the ideal cosmos, and threefold inasmuch as He unites the divine substance not only with the rational soul of Man, but also with his material and bodily nature. So in the holy sacraments Christ is the principle of life, of the whole of life, not only spiritual but also bodily, not only individual but also social. You, sacrificing priests, were created to plant within humanity the mystical yet real seed of divine-human life; you sow within our nature the seed of matter made divine, of a heavenly corporeity. The beginning of this work, the first source of supernatural life within the body of earthly humanity, must be an absolute fact surpassing human reason, a mystery. But there is nothing hid which shall not be revealed; the mystical elements implanted in human nature by the grace of the sacraments through your ministry must germinate, grow and display themselves in visible existence, in the social life of mankind which they progressively transform into the true body of Christ. This work of sanctification does not, therefore, belong only to the priesthood; it demands also the co-operation of the Christian State and of Christian society. What the priest initiates in his mysterious rite, the secular prince must continue by his legislation and the faithful people must consummate in its life.”
The prophetic spirit of Christianity will say then to the Christian princes and peoples: “The Church gives you the mysteries of life and happiness; it is for you to reveal them and to take pleasure in them. You have Baptism, the Sacrament or Mystery of liberty. The Christian redeemed by Christ is, above all, a free man. The eternal and absolute principle of this freedom is conferred by sacramental grace and cannot be destroyed by the external relationships or the social condition of Man. But in the Christian world can these external relationships be allowed to remain in contradiction to the gift of God? The baptized Christian retains his freedom even if he is a slave, but should he be a slave in a Christian society? Banish, therefore, Christian kings and peoples, the last traces of pagan degradation, suppress slavery and servitude in all its forms, direct or indirect, for they are all the negation of Baptism — a negation which, for all its inability to destroy interior grace, none the less hinders its external realization. Our God is no hidden God; and if He has revealed Himself and become incarnate, it is certainly not His will that the contradiction between the visible and the invisible should be perpetuated. Do not, then, allow Man, whom the living God has set at liberty, to be driven back into servitude to dead things, into slavery to machines.
“You have Confirmation, the Sacrament or Mystery of equality. The Church of Christ communicates to each Christian, without distinction, the Messianic dignity, which the first Adam forfeited and the second restored, by bestowing upon each the sacred anointing of sovereigns. We know that the perfect condition of society which is foreshadowed by this sacrament (the state of malkhouth cohanim — regnum sacerdotale) cannot be immediately realized; but do not you mighty ones of the Earth forget on your part that that is the true goal of Christianity. By maintaining at all costs from selfish motives the inequalities of society, you will justify the envious and bitter reaction of the disinherited classes. You profane the Sacrament of Holy Chrism if you turn the Lord’s anointed into rebellious slaves. The law of God has never sanctioned inequalities of birth or fortune, and if in your impious conservatism you raise what is only a transitory circumstance to the dignity of an absolute and eternal principle, upon your own heads will be the sins of the people and all the blood of revolutions.
“And you, Christian people, remember that the Church, in bestowing upon you the Messianic dignity in Confirmation, in making each one of you the equal of priests and kings, has conferred upon you not an empty mockery of a title, but a real and permanent grace. It is for you to profit thereby; for by virtue of this grace each one of you can become an instrument of the Holy Spirit in the social order. Beside the priesthood and the kingship, there is in Christian society a third sovereign ministry, that of prophecy, which depends neither on birth nor on public election nor sacred ordination. It is validly conferred upon each Christian by Confirmation and can be lawfully exercised by those who do not resist divine grace, but use their freedom to co-operate with it. Thus, every one of you who will, can, by divine right and through the grace of God, wield sovereign power as truly as Pope or Emperor.” 3
Is it the fault of Christianity that this supreme right which it offers to the world is sold by the mass of mankind to Satan for a mess of pottage?
The equality in sovereignty which belongs by right to every Christian is not an equality without distinction. All have an equal dignity, each has an infinite value in the eyes of all; but all have not the same function. The unity of Christian people, founded upon the divine-human fatherhood, is the unity of an ideal family. The perfect moral equality between the members of such a family does not exclude the dutiful recognition by the sons of the primacy and authority of their father, nor the distinction of one from another by a difference of vocation or of character. Genuine and positive equality, like true liberty, is manifested and realized in that solidarity or fraternity which makes many to be as one. The Baptism into liberty and the Confirmation in equality are crowned by the great Sacrament of Communion, the fulfilment of the prayer of Christ, “that they may all be one, as I am one with Thee, My Father.” In bringing about the unity of all His disciples in a single communion, Jesus Christ did not mean to stop short at national frontiers; He extended His brotherhood over all the nations. If this mysterious communion of the divine Body is genuine and real, we become by the real partaking of it brothers without distinction of race or nationality; and if we slaughter one another in the name of so-called national interests, we are — not metaphorically, but in actual fact — fratricides.
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1. [“L’État,” which occurs here in all the French editions, would appear to be a printer’s error. — Tr.]
2. The real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist is, of course, a living actuality, but essentially mystical and so without direct and obvious influence upon the practical and social existence of earthly humanity.
3. It goes without saying that the prophetic ministry can have no outwardly binding character, since its exercise is solely determined by inward and purely spiritual conditions. As the representative in human society of the absolute ideal, the Christian prophet would be inconsistent and untrue to his mission if he were to employ means suited only to an imperfect state of society.
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