A free community such as ours has two outstanding characteristics. First, it is held together not by force but by law. Second, it guarantees to every individual the largest amount of freedom compatible with public order. A regime of freedom under law: such would be my definition of a free community.
In other words, a free community is essentially a balance between opposites: between law and liberty, between freedom and order. Upon the preservation of this balance its very existence depends. To tilt the balance either way is to change a free community into something else: a despotism, if freedom is violated in the name of order; an anarchy, if law is defied in the name of liberty. In either case the free community is destroyed; in the first, because it ceases to be free, in the second, because it ceases to be a community.
How is this precarious balance to be maintained? The question is not an academic one. It is the central question of our time. It is the riddle proposed to our generation by the sphinx of history. We must answer it or perish. How is this balance to be maintained?
Purely external and mechanical means, such as written constitutions, the divison of powers, periodic elections, the secret ballot, and the other techniques worked out by political science, help to maintain this balance, but do not of themselves suffice. The reason is obvious. Physical forces can be kept in a state of equilibrium indefinitely by a mechanical arrangement. But law and liberty, freedom and public order, are not physical forces. They are human forces, and the secret of their balance lies, not in a mechanical or mathematical formula, but in the mind and in the heart of man.
You cannot present a community with two separate propositions, first, "You are free," then, "You must obey authority," and expect the psychological forces released by them to balance automatically. These two propositions cannot be taught separately. They must be related to each other or they will cancel each other out. You must make people want to be free, but free in such a way that they will keep a wholesome respect for the law. You must make people want to obey the law, but to obey in such a way as not to abandon freedom. Otherwise you will be producing either anarchists or totalitarians, and very probably a number of both.
What we must do, then, is to fit these two necessary yet seemingly incompatible principles, the principle of freedom and the principle of order, into some sort of rational synthesis, some concept of society broad enough to include both of them, yet consistent enough to make sense.
I will not claim that the Catholic doctrine on the nature of human society is the only such concept. This is my personal conviction, but it is not necessary for our present purpose to defend it. It is sufficient to show that that doctrine is one such concept; and hence that the Catholic religion does make a positive and valuable contribution to the free community; and hence that those of us who are Catholics need not hesitate to draw from the rich resources of our religious belief the ultimate justification for our political and social beliefs. There may be ways as good, but there can be no better way to teach a man to be a good citizen than to teach him to be a good Catholic.
We often talk about the marvelous democracy of Athens. If I may be permitted a paradox, the marvelous democracy of Athens, judged by our standards, was not a democracy at all. It was an aristocracy, and even an oligarchy, of the most unscrupulous sort. It was a society of free citizens, true enough, but a society of free citizens made possible by the ruthless exploitation of a vast population of slaves.
And why is it that such a society, half-slave and half-free, cannot be considered a democracy by our standards? Why, because our standards happen to be Christian standards; because between the ancient Athenians and ourselves something intervened, an event of incalculable importance took place. A Man named Christ, who claimed to be God and proved it, died for all men; not just for Athenian citizens but for all men; and by doing so, set free, not only the Athenian slave, but all slaves forever.
It took the Church which he founded ― the Catholic Church, which is merely the extension of His personality in time ― it took that Mystical Body of His several centuries to destroy this formidable system of human exploitation ― all the more formidable as the whole economy of ancient and early medieval Europe was based on it ― but in the end it destroyed that system.
Christianity freed men from slavery, but it did not free them from the law. Christianity has always held that the true definition of liberty is not the ability to do what one likes but the ability to fulfil justice. If everybody did what he liked, there would be very little freedom; indeed, after an extremely brief period of such chaos, there would be very little of anything. Freedom is possible only if everybody respects the rights of everybody else; that is, if everybody does what is just; that is, if everybody obeys the law.
It used to be the fashion among historians to refer to the Dark Ages as the ages of faith and of barbarism, the rather broad hint being that where religion is dominant barbarism is the inevitable result. According to this naive nineteenth-century view, the Middle Ages is a valley of darkness between two peaks of light: the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was the nineteenth century.
No reputable scholar today would stake his reputation on such a statement. We have found out too much about the so-called Dark Ages since Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. We have, incidentally, found out too much about the very peculiar methods of proof of Gibbon himself. Even non-Catholic historians today fully confirm, with a wealth of learned footnotes, Chesterton's dictum that if there was anything about the Dark Ages that was not dark, it was the Church.
There were decades during the unhappy period of barbarian raids and social chaos when the only figure that stood for the pax romana, for the old Roman ideal of civic order, was the Christian bishop, and the only wall that protected civilization from savagery was the monastery wall. It was the saintly scholars behind that wall who saved all that was worth saving of Greco-Roman culture and rebuilt it, stone by stone, on firmer foundations, on the bedrock of the Faith, until they had raised, by the thirteenth century, at the highest peak of the Middle Ages, a cathedral worthy to house not only man but God; man free and man redeemed, but also God who was both Liberator and Law-Giver.
To the modern who reads history with eyes unclouded by prejudice, nothing could be clearer than that it is to Christianity, and specifically to Christianity in its Catholic form, that we owe not only the very concepts of liberty and law, but the synthesis, the rational framework which holds both concepts together in a unity. Like the keystone of an arch, Christianity keeps these two pillars of our society apart yet united; fully themselves, yet complementing and strengthening each other. Take away that keystone and you destroy not only the arch and its pillars but the structure which they support: this free community in which and by which we live.
The same impartial observer will notice that political and sociological opinion since the Reformation may be plotted as a series of pendulum swings from one extreme to the other. The radical anarchism of the Anabaptist sects in Germany was followed by the totalitarian rule imposed by Calvin on Geneva. To the supremely "enlightened" ― and supremely despotic ― government of divine-right monarchs like Louis XIV succeeded the blood-bath of the Terror, followed almost immediately by the doctrinaire dictator Robespierre and the military dictator Napoleon. And no sooner had the architects of liberalism and laissez-faire completed the imposing edifice of European imperialism, than it began to shake with the ominous rumble of the mine that Marx was digging, mole-like, from the British Museum to the cellar of the capitalist structure, where a powder keg, the proletariat, would take fire from the Communist Manifesto and blast that whole Victorian world to kingdom come.
Today that same movement, communism, so revolutionary and even anarchic in its childhood, has matured into the most all-embracing and ruthless tyranny the world has ever known; and, by a fine irony, the former imperialist powers have been driven to defend for themselves those freedoms which in the lustihead of their youth they denied to their colonial subjects.
Throughout this mad careening of the modern world from one end of the ideological arena to the other, from extreme Left to extreme Right, from the Sun-King responsible only to himself to the crimes committed in the name of liberty, from Bismarck's "blood and iron" to the Spanish anarchist's "Viva la dinamita!", the Church remained where she has always stood, her feet firmly planted on the synthesis of law and liberty which she taught in the beginning and continues to teach today.
Man is free, yet subject to authority, for both freedom and authority are from God. You cannot have liberty without law, neither can you have the rule of law unless you guarantee freedom. These two forces are antithetic only if religion is not there to resolve the antithesis; once crown the arch with the keystone of faith, and their mutual pressure becomes a mutual support, a rock to withstand the ages.
That is why it has been the destiny of the Church to be attacked from opposite directions: by the Left for being Rightist, by the Right for being Leftist; by communists for being the opium of the people, by economic royalists for preaching revolution; by mossback conservatives for being too liberal, by starry-eyed reformers for not being liberal enough. Catholic priests in this country have been criticized both for taking no interest in the common man and taking too much of an interest in him; both for perversely staying in their conventos, and for perversely going out of it. It is part of the same phenomenon; the most difficult course to steer is the middle course, for although the truth lies in the middle, it is a most uncomfortable position: you are there exposed to enfilading fire from both sides.
But be that as it may, there surely must be a great deal to be said for a religion that can be so generally objectionable; so universal a halo of hatred can only surround the Church of God. At any rate, if history teaches anything, it teaches this: that freedom has nothing to fear from a Church whose martyrs died for freedom, and that authority has nothing to fear from a Church in those whose eyes all legitimate authority is from God. Not only have we nothing to fear from such a religion, but we have everything to hope from it.
I must end where I began, that what we need most today is balance, and balance is exactly what Christianity is: the balance between faith and reason, between grace and nature, between freedom and order; between body and soul; the balance established for all eternity by the God who is also Man, who took upon Himself the form of a slave that all men might be free; who died that we might live.
I will not claim that the Catholic doctrine on the nature of human society is the only such concept. This is my personal conviction, but it is not necessary for our present purpose to defend it. It is sufficient to show that that doctrine is one such concept; and hence that the Catholic religion does make a positive and valuable contribution to the free community; and hence that those of us who are Catholics need not hesitate to draw from the rich resources of our religious belief the ultimate justification for our political and social beliefs. There may be ways as good, but there can be no better way to teach a man to be a good citizen than to teach him to be a good Catholic.
We often talk about the marvelous democracy of Athens. If I may be permitted a paradox, the marvelous democracy of Athens, judged by our standards, was not a democracy at all. It was an aristocracy, and even an oligarchy, of the most unscrupulous sort. It was a society of free citizens, true enough, but a society of free citizens made possible by the ruthless exploitation of a vast population of slaves.
And why is it that such a society, half-slave and half-free, cannot be considered a democracy by our standards? Why, because our standards happen to be Christian standards; because between the ancient Athenians and ourselves something intervened, an event of incalculable importance took place. A Man named Christ, who claimed to be God and proved it, died for all men; not just for Athenian citizens but for all men; and by doing so, set free, not only the Athenian slave, but all slaves forever.
It took the Church which he founded ― the Catholic Church, which is merely the extension of His personality in time ― it took that Mystical Body of His several centuries to destroy this formidable system of human exploitation ― all the more formidable as the whole economy of ancient and early medieval Europe was based on it ― but in the end it destroyed that system.
Christianity freed men from slavery, but it did not free them from the law. Christianity has always held that the true definition of liberty is not the ability to do what one likes but the ability to fulfil justice. If everybody did what he liked, there would be very little freedom; indeed, after an extremely brief period of such chaos, there would be very little of anything. Freedom is possible only if everybody respects the rights of everybody else; that is, if everybody does what is just; that is, if everybody obeys the law.
It used to be the fashion among historians to refer to the Dark Ages as the ages of faith and of barbarism, the rather broad hint being that where religion is dominant barbarism is the inevitable result. According to this naive nineteenth-century view, the Middle Ages is a valley of darkness between two peaks of light: the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was the nineteenth century.
No reputable scholar today would stake his reputation on such a statement. We have found out too much about the so-called Dark Ages since Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. We have, incidentally, found out too much about the very peculiar methods of proof of Gibbon himself. Even non-Catholic historians today fully confirm, with a wealth of learned footnotes, Chesterton's dictum that if there was anything about the Dark Ages that was not dark, it was the Church.
There were decades during the unhappy period of barbarian raids and social chaos when the only figure that stood for the pax romana, for the old Roman ideal of civic order, was the Christian bishop, and the only wall that protected civilization from savagery was the monastery wall. It was the saintly scholars behind that wall who saved all that was worth saving of Greco-Roman culture and rebuilt it, stone by stone, on firmer foundations, on the bedrock of the Faith, until they had raised, by the thirteenth century, at the highest peak of the Middle Ages, a cathedral worthy to house not only man but God; man free and man redeemed, but also God who was both Liberator and Law-Giver.
To the modern who reads history with eyes unclouded by prejudice, nothing could be clearer than that it is to Christianity, and specifically to Christianity in its Catholic form, that we owe not only the very concepts of liberty and law, but the synthesis, the rational framework which holds both concepts together in a unity. Like the keystone of an arch, Christianity keeps these two pillars of our society apart yet united; fully themselves, yet complementing and strengthening each other. Take away that keystone and you destroy not only the arch and its pillars but the structure which they support: this free community in which and by which we live.
The same impartial observer will notice that political and sociological opinion since the Reformation may be plotted as a series of pendulum swings from one extreme to the other. The radical anarchism of the Anabaptist sects in Germany was followed by the totalitarian rule imposed by Calvin on Geneva. To the supremely "enlightened" ― and supremely despotic ― government of divine-right monarchs like Louis XIV succeeded the blood-bath of the Terror, followed almost immediately by the doctrinaire dictator Robespierre and the military dictator Napoleon. And no sooner had the architects of liberalism and laissez-faire completed the imposing edifice of European imperialism, than it began to shake with the ominous rumble of the mine that Marx was digging, mole-like, from the British Museum to the cellar of the capitalist structure, where a powder keg, the proletariat, would take fire from the Communist Manifesto and blast that whole Victorian world to kingdom come.
Today that same movement, communism, so revolutionary and even anarchic in its childhood, has matured into the most all-embracing and ruthless tyranny the world has ever known; and, by a fine irony, the former imperialist powers have been driven to defend for themselves those freedoms which in the lustihead of their youth they denied to their colonial subjects.
Throughout this mad careening of the modern world from one end of the ideological arena to the other, from extreme Left to extreme Right, from the Sun-King responsible only to himself to the crimes committed in the name of liberty, from Bismarck's "blood and iron" to the Spanish anarchist's "Viva la dinamita!", the Church remained where she has always stood, her feet firmly planted on the synthesis of law and liberty which she taught in the beginning and continues to teach today.
Man is free, yet subject to authority, for both freedom and authority are from God. You cannot have liberty without law, neither can you have the rule of law unless you guarantee freedom. These two forces are antithetic only if religion is not there to resolve the antithesis; once crown the arch with the keystone of faith, and their mutual pressure becomes a mutual support, a rock to withstand the ages.
That is why it has been the destiny of the Church to be attacked from opposite directions: by the Left for being Rightist, by the Right for being Leftist; by communists for being the opium of the people, by economic royalists for preaching revolution; by mossback conservatives for being too liberal, by starry-eyed reformers for not being liberal enough. Catholic priests in this country have been criticized both for taking no interest in the common man and taking too much of an interest in him; both for perversely staying in their conventos, and for perversely going out of it. It is part of the same phenomenon; the most difficult course to steer is the middle course, for although the truth lies in the middle, it is a most uncomfortable position: you are there exposed to enfilading fire from both sides.
But be that as it may, there surely must be a great deal to be said for a religion that can be so generally objectionable; so universal a halo of hatred can only surround the Church of God. At any rate, if history teaches anything, it teaches this: that freedom has nothing to fear from a Church whose martyrs died for freedom, and that authority has nothing to fear from a Church in those whose eyes all legitimate authority is from God. Not only have we nothing to fear from such a religion, but we have everything to hope from it.
I must end where I began, that what we need most today is balance, and balance is exactly what Christianity is: the balance between faith and reason, between grace and nature, between freedom and order; between body and soul; the balance established for all eternity by the God who is also Man, who took upon Himself the form of a slave that all men might be free; who died that we might live.
― Fr. Horacio Luis de la Costa y Villamayor, S.J.
First delivered at a speech to the Knights of Columbus
4 November 1954
Published in The Background of Nationalism and Other Essays
Manila, 1965
First delivered at a speech to the Knights of Columbus
4 November 1954
Published in The Background of Nationalism and Other Essays
Manila, 1965
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| Going to Church by Andrew Loomis Oil on canvas. Undated. |
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