The Aims of Separating the State from the Church
We know that ultimately the driving force behind modern atheistic politics is Satan, who wills to damn the maximum number of souls and seeks this end by creating a political climate hostile to the spiritual health of souls, as Pius XII taught: “The good or evil of souls depends and seeps in from the form which is given to society, in conformity or no with the divine laws.”[1] Thus, he glories in a society who pretends that God either does not exist or is irrelevant, and which either allows or even fosters all manner of iniquity and perversion.
However, it would be false to say that all the philosophers and statesmen who have advocated or pursued what we call “liberal” political ideologies share Satan’s vision, or even take it seriously. How could they if they believe neither the Christian God nor Satan exist? Not all were motivated by the same spirit that led Voltaire to write “Ecrasez l’Infame.” What then does motivate them? Why do they advocate for religious liberty and the separation of Church and state? Further, what is there in their views and arguments that has attracted such great minds and so many men over the past few centuries?
We cannot ignore these questions, since the supernatural order—whether of grace or of sin—is built on the natural order. While the ultimate solution to what St. Pius X calls “the apostasy from God”[2] is supernatural (Faith, prayer, sacrifice, the sacraments), we cannot neglect the very real arguments made for this apostasy on the natural level. We can compare our approach here to the Church’s attitude regarding diabolical possession. She demands that priests make every effort to explore possible natural causes of the phenomena observed in the person apparently possessed. Only after truly ruling them out these natural causes does She advise her priests to proceed to an exorcism.
We can say that it appears modern society is possessed. But we have to grasp first the natural causes of the disaster before resorting to the supernatural remedy, both because natural causes require some natural remedies, and also because while supernatural remedies certainly are still needed, they will be profoundly unstable if applied without remedying underlying natural errors.
If we are then to look at the overarching philosophic movement which has aimed at the separation of the Bride of Christ from the political life of nations, what do we see as the underlying principles driving these men onward? Given the nature of this brief article, we cannot give a thorough—let alone comprehensive—answer. However, for our purposes, it will suffice to state that these men have sought both to lower the aim and goal of politics and to establish a ground of political authority that was wholly independent of religious authority.
Assumption of Modern Philosophers
As a preliminary remark, I think it is critical to understand many of the modern philosophers who have advocated for the separation of church and state in one form or another (e.g., Machiavelli, Locke, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, etc.) emphatically believed that the Christian religion—especially in its hierarchical structure—is a merely human institution. John Locke’s definition of a church in his Letter on Toleration is a good illustration of this point:
A Church then I take to be a voluntary association of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshiping of God, in such a manner they judge acceptable to him and effectual to the salvation of their souls.
To a greater or lesser degree, they deny that God revealed Christian doctrine or established a visible Church. As such, it represents at best a human institution which is the source of some reasonable opinions about the divine nature and healthy human behavior. At worst, it is an obstacle to knowledge and/or good human life. For most, it was something in between, a mixture of some good elements and some bad elements. In any case, it is nothing more than the fruit of human thought or imagination, and can be adjusted or modified by men who lay claim to wisdom.
These men, broadly speaking, either faced directly or in its vestiges a Christian civilization in which the representatives of the Church exercised an immense influence on political life, both in determining the goals of politics and in indicating who should rule. We can think of the famous scene of Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV kneeling and begging the forgiveness of St. Gregory VII, or the use of interdicts by Popes against their geopolitical rivals such as the Florentines (a famous occurrence took place in the mid-1300s, and St. Catherine of Siena was asked by Gregory XI to serve as his representative to bring about the submission of the Florentines). We can also think of the principle by which Popes claimed the right to depose rulers for offenses against the faith; a famous example here is St. Pius V excommunicating Elizabeth I in England and absolving all Catholics in England of allegiance to her.
The vision underlying this civilization might find its fullest and most comprehensive expression in the bull Unam sanctam written by Boniface VIII in 1302. He writes:
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. Certainly the one who denies that the temporal sword is in the power of Peter has not listened well to the word of the Lord commanding: ‘Put up thy sword into thy scabbard’ [Mt 26:52]. Therefore, both are in the power of the Church, namely, the spiritual sword and the material. But indeed, the latter is to be exercised on behalf of the Church; and truly, the former is to be exercised by the Church. The former is of the priest; the latter is by the hand of kings and soldiers, but at the will and sufferance of the priest. However, one sword ought to be subordinated to the other, and temporal authority subjected to spiritual power.
Objections to Union of Church and State
Many of the thinkers (including Dante, a Florentine who deeply objected to Boniface’s papal government[3]) we are considering had multiple concerns with this arrangement. We can highlight two.
In the first place, as a rule they judged that the high ideals of the Christian commonwealth were counterproductive to a healthy political life. By setting the goal of politics as the salvation of souls and supernatural virtue, theologians and statesmen aimed at a perfection which is unattainable in political life. A literary representation of this concern can be seen in the first chapter of Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed,[4]where Milanese authorities repeatedly publish noble sounding and lofty decrees against highwaymen without ever actually freeing the countryside of them. The emphasis on noble ideals and doctrinal purity on a theoretical level leads to the neglect of the necessary practical virtues of political life. The virtues conducive to military strength and civic peace were neglected, leading to constant petty strife domestically and among Christian princes. Such thinkers would highlight the words of Urban II when he invited the Franks to initiate a Crusade:
Let none of your possessions detain you, no solicitude for your family affairs, since this land which you inhabit, shut in on all sides by the seas and surrounded by the mountain peaks, is too narrow for your large population;[5] nor does it abound in wealth; and it furnishes scarcely food enough for its cultivators. Hence it is that you murder one another, that you wage war, and that frequently you perish by mutual wounds. Let therefore hatred depart from among you, let your quarrels end, let wars cease, and let all dissensions and controversies slumber. Enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulchre; wrest that land from the wicked race, and subject it to yourselves.”[6]
They would argue, perhaps, that the Pope’s proposal did not address the underlying vices of a Christian political order, whose fruits as described by Urban II were poverty and strife, but merely obscured them under a form of Christian imperialism.
Indeed, the Christian emphasis on flight from the world, humility, trust in God’s providence, and the consequent depreciation of the virtues proper to statesmanship (prudence, energy, and public spiritedness) pushed decent men to avoid involving themselves in politics, giving an outsized influence to passionate and even vicious men. This is perhaps most famously expressed by Machiavelli when he compares the religion of the ancients to the religion of the moderns:
These [Christian] principles seem to me to have made men feeble, and caused them to become easy prey to evil-minded men who can control them more securely, seeing that the great body of men, for the sake of gaining Paradise, are more disposed to endure injuries than to avenge them.[7]
In the second place, the emphasis on virtue as the end of politics tends to promote quarreling. Why? For most political men, the highest, most beautiful, and obviously visible excellence is the nobility in self-sacrifice. However, the highest form of self-sacrifice is to give one’s life in battle. In other words, there is a profound logic in making virtue the end of politics that easily and often results in men who are eager for conflict and war so as to prove themselves. This logic is expressed by the German field marshal Helmuth von Moltke:
Permanent peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful one, and war is a law of God’s order in the world, by which the noblest virtues of man, courage and self- denial, loyalty and self-sacrifice, even to the point of death, are developed. Without war the world would deteriorate into materialism.[8]
Re-orienting the Goals of Political Action
How then did the modern philosophers seek to address these concerns? We may simplify and state that they proposed two major shifts in political life. In the first place, they aimed to re-orient the goals of political action. In the second place, they sought to find a source of political authority that was independent of revealed religion.
Luther famously wrote that “up till now, goal of Christian service is to worship God; from now on it will be to console men.” In a way, this echoes the shift of political thought on the part of the early moderns, perhaps best expressed by one of the initial architects of that shift, Niccolò Machiavelli:
Many have imagined republics and principalities which have never been seen or known to exist in reality, for how we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done will rather bring about his ruin than his preservation.[9]
Political life would no longer be to promote idealistic goals like the glory of God or even to nurture human excellence (i.e., how men ought to live), but rather would rather take into account men as they are and therefore provide for their lower needs (i.e., his preservation).
The moderns sought to lower the goal of politics by making these “common goods” of peace, freedom, and wealth the chief and primary aims of political action and statesmanship, leaving aside—as was said above—the higher pursuits of virtue and human excellence, as commonly understood. We can glimpse this in a passage from John Locke’ Letter on Toleration:
These [three considerations] to omit many others that might have been urged to the same purpose, seem unto me sufficient to conclude that all the power of civil government relates only to men’s civil interests, is confined to the care of the things of this world, and has nothing to do with the world to come.[10]
Locke and other thinkers did not necessarily dismiss human excellence[11] or the seriousness of salvation as such, but argued that statesmen should not aim to produce it among their subjects. They would agree with the assessment that human laws are designed for the majority of men who are not virtuous and thus these laws forbid only the more serious offenses against public peace which most men can avoid (like murder, theft, etc.)
As a result, politics should promote temporal peace. This kind of argument was articulated even by men such as Dante. He writes in De Monarchia that
this is the goal the protector of this world, who is called the Roman prince, must strive with all his might to bring about: namely, that life on this threshing floor of mortals may be lived freely and in peace.
How to promote this peace, independently of an appeal to virtue? All men necessarily pursue their own interests; it is a necessary consequence of their self-love. As a result, they will seek their own good no matter what lip service is given to excellence, and so men like Machiavelli thought it better for statesmen not to pretend to aim at a virtue which was unattainable for most—if not all. Instead, it would be better to allow men to pursue their self-interest, but in such a way as to be conducive to the peace and prosperity of the community. This is what John Locke had in mind when he wrote:
God gave the World to Men in Common; But since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest Conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated. He gave it to the use of the industrious and Rational, (and Labour was to be his Title to it;) not to the fancy or covetousness of the quarrelsome and contentious.[12]
Making Political Authority Independent of Religion
Obviously, lowering of the goals of politics would necessarily mean the statesman should not aim at the eternal salvation of his subjects. Since Locke and other like-minded men judged that clerical rule tended in the direction of making politics a tool to assure orthodoxy and to ensure the salvation of souls, the intention to lower the aim of politics necessarily meant striving to find a ground of political authority that was independent of Church authority.
Again, Dante had already articulated this argument in the 1300s when he wrote in his De Monarchia:
Two ends, therefore, have been laid down by the ineffable providence of God for man to aim at: the blessedness of this life, which consists in the exercise of his natural powers, and next, the blessedness of the life eternal. Now, these two kinds of happiness [e.g., temporal and eternal] are reached by different means as representing different ends. Therefore man had need of two guides for his life, as he had a twofold end in life; whereof one is the Supreme Pontiff, to lead mankind to eternal life, according to the things revealed to us; and the other is the Emperor, to guide mankind to happiness in this world, in accordance with the teaching of philosophy.[13]
It is therefore clear that the authority of temporal Monarchy comes down, with no intermediate will, from the fountain of universal authority; and this fountain, one in its unity, flows through many channels out of the abundance of the goodness of God.
The appeal to the nature of things is a version of what has come to be known as an argument from natural law, which can be summarized by the axiom that every human law is a law precisely inasmuch as it is derived from the law of nature. The law of nature can be grasped and comprehended by unaided human reason at any time. Furthermore, it is open in some measure of being demonstrated through arguments accessible to any reasonable man. There would therefore be no need for any special revelation or divine commission to understand what is required for making wise laws or exercising prudent statesmanship. A bishop or pope would be no more nor less qualified to rule or to command those who rule than would be any other reasonably educated and judicious statesman who has insight into human affairs.
We can go further and note that, for many of the moderns, their aim was to subordinate the religious authority to the civil authority; in a sense, they wished to return to the arrangement described by Aristotle in his Politics, where the priesthood was a civil office of the state. This is not opposed to the desire to separate politics from salvation; Aristotle’s vision of the priesthood little to do with the next life. The most glaring example of this is the French Law of Separation promulgated in 1905. A careful reflection on this law makes clear that its authors did not mean to “separate” Church and state, but rather to subordinate the former to the latter. Not only is civil authority independent of religious authority, but it is superior to it. Once again, this relies on the judgment of these thinkers that the Church is a merely human institution.
Conclusion
In sum, we can say that the modern separation of church and state is ultimately the fruit of a philosophic project to reduce the aims of politics to more attainable goals such as peace, political freedom, and security. They judged this would help overcome the situation of Christian politics where there was constant petty warfare which made life poor, nasty, brutal and short. As a corollary of this, they judged it necessary to find a way to ground political authority in a way that would eliminate the role of churchmen who were both too idealistic and unaccountable to the people they would rule. In this way, these modern thinkers have served to further the aims of the enemy of men, the devil, who wishes to create a situation where Our Lord Jesus Christ is made the equal of any and every other god the fallen angels or men invent.
Endnotes
[1]Pius XII, Radio message, July 1, 1941.
[2]E supremi apostolatus. 4 October 1903.
[3]Dante is generally understood to have placed Boniface VIII in hell in his Divine Comedy, as seen in the 19th Canto of the Inferno. He specifically accuses Boniface there of simony, but it is in the context of the temporal influence and wealth of the Church. At one point, Dante the Pilgrim questions whether the gifts of Constantine to the Church at the end of the persecutions were truly beneficial for the Church.
[4]A charming Italian novel published in the early 1800s, the action centers around two young lovers from northern Italy in the early 1600s who struggle to get married amidst the general political chaos of their home.
[5]At the time, the population of France would have been roughly between 7 and 10 million people. As of 2021, the population of France was estimated to be roughly 67 million, in a territory equivalent in size to Texas (population of roughly 30 million).
[6]Speech of Urban II on 27 November 1095 in Clermont-Ferrand, France. Urban II was a disciple of St. Gregory VII, and was elected pope 5 years after the death of the former.
[7]Discourses on Livy. Book 2, chapter 2. He is there opining on the causes of the fact that there were fewer “republics” in his day than in the ancient world, and less of a love of spirited liberty.
[8]Personal letter written December 11, 1880. Von Moltke modernized the Prussian army in the mid-1800s and successfully led Prussian forces in multiple wars, including the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. This same spirit is admirably expressed by Shakespeare’s Henry V in his St. Crispin’s Day speech, given to rally troops in a war of foreign conquest.
[9]Machiavelli, The Prince. Chapter 15.
[10]John Locke: Political Writings. Letter on Toleration. Page 396.
[11]For example, Locke addresses the active virtues at length in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education, written for a friend and the contemplative life in various respects in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which he explicitly states in the prologue was written after a discussion with a few friends and intended primarily for their benefit.
[12]John Locke, Second Treatise on Government.
[13]De Monarchia. Book III.xvi This argument would be substantially used by another Christian political philosopher, Marsilius of Padua.
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