By Pauper Peregrinus

When the nucleus of an atom is broken up, great energy is released, for good or ill. This is not a bad analogy for Europe after the Great War. Until August 1914, a social and political order prevailed, which for all its grave spiritual defects gave to the old continent a certain stability. What St. Pius X called “the suicide of Europe” broke up this order of things; and after the armistice of 1918, the revolutionary energy that had been released was free to do its work. Enthusiasts, both simple-minded and sinister, sought to harness this energy, and to direct it, each to his chosen end.

Pope Leo XIII, reigning from 1878 to 1903, had set forth the blueprint for the evangelization of the world and the rebuilding of Christendom in a series of lucid and lapidary encyclicals. But evangelization and rebuilding are hard work, and the results were mixed. In the United States and Britain, the Church grew. In other places such as France, Catholics were still giving ground, despite the many monuments of holiness and learning that the reigns of Leo XIII and St. Pius X had witnessed. No wonder that some ardent Catholics, finding themselves after the Treaty of Versailles in a new and uncertain world, and fearing that the de-Christianization of their native lands would continue apace, looked with interest or envy at the revolutionary energy that surrounded them, and wondered if they could press it into Christ’s service.

One of the principal names here is that of Jacques Maritain (1882-1973). Maritain was the grandson, on his mother’s side, of Jules Favre, who had been one of the founders of the anti-Catholic “Third French Republic” in 1870. While at university in Paris, Maritain underwent a powerful conversion and was baptized into the Catholic Church in 1906. A philosopher by vocation, he put his considerable gifts of intellect and rhetoric at the service of the ‘Thomistic revival’ launched by Leo XIII a generation before, and collaborated with, among others, the Dominican theologian Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange. By the 1920’s, his brilliant expositions of St Thomas and his readiness to bring the perennial philosophy to bear on all the subjects of the day, from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to Picasso’s Cubism, had already won him great prestige among French Catholics. Yet he wished to do more to bring his fellow countrymen, especially the workers, back to Christ.

For a while, Maritain had co-operated with Charles Maurras (1868-1952), the principal organizer of Action Française, a movement that combined intense French nationalism with a desire to undo the atomizing effects of the French revolution. In 1926, Pope Pius XI condemned Maurras and Action Française on the grounds that it subordinated Christianity to the goal of national greatness. This Pope, who admired Maritain’s work, asked the philosopher to write a work explaining the condemnation to Maurras’s many Catholic supporters, who were to be found not least among the French clergy. Maritain obliged with a work called La Primauté du Spirituel; translated into English as “The Things that are not Caesar’s,” the title literally means “the Primacy of the Spiritual.” This was chosen as a riposte to Maurras’s well-known slogan, La politique, d’abord! (“Politics first!”).

These events proved a turning-point in Maritain’s political thinking. Yet it may be doubted whether he had grasped the true intention of the pope. Action Française was a ‘reactionary’ political movement that promoted monarchism, but which, in Pius’s judgment, made religious truth an optional extra. By the time the dust had settled from the papal condemnation, Maritain was endorsing a ‘progressive’ political movement that promoted democracy, but that also made religious truth an optional extra. Yet it was precisely treating religious truth as optional in politics that was the problem!

The Church had long enshrined her political doctrine in practice. The emperor Constantine first legalized and then favored the religion of Christ, making Sunday a time of rest and building magnificent basilicas. The emperor Theodosius I, who reigned from 379 to 395, united citizenship and faith more closely, decreeing that those who reneged on the Catholic faith would be subject to the discipline of the laws, and forbidding Arian heretics to reside in Constantinople. In words that his successors would often repeat, Pope St. Leo the Great (440-461) told the emperor of his day that royal power had been granted to him not only for governing the world but even more, for the protection of the Church. Doctors of the Church from St. Peter Damian and St. Bernard onwards would later see this salutary union of the spiritual and temporal powers as foreshadowed by our Lord’s mysterious instruction to the apostles to take “two swords” with them when they went out into the night (Lk. 22:34-38).

The seal was set on Christendom when Charlemagne was crowned as the first holy Roman emperor by the pope, on Christmas Day 800. Although neither Charlemagne nor his successors governed all Christian people, the emperors enjoyed a primacy of honor over other Catholic kings, and the continued existence of the Holy Roman Empire served to make vivid the ideal of Christendom, as the realm where earthly matters are duly subordinated to heavenly ones, and rulers recognize the service of Christ and the defense of His faith as their greatest glory.

The German philosopher Hegel once wrote that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk.” Minerva was the pagan Roman goddess of wisdom, and so he meant that wisdom to understand the principles at work in a given age only arises when that age is drawing to its close. However that may be, it is certain that the popes began to expound the ideal of Christendom most clearly and thoroughly only when Christendom had been struck by the cataclysm of the French Revolution in 1789. Although this was not the first secularizing revolution in Europe—Portugal, for example, had already known the anti-clerical government of the Marquis de Pombal—it proved to be the most doctrinaire, dramatic and communicative of them, and it has rightly been seen as a watershed ever since.

The popes of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with Leo XIII standing above them all for clarity and thoroughness, articulated the doctrine of Christendom from many angles: the rights of God the Creator over the human societies of which He is the cause; the rights of Christ the Redeemer over these same societies, which cannot be healthy except by His grace; the need of men to be taught by divine light and the hierarchy of the Church to live well on earth; the need of men to be protected even by material force from the wiles of the devil and his human agents, witting and unwitting. At times, as in Pius IX’s assertion in Quanta cura that Scripture and the Fathers require the civil power to favor the Catholic religion beyond all others, even individual teachings during this period rank as infallible judgments of the Roman see. And when we consider this body of doctrine as a whole, and how it was unanimously accepted by the episcopate, we can say that the desirability of Christendom ranks as a teaching of the ordinary and universal magisterium of the Church and hence as something that must be held by all Catholics.

Maritain did not want to disavow the Church’s past. He believed that Christendom had been good in its time. But he supposed that the time had come for a new organization of society, in which the Church would seek no special aid or protection from the civil power, and where countries would no longer declare themselves Catholic or even Christian, but would give equal respect to all religions, or at least to all monotheistic ones. For him, this was not a betrayal of the gospel; he thought that it was a way to advance it. Non-Catholics, he supposed, would be more easily freed from their prejudices against the Church when they saw her renouncing all claims to temporal power. By relying on spiritual means alone, her true visage would appear more radiantly. She would become the inspiration, even if unacknowledged, of a more fraternal human society, and this new society, since it would be animated by the grace of Christ—which Maritain supposed was to be very often found in the hearts of non-believers, even pagans, atheists and communists, without their knowing it—could be called a ‘new Christendom.’ Only it would be, he said, a ‘lay’ or ‘secular’ Christendom, unlike the ‘sacral Christendom’ of medieval times. He called this vision ‘integral humanism,’ the title of a hugely influential book that he published in 1936.

The idea of a fraternal human society, respecting the rights of man, and inspired unbeknownst to itself by the grace of Christ, captured the imaginations of many French clerics from the 1930’s on. Archbishop Lefebvre once remarked that his time in Africa separated him from the influence of this spirit in the French church. Through them, and also through Pope Paul VI, who in his youth had translated Maritain’s book into Italian, integral humanism asserted itself powerfully at the Second Vatican Council and thereafter.

Today, a long lifetime later, it is easy to smile at Maritain’s naivety. He did not realize that the moral consensus of his time, itself an inheritance of the Catholic centuries, was destined to pass away within a generation. Still more, his belief that it was possible, even common, to be in a state of grace without knowing and confessing Christ as Saviour, prevented him from grasping the enduring hostility of the world toward the Church. What is stranger is that he apparently overlooked the duty of rulers to offer acceptable, public worship to the God from whom all authority comes.

Maritain still has heirs in high places. Yet they are less traditional than he. We still hear many churchmen speak about fraternity and human rights, but who among them today will aspire to ‘Christendom,’ even to a secular one? The phrase ‘secular Christendom’ has quite passed away: a sign, no doubt, of its unreality.

We have, today, what Maritain partly lacked in his time: empirical demonstration of the papal teaching that states must publicly honor Christ or tend to ruin. He who is not for me, is against me, our Lord said: and this applies to nations as well as to men. Integral humanism sought to avoid this stern saying in the name of ‘the movement of history’; but Christ Himself has told us that His words will not pass away.