that we might share the rule with you

The Spirit has moved in recent years to correct the prevailing irrationalities concerning our Church’s relation to the sphere of earthly politics. The greatest harbinger of his work has been the revival of Catholic Integralism, spurred through Edmund Waldstein, vowed brother of Benedict and Bernard.

The movement’s king blog, The Josias, offers a three sentence definition of Integralism which is familiar to anyone who has taken interest in the movement:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.

Politics must order us to our final end. Amen. But we see that to embrace the traditional understanding of integralism, it is required to make an unseemly hop from the “final goal” (singular) of the first sentence to the ends (plural) of the last two. The awkwardness comes from the desire to reconcile the philosophies of Thomas and Aristotle with the teaching of a fifth century pope named Gelasius. Brother Edmund himself acknowledges this awkwardness when he says in his essay, Integralism and Gelasian Dyarchy, which I will multiple times refer to as IGD:

Aristotle’s marvelously simple account of politics and the good seems to be challenged, or at least complicated, by Christianity. “Duo… sunt:” there are two by which the world is chiefly ruled, Pope St. Gelasius wrote in his classic letter to the Emperor Anastasius, which was to be endlessly cited and interpreted by subsequent popes…

The clunkiness of the connection between the two powers, temporal and spiritual, has shown forth in the history of the dyarchy. The subordinate relationship of Christian rulers to their bishops seems to have hardly been integral, except in the most superficial sense of the word. It was often tense, playing out in “oscillations between caesaropapism and hierocratism”, to use a John Courtney Murray phrase quoted in IGD. The lack of chemistry between the two parties and the toleration of each for the other’s worldliness eventually led to the old form of the dyarchy’s divorce.

I am one of the vast majority of Catholics who has little to no nostalgia for the way things used to be, whether in the Church or in temporal society or in the relationship between the two. Yes, politics must explicitly order us to our final end and, more than that, it is inextricably bound with our final end. It is absolutely necessary that the Church recognizes this, and so we are blessed that Edmund has worked to make the truth recognized. But the way that Christian political leaders related their work to the mission of the Church in the past was not even close to good enough. Many things need changing, and the changes cannot come from simply looking to the past of European Christendom and copying what we see there.

There is a new way which preserves the dyarchical teaching, which makes political rulers the unambiguous servants of the spiritual end, and which will lead to a witness more consistent with the Gospel and more edifying to the world. It will bear more fruit than the medieval relation did.

With certain things clarified and with a slightly modified set of focuses, it is possible to see a more integral integralism, a relation between politics and Church more resembling the unity of the One Man, the One Priest and King, Jesus.

Our End(s)

According to Edmund’s Three Sentences, the dyarchy of powers is rooted in the fact that man has both a temporal end and a spiritual end. But is this true? Does man, particularly the Christian man, have two ends?

As he notes often in his work, Edmund agrees with Thomas Aquinas that man only has one final end, and that all other ends are subordinated to this one. From IGD:

The supernatural end of the City of God is indeed the absolutely final end to which all other ends must be in some way subordinate…

The City of God. Our final end, then, is a physical place, populated with many persons of flesh and blood who take up space and who, if the Father kisses the land with a gentle rain, will probably want to take shelter in houses or in a nearby pavilion. Our final end, the spiritual end, is a polity.

Having said that, here is another quote, thesis 36 from Edmund’s set of theses called The Good, the Highest Good, and the Common Good:

Until the second coming, the Church, which is immediately ordered to the common good of the Heavenly City, exists alongside temporal polities, which are immediately ordered to the temporal common good. But the temporal common good is a participation in the order of creation itself, and so it can dispose those who share in it toward the eternal common good. The temporal common good is thus subordinate to the eternal common good, and the temporal rulers are subordinate to the hierarchy of the Church.

Edmund reaffirms that the eternal end is the City of God, but what is most notable is that no distinction is made between polities ruled by Christians and polities ruled by unbelievers, no distinction between Christian rulers and unbelieving rulers. The lack of distinction seems to run through all of Edmund’s writing on the topic. All involved in political reign are assumed to be “immediately ordered to the temporal common good.” It is, of course, understandable that unbelieving rulers would be ordered to a temporal end, because they are unfamiliar with the eternal one. It seems to be assumed and accepted, though, that Christian political leaders will be just as temporally-focused as the unbelieving leaders, which is what necessitates their subordination to “the Church”, by which he means the bishops of the Church, because they are the ones who are immediately focused on the Heavenly City. It is easy to see in this view the effects of the old disease which Francis calls “clericalism”, where clerics have basement-low expectations of the laity and the laity share the same expectations for themselves, opting to live their Christianity vicariously through their priests and local religious.

So I ask again: does the Christian man indeed have two ends? Is it proper that there be some Christians who pursue temporal ends and some who pursue the eternal end?

Happily, the Lord Himself answered the question, speaking unambiguously about his disciples’ relation to temporal ends.

Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

To seek after temporal ends? That is for Gentiles. For Christians, both lay and ordained, the way is to seek first the Kingdom of God or, translated into scholastic jargon, to “immediately order oneself to the spiritual end”. Yes, the Lord stands against seeking the temporal even as a means. He teaches emphatically that if we seek the Kingdom, whatever temporal goods we need will be given to us by the Father. We shouldn’t seek bread in order to nourish ourselves in order to be able to effectively seek the Kingdom; rather, if we seek the Kingdom, bread will be given to us and we will be able to effectively seek the Kingdom. The final end is also the means to the final end.

For us there are not, then, two ends, one subordinate to the other, but instead one end, pursued with reckless, tunnel-visioned obsessiveness. Psychologically, any intermediate actions of the Body’s members should fade into the true action, the true object of our intention. If you ask a man who is walking toward the altar, “What are you doing?”, he will not say, “I am lifting my right foot and moving it forward. Now I am doing the same with my left foot. I am inhaling.” Such a response would be bizarre, and we would likely take it as a sign that the man is unhealthy in mente. Even though he is doing these things, just as the Lord Jesus did them in first century Judea, it doesn’t cross the man’s mind to respond this way, because his conscious desire, the cause of his individual muscular movements, takes up all of the space in his thought. Instead, he says, “I am going to drink the Blood.”

Likewise, we should deem it a sign of insanity, or at least of immaturity in the Faith, if a Christian leader, when asked what the goal of his work is, should give any other answer than the realization of God’s universal Kingdom. If this is not his immediate goal, then it is a serious problem for which juridical submission to the pope is wholly insufficient as a remedy. The only remedy is a renewal of his mind, so that he sees the impropriety of pursuing the temporal and embraces his calling to seek directly the spiritual end.

Having lost our right as believers to directly pursue temporal ends, having brought this right to market and foolishly sold it for a single pearl of great price, does that mean that dyarchy too must be given up?

In a sense: soon, yes. Of course. We know that only one man will be the priest and prophet and king of the City of God.

In another sense: maybe. Perhaps your vision of an integralist Church/polity relationship is a Milton Friedman-y one, where Christian leaders pursue the temporal good and glory of their sovereign territories however they see fit while we trust that their explicit “juridical submission” to the episcopate will be sufficient to spiritualize their temporal-mindedness. This vision of dyarchy is completely inconsistent with the above teaching of Jesus and must be abandoned.

In another sense: no. The dyarchy of powers is still a useful way to understand the order of the world during this brief interlude. Paul tells us that the political power which worldly leaders wield has been given to them by God. Even though they, in their ignorance, can only pursue temporal peace directly, they ought to be obeyed, for temporal peace is a godly good and has in many seasons been helpful for the Church’s work. Yet Gelasius wisely says, in this segment quoted in IGD:

There are two, august Emperor, by which this world is chiefly ruled, namely, the sacred authority (auctoritas sacrata) of the priests and the royal power (regalis potestas). Of these, that of the priests is weightier, since they have to render an account for even the kings of men in the divine judgment.

and Thomas says, in another IGD quote:

Thus, in order that spiritual things might be distinguished from earthly things, the ministry of this kingdom has been entrusted not to earthly kings but to priests, and most of all to the chief priest, the successor of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ, the Roman Pontiff. To him all the kings of the Christian People are to be subject as to our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. For those to whom pertains the care of intermediate ends should be subject to him to whom pertains the care of the ultimate end, and be directed by his rule.

Though the authority of worldly, unbelieving leaders has, by the providence of the Lord, been given to them to order their societies for the temporal common good, these leaders must submit to the priests who have been tasked with seeking the ultimate end, the Kingdom of God. And since we have had periods of forgetfulness over the centuries, the bishops of the Second Vatican Council, in their apostolic constitution Lumen Gentium, thought to remind us about who the priests of God are. Emphasis mine:

Christ the Lord, High Priest taken from among men, made the new people “a kingdom and priests to God the Father”. The baptized, by regeneration and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood, in order that through all those works which are those of the Christian man they may offer spiritual sacrifices and proclaim the power of Him who has called them out of darkness into His marvelous light.

The proper understanding of the venerable teaching of dyarchy, then, is that two powers rule now, both having received their power from God: the unbelieving leaders of the many temporal polities, and the Body of Christ, consisting of all the faithful, whose project is the One Eternal City. The polities of unbelievers will be absorbed into the City of God very shortly, but in the meantime, they must submit to us, the One Church of Jesus who is King of kings.

Most rulers would not, if asked, express an eagerness to submit to the Catholic Church. But I in no way share the generally pessimistic tone of IGD’s Augustinian Radicals on account of this fact, nor do I feel any urge to throw up my hands in frustration and withdraw from the toxic realm of earthly power. I do not feel any shyness about stepping into the sphere of the worldly leader and demanding that he bend the knee, then dismissing him like a servant if he refuses. Even if he lies prostrate and teary-eyed before the tabernacle of St. Peter’s, we should feel comfortable dismissing him if doing so will bring the fullness of the Kingdom an inch closer. The Church will not forget his humble gesture.

So yes, the dyarchical powers are the worldly rulers and the Church. Other interpretations do not make sense. It doesn’t work, for instance, to take the penultimate part of the Thomas quote above, that “those to whom pertains the care of intermediate ends should be subject to him to whom pertains the care of the ultimate end”, and to interpret this to mean that Kingdom-seeking political leaders must be subordinate to Kingdom-seeking bishops. For if we accept, as we already have, that the City of God is our ultimate end, then it would seem that the task of the bishops, which is to proclaim the Good News of the City’s coming and to teach and to organize the Body of Christ, is slightly less proximal to our common end than the task of the political leaders, which is the realization of the City itself. I much prefer, therefore, to focus on the unity of the whole Body and its mission rather than ranking members based on the mediacy or immediacy of their given task in relation to our final goal.

I appreciate that Edmund himself seems to emphasize our unity of mission at one point in IGD when, criticizing a Thomist named Grenier who too cleanly separated the Church’s sphere from the sphere of civil society, he says:

If by “the Church” he means the hierarchy of the spiritual power, then indeed it does not embrace the temporal order as a part. But a more proper meaning of “the Church” is simply the City of God, and in this sense the Church includes both the temporal and the spiritual powers as its parts. The City of God is indeed an all-embracing community, ruled by Christ the King.

I’ll end this part by saying that Paul, vested with apostolic authority, maybe a bit frustrated with the church at Corinth, best expressed the proper relationship between Christian political leaders and Christian bishops:

Without us you have become kings! And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you!

Having clarified that our end is one, that all of the Church is, or at least ought to be, immediately ordered to the eternal end, we should next clarify that the Body’s role is not only to notify the world of the City’s coming, not merely to wait for Jesus’ return. To seek the Kingdom of God is to try to find it or, in its absence, to try to make it. If a Christian, finding herself in political office, decides in her misguided piety that it is not her place to reshape this world into the New Earth, decides that until she sees a man in white floating down from the clouds that she must properly focus on merely temporal things: this woman cannot be said to be a Kingdom-seeker. We have had an excuse, two thousand years evergreen, that we are waiting for Jesus to come and build the future for us. The Lord’s Spirit has descended to us. He is already here. Christ the King literally, concretely lives in His Church and he longs to build the Kingdom, to completion, now, using his Church’s hands. We must shift this truth to a central place in our thinking.

Finally and again: now. The greatest cancer in the Church today, the greatest betrayal of our Lord’s Gospel, is the constant and unconscious pushing away of the perfected Kingdom to a time far off in the future, to a time when we readers will have long been bones in the ground, well past the horizon of things we give a care about on a daily basis. The Gospel of our Lord is that the Kingdom of God is at hand, that there are some standing here who will not taste death until after it has come with power. Let us look honestly, brothers and sisters, at our thoughts and ensure that we are in alignment with the Lord’s teaching, that the Kingdom is for us Very, Very Near instead of distant and vague. Let us especially be vigilant in the language we use when talking about our Faith, for if we do not make it utterly clear that the Kingdom is Very, Very Near, then we are sharing a message which negates the Gospel of Jesus. A renewed focus on the any-day-now coming of God’s Kingdom will be solve almost all of the ecclesial ailments which churchgoers fret about.

Because the time is so short, let us not be hearers of the word only, but doers. The Kingdom does not consist of words, but of power. And would that you did reign.