Update: Hittinger’s lecture is now on YouTube.
In a recent lecture at the Catholic University of America, Russell Hittinger argues that “a separation” must exist between the kingdom of God and the world. The talk’s title, “How to Inherit a Kingdom,” was inspired by one of St. Augustine’s sermons directing disconsolate Christians towards their true end after the sack of Rome. Christians then, as now, live in catastrophic times.
Hittinger states that he was not addressing any integralist but, rather, speaking only for himself. Nonetheless, the scope of his argument remains relevant to the controversy surrounding Christianity in the public sphere in general and integralism in particular. Indeed, it could even cast light upon our hopes for a nation that was once far more Christian and which, if trends continue, will be far less Christian in the future.
In what follows, I review Hittinger’s argument and propose why his view of “separation” fails (theoretically, by not saying enough), while also suggesting how his lecture reveals why “integralism” fails (practically, by trying to do too much).
1.
To judge by its online reception, integralism is as hard to understand as it is to achieve. Previously, I wrote a brief genealogy of integralism in the internet age. The stream of web and print commentary on the topic has since far from ceased.
Despite this supply, it is difficult for someone new to the topic to get an unbiased take. One might start with Charlie Camosy’s three interviews at The Pillar: one with Joseph Capizzi, of the Institute for Human Ecology which hosted Hittinger’s lecture; one with Fr. Bill McCormick, S.J., here; and one with Thomas Pink here. (I recommend reading them in that order if you are new to the subject.) In each interview, albeit in different ways, contemporaneous cultural disasters, the collapse of faith, and rising secularism are seen as factors motivating integralist and integralist-adjacent views.
Is this where one should begin to explain integralism? By accounting for it as a reaction to current crises of apparent world-historic magnitude? After Hittinger’s lecture, it became clearer to me why this is not the case. Rather, one must begin with a proposal.
The kingdom of God is here.
He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the first-born from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent. For in him all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.
Col 1:17–20
What the Catholic Church proposes to the world is Jesus Christ, crucified for the sins of that world, the God-man who died and then rose from the dead, the one awaited for ages and who will reign unto ages of ages. Amen.
It is in this eschatological key that the question of the relationship between the Church and the nations must be heard. The first-order principle regards revelation, secondarily a theological-philosophical account of the course of human history shot through with divine grace, and only thereafter human theories, movements, plans, or policies. The kingdom of Christ is even now partially present in time, subsists in the Catholic Church, and this very body, this supernatural society, by its existence and mission answers definitively the dread Socratic challenge about the fate of one’s soul posed to those dwelling in this world.
This eschatological proposal—the scandal of particularity that here and now proclaims the truths of eternity—immediately informs what Hittinger means by “separation” in his lecture. It is for this reason that none can “foster any doubt as to the Church alone having been invested with such power of governing souls as to exclude altogether the civil authority.” (Leo XIII, Sapientiae Christianae, n. 27) Quoting this very line (in a slightly different translation), Hittinger states that this is what he means by the “separation” of the Church of Christ and the temporal sphere. It is not a juridical separation, a “separation of church and state” in a constitutional sense, but the being “set apart” of the Church along with its end, is mission, and its members.
In a word, by separation Hittinger means the Church’s sacredness.
If this is the way to the Kingdom, then, as Hittinger puts it, how can one inherit a kingdom except by supernatural faith? This is the Pelagian problem: the kingdom of Christ cannot be brought about by natural causes and human volition. Indeed, Hittinger zeroes in on Christ’s words to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world,” (John 18:36) as words of “supreme importance.” This separation or “set-apart-ness” of Christ’s kingdom—and, consequently, the Church here on earth—is a first-order principle, precisely because the supernatural end proposed requires supernatural capacities and supernatural community to achieve.
As a further consequence, for those still lingering over the flesh-pots of “pagan integralism”—Hittinger’s term, as I understand it, for when fallen religio and fallen polis were indeed fused—this separation is seen as an evil. In Hittinger’s view, the kingdom of sin and death—“the world” in the third of Aquinas’s three senses, “from the point of view of its perversity” (Super Iohan., I.5, n. 128)—is contradictory to the Kingdom of God, while the good of the temporal political order is merely contrary to the Kingdom (and, thus, the Church). That is, the former pair are opposed as total negative opposites (such as being and non-being), while the latter pair are opposed as incompatible opposites (such as a statement being true and false at once, or the same volume of water boiling and being lukewarm). For Hittinger, the separateness of the Church from the temporal powers requires full cognizance of both parts of separation: contradiction and contrariety.
Drawing upon Ratzinger (from his book on eschatology) and Gilson (in The Metamorphoses of the City of God), Hittinger argues that, because faith is not naturally transmittable, the counterfeits or avatars of Christendom, unmindful of the shadow of the Cross in which the Christian difference is rooted and from which it is proposed, substitute an intra-mundane task or mission—that of morals and politics—making the Church at work in the world vulnerable to collapsing eschatology into mere social teaching. They mistake the Church for supervenient effects of Christian politics and culture.
Now, Hittinger agrees with those who would be such counterfeits that his meaning of separation would be an evil if he were speaking only about social realities and goods, such as marriage, family, education and the like. It is talk about “how to inherit a kingdom” that changes this. Separation, he concludes, is “the beginning of widsom.”
2.
Yet a beginning is not the last word. Indeed, it seems that Hittinger’s defense of the Christian difference—its proposal, the sacral and other-worldly, unsecular character of its message of Christ crucified for your salvation and for mine, for ours—is only the beginning. If “the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body” (Letter to Diognetus), then Hittinger’s proposal, if taken as the last word, would understand soul and body in dualistic terms.
Again, in the first part of his lecture, he quotes Leo XIII:
Civil society, established for the common welfare, should not only safeguard the well-being of the community, but have also at heart the interests of its individual members, in such mode as not in any way to hinder, but in every manner to render as easy as may be, the possession of that highest and unchangeable good for which all should seek. Wherefore, for this purpose, care must especially be taken to preserve unharmed and unimpeded the religion whereof the practice is the link connecting man with God.
Immortale Dei, n. 6
He concludes that “clearly” the Pope is not giving instructions for the state “to make laws about religion, not directly, much less to direct citizens to a supernatural end, but rather not to hinder and ‘to preserve unharmed and unimpeded’ the religious practices of Catholics.” (cf. Hittinger, 13:17) Yet the very same paragraph of that encyclical—which most scholars find to be Leo XIII’s “most doctrinal,” Hittinger notes—opens with this line: “As a consequence, the State, constituted as it is, is clearly bound to act up to the manifold and weighty duties linking it to God, by the public profession of religion.”
Again, Hittinger argues later in the lecture that, unlike civil society which, as an organic whole, contains integral parts such as family and smaller groups, the kingdom in pilgramage does not consist in other societies as integral parts. Yet how do we account for parishes, dioceses, and, indeed, Christian families? The “comedy of jurisdictions” throughout history aside, does not Hittinger’s emphasis upon separation merely raise with renewed force the question about how a member of the Church is not “of” the world but nonetheless lives “in” the world?
To see that this is the case, we must reconsider the lynchpin of Hittinger’s argument: contradictoriness and contrariety. To illustrate the latter, he notes Christ’s words that there will be no marriage in heaven. (Hittinger adds that neither will there be family, but this seems metaphysically impossible: Mary is still the mother of Jesus, even in heaven.) This is contrary to the goods of marriage now present. Marriage as a sign of the union of Christ and His Church, and thus, upon the full presence of the Kingdom, the eternal marriage feast, the sign yields to the reality. Both cannot coexist at one and the same time and fashion.
However, this relationship, between incompatible contrary states, does not obtain in his required case. For contraries cannot co-exist at the same time in the same subject. But being a citizen of a state and being a member of the Church do coexist in the same subject at the same time. So they cannot be opposed as contraries. Rather, they must be related in some other way. Furthermore, since being a citizen of a state and being a member of the Church are defined by different goods—distinct final causes—, they can co-exist in the same subject since they do not exist there in the same way. But “in the same subject and in the same way” are required to be contraries. So they cannot be opposed as contraries. Unlike the case of marriage passing away, one’s “dual citizenship” is not by sign to reality signified, or an imperfect stage to a more perfect one.*
In short, Hittinger has not made any points against integralism, or, for that matter, neither has he directly supported through such a notion the juridical sense of separation. Rather, through “separation” in his sense, meaning the “set-apartness” of the Church, the Christian difference, he has simply raised the question more forcefully in regards to how they are related in the here and now, in this vale of tears (see Urban Hannon, here). If one asserts, by extrapolation—which Hittinger does not do—that this “separation” rebuts integralism or establishes a version of juridical separation, this would beg the question at issue. For goods of different orders are not necessarily contraries. Indeed, how would such an extrapolation not undermine the compatibility of nature and grace?
What Hittinger’s notion of separation does show it that the question of Catholic integralism, or juridical separation of the Catholic Church from the state, for that matter, cannot be adequately raised unless by beginning with the eschatological dimension of the Christian proposal. I think this is a salutary point, one which has received poor emphasis in the furious fires of the internet integralist controversies. This “set-apart-ness” is a first order term, and, therefore, the question of how the Church as sacred lives in and among natural societies during this age can be and must be raised only afterwards. Indeed, this is the natural reaction. This has, in no small part, led rulers throughout the ages to worry about the “dual allegiance” of Christians, a fact which Newman knew well.
That the promised Kingdom stands in contrariety to the world “taken from the point of view of its perversity,” does not settle the question about the coordination of the Church and the world taken “from the point of view of [the world’s] perfection, which it reaches through Christ.” (St. Thomas, Super Iohan., I.5, n. 128) As Hittinger himself notes, following Ratzinger, it is good and healthy for the political order to be healed of its pretensions towards the highest good—to be saved from its “pagan integralism.” Yet for all that:
Inasmuch as each of these two powers has authority over the same subjects, and as it might come to pass that one and the same thing—related differently, but still remaining one and the same thing—might belong to the jurisdiction and determination of both … Two powers would be commanding contrary things, and it would be a dereliction of duty to disobey either of the two.
Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, n. 13, and see nn. 14–15
3.
Given separation, what of relationship? Even within a harmony one finds distinct and opposed elements. How to coordinate these two realms?
A solution such as Fr. John Courtney Murray’s is more familiar to many Americans (even if they are unaware of that fact and could be forgiven for confusing it with the political stances of a Kennedy, a Cuomo, or a … etc.). The Marsilian solution, the Gallican solution, the Erastian solution, or Caesaropapism—these are perhaps without meaning to most. What else is there besides fusion, a welding of throne to altar, in that order of priority? Perhaps the alternative must be “about removing religion from state authority. The state should protect religion—but as a supreme good transcending its own authority.”
Some call that “integralism,” or at least one version of it. Should we? Ought we?
Hittinger notes near the outset of his lecture that those with no stomach for historical contingencies and reversals of fortune will most likely find Church-State relations not to be their cup of tea. Indeed, to judge by history is to judge integralism in its stronger forms harshly, and justly so.
So let us drop the name to focus upon realities. The reality, the first-order principle, is the call by the Catholic Church to all human persons, of every nation, race, people, and tongue, out of the world and into the Kingdom of Christ.
To separate oneself from “the world” insofar as this is taken, in a first sense, “from the point of view of its perversity, as in the whole world lies under the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19) is to enter the kingdom of Christ, on earth: His Church, which subsists in the Catholic Church. Even in this case, as is the case with contraries, defection is possible.
To separate oneself from “the world” insofar as this is taken, secondly, “from the point of view of its creation, as when the Evangelist says here [John 1:10], through him the world was made” is not death to one’s former ways but death itself. Prior to that time one is not separate from the world in this second sense, existing statu mutabilitatis.
Lastly, to separate oneself from the world “from the point of view of its perfection, which it reaches through Christ, as in God was, in Christ, reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor 5:19; for these quotes, see St. Thomas, Super Iohan., I.5, n. 128) is against the very heart of the Christian way of life. Yet at present, we are not fully present in that world, existing as we do only statu novitatis.
So also there are two kinds of perfection for the universe: one perfection according to the state of this mutability, the second according to the state of future newness.
St. Thomas, Super IV Sent., d. 48, q. 2, a. 5, ad 3
Upon this temporary stage, between the created world of change and deprivation and the world renewed in light of eternal grace, the history of the salvation of human persons plays out in the scenes of society in all its forms: families, cities, and countries. Individuals can be members both of natural societies and the divine one, the Church. How ought these memberships be related? Surely one ought not live a “double life”!
The only true separation is that of pagan integralism from its pretensions. For “there is no aspect of human life and no sphere of human action which is neutral or ‘secular’ in the absolute sense,” and thus the created world requires even here and now the perfection of redemption (Christopher Dawson, “The Problem of Christ and Culture” [1952] quoted here, p. 91).
Even the modern State, that new Leviathan, that “King over all the children of pride,” is not irrelevant to the work of grace nor impenetrable to its influence. If it does not destroy itself, it must be transformed and reconsecrated, as the power of the barbarian warrior became transfigured into the sacred office of a Christian king.
Dawson, “Church, State, and Community: Concordats or Catacombs?” [1937]; quoted here, p. 92
The reason is, again, rooted in the reality of the Christian proposal: “The Christian view of history is not merely a belief in the direction of history by divine probidence. It is a belief in the intervention by God in the life of mankind by direct action at certain definite points in time and place.” (Dawson, Dynamics of World History, p. 235) Family, culture, and polity are the natural substrates for grace, for Christians are to the world what the soul is to the body.
The goods of this life are not ultimate. Since they are nonetheless required as means for the life hereafter, they are, therefore, subordinated goods. Since one cannot life a double life—for that is to live a lie—, the authorities whose care it is to direct men to this array of goods must be coordinated, harmonized. Since their final ends are ones ordered one to the other, the authorities ought to be arranged in like manner, in knowledge and activity.
Ought to be—call this “ought” of harmony what you will, or valorize it to various degrees. If the words of Cardinal Manning are true that “all conflict is ultimately theological,” then even more so is it true that all peace is ultimately theological. As with roses, so too with what name befits that sacral concord which is the meet response by individuals, families, communities, and peoples towards the very set-apart-ness of the Church while living as her members in the world.
The question of such harmony—unity arising from order—with the sacred cannot be ignored. Merely look at the frequently yet unwisely neglected third and fourth books of the Leviathan to see how fiercely Hobbes had to fight to attempt to inspire such ignorance. The problem is unavoidable because man is at once a credal animal and a social animal, and credal as social, for belief comes from hearing from others, from their teaching, their witness, their lives.
4.
Three interrelated corollaries follow:
(1) Hittinger is right about those with no stomach for historical contingencies and reversals of fortune, for any sacral concord between polis and the one true Ecclesia is fragile and fleeting. Yet for all that, it is fruitless to conflate discourse about “desiring a better country” at national conservatism conventions or post-liberal discourse at Catholic college conferences with first-order discourse about the sacred nature of the Church and the meet response of temporal society, even if such discourse at the level of policy is inspired by goals and goods informed by Christianity. One reason why it is fruitless has inadvertently been noted by Hittinger: the “Christian difference” ought to first be proclaimed, and, once accepted, it is natural that social groups seek the means for the preservation and promotion of a life devoted in common to such a good even insofar as these touch upon the secular or temporal affairs of life.
There are two further reasons, for the resolution to theoretical questions about and the practical achievement of sacral harmony require an appeal to hierarchies of wisdom and causality which frequently escape notice.
(2) Theoretical questions. Discourse about “integralism” is often unclearly confined to debates in political philosophy or politics. However, first and foremost, the account of how the Church ought to properly relate to the political order—and vice versa—is an account which must be given by the Catholic Church first and foremost. This obtains at the level of dogma or various levels of doctrine, and the most recent example of this is the declaration Dignitatis Humanae. (Hittinger well explains a key to the document’s articulation of religious liberty in a disciplined reading, noting how the declaration shuns the errors of both cuius regio establishment and modern liberal indifferentism.)
It is only due to this magisterial teaching that an accounting of sacral concord is, secondly, theological in nature, a part of ecclesiology. Thirdly, in consequence to this, sacral concord can only be understood within a theological-philosophical account of history, for such a viewpoint is required to see in the light of the Gospel the unfolding possibilities of natural order (including, in particular, the ius gentium) and thereby understand the possibilities and limitations to such harmony. Implicitly, and fourth, it follows upon the third that a sound metaphysics is presupposed.
Fifth, to give an account of the nature and good of sacral concord falls to political philosophy in last place. Yet that philosopher can only grasp such realities as in a darkened mirror. His knowledge is limited even at its best to conclusions obedientially potent towards revelation (for example, articulating natural law regarding religion and theism). If his conclusions are not thus related in fact, they fall short of their true telos. Were they not thus relatable in principle, this would imply a metaphysical impossibility, for grace could not perfect a human nature ruled by such unnatural laws.
If political philosophy is thus demoted, then why is the mix-up so frequent? It seems to me this is because modern political philosophy by design has coopted higher orders of discourse and become erastian in its theory. The modern age works out its metaphysics in white papers and policy proposals, its public theology via judicial review.
(3) Practical achievement. Hittinger’s lecture helpfully underscores one extreme reaction to the Christian difference and subsequent practical question of sacral concord: Pelagianism. The avatars for Christendom or those who seek to assimilate the Church to a human group miss key causal truths. Faith cannot come about by mere human effort. As “faith is not naturally transmittible,” there is an intrinsic political impossibility about universalizing the kingdom on earth.
The other extreme, however, goes unnoted. It does not follow from the fact that we cannot accomplish an end of our own power or volition that the end will be accomplished without such efforts of ours. The other extreme, then, is a sort of quietism.
They are surely right who say that “Christendom dilutes Christianity.” Yet this is because the “Christendom” of which they speak is an erastian monstrosity in the grips of pelagian delusions of intra-worldly eschatological grandeur. The Christianity of which they speak, furthermore, was the offspring of that same monster: post-Reformation, disintegrated and diluted, “least-common-denominator” denominations, which the centuries have marched into quiet corners, there to shrink from the shadows of their former selves.
This is the danger of focusing upon Christianity as radically and merely personal in its renewal and redemption—a sort of salvation individualism—and not working through human nature’s very sociality, for we are credal only as we are social. Ultimately, there is such a danger because such a focus is without the Church. The only safe path to sacral harmony, therefore, is between pelagian delusion and quietistic retreat.
Would that the Te Deum be sung by all. But who would sing it now? Who would be their teachers?
5.
Few today would listen or be taught, you will say. Indeed, why is it, as Hittinger asks, that we Christians now meet with opprobrium not especially because of our supernatural claims but because of our moral ones? Perhaps it is less paradoxical when one considers that we now live in the future Newman foresaw:
You will say that their theories have been in the world and are no new thing. No. Individuals have put them forth, but they have not been current and popular ideas. Christianity has never yet had experience of a world simply irreligious.
“The Infidelity of the Future”
A pagan yet religious world is averse to claims contrary to its “supernatural” teachings. A wholly irreligious world finds such contrariety of little import. This has been called to the faithful’s attention again and again by the popes for over a century.**
There was once a time when States were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel.
Leo XIII, Immortale Dei [1 Nov 1885], n. 21 (referring to pre-1500’s)
Christian civilization itself is irreparably damaged thereby. In the face of our much praised progress, we behold with sorrow society lapsing back slowly but surely into a state of barbarism.
Pius XI, Ubi Arcano [23 Dec 1922], n. 15
And We remember saying that these manifold evils in the world were due to the fact that the majority of men had thrust Jesus Christ and his holy law out of their lives; that these had no place either in private affairs or in politics: and we said further, that as long as individuals and states refused to submit to the rule of our Savior, there would be no really hopeful prospect of a lasting peace among nations.
Pius XI, Quas Primas [11 Dec 1925], n. 1
For We are now confronted, as more than once before in the history of the Church, with a world that in large part has almost fallen back into paganism.
Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno [15 May 1931], n. 141
Even in countries evangelized many centuries ago, the reality of a “Christian society” which, amid all the frailties which have always marked human life, measured itself explicitly on Gospel values, is now gone.
John Paul II, Novo Millennio Ineunte [6 Jan 2001], n. 40
If Christianity, on [the] one hand, has found its most effective form in Europe, it is necessary, on the other hand, to say that in Europe a culture has developed that constitutes the absolutely most radical contradiction not only of Christianity, but of the religious and moral traditions of humanity.
Benedict XVI, “Subiaco Address,” 1 April 2005
Brothers and sisters, Christendom no longer exists! Today we are no longer the only ones who create culture, nor are we in the forefront or those most listened to. We need a change in our pastoral mindset, which does not mean moving towards a relativistic pastoral care. We are no longer living in a Christian world, because faith—especially in Europe, but also in a large part of the West—is no longer an evident presupposition of social life; indeed, faith is often rejected, derided, marginalized and ridiculed.
Francis, “Christmas Address to the Roman Curia,” 21 Dec 2019
This is the world in which the Church now finds herself. What will she do? Some write of the Church of 2050, others propose one-thousand-year visions. Even Maritain’s “new Christendom” of the third millenium will surely look very different from his imaginings. Any such new sacral harmony, born out of the ashes of a dying Christian West, must arise from the temporal order but not entirey due to it: “I should call myself an Anti-Liberal,” Newman writes, “because, in harmony with the Pope’s syllabus, I should say that the best thing of all is to have a Unity of religion in a country and that so real that its Ascendancy is but the expression of the universal mind.” (Letters and Diaries, 24:191–92)
Where to look for such ascendancy today? Those who know tell me that renewal is not to be found in the Old World or the New, but elsewhere: Africa, perhaps even Asia. Only time, and much time, could hope to tell.
Were we ever “integralists”? At least, we were never fully integralists; this has always been an aspiration within Christendom, realized periodically or incompletely. Any hopes integralism had in western Christendom began to be undone long before the Enlightenment, and one must think that not merely cultures or governments, but pre-political and supra-political goods and agents are causally effective upon regimes and sacred kingdoms.
After this death of western Christendom, what are we to hope for? Against modern, multi-form gnosticism, we must hope for a new Christendom, a sacral concord for the third millennium, whose form we cannot yet see or imagine. We must seek a new rebirth of nature’s freedom in Christ’s charity in the Catholic Church by an evangelizing renewal keyed to the harmony of faith and reason, nature and grace.
We?—Remember, why does integralism fail? It fails when the avatars of Christendom confuse the Kingdom with the horse that would get them there. Integralism fails when nature overreaches and assumes to itself a pelagian avatar of grace. Separationism fails when it falters and quietistically buries its talents in the ground.
To achieve a sacral concord here below is beyond mere human strength, but its achievement, for all that, is not possible without it or apart from it. “People say to me, that it is but a dream to suppose that Christianity should regain the organic power in human society which once it possessed. I cannot help that; I never said it could. I am not a politician; I am proposing no measures, but exposing a fallacy, and resisting a pretence.”
* In the above paragraph and the following one, the argument was developed in conversations with Urban Hannon. See his essay “Correlation, not Contrariety: A Response to Russell Hittinger.”
** For some of these quotes, I am thankful to Fr. James P. Shea’s From Christendom to Apostolic Mission.
John G. Brungardt 