James Rogers has raised some critically important questions regarding the Statement composed by National Conservatives in their response to what seems to be the universal experience of a radical disorder taking over the political arena, both “at home” and abroad.  Crises of this sort prompt renewed attention to first principles: one thing we may be grateful for, amidst all the contemporary distress, is that regular conversations have began about the very nature of the political order, and its relation to the Church, that would have been scarcely thinkable a couple of decades ago.

There is much in Rogers’s essay that I heartily agree with: his judgment that the National Conservatives stand for many things worth defending, but—to zero in on the principal criticism—they seem to get the Church-state relation exactly backwards: they presume that the nation-state is the fundamental human community, to which the Church is relative.  They thus generally give the state a purpose and function only the Church can properly fulfill.  In response, Rogers proposes an “ecclesiocentric” politics, which recognizes the Church as the telos of human community, and so relativizes the state to it.

The concern that giving an unqualified priority to the nation-state is both dangerous in itself and ultimately incompatible with the Christian faith is valid, and the criticism could even be amplified—along the lines of the “Open Letter,” composed by John Milbank and others, that the European Conservative has published subsequent to the original Statement.  Moreover, the insistence on an “ecclesiocentric” politics is also to be affirmed.  But, as the old saying goes, “The devil is in the details”; as some of the responses to Rogers’s essay have already made clear, making the Church the center of the political order can mean a great variety of things, and subtle differences in formulation can have profound implications, not only for how we understand politics, but how we understand the Church and the faith, and indeed how we understand human life simply.

Because of the brevity of space here, instead of commenting on the breadth of points Rogers makes in his essay, I want to try to go into a little depth regarding a single point, with the hope that it might imply a response in principle to the various other things said.  The passage I want to reflect on is the following:

Aristotle’s immanentist teleology sees the earthly polis as the end or summation of earthly communities. Hence, for Aristotle, the polis is the community that encompasses all other communities. The Scriptures, however, identify the Church as the telos of the earthly polis and the earthly ethnos. Therefore the true nature of the earthly polis and the earthly ethnos is found in the Church and not vice-versa. The Christian understands the nation-state from and within the Church and her telos.

Rogers is here setting into opposition an Aristotelian perspective, which would absolutize an “immanentist teleology,” and a Scriptural perspective, which would relativize the immanent sphere of the earthly polis to the eschaton.  The thesis I want to argue is that this opposition seems to presuppose a dualism, an extrinsicism, in the way it conceives the relation between the immanent and the eschaton, which proves to have disastrous consequences for both the Church and the earthly polis.

The quickest way into the thesis is to consider an alternative interpretation from the perspective of one who shares Rogers’s concern to do justice to the Scriptural account of human existence in this world, namely, that of Thomas Aquinas.  To put the matter very simply, Aquinas both affirms Aristotle’s account of the earthly polis as a comprehensive human society and affirms the superiority of the Church to the polis even in the temporal order.  This might seem like a straightforward contradiction, but it is actually a richly nuanced paradox, which cannot but remain obscure to any thinking that simply concedes normative significance to the modern political category of the secular nation-state.

In his commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, Aquinas says the following:

If every society is ordered to a good, that society which is the highest necessarily seeks in the highest degree the good that is the highest among all human goods. . . .  Now it is clear that the city includes all the other societies, for households and villages are both comprised under the city; and so political society itself is the highest society. Therefore, it seeks the highest among all human goods, for it aims at the common good, which is better and more divine than the good of one individual, as is stated in the beginning of the Ethics.  (I.1.11)

Aquinas does not mention the Church here, which would of course have been outside of the purview of Aristotle, on whom he is directly commenting, but it is important to see that, though he takes the Church for granted himself, he does not qualify his assertion, not only that the earthly polis is set on the highest among all human goods, but that this ordering is inevitable (necesse).  This needs to be given a strong reading: it is not simply that the earthly city ought to be set on the highest human good, but that it cannot help but be set on the highest good, whether it understands itself to be determined in this way or not.  The force of this point stands out in greater relief when we consider the Latin phrase that the standard translation, cited above, renders in English as “[the city] seeks in the highest degree the good that is the highest.”  What the Latin in fact says is that the city cannot help but interpret the highest of human goods—more literally, the city cannot help but be a determinative conjecture regarding the highest good, or in other words, it cannot help but project the nature of the good to be aimed at: necesse est quod illa communitas quae est maxime principalis, maxime sit coniectatrix boni quod est inter omnia humana bona principalissimum.

The point seems to be the following: human beings, as social, or indeed political, by nature, will always tend to live together, and, because they are rational, they will invariably give their common life an organization according to ordering principles.  That organization will inevitably present an interpretation of the goods that determine human existence, either by excluding certain things, or instead by including them, designating them as things to be protected and fostered.  Again, this is not simply something that a community ought to do; it is something a community necessarily does insofar as it organizes human existence.

The objection to this point that immediately occurs to the modern imagination, if that imagination is Christian, is that the claim that the polis itself aims at the highest good threatens to subordinate the Church to this human society.  But this is an incorrect inference; the logic is much more subtle: if the highest good of man is in fact super-natural, if man has an eschatological destiny beyond the temporal order, then the highest human society will necessarily order itself in relation to this telos, either protecting and fostering it or denying it.  The highest human society cannot be neutral.  For Aquinas, who lived of course in a thoroughly Christian world, the polis understood itself spontaneously to be Christian, from top to bottom, and the king understood himself as ruling over subjects with a supernatural destiny.  This was a radically “ecclesiocentric” politics, because the Christian kingdom was not a “secular” realm, like the “nation-state,” lying somehow outside of the Church; instead, it was something more like the temporal or earthly face of the Church, the life of the Church precisely in this world.  This comprehensive view of politics did not discredit the Church or trump its authority; precisely to the contrary, it gave the Church and her official minsters—the priests and religious, the bishops and the pope—a central significance not only regarding man’s eschatological destiny, but also in the world.  It is just this integration of a polis set on the highest good and the Church directly communicating that highest good, that allowed the Christian faith to enter so deeply into every aspect of human existence.  Andrew Willard Jones’s book, Before Church and State, is a beautiful account of this properly Christian form of community.

Now, as the passage cited from his essay indicates, Rogers also conceives the Church as the telos of the polis, the family, and the ethnos.  The problem is that he interprets “telos” in an extrinsicist fashion, or, more specifically, in a linear, immanentist rather than a metaphysical or transcendental manner.  Thus, for him, the Church is the true polis, family, and ethnos, which means it will ultimately take their place.  These realities are good “for now,” as it were, but their validity is short-lived.  The problem with this conception is that it assumes a fairly crass notion of telos: “When the fulfillment comes the type passes away.”  It is not at all clear how this can be a fulfillment; it is much more a replacement of one thing by another.  The Church can only be the fulfillment of the polis, family, and ethnos, if those things are ordered to the Church even now.  But this implies that the truth of the Church already now bears on the very form of these earthly realities, or, seen from the other side, these realities already anticipate the eschatological fulfillment in their nature, which is to say that they themselves are—again, already now—images that participate in that ultimate reality.  If this is the case, it of course bears on how they ought to be organized, and we are again brought back to the earlier point made above.  But now we can add a new dimension: the institutional form of the polis will not only inevitably interpret the highest human good; it will also inevitably present an image of, or analogy to, the Church—and it will do so either adequately or inadequately, in a manner that distorts the nature of the Church.

Thus, while it is true to say, as Rogers does in the passage we quoted, that “The Christian understands the nation-state from and within the Church and her telos,” it is also true that the Christian will come to the Church from within his polis, and that he will inevitably interpret the nature of the ecclesial community in light of what he understands “community” to mean.  In other words, the light of the Church will inevitably pass through the filter of the polis.  This is a logical point, but one could also show historically that there has always been a reciprocal relation between the nature of the Church in a particular age and the nature of the political order—from the very beginning of Christianity, when the apostles already began to appropriate Roman political forms, symbols, rites, and institutions, to the contemporary age when the Catholic Church has begun promoting “synodality” as an ecclesial ideal.  The question is never whether the political form bears on one’s relation to the Church, because it inevitably does; the question is simply whether that form is adequate to the Church according to the proper sense of analogy, or whether it distorts it.

If this argument carries weight, it is a bad “strategy” to attempt to restore substance to the Church in the contemporary world by limiting the scope of the earthly city, which has been the aim of liberal political theory from the beginning.  It is now becoming clear to all but the most ideologically blinded that this political theory has failed.  The difficulty with the liberal strategy is that, if the aim of the earthly polis is artificially limited, this neither keeps it from interpreting the highest human good nor does it relieve the polis of its function as being an analogy to the Church.  Instead, it makes an implicit claim about the highest human good in self-reinforcing ignorance, and it is a claim it nevertheless ends up imposing in totalitarian fashion on every dimension of human existence without having to defend it or be held accountable to any higher authority.

What is more, this radically impoverished political order, again by necessity, inevitably presents itself as an analogy to the Church, which means it ends up interpreting the nature of the Church as a mirror to its own disorder.  The understanding and experience of faith in this case becomes a reflection of the fragmentations and dialectical inversions that haunt liberalism: the Church is forced into a radically democratic form, faith becomes privatized, a matter of the free choice of atomized individuals, the Church becomes a free association of individuals in civil society, a “pre-political” phenomenon that cannot sustain its own substance in the face of the actually political, but immediately volatilizes like a shadowy image in relation to the reality.  And so forth.  If the polis is simply replaced in the eschaton by the Church, then the Church cannot but be left effectively out of the picture, so to speak, in the current age.  To have a truly “ecclesiocentric” politics, we need to recover a sense of politics as concerned with nothing less than the whole truth of man, from natural reality to supernatural destiny.  Only a politics set on the whole truth will be able to respect the authority of the Church.

D.C. Schindler is Professor of Metaphysics and Anthropology at the John Paul II Institute.