The Sacred Public Square

By Ruben C. Alvarado
Contra Mundum, No. 8, Summer 1993
Copyright 1993 Ruben Alvarado

Part I: The Abandonment of the Gentleman's Agreement

The attack on liberal democracy proceeds apace even at the hour of its apparent triumph. Its principles once again seem indefensible. Its creedindividual greed. It's every man, or woman, for him- or herself in a scramble to survive. What's mine is mine; forget the rest. It has no public spirit, no consideration for the poor or the weak and less-fortunate. But now an alternative form of society beckons to modern man. It offers mankind the hope of oneness, of community, of sharing, of the healing of wounds, the breakdown of barriers, of wholeness. It is the political philosophy of community, which will supersede the game of possessive individualism and unrestrained economic growth. For community is a dream in which everyone is assured of receiving his due, materially, spiritually, socially. Community means that no one need ever again be lonely, nor suffer material want, nor worry about the money to pay the bills. Community means that people can cease fighting with each other and instead help each other with their burdens. It means the strong will put the weak back onto their feet, not pin them to the ground and hold them there. Wrongs will be forgiven, not avenged; slights, forgotten; and the soul healed from the wounds and bitterness of conflict. Community could never be achieved under the regime of liberal democracy, because hearts are set on material things, and on competition for material things; for acquisition of property, and preservation of property. This soulless system calls not upon the good, the virtuous, the just, but rather upon the agreement to disagree about everything of real importance, in order to concentrate upon base interests, wants, ambitions. And indeed, the hallmark of liberal democracy is to reduce the common ground of society to those material aspects and elements of a civilization which are mundane at best and fundamentally corrupt at worst. Televisions, VCRs, cars, refrigerators, microwave ovens, toasters, vacuum cleanersthese are the substance of our social contract.

But is not life more than bread, the body more than clothing? Are things all we are concerned with in our common life, as citizens of communities and nations? Isn't there more to life in society than an agreement to keep one's hands off what belongs to someone else? There are those who, in responding to these questions in the negative, have built an industry on exposing as many of the injustices (real or imagined) of liberal democracy. In so doing, they satisfy a deep psychological urge: to shake up those corpulent, complacent little burghers, so smug and satisfied in their apparent prosperity. Then there are those who decry the laxity and moral corruption liberal society allows and even seems to positively nurture. To the left, this society continually violates the canons of social justice; to the right, it continually undermines civic virtue.1 Nevertheless, for better or worse we are all active participants in, yea beneficiaries of, liberal democracy. During this time of post-socialism, post-Berlin Wall, post-Cold War reckoning of balance sheets, most if not nearly all of us give grudging approval to what this system does seem capable of providing: a distribution and balance of wealth superior to that ever attained by any civilization in history.2 It does not fill the emptiness in our hearts, but it does fill our bellies. But there is a more fundamental reason for the success of liberal democracy. Economic efficiency in itself does not explain this society's success. Even given its marvelous economic performance, liberal democracy would not succeed if there were not an even more basic criterion upon which to ground its legitimacy. Liberal democracy, in fact, satisfies basic criteria of justice, apart from any consideration of efficiency. Which is why its critics have failed to overthrow it. Despite incessant attacks from both right and left during the 300 or so years of its existence, it stands bloodied but unbowedin J.G.A. Pocock's words, a tormented but oddly triumphant entity3because its critics have not recognized the true secret of its success: the focus of the rle of the state on the administration of commutative justice.
On the left the charge is one of failure in social humanism: the liberal individual is said to be engrossed in acquisitive activity, and so to detach himself from a politics which he pays to repress those whom acquisitiveness excludes. On the right the charge is one of failure in civic and intellectual humanism: both the acquisitive individual and the wage-earning individual who looks to the state for protection against him are charged with abandonment of politics - by which is meant the heroic moralism of political and philosophical decision, practice, and contemplation. J.G.A. Pocock, Authority and Property: The Question of Liberal Origins, in Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 60. 2 Apart from ancient Israel during such times as after the conquest of the Promised Land under Joshua: And the Lord gave to Israel all the land which He swore to give to their fathers. And they possessed it, and lived in it. And the Lord gave them rest round about, according to all that He swore to their fathers. And not a man of all their enemies stood before them. Jehovah delivered all their enemies into their hand. Not any good thing which the Lord had spoken to the house of Israel failed. All came to pass. (Joshua 21:43-45, MKJV). 3 Virtues, Rights, and Manners: A Model for Historians of Political Thought, in Virtue, Commerce, and History, p. 38. 1

The legitimacy of liberal democracy therefore hinges on its peculiar implementation of justice, even more than efficiency. As shall be shown, though, considerations of justice not only explain its success, but expose it's Achilles's heel. Inquiry lays bare the perilous situation awaiting us if we do not recognize the character of the issues involved; it also points to the way beyond modern society's present stalemate. Truly, Western civilization, and the world with it, is poised toward progress or collapse. The concept of commutative justice was first put forward by Aristotle, also the first philosopher to discuss the concept of justice in a detailed and systematic manner. Aristotle distinguished commutative justice from distributive justice. Commutative justice Aristotle called contractual justice: it ensured that buying and selling were done on the basis of equalityi.e. that the value of the exchanged items were really equal. This principle of equality was also the basis for restitution, which he also included under commutative justice. Restitution demanded that infractions of law be punished according to the nature of the crime, with the penalty equalling, and so commuting, the damage done by the crime. So commutative justice is equalizing justice, ensuring that where the principle of equality applies, it is adhered to. But not all justice had to do with equality. Aristotle recognized another category of justice, distributive justice, which concerned what one was due in regard to a certain status one might possess. Thus, a father is due honor not due a child, because a father is greater than a child in certain respects, such as his authority. Distributive justice would demand that the father, among other things, receive consideration in law in those things which are peculiar to his fatherhood; in this instance, that he be recognized as having authority over his child possessed by no one else. To accord him this position is to do justice to him in terms of his status. Thus, distributive justice accords rights in terms of special, distinguishing characteristics, not in accordance with a general principle of equality. Although this approach to the concept of justice was not introduced to the West until the thirteenth century, the ground had been prepared for this reintroduction by the development of the concept of jurisdiction. Jurisdiction evolved in medival society as multiple loci of authority took root, splitting society into a multiplicity of groupings. Authority came to be restricted, and assigned in terms of hierarchy as well as function. The basic separation was that of Church and State; this separation proved the driving force behind the differentiation of the remainder of society. Underlying the separation of Church and State was the distinction between the sacred and the secular. Contrary to popular opinion, medival society was not conceived as a unitary society. Much rather, it was based on the fundamental Augustinian separation: the division between the spiritual society and the natural society, the eternal community and the temporal community, the City of God and the City of Man. In Augustine's approach, the City of God existed in the City of Manearthly human societybut was not of the City of Man. These two societies had two different ends; the spiritual society sojourned in the midst of the natural society, but had a supernatural and eternal destiny. The natural 3

society would perish; the spiritual society would live forever with God. What this meant was that earthly life was denied ultimacy. The spiritual, eternal end of man relativized all of his earthly activity. This relativization found expression through the institutional church, which claimed authority over man's eternal destiny. The state was demoted to the rle of overseeing temporal matters. Along these lines jurisdiction was realized in practice. For the church to have jurisdiction of spiritual affairs meant that spiritual affairs had to be defined, and the same held true for the state. The limitation of the state's jurisdiction to temporal affairs relativized the state's competence: the state could not usurp supremacy over all of life. The state could no longer act as an end in itself. Its jurisdiction over temporal matters meant that it would have to establish and maintain a framework of laws expressive of principles of justice lying beyond its power. The fruitfulness of this division of powers was realized in the collaboration of the two powers in defining and administering justice. For the kind of justice which the state needed to enforce needed to be defined, and the church stood tall to ensure that the justice which was enforced was justice in correspondence with God's will. The felicity of such an arrangement is evident, for if the executor of justice also defines justice, it cannot be held to account by anyone or anything outside of itself. For the state to exercise the ministry of justice while the church is recognized as the source of the principles of justice is to ensure a constitutional arrangement in which power is fundamentally and conclusively constrainedboth horizontally and vertically. Thomas Aquinas buttressed this arrangement by introducing the Aristotelian analysis of justice. As a doctor of the church, Thomas was concerned precisely with defining justice to provide a standard by which the civil magistrate could properly conduct his ministry. In appropriating Aristotle's conception, though, Thomas also worked a fundamental reorientation to that conception in accordance with Christendom's Augustinian jurisdictional framework.4 For Aristotle's view of justice was conceived within a pre-redemption context: that of the polis, the ancient Greek city-state. The polis was the be-all and end-all of earthly existence, while earthly existence was the be-all and end-all of human existence itself. Life extended to the physical and temporal borders of the polis, and no farther. This community, being absolute, constituted the boundaries and framework of justice. The whole, therefore, was greater than the parts; in importance, the collective superseded the individual. As far as justice was concerned, therefore, Aristotle's version of commutative justice tended to be swallowed up in distributive justice. That is,
4 On this point, as well as on this discussion in general, see Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987). The discerning reader will notice that my argument differs from MacIntyre's mainly in deriving liberalism's legitimacy from criteria of justice rather than efficiency.

commutative justice, which defined relations between individuals, took second place to distributive justice, by which individuals were accorded status and benefits in terms of the community. The community held all the cards. Distributive justice depended upon the community's judgement as to who was worthy of the privileges and benefits which it had to distribute. Distributive justice established reward in terms of status, and the decision as to who was worthy was left up to the community, i.e. the powers that be within the community whose decisions could not be gainsaid. Contractual give-and-take, the validity of activities whose roots lie in the freedom of choice between private actors, was thus accorded secondary status. Among other things, this deadened commercial life. Dooyeweerd summed up Aristotle's approach thusly: The whole Aristotelian conception of commutative justice has its background in his aversion to commercial trade and interest. In his opinion the latter threaten the virtue of the community, because they are to be viewed as unnatural methods of enrichment and are not primarily directed to mutual and equal service, which is a communal duty. Interest (tokos ) cannot rightly arise from money, because the latter, being inanimate, is not able to beget (tokouein ). And commercial trade which has its aim in profit making is unworthy of a citizen since it stimulates the striving for wealth as an end in itself, whereas wealth can only be a means to the fulfillment of the task of the good citizen.5 When the community both defines and administers justice, inter-individual justice, and thus individual freedom, is inevitably shortchanged. The group becomes all-embracing. Essential to the proper administration of justice, then, was the realization that justice cannot be both defined and administered by the same community, for the community then becomes an end in itself and orders all things in terms of its own ultimacy. In order to obtain the proper relation between distributive and commutative justice, the monopoly of the community needed to be broken. To achieve this, Thomas insisted that the church must establish the basic criteria of justice. Justice is a virtue, indeed the chief of the virtues; its fulfillment, therefore, is an issue of virtue and of morality, and to that degree therefore falls under the jurisdiction of the church. For the church must oversee the affairs of men to ensure that their supernatural end is promoted, and that spiritual corruption is mitigated; injustice is sin, and cannot be abided, as it cuts men off from fulfilling their supernatural end of beatitude with God. The church, therefore, has to hold rulers accountable to a standard of justice consistent with the justice of God. The state exists to promote and further the common good of the society over which it is set. The essence of that mandate is the administration of justice, in terms of law which
5 Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought (Jordan Station, Ontario, Canada: Paideia Press Ltd., 1983 [1969]), vol. III, p. 213.

corresponds with the law of God. Divine justice stands over and defines earthly justice. The concepts of distributive and commutative justice receive definition in terms of the divine law-order as expressed in the Bible and the teachings of the church, the basic standard being the Ten Commandments. The entry of the church into the lives of pagan nations broke the monopoly of the community over the lives of individuals and released commutative justice from subordination to distributive justice. The doctrine of the atonement showed the centrality of the principle of retribution, a commutative concept, to the Biblical concept of justice. If even God Himself could not simply do away with sin, but had to actually pay that penalty through the death of His Son, then surely an immutable principle of justice was put forward here which man must honor in his own administration of justice. Anselm was the theologian who first fully appreciated the significance of the atonement as the foundational demonstration of justice; the Anselmian doctrine was basic to the church's view of justice.6 The freeing-up of commutative justice from distributional value-judgments became especially visible in laws regarding economic behavior. In general, and as a matter of basic principle, the market for Thomas became the determinant of value for exchanged goods or services, and the market also determined wage levels. Justice here was achieved by adhering to the common estimation as arrived at in the marketplace, not by fixing prices and wages by decree (although the possibility and legitimacy of such action, in certain circumstances, was not ruled out). Private property and trade fell under the auspices of commutative rather than distributive justice.7 Thomas's outworking of justice, expounded in the second section of the second book of his Summa Theologica, spawned a tradition of moral theology in which basic criteria of justice were developed and applied to the elements of evolving Western civilization. One of the most comprehensive treatments of justice within Thomist tradition was put forward in the sixteenth century by the Spanish Dominican theologian Domingo de Soto in his work De Iustitia et Iure (Of Justice and Law).8 De Soto grounded his discussion of justice on the distinction between distributive and commutative justice. His discussion of commutative justice began as follows: Before beginning the treatment of the second kind of justice, which is opposite to distributive justicei.e. commutative justiceit is necessary to
6 Cf. Harold Berman Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 174ff. 7 For an introduction to the Thomist approach to justice with regard to economic activity, with special reference to the Spanish school of Salamanca, see Alejandro Chafuen, Christians for Freedom: LateScholastic Economics (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1986), passim. For a quick survey of the Thomist free-market tradition, see Murray Rothbard, Late Medieval Origins of Free-Market Economic Thought, in Gary North, ed., The Journal of Christian Reconstruction: Symposium on Economic Thought, v. II, no. 1, Summer 1975. 8 Domingo de Soto (d. 1560) was a pupil and colleague of Francisco de Vitoria at the University of Salamanca in the sixteenth century.

speak concerning the two things which serve as its basis: first, of the ownership [dominium] of things, and thereafter of restitution. In truth, ownership of things and their division is the basis and foundation of all contracts, pacts and agreements of which commutative justice is concerned. It follows that all vices which oppose this virtue are violations and abuses of ownership and property of things. Therefore such injustices and trespasses must be compensated by way of restitution.9 The restriction of property and restitution to commutative justice is clear. Distributive justice therefore has nothing to do with redistributing private property; it is limited to administering those honors and emoluments which the state might bequeath, as well as goods held in common by the people and administered as a trust by the state. The application of these principles of commutative justice to jurisprudence was the work of another Spaniard, the jurist and protege of Domingo de Soto, Fernando Vazquez de Menchaca (d. 1569). Vazquez brought together Thomist moral philosophy, Roman-legal jurisprudence, and European customary law in a ground-breaking synthesis which put the juridical doctrine of subjective rights on center stage. In so doing, Vazquez brought the concept of commutative justice to full expression. In Vazquez's system, subjective rights were based upon the criteria of distributive justice and served to give it concrete expression. Vazquez also took a crucial step further: he defined these rights, jura, as property, dominia, thus bringing rights within the purview of commutative justice. Vazquez harnessed the complementarity of distributive and commutative justice for jurisprudence. Vazquez applied the Thomist conception of the nature of man, as made in the image of God, to legal theory. By virtue of his being made in God's image, man possessed dominium, dominion, as an inherent aspect of his nature. The command to pursue dominion, made by God in Genesis ch. 1, was thus a command to live out the image of God.10 It was also the way in which man expressed his freedom. Freedom is gained through the exercise of dominion. The freedom of the will is the dominion of Spirit over flesh, the subjection of the passions to reason. Dominion and freedom therefore are correlative expressions of the image of God. Man exercises dominion as a proper expression of his freedom. True freedom is dominion carried out in obedience to God's will. One of the ways in which this freedom/dominion principle became concrete was through the institution of private property. Man expressed dominion through taking possession of parts of the creation; when he worked those parts, he added value to them. The sum of his works made up culture. His works were his property; the division of property was essential to human culture, indeed to human survival.11
9 De Soto, De Iustitia et Iure, Book IV, Prologue. 10 On this point, see Peter Leithart's discussion in his article, What is the Kingdom of God? Contra Mundum, No. 5, Fall 1992, p. 7f. 11 One of Vazquez's arguments in favor of private property echoes the modern argument of the tragedy of

But with the Fall of man, men began to envy their neighbors and then to usurp their goods. Warfare was the result. This brought another form of dominium - that of man over manto offset the inability of men to restrain their appetites. God subjected men to the coercive authority of other men both as punishment for sin and to mitigate the effects of sin. The dominus-servus, lordship/subjection relationship, so alien to man's original state, found institutional expression in the state. Given the reason for its institutionto restrain man's attacks on his fellow manits primary purpose lay in the preservation of the institution of private property, since the root cause of warfare was envy. The state, therefore, did not exist as an end in itself. Vazquez was perhaps the sixteenth century's most vociferous exponent of restrictions on state power. The state could only act where it had just cause to act; its laws must not only not contradict the principles of justice (lex permissiva ), they must be direct expressions of that justice (lex praeceptiva ). No human law is legally binding if it is unjust. In such a case, the civil magistrate was required, not just admonished, to set aside the law in favor of justice.12 As for Vazquez the state existed to preserve legitimate property rights, its right to interfere with or revoke property rights was severely restricted. Such interference or revocation could only be justified in the case of public necessity narrowly defined, and needed always to be accompanied by just compensation. Vazquez's conception of the fundamental importance of property rights was a direct development of both the Thomist philosophical and the Bartolist Roman-legal traditions. Where he innovated was in attributing the status of dominium, of property, to all specific legal positions held by citizens. As a result, rights were vested with the same protections and privileges as property in the strict sense. The state existed to establish citizens in their acquired rights. Thus, not only did the state exist in the interest of property owners in the narrow sense, but also in the interest of property-owners in the broad sense: all rightsbearing citizens were protected in their property by the state. The general principles of distributive justice were hereby translated into the specific terms administrable through commutative justice. In Vazquez's system, the full recognition of both man's status as a being created in the image of God and fallen away from God comes to fruition. Man's dominion is the expression of this image; dominion is also placed over man, to mitigate his rebellion. Man's exercise of dominion is greatly restricted by the establishment of institutionalized dominium of man over manthe stateyet dominion remains an essential aspect of his nature, a potential waiting to be actualized. Within the framework of the rule of law and
the commons natural resources would be reduced to nothing if exploitation were unrestricted, open to all. 12 Fernandus Vasquius, Controversiae Illustres, I, 29 [section] 19; quoted in Ernst Reibstein, Die Anfnge des Neueren Natur- und Vlkerrechts: Studien zu den Controversiae Illustres des Fernandus Vasquius (1559) (Bern: Verlag Paul Haupt, 1949), p. 90.

progress in the virtues, his dominion-potential can be actualized; this actualization finds expression in rights granted by the state, which once granted were irrevocable. One could not ask for a more summary and comprehensive description of the core of Western constitutionalism.13 In getting from an Aristotelian to a Thomist concept of justice, one should take notice of the change which was wrought in pushing back the hegemony of the state and freeing the private sector from state tyranny. The establishment of jurisdiction, and chiefly a spiritual jurisdiction along Christian lines, created the room for unprecedented political freedom. But even though much greater individual freedom was on offer here than could ever have been hoped for in Aristotle's polis, this freedom was bought with a price: agreement as to the moral, philosophical, and theological foundations of the state. That agreement was brokered, not by the state, but by the church. If the church should ever fall down on the job, then the state would be freed to again make up its own standard of justice. Such would be devastating to the social order of Christendom. Such, we know, also came to pass. With the miserable failure of the Roman church to fulfill the promise of this ministry, and consequentially the unstoppable rise of absolute monarchy, a return was made to the ancient polis, only this time one more akin to Rome than Athens. The age of the imperial nation-state superseded the age of faith. Little wonder that revived forms of Aristotelianism were applied to bolster the authority of the king along the lines of Aristotle's original formulation of justice.14 The scholastic conception of justice was by and large rejected, because of its theocratic nature. The crowning blow to medival Christendom, the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) seemed to have brought an end to civilization itself. Quite definitely the Europe of unity and community was no more; and everyone knew it. The chief cause of conflict? Religion. No one agreed anymore to the primacy of Rome. And even less could they agree upon a replacement. But common submission to the teachings of the Roman church had been the basis for the civilization of Christendom. What could take the place of that? One of the towering intellectual figures in that age of devastation, the Dutch jurist and statesman Hugo Grotius, was hard at work on a solution. How could the peace be restored which had vanished along with disintegration of the medival world? Grotius hit upon the answer. What was dividing the peoples and nations was the inability to agree upon revealed religion. Some substitute common ground had to be found to replace it. But what kind of bond could be found which could unite people who did not share first principles? Well, people had come to share a broad common ground with respect to the kind of
13 I know of no material in English which discusses Vazquez in any detail. My sources for this description are: Ernst Reibstein's work quoted in n10 above; Reibstein, Johannes Althusius als Fortsetzer der Schule von Salamanca: Untersuchungen zur Ideengeschicthe des Rechstaates und zur altprotestantischen Naturrechtslehre (Karlsruhe: Verlag C.F. Mller, 1955); Kurt Seelmann, Die Lehre des Fenando Vazquez de Menchaca vom Dominium (Kln, et al.: Carl Heymanns Verlag KG, 1979). 14 See H. Dreitzel, Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat; die Politica des H. Arnisaeus, Veroft. d. Inst. f. Europaische Geschichte, Mainz, LV (Wiesbaden, 1970).

earthly existence they were after. Protection in their liberty and property, the right to commerce and to travel, the right to do business and live their own lives. A framework of laws in which people would be protected in these rights could be sufficient to bond them together in a society. The criteria of commutative justice could serve to regulate the affairs of state, if everyone agreed that the purpose of the state was not to impose one particular vision of the good on its citizens, but simply to respect differences of opinion here and agree only to act when one citizen's rights are violated by another. And since the category of distributive justice is dependent upon the kind of subjective value-judgments to which agreement cannot be found, that category would have to be eliminated from the purview of the state. Along these lines, Grotius elaborated the theory which would became the basis of liberal democracy. Its principles are enunciated in his The Right of War and Peace, first published in 1625, at the height of the Thirty Years' War.15 The heart of his argument lay in the denial of the category of distributive justice as the standard of public justice, and the elevation of commutative justice to a position of exclusivity. Justice itself simply meant respect for another's rights. Grotius was heavily dependent upon Vazquez for his system, both positively and negatively.16 His approach to civil lawrights on center-stage, defined as propertywas taken from Vazquez. But contrary to Vazquez and the entire Thomist tradition, rights for Grotius were held by individuals a priori, outside the state, and so were not created by or given by the state. Rather, there had existed a pre-civil condition, called the state of nature, in which men had the right to avenge the infringement of their rights, even to inflict the penalty of death on the violator. Each individual was the equivalent of a sovereign in international law: each could act as judge in his own cause. With the formation of the state, that right of administering justice was transferred to the state. Other rights need not be, however, and in fact the only reason the state was formed was to provide a better means to achieve such an administration of justice. The rights which needed defending needed undergo no change at all in the switch to civil society. Grotius thus reversed the relationship between distributive and commutative justice put forward by Aristotle. Commutative justice had now swallowed up distributive justice. This approach, which elevated the sovereignty of the individual to a decisive position in jurisprudence, was new with Grotius. Grotius took Vazquez's doctrine of rights and turned it into a metaphysical first principle. Vazquez had never attributed sovereignty to the individual; the state of nature in that sense was Grotius's innovation. For Vazquez, as for the Thomist tradition, nearly all rights were civil rights, expressions of principles of
15 The Prologue to this work can be considered the charter of liberal democracy. 16 For Grotius, Vazquez's besetting sin was his penchant to subordinate the civil magistrate to strict, and strictly enforceable, criteria of justice. Such Vazquezian positions as the contractual nature of positive law and the concomitant right to resist a ruler who acts above the law were anathema to Grotius. Grotius's concern was to free the sovereign from any sort of judicial review based on church-defined criteria. He made the individual a juridical sovereign, in order to legitimate the state's sovereignty in public affairs.

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justice within the framework of a constitutional state-order.17 Grotius's approach constituted the foundation for what would become modern democracynatural rights. It should be clear from the previous discussion that liberal democracy derived its basis from the theocracy which preceded it. It took one-half of its concept of justice, and left the other half behind. It is here that liberalism delivered a hostage to fortune. Basic to the liberal order was what would later come to be termed the bourgeois family, the nuclear family of husband, wife, and children, crucial to which are the authority of the husband and the right to pass down property to children. The authority of the husband meant inequality between husband and wife, which meant inequality between men and women. That was selfevident principle #1 which would come up for reevaluation. Inheritance meant property rights, and it meant the accumulation of wealth, passed down to future generations which were thereby privileged with respect to those who were not so fortunate as to have prosperous forebears. Self-evident principle #2 which would lose such status rather quickly. Now these foundations of the liberal order were presupposed. They did not in fact have any theoretical legitimacy within the system. For in denying the category of distributive justice, liberalism denied the validity of any institution or authority with legitimacy based in status, whose origins could not be traced to a contractual basis. All authority required an act of positive will to be legitimate. Each individual, remember, was a juridical sovereign. Natural rights were the expression of that sovereignty, and were to protect the institutions of liberalism. But in fact, rights proved to work directly against those institutions. As soon as the tacit agreement as to the pillars of liberal society evaporated, war would commence, with rights as the weapon of choice among the antagonists. The hollowness of Grotius' solution becomes apparent when the nature of rights is considered. To make rights the criteria of justice is to beg the question of what justice is supposed to accomplish. Rights in themselves affirm nothing but the power of one person to something, at the expense of someone else. Rights are exclusive. One's rights will infringe another's. That is the very nature of a right. In themselves, therefore, rights do nothing to mediate relationships between human beings. They only do so when they are expressions of principles of justice which do mediate those relationships. Rights only serve to specify in concrete terms the broader demands of justice and law. In the heyday of liberalism, rights could serve as the subject matter of justice because everyone implicitly agreed upon their content. But with the evaporation of that common standard, rights became the subject of controversy and weapons for the achievement of
17 Individual rights could exist and develop only on the foundation of the general doctrine of natural right and in the climate of constitutional government [klima des Rechtsstaates ]. Reibstein, Die Anfnge, p. 137.

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aims directly opposed to the original liberal program. The direct offspring of natural rightshuman rightsbecame the vehicle for the reentrance of the category of distributive justice on the juridical stage. Human rights reintroduced subjective valuejudgments, status judgments, as to what a person is entitled apart from any considerations of contract. The doctrine of natural rights left a peculiar vacuum at the heart of civil society which liberal democracy was never able to fill. The category of distributive justice cannot be gotten rid of. For as history continues to demonstrate, civil society is as incurably religious as are the individuals of which it is composed; and it expresses its religious belief in its concept of justice, in particular, in the way it conceives and relates distributive to commutative justice. The very existence of an integral, answerable version of commutative justice depends upon a concept of distributive justice: the two are related as sides of the same coin. Value determinations are essential to maintain the viability of commutative justice, because judgments concerning rights and contracts rest upon a framework of understandings within which contract can operate. It is not enough to base all considerations of justice upon the bare idea of pacta sunt servanda, agreements must be kept, as Grotius navely assumed. That is pure formalism. It is the content that matters, and content is supplied by the notion of justice as a criterion of value, of commitment, of faith. The category of distributive justice has returned to the public square, even while democracy claims to function in terms of the principle of neutrality. This should come as no surprise. That it is fueling a political process which Alasdair MacIntyre has termed civil war carried on by other means18 should also come as no surprise. Contemporary society is at war with itself, using the juridical weapons of warfare shaped during the medival period. This war is a war over first principles, just as in the time of the wars of religion. It is being conducted in the name of rights: the right to work vs. the right to the cheapest, most efficiently produced goods; women's rights vs. the right to life; children's rights vs. parents' rights; freedom of religion vs. freedom from religion. Rights have become tools, weapons, clubs, to be wielded by the politically most vociferous, most influential, most survivable in the Darwinian sense. A religious crusade is being conducted under the camouflage of rights, the kind of crusade which liberal democracy was supposed to have averted. Considerations of merit, of status, of moral value and religion are taking center stage in public life, the public square, which was supposed to be kept free of such divisive considerations. Society's very foundations are being swept away in a flood of deeply religious programs and agendas. The gentleman's agreement to respect each other's rights has been transformed into a fanaticism of ramming as much of one's partisan agenda as possible onto the lawbooks, through the legislature, the courts, or simple executive decree. Winner take all. The promise of majoritarianism, fulfilled according to the prophetsBurke, de

18 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), p. 253.

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Tocqueville, Groen van Prinsterer19with the corroborating testimony of Jos Ortega y Gasset.20 The root error is to assume that the public square could be kept closed to value judgments. Such a situation is much rather the prelude to barbarism: barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made.21 As if society could be content in a negative sort of partnership, agreeing to only a bare amount of rules (which, of course, rested on agreement as to a certain standard anyway) regarding private property and liberties, while leaving the community as such without a central belief-structure, an organized religion, an imposed form of public education. A nation, if it is to remain a nation, must establish and maintain a religion! If one is not provided, another will fill the void. If Christianity decides to remove itself from the public arena, another will take it's place. If the church is disestablished, other, secular, ideology-driven institutions will take her place. There simply is no escape from this choice. With liberal democracy we can agree that the direct rle of the state is a negative one: the administration of commutative justice. In fact, as is evident from the above, it is an idea stolen from Augustinian theocracy by liberal democracy in the first place. That to which we can no longer agree is that such an administration of justice can operate independently
19 Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer (d. 1876) was a Dutch statesman and the author of Ongeloof en Revolutie (Unbelief and Revolution), an incisive analysis of the French Revolution and its implications from a more explicitly theological perspective than was undertaken by Burke or de Tocqueville. An English translation of his magnum opus is now available: Harry van Dyke (translator and editor), Groen van Prinsterer's Unbelief and Revolution (Jordan Station, Ontario, Canada: Wedge Publishing Foundation, 1989). 20 No one has described contemporary politics better than Ortega y Gasset. Witness the following: Civilization is nothing else than the attempt to reduce force to being the ultima ratio. We are now beginning to realize this with startling clearness, because 'direct action' consists in inverting the order and proclaiming violence as prima ratio, or strictly as unica ratio. It is the norm which proposes the annulment of all norms, which suppresses all intermediate process between our purpose and its execution. It is the Magna Carta of barbarism. All our communal life is coming under this regime in which appeal to indirect authority is suppressed. In social relations good manners no longer hold sway. Literature as direct action appears in the form of insult. The restrictions of sexual relations are reduced. Restrictions, standards, courtesy, indirect methods, justice, reason! Why were all these invented, why all these complications created? They are all summed up on the word civilization, which, through the underlying notion of civis, the citizen, reveals its real origin. By means of all these there is an attempt to make possible the city, the community, common life. Hence, if we look into all these constituents of civilization just enumerated, we shall find the same common basis. All, in fact, presuppose the radical progressive desire on the part of each individual to take others into consideration. Civilization is before all, the will to live in common. A man is uncivilized, barbarian in the degree in which he does not take others into account. Barbarism is the tendency to disassociation. Accordingly, all barbarous epochs have been times of human scattering, of the pullulation of tiny groups, separate from and hostile to one another. Revolt of the Mases How can our barbarians ever attain community? 21 Ortega y Gasset, Revolt, p. 72.

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of the criteria of distributive justice. The public square is more than the state; public justice is more than commutative justice. The principle of neutrality and majoritarianism as pillars of our public philosophy must be abandoned, because a theological, religious, and moral framework is required to undergird the legal order administered by the state. And the state needs to recognize that higher order, explicitly. The custodian of that higher-law framework is the churchor it will be some other priesthood. We therefore have to work to reestablish the church in her public ministry. We have to refill the vacuum left when it was disestablished in the first place, to ensure that false alternatives are given no chance at hegemony. We have to clean out the national temple. We must tear down the high places. Our Ahabs must be prophesied against, and our Jezebels must again be cast from their palace windows. Otherwise, the state, losing its moorings, will revert to a perverted kind of distributive justice, allowing it in through the back door, as it were, in its lust to assume total power. And the last state of that union is worse than the first.

Part II: The Reins of the Body Politic

Our problem hinges on the ambiguity involved in, and the inability to come to terms with, the public dimension of life. What is meant by public? What pertains to the public? The short answer, of course, is that public matters are those which concern an entire political body, such as a city or a nation. These groups are all-embracing, the most extensive ones that exist: everyone forms a part of some political unit or other. They extend to everything which finds itself physically within determined geographical boundaries. The ambiguity arises when the question is considered, how something or someone makes up a part of this grouping. It is an ambiguity intimately related to modern conceptions of politics and law. Normally, we consider things to be public which pertain to everyone in common. These are then, in the modern view, state-owned things, under the direct jurisdiction of the civil magistrate. What is public belongs to the state, what is private belongs to private individuals and groups, who by definition form only a part of the body politic. Modern democracy functions in terms of this simple distinction between public affairs, ruled over by the state, and private affairs, ruled over by the individual. Liberal democracy emphasizes the private sector: it emphasizes individual freedom, economic freedom, the freedom of private association; it strives to restrict the scope of public affairs to as small a sphere as possible. Since the state and the public are coterminous, public matters are restricted to the strict administration of justice (commutative justice) and the keeping of the peace. As the function of the state is an essentially negative one, public affairs are also considered in a negative light, a necessary evil to be attended to without allowing the state any further powers than absolutely necessary to this task. Social democracy strives to bring about exactly the opposite condition. It strives to extend the scope of the public sphere as widely as possible, and deprecates the rle of the private 14

sector as much as liberal democracy deprecates the rle of the public sector. Social democracy strives to mitigate the social evils it feels are bred by the liberal system, through extending the boundaries of legal justice far beyond what is put forward by liberal democracy. The public sector is considered to play the leading rle in society; in fact, its leading rle is considered a metaphysical necessity, in that the underlying presupposition of the social-democratic agenda is the overcoming of the conflict of interests felt to be intrinsic to the private sector. This is the fundamental condition of modern democracy laid bare. It is based on the twin poles of individual and state, which correspond to the concepts private and public. It is also woefully inadequate, for precisely this reason: it is far too simplistic. It has worked for the past three hundred or so years, but it is now perilously close to the end of its history. The fundamental danger lies in the reductionisms through which certain elements which have a legitimate place in a healthy social order are isolated and absolutized. This needs to be emphasized: both of the current forms of democracy, along with democracy itself, contain moments of truth which have been absolutized. And having been absolutized, they have become perversions of justice and of truth. They become ideologies. The privatization of the church, to which all parties ranged along the democratic spectrum agree, brought this in its train. The church provided the transcendent focus by which these particular aspects could be integrated. The loss of the transcendent reference point led to the taking-up of what Dooyeweerd has termed immanence standpoints: aspects of created reality are absolutized into the meaning of existence.22 These two alternatives are continuations of aspects of a preexistent tradition, the tradition of the Western Christian polity. From the vantage point of tradition and history, they can be seen for what they are, whereas from the vantage point of men without history modern manthey seem absolute and irreconcilable foes. It is from the heights of theological/historical awareness that a perspective may be gained on this predicament, and wisdom as to how to proceed beyond it. As stated in the previous section, the tradition of Western Christian justice was abandoned in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in favor of what would eventually become our materially rich, morally bankrupt nirvana. This tradition was paired with a theocratic conception of government which was likewise lost. Although largely forgotten, this tradition has by no means wholly disappeared. We may even live to see its revival among the nations. The essence of this tradition of law and government was captured and distilled by the distinguished German Calvinist jurist Johannes Althusius, in his Politica Methodice Digesta, Compendium of Politics Methodically Explained, who in this work traced a
22 For Dooyeweerd's philosophy in this regard, see his New Critique of Theoretical Thought, cited above.

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comprehensive outline of a Christian polity, specifically greater Germanythe Holy Roman Empire of his day. The distinctions public and private were foundational to Althusius's vision of a social order. A public association is built of private associations: for human society develops from private to public association by the definite steps and progressions of small societies.23 The power of a public association is of a different order than that of a private association. Private associations, the family and the private corporation, are limited in that they are exclusive, and are formed to meet limited ends; in the case of the family, to provide for the economic24 needs of its members, and in the case of the corporation, to further the narrow interest of the particular group forming it (for Althusius, the prime example of the corporation is the professional guild). These associations are exclusive in that they do not incorporate each other but exist side by side, pursuing like ends. The public association, on the other hand, is composed of and derived from these private associations; it assimilates and incorporates them into a higher unity. As it is composed of these private associations, it supplements them rather than supersedes them. For example, the public association is not formed to pursue economic activity per se; it is formed to enable and to promote the pursuit of economic activity. There is a cooperation, a symmetry, and a harmony of interests between the public and the private spheres, not an opposition. In the Althusian social order, more than one kind of public association exists. The basic one is the city, on the next level is the province, and on the highest level is the republic. The basic attributes of a public association are the same at each of these levels, although only the republic as a whole possesses sovereignty. The basic public association is the city; in Althusian terms a microcosm of the commonwealth.25 The city as a public association is bound together by, in Althusian terms, the jus symbioticum, the symbiotic right or symbiotic law-order, the city's legal order. The purpose of this legal order is to establish and further the communication of goods, services, rights and concord among its members.26 The symbiotic right therefore defines the public arena. What comes as a shock to the modern reader is that Althusius then divides this symbiotic right, this public power and authority, among two complementary jurisdictions: the ecclesiastical and the secular. The administrators of public duties are those who expedite the public functions of the
23 Frederick Carney (translator and editor), The Politics of Johannes Althusius (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1965), p. 34. 24 What should be kept in mind here is the more inclusive meaning held by the term economic in premodern times. The meaning of economy in those days included what we consider economic activity, but was also more than that. All of domestic activity was included in the term, including husband/wive, parent/child, and master/servant relations. 25 Carney, Althusius, p. 41. 26 Carney, Althusius, p. 41.

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commonwealth or city, both political and ecclesiastical.27 The representative of the public ecclesiastical power is the institutional church; that of the public secular power, the state. This juris-dictional division finds its basis in the Ten Commandments, which teach duties to God as well as duties to man, the vertical as well as the horizontal. Its two tables speak to the two axes of human life. The public dimension is as much subject to both tables of this Law as the private dimension. That two ministers of the public right, the ecclesiastical and the secular, are put forward does not mean that the church is a department of state. Church and State as institutions are ministers of a public law-order which stands over them both, and thus administer a unified public order which recognizes the spiritual as well as the secular and material. Furthermore, in Augustinian fashion the church is recognized as a community sui generis, unique and primary, the direct representative of God on earth. The church is thus an institution of a fundamentally different order than the state. Althusius wrote of the ecclesiastical power in the commonwealth as the power by which those means that pertain to the public organizing and conserving of the kingdom of Christ (regnum Christi) are established, undertaken, and communicated according to his will .... to the eternal glory of God and for the welfare of the realm.28 The kingdom of Christ is not equated with the realm: it is in the realm but not of it. Christ's kingdom enters into the nation without ever becoming identical with it. The power of the church which distinguishes it from all other earthly institutions is summarized in the doctrine of the keys to the kingdom. As Althusius put it, the presbytery receives from God the power of the keys by which the kingdom of heaven opens and closes:29 through the ministry of the church, the way to the kingdom of God is opened to the whole of society. According to Calvinists, the keys to the kingdom consisted of the preaching of the Word and the exercise of church discipline by allowing or restricting access to the Lord's Supper (cf. the Heidelberg Catechism, Thirty-First Lord's Day). It is crucially important that Calvinists saw this ministry as a public ministry. This power dealt with the spiritual life of the whole community. That such things as public morality and public spirit exist is perhaps often recognized, but that it requires a public ministry is today not recognized, at least not in any way consistent with democratic ideology. Then, however, this ministry was recognized as crucial to public health. And Calvinists were jealous to reserve this ministry to the church. As Calvin put it, the whole jurisdiction of the church pertains to the discipline of morals.30 This idea of a public power to supervise morals was a hallmark of states in which Calvinism was established, and was so first and foremost in Geneva. It has been one of
27 28 29 30 Carney, Althusius, p. 42. Emphasis added. Carney, Althusius, p. 70. Carney, Althusius, p. 52. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Ford Lewis Battles, trans. (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1960), p. 1211 (Bk. IV, ch. xi, [[section]] 1).

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the key points concerning which historical Calvinism has ever come in for criticism. In its defense, however, one must in the first place recognize that the moral code put forward in, for instance, Geneva, was little different from the kind of code that was already in existence. The difference was that it was enforced; and that it was enforced by the consistory. Thus sanctions were meted out, even for offenses which were not crimes in the strict sense. It goes without saying that these sanctions applied only to church members, for the consistory only exercised jurisdiction over members of the church. The importance of this power, in Latin termed the censura morum or censure of morals, was laid out comprehensively by Althusius as part of the constitutional order. The censura morum consists in the inquisition into and chastisement of those morals and luxuries that are not prevented or punished by laws, but which corrupt the souls of subjects or squander their goods unproductively.31 That this power was fundamentally different from the power exercised by the state was clearly recognized by Althusius: the censura morum corrects the things that are not yet worthy of legal punishment, but when neglected or treated with disdain furnish the cause of many and great evils...; it takes place with respect to vices that do not come into the courts because of the lack of an accuser or denouncer, and yet offend the eyes of good and pious citizens. For the sake of example, these vices receive a most serious rebuke and notation, even though recourse is not had to legal punishment.32 This significance of this power has not been forgotten, even in modern times. The Dutch Reformed theologian A.A. van Ruler wrote of this against the compelling background of the German occupation of the Netherlands in the Second World War. Van Ruler described this power as follows: In terms of principle, the connection between Christianity and culture must be sought here: in the censura morum of the consistory. One might term that a moralistic solution to the problem of Christianity and culture. Such a verdict, though, would constitute a betrayal of the church, its offices, and its sacraments.... This is no moralistic solution but a sacramental deepening brought in Christian humility to the relation between Christianity and culture. Around and from out of the Lord's Supper, the church works to bring order into the world. It is the holy order of the satisfactio vicaria which extends itself in the chaos of sin.33 Calvinists recognized clearly that this was no place for the state: the jurisdiction of the state could not extend into the realm of morals, of mercy, of salvation. As Ursinus observed, The church in the exercise of discipline, looks to the reformation and salvation of the offender; the magistrate to the execution of justice and the public peace.... Christian discipline often takes cognizance of things which the state does not notice, as when the church casts out of her communion those who do not repent, and refuses to recognize them as her members, whilst the magistrate, nevertheless, tolerates them.34 There is a
31 Althusius, Politics, p. 173. 32 Althusius, Politics, p. 174. 33 A.A. van Ruler, Religie en Politiek [Religion and Politics] (Nijkerk, the Netherlands: G.F. Callenbach, 1945), pp. 106-107. 34 Zacharias Ursinus, Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, translated by Rev. G. W. Williard

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public dimension to morality and spirituality; it must be ministered to by the institution ordained by God to that end, the church; the state, exercising the power of the sword, is in no way competent to administer this power, the power of the keys of God's kingdom, the power over the heart of a nation. The ministry to the moral and spiritual health of the body politic was thus centered in the exercise of the power of the keys, but it did not end there. Calvin defined the public ministry of the church beyond the power of the keys, although the keys essentially characterized and defined the church.35 The church was given custody of the poor, through the diaconate; it, and not the state, was also to establish and administer a system of public education. Geneva adopted Calvin's constitution and thereby became the model for future Calvinist polities. Althusius drew upon the Genevan model for his own outline of the rle of the church in public life. Poor relief was becoming a very real problem in the sixteenth century with the breakdown of the medival system of poor relief through the Roman church and its abbeys, monasteries, and churches. Rapid changes in economic conditions along with dislocations brought on by continuous wars had thrown many people onto the streets and onto the mercy of others. The state, which in combination with monopoly capital was the efficient cause of this distress, was busy proclaiming itself to be the solution as well, arrogating to itself this work of mercy, as princes and cities were themselves moving into the vacuum left by the Roman church. Calvinism, in this as in the case of the more direct ministry of the church, demanded that the state leave this ministry to the church, as it was a ministry of mercy and not justice. Althusius follows suit here, when he consistently calls for both a public welfare ministry, and for the right of the church, specifically the diaconate, to administer that ministry.36 Why should poor relief be a responsibility of the public power? And why reserved to the spiritual power? Because of the possibilities a dependent proletariat entails for political manipulation, and because of the close relation between material and spiritual condition. Examples from classical history exposed the danger posed by an impoverished, rootless proletariat, willing to throw itself into the hands of any demagogue willing to play to its desires. The result, history taught, was social chaos and the destabilization of government. This lesson was hammered home by later political theorists. The condition of the poor needed to be attended to according to principles of justice which upheld authority and the rights of property, as well as the claims of the unfortunate upon other people's wealth. The tithe was the primary means of healing this breach in distribution. Poor relief was never considered a branch of distributive justice. It was not a matter of
(Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, n.d. [1852]), p. 450. 35 That is why the doctrine of the marks of the church corresponds so closely to the doctrine of the keys of the kingdom. 36 It is interesting to note that in his discussion of the rle of Church and State in poor relief, Althusius resorts exclusively to the Bible, and especially the Mosaic law. As to the church's rle, he points primarily to the tithe; as for the state, he refers to laws concerning restrictions on collateral for debts, manumission of debt slaves, gleaning, and payment of a fair and prompt wage. Politica Methodice Digesta, ch. 37, [section][section] 87-89 (not translated in Carney's version).

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justice at all, but of mercy. Poverty also exposed the fundamental spiritual condition of man: sinfulness. Jesus said, the poor you have with you always (John 12:8); Deuteronomy states that the poor shall never cease out of the land (Deut. 15:11). Because of sin, poverty would remain. But the causes of poverty are various. Therefore, the Book of Proverbs makes a distinction between the deserving poor and the sluggard. This distinction was basic to poor relief until victimization and human rights were substituted as its legitimating doctrine in modern times. In order for poor relief to be effective, however, there must be discernment as to the cause of poverty in a particular case. Some people may need a boost to get back on their feet; others made need permanent help; still others might deserve a swift kick in the pants. No bureaucracy and no blanket theory of entitlement can do justice to this diversity. And if poor relief is not properly performed, not only are the poor shortchanged but proletarianization continues unabated (to the benefit, certainly, of a certain persuasion of political activist). Poor relief therefore requires discernment with regard to the spiritual, inner part of lifeprecisely the area of the church's competence. The third branch of the church's public power concerned public education. The church, as the custodian of the community's spiritual and moral life, was to establish a system of schools to train the citizenry into pious and just living. This education was in the first place theological, but also an education into the virtues and the liberal arts. As Althusius described it: In these schools the seeds of piety and virtue are adroitly poured into the youth from sacred writings and the more human liberal arts, so that good citizens may go forth as pious, manly, just and temperate persons.... Moreover, these schools are the custodians of the keys of science and doctrine, by which the resolution of all doubt is sought and the way of salvation is disclosed. Whatever the quality of rulers and citizens the school produces, of such is the commonwealth and Church constituted.37 Not only did the schools provide training in a pious and just life; they also acted as the magazine of intellectual defenses against public enemies intellectual and spiritual: The school... is the armoury of the church and commonwealth. Arms of every kind are produced in it not only for defending the true and sincere worship of God against heretics, but also for defending and conserving the welfare and soundness of the commonwealth.38 Through this ministry of education (Calvin considered teachers [doctors] to occupy one of the four offices in the church) the church exercised a direct impact on culture. Culture involved the cultivation of the moral and intellectual resources of the nation. Sound,
37 Carney, Althusius, p. 71. 38 Carney, Althusius, p. 162.

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healthy polities and laws could only be based upon a morally regenerate people. Rulers needed to be grounded in piety and virtue before they could be expected to function as ministers of justice. Morals could not be separated from religion: ethics were covenantal, expressions of an oath-bound relationship with God. Through its control of education, the church held the reins of the heart of the nation, and held the nation's future in its hands as well. Althusius's Calvinist political system was no anachronism. It was a well-thought-through, historically-grounded development of the constitutional, political and legal tradition of the West. The intricate balance of the parts in the whole and the careful attention paid to their respective rles, from household to king, make this work a fitting culmination to that tradition. It is its wholeness that is so striking. How could such a balance between the myriad facets of social life be found? How so gracefully obtained? Simply put, because of its faithfulness to the tradition of Christendom, of the peculiarly Western conception of the separation of Church and State and of the rights of the church in the nation to the furthering of the public interest. This is especially true for Althusius's application of the concept of jurisdiction to public affairs. Modern society has lost the distinction between sin and crime, between the matters which can properly be brought to the attention of secular courts and those which can only be dealt with on the level of spiritual engagement. The result? Catharsis via the courtroom. Civil law as instrument of atonement. The politics of guilt and pity.39 Althusius's polity is the polity for which modern society at bottom yearns, although it could never admit that, much less act upon it. It would no longer then be modern.

Part III: Benedictine Infrastructure

The fundamental issue facing modern society is the issue of religion: in what does it believe? Which god will it serve? The nations as nations, especially as they come increasingly into the orbit of Western civilization, will find this question rearing up with ever-increasing regularity and ever-intensifying forcefulness. Material development only exacerbates this. While it destroys traditional foundations, it creates a vacuum which must be filled. The church faces the other side of the same question: will she recognize that her spiritual power concerns the building and guardianship of the public character and life? That her mission is aimed straight at the soul of a people as such? Liberalism's establishment of a naked public square gave us the recipe for the culture war which now rages around us. The church must now pick up the pieces. Liberalism was nothing but a temporary cease-fire; its solution never could be more than that. As libertarians jump ship for a more amenable live-and-let-live with just-as-godless socialists who have more or less come to terms with the free market, the church must purify herself of the unholy compromise made by her sons in earlier days: rendering allegiance to that standing joke, the neutral state. Both libertarians and conservatives
39 Rushdoony's treatment is still the classic one: R.J. Rushdoony, The Politics of Guilt and Pity (Fairfax, VA: Thoburn Press, 1978 [1970]).

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seem ready to accept a watered-down compromise with the left while in the wings looms yet another form of neo-pagan totalitarianism. Will the churchi.e. the churchgoers who are the bricks which make up the edificefinally gather the courage to make a clean break? As usual, the pagans think they own the future. How often has this been the case? The last time pagans ruled the West, they ran it into the groundpace Edward Gibbon. The church picked up the pieces, and midwifed a new society. The church still holds the reins of this civilization. Its collapse can be averted. And yet, although the whole of material culture may not, by the grace of God, disintegrate, the spiritual core is in an advanced stage of decay, and cannot much longer endure the weight of civilization. From this simple reality stem such contemporary cries as those for investment in infrastructure. Everyone now senses the fundamental decay at work, worming cultural strength away at its roots. The fracture lines are becoming increasingly visible on the face of the edifice. What do our sycophants come up with for an answer? Roads, factories, investment in high-tech, competitive advantage for nation against nation, so-called education. Sophists never learn. Something much more radical is needed: the recovery of the original mission and function of the church. The consciousness must be recovered that the church - the juridically-organized body of those juridically (covenantally!) bound to God through Jesus Christis the Temple of God on earth, and the Ark of His Covenant, an ark that safely conveys its passengers through the perilous waters of a corrupt societyitself wishing to corrupt everything it touches (e.g. sodomization as the meaning of life)and God's judgments (e.g. AIDS) upon that society. The church is such an ark, and only the church is such an ark. No political party can be a substitute. No spiritual Lone Ranger vigilantes can substitute. Only the corporate exercise of the keys of the kingdom of God. In the days when civilization as they knew it was collapsing all around them, Roman Christians did what they knew they must. They gathered together the elements of their culture essential to its continuity and deposited them in their Ark of the Covenant. That ark was the monastery. Monasticism was far more than a simple flight from the world. It was a flight to a new civilization. It signified a total break with a civilization built upon the natural man. It was the embodiment of the living sacrifice, acceptable to God: a renunciation of the world, the flesh, and the Devil, upon which had been built the City of Man; a world which had to be crucified and buried before it could be resurrected. It was Augustine who, humanly speaking, laid the groundwork for this effort. He more than any other realized how total was the need for the natural man to die, to rise again as a new man through the resurrection power of Christ. And yet he understood that it was not the creation itself, nor the cultural efforts of fallen man, which were evil, but the evil will with which these were infused. Man's flesh and his works needed to be purged, not 22

destroyed. This purgation would prove to be salvation; Roman civilization would live on, because it would first die, as it had in this man, this preeminent Roman. Augustine's attitude to culture was therefore momentously unambiguous. The inheritance of classical civilization could serve the spiritual end of man if it were properly subordinated to that spiritual end. The crown of classical civilization was formed by the artes liberales, the Liberal Artsliterally, the arts of freedom. True freedom, Augustine knew only too well, came only in a release from bondage to sin and the flesh. By recasting this inheritance of liberty in terms of the liberty in which Christ sets men free (cf. Ephesians 5:1), this entire civilization could gain a new lease on life. This process of assimilation took place in the monastery. The civilization which had become Christian in name, but remained pagan at heart, underwent a baptism. The monastery reconstructed the material world in terms of the spiritual; it placed the keys of God's kingdom at the center of earthly life. Liturgy was its lifeblood, and from this life flowed the power to purge, renew, and restore the life of this dead civilization. Cassiodorus, a Roman who spent 40 years of his life in public service to the Gothic king Theodoricthen reigning over the western fragment of the empirespent the last part of his life gathering together and preserving for posterity the classics, both Christian and pagan, of his dying world. He set aside his patrimonial estate as a monastery, to bring together spiritually-minded brothers and sisters to share in death-unto-life. He set them upon the task of copying the manuscripts which embodied their civilization. Cassiodorus's innovation initiated the monastic tradition by which the classical-Christian inheritance was transmitted to new times and to new stewards. Cassiodorus's contemporary, Benedict, devised the rule by which Western monasticism would henceforth be governed. Benedict's Rule captured the Roman genius for discipline, order, organization and practical bent. The Rule was a rule for a common and social life rather than for a life of isolation. Honest labor was established as one of the pillars of a monk's routine. It was also relatively flexible and mild, compared with other monastic regulations, such as the Irish. At the center of monastic life Benedict put worship, the chanting of Psalms, the preaching of God's Word and the celebration of the sacrament. The entire Psalter would be gone through each week; the greater part of the Bible would be read aloud each year.40 There was obligatory time set aside for reading and study, transmitting the sanctified wisdom
40 At the centre of every requirement of the Rule there lies the prescription of a daily round of divine service. For the time at which it was written the regulations for these corporate acts of worship are remarkably careful and unambiguous. The whole system is built on two biblical pillars: 'at midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee', and 'seven times a day do I praise thee'hence the long night-office, and the seven day-offices of Matins (or Lauds), Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, and Compline. The main structure and psalmody are clearly laid out to ensure the weekly recitation of the whole Psalter and the annual reading (much less clearly indicated) of the greater part of the Bible. R.W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (London: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 221.

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and culture of the past; it was also obligatory to work, out in the fields or perhaps in the kitchen, on tasks essential to the upkeep of the monastery. Work was necessary; diligence was good for the soul, idleness, the Devil's workshop. The Rule embodied the kind of rigid discipline which the times required. Every aspect of life was regulated; orders were unquestioningly obeyed. Stubborn and willful human nature was thusly to be put to death, leaving behind a humble and submissive spirit, exercised in patience and forbearance. Membership in the monastic community was established by oath, after the model of the Roman legions: these were spiritual warriors, forged into a disciplined fighting machine. The monasteries were the outposts of civilization in a barbaric world. The world of the laity, of material culture, clustered about them, giving the civilization-in-the-making a new center of gravity. The presence of a monastery sanctified the surrounding countryside, giving spiritual security to a world terrified of roaming devils and demons. Public order arose upon a new spiritual base, purged of the demonic. Consider the importance assigned by contemporaries to a newly-founded abbey: The abbot is armed with spiritual weapons and supported by a troop of monks anointed with the dew of heavenly graces. They fight together in the strength of Christ with the sword of the spirit against the aery wiles of the devils. They defend the king and clergy of the realm from the onslaughts of their invisible enemies.41 The monks of the Dark Ages lived and preached a world-and-life-view radically opposed to the prevailing barbarian culture, but one of which that culture became fascinated and by which it eventually was conquered. Monastic discipline and piety served to demonstrate the demands of the gospel to a culture which knew nothing but blood and honor. The renunciation of the things which that society most valued - territory, kinship, prowess resulted in the development of a lay piety and ethic in which these things were restored to their proper rle. For example, the ideal of celibacy and the renunciation of the family values of the day, the values of a clan society, brought about the transformation of the family. It eventually resulted in the rise of an ethic centered on the nuclear family rather than the clan, which upheld the mutual fidelity of husband and wife rather than the loose ethic which permitted adultery and incest and allowed for no family surname because brothers' and sisters' fathers and mothers so often did not coincide. This transformed institution formed the building block of the budding social order of the West.42 The monasteries instilled the Augustinian understanding of freedom in barbarian society. In so doing, they made possible the rise of Western civilization. Our civilization was built
41 Foundation charter of King Edgar for New Minster, Winchester, 966, in the Liber Vitae, ed. W. de Gray Birch, 1892, pp. 232-46; quoted in Southern, Western Society and the Church, pp. 224-225. 42 This development has been brilliantly traced by George Duby in his The Knight, the Lady and the Priest: the Making of Modern Marriage in Medieval France (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

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not upon on the abstract notion of innate human freedom. Much rather, it was built on the idea of human corruption, human depravity, and the necessity to submit to authority. The truly free man was the man who humbled himself, who recognized his fundamental corruption and bewailed it rather than gloried in it. He was one who could love his enemies, pray for them, and forgive the wrongs done against him. The slave was the man who was enslaved to glory, to vengeance, to mastery. He was caught in a snare of his own device, for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword (Matthew 26:52). The only reason for the dominium of man over man was his own sin. Because man lacked self-control, an external restraint had to be placed upon him. No man was better than another simply because he exercised dominium over the other. The slave subject to Christ was the true freeman; the dominus wrapped up in his own vices was the true slave. Only grace could restore the condition of self-control, and so the original condition of man, exercising dominion over the creation rather than over his fellow man. This was the message brought by the church to a society based on, in Duby's words, war and slavery.43 The church held the rulers accountable to a standard of justice consistent with this fallen state. Yes, rulers held a near-absolute authority over their subjects, but to what end? Not to serve their own lusts, but to further the good of those very subjects. Not only that, but it was to their own benefit to grant their subjects as much liberty as they could exercise consistent with the claims of order. The manumission of slaves and serfs was a blessed act. The church, herself a domina with slaves and serfs under her control, showed the way here, as witness an act of Gregory the Great: Gregory to Montana &c. Since our Redeemer, the Maker of every creature, vouchsafed to assume human flesh for this end, that, the chain of slavery wherewith we were held being broken by the grace of His Divinity, He might restore us to pristine liberty, it is a salutary deed if men whom nature originally produced free, and whom the law of nations has subjected to the yoke of slavery, be restored by the benefit of manumission to the liberty in which they were born. And so, moved by loving-kindness and by consideration of this case, we make you, Montana and Thomas, servants of the holy Roman church which with the help of God we serve, free from this day, and Roman citizens, and we release to you all your private property.44 This was the basis for the growth of constitutional liberties, because it made possible an Augustinian-covenantal progress in liberty. The relationship between ruler and ruled was based on a covenant. This was evident in the feudal bond (lord and vassal), the manorial bond (between lord and serf), and, later on, in the growth of the cities (charter between
43 Georges Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 150. 44 Epistle XII, Book VI, The Book of Pastoral Rule and Selected Epistles of Gregory the Great, trans. etc. Rev. James Barmby, D.D., in Philip Schaff (ed.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. XII, p. 191.

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city-dwellers and regional lord). The slave/free dichotomy was eliminated, replaced by a relative hierarchy of freedom: more freedoms one enjoyed, the more responsibilities he incurred. Serfdom was the lowest rung on this ladder, but even serfs had covenantallyguaranteed rights, focused on family and property. The church oversaw the covenantal process, ensuring that the rights and duties laid upon both parties were consistent with Augustinian principles of justice. This meant that obedience needed to be rendered to the superior, while a degree of freedom should be granted to the inferior consistent with his ability to exercise that freedom properly. The seal of these covenantal agreements was the oath, sworn to the Holy Trinity. This was the basis for the church's oversight. Through the oath, the superior was bound to keep his agreement with his inferior. Default meant that the inferior was released from his obligation to obedience (in feudal terms, diffidatio ). Because these agreements were covenantal, they also extended to future generations. They were therefore renewed with each generation. At each renewal ceremony, the stipulations could change, thus allowing for amelioration. It was the church's oversight which enabled this process to succeed. Apart from her mediation, covenanting parties would be left face-to-face, each determining for himself whether the other party was properly fulfilling the conditions of the covenant. A covenanting process requires a mediator, an arbitrator; otherwise it degenerates to a relationship of force and deceit. And since the covenanting process in the West was conducted by the church, in terms of Trinitarian oaths, the eternal destinies of the covenanting parties were implicated. In an age of faith, the threat of eternal sanctions for violation of a sacred oath was enough to deter even the most headstrong. Liberty grew in fitful stages, as the leaven of freedom through submission permeated Western society. Western liberty did not exist a priori, the patrimony of barbarian (Teutonic, Saxon, Batavian, etc.) tribe culture, a patrimony which was submerged by the church during the Dark Ages only to be recovered after that age expired (a thesis dear to Renaissance and Reformation historians, enabling them to avoid having to give the Roman church any credit for the genesis of their civilization). Through the patient work of the monks, the heart of European culture was subdued to the claims of Christ. The institutions which arosethe nuclear family, chivalry, the universities, the cities, the free market, the rule of law, constitutional government, chartered rights and liberties, even nationhood and international lawall found their roots in this labor. The monks created European civilization's true infrastructure: the infrastructure of the heart and soul. These foundations are caving in from neglect, if not outright sabotage. This, in Kierkegaard's words, is a sickness unto death. Perhaps there is nothing left but to heed MacIntyre's advice: What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite 26

some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for anotherdoubtless very differentSt. Benedict.45

45 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 263.

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