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Civic Solidarity
and Catholic Social Thought:
A Critique of Hauerwas
by
R. Chase Skorburg
[Mr Skorburg, a native of Dallas, Texas, graduated from
Princeton University and is in the MAR program of Yale Divinity School.
This essay was written for a Seminar on Political Theology at YDS for
the spring semester of 2006 taught by Joe R. Jones, then Visiting Professor
of Theology. Used here by permission. Copyright©R. Chase Skorburg.
Posted here 2/24/07.]
Part One
Various Christian theologians have questioned the merit of political liberalism
since its inception. Things today are no different. The shape of modern
theologians’ suspicions, however, has its own particularities. A
growing movement claims liberalism’s political values and ways of
thinking about morality are seeping into society as a whole. And the stone
walls and stained glass windows of churches provide no protection from
this seepage. Monadic individualism, an ethical emphasis on rights, and
anemic conceptions of justice and freedom, according to this view, compromise
the current health of the church and, correspondingly, the health of Christians’
souls. Figures like Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, and John Milbank,
among others, represent this view. They critique liberalism to varying
degrees on varying grounds, but all agree that liberalism’s values
threaten the health of the church. Furthermore, of late they have gained
prominence and are cited regularly as noteworthy American theologians.
This is probably because, to many, they seem flatly right about liberalism’s
inadequacies. Humans are, in an important sense, political, social animals;
thus, as much as liberalism may intend to allow citizens to pursue thick
conceptions of the good outside of the ‘thin consensus’ of
the political sphere, the political sphere is bound to influence citizens’
moral thinking.
Reacting to this, Hauerwas and others call Christians to take back the
church. More specifically, they exhort Christians to reclaim an ethos
of subversion whereby the particularity of Christian values and
virtues may flourish in community as an alternative politics to the politics
of liberalism. Constitutive of this exhortation is a repudiation of the
view that a person’s public life need not affect him or her epistemically.
These theologians claim, to the contrary, that moral knowledge is a communal
affair. Humans learn values and virtues from the communities with which
they interact socially. Accordingly, notions like justice and even rationality
are not free-standing. They are conditioned. They are learnt according
to the community one inhabits and the unique moral tenets it employs.
Consequently, “practical moral reasoning, if Christian, must always
be expected to be at some point subversive.”[1] And this is because
“the church precedes the world epistemologically.”[2] Thus
the church as an alternative politics subverts the very structures of
moral rationality the world takes for granted.
In this way, these theologians emphasize a) epistemic incommensurability
between different communities of virtue and b) the church’s need
to reclaim its role as a particular community with unique values, virtues,
and moral practices. Given a) and b), how, then, do these theologians
construe Christians’ ability to support, participate in, and ultimately
effect extramural (extra-ecclesiastical) political change? This is less
clear, and its ambiguity has led individuals to call these figures, to
varying degrees, “sectarians.”
Outright sectarians, however, they are not. They all have their own account
of how Christians can retain the authenticity of the church’s politics
and effect positive social, political change on an extramural level. This
paper evaluates the theological merit of Hauerwas’s account. It
focuses, in particular, on the topic of solidarity. In virtually all contexts,
Hauerwas winces at the idea of civic solidarity. That of which he is perhaps
most critical is Christians’ identification of the church with America.
Thus, in his eyes, it is precisely a wayward solidarity that most threatens
the modern church.
This paper, however, argues that political solidarity, indeed solidarity
of a qualified shared epistemic kind with non-Christians, is
both to be political desired and theologically warranted (and not necessarily
in that order). I make my case for this, first, by unpacking what it is
I mean by solidarity—and, perhaps more importantly, what I don’t
mean by it. Second, I outline Hauerwas’s ideas about the ills of
liberalism, the church as an alternative politics, and the appropriate
and inappropriate extramural relations of the church with persons and
institutions outside the church. Third, I make my case for the theological
warrant of civic solidarity with the help of Catholic social teaching
through the lens of Charles E. Curran. Finally, I conclude by employing
this theological and definitional work to clarify what kinds of extramural
solidarity seem appropriate for Christians and how civic solidarity may
serve an irreplaceable purpose in Christian social thinking and practice.
Part 2
What, then, is solidarity? The term is, to be sure, not
without its ambiguity. Various groups and thinkers have employed it differently.
In an attempt to divorce it from more loaded connotations, consider a
basic illustration. Consider the kind of solidarity one tries to foster
on a sports team.
If a coach sought to foster a heightened sense of solidarity within members
of a basketball team, she would likely give a pep talk. An effective pep
talk would include several appeals. It would appeal, first, to the team
members’ shared mission, that is, the team’s common goals.
The team might have hopes of achieving a state or local championship;
conversely, it might simply aim for a performance of which the team can
be proud. Whether the goal is more objective, like a championship, or
more subjective, like a sense of pride, its character as commonly recognized
is central.
A good pep talk, moreover, would seek to foster a shared imagination
of the goal. This includes a mutual understanding of the goal and its
worth from different imagined ‘angles.’ The coach might, for
instance, describe how wonderful it will feel to celebrate being the most
excellent team in the state—a mutual understanding of the goal from
a certain imagined angle. Or, the coach might describe how winning a state
championship will be something the team members will talk about and prize
for ever; it will be something no one can take away from them—a
mutual imagination of the goal’s worth from a certain angle.
A pep talk at its best would not stop there. It would encourage the team
to develop a sense of shared sacrifice, a sense of devotion not just to
what the team has to offer each member individually, but to what the members
can contribute to something bigger than themselves. To develop a sense
of shared sacrifice, a good pep talk would exhort the team to develop
an understanding, deep feeling, and appreciation for the kind of reciprocal
sacrifice that will obtain in the team’s efforts toward its common
goal. This will involve mutual sympathy between the members and a manner
of seeing in other members’ eyes, so to speak, reciprocal understanding
and requited devotion to each other’s well-being.
A good pep talk would also appeal to the team’s common history.
The team has likely shared moments of joy and moments of despair, moments
of struggle and moments of rest, moments of solemnity and moments of levity.
A good pep talk would undoubtedly appeal to these as a powerful source
for what is the final, uniting component of a good pep talk: an appeal
to a common identity.
The team members are part of one team, identified, among other things,
by their common goal, shared imagination, reciprocal sacrifice, and mutual
history. In this way, identity plays a kind of gathering role in a pep
talk. It brings the commonalities of the team together into a kind of
symbol. Perhaps the coach would conclude, “Because this is what
it means to be a tiger!” or “Because that’s what tigers
do!” The team’s identity, in this way, gathers the previously
identified features of solidarity together, representing, in one synoptic
appeal, the commutual pathos forged by a common history (past), sacrifice
(present), and purpose (future).
It stands to reason that a good pep talk would include these appeals.
And, if successful, it would engender a heightened sense of the following
among team members: 1) shared interest, 2) mutual understanding, 3) reciprocal
sacrifice, 4) common history, and 5) collective identity. With these in
place, the team would take the basketball court with a freshly acquired
understanding and feeling of solidarity. The members would understand
and feel in a more profound and even accurate way what it means to be
the team they are. They would know what it means to be part of something
that is both larger than their own private interests and integral to the
satisfaction of a deep private interest in cooperating in a constructive
social endeavor. In the spirit of solidarity, they would share a common
recognition of reciprocal need and mutual sacrifice toward the
end of achieving a goal no member could achieve alone.
Given this analysis, how may we encapsulate 1) through 5) in a more general
definition? We may say that solidarity is reciprocal recognition of shared
intention, understanding, sacrifice, and identity for the sake of a goal
requiring cooperation. It may be other things as well, but this definition
limns at least several fundamental aspects. Defined as such, what difference
does it or should it make concerning our understanding of politics?
In Democracy’s Discontent, Michael Sandel instructively
identifies the political importance of solidarity. He does so, first,
by describing what a politics without solidarity looks like. And he believes
it looks a lot like America today.
America’s prevailing political thinking, he claims, understands
the self to be an autonomous, choosing self, unencumbered, as a chooser,
by its social contexts. This elemental feature of the human self lends
it its dignity. Politics is thereby crafted minimally, structured only
to protect free choosing (that which constitutes human dignity). The consequences
of this political perspective are as follows:
Conceived as unencumbered selves, we must respect the dignity of all
persons, but beyond this, we owe only what we agree to owe. Liberal justice
requires that we respect people’s rights (as defined by the neutral
framework [of agreement]), not that we advance their good. Whether we
must concern ourselves with other people’s good depends on whether,
and with whom, and on what terms, we have agreed to do so.[3]
This is what Sandel calls the procedural republic. It claims to impose
no rules according to any substantive conception of goodness or badness;
doing so might impinge on citizens’ negative freedom from the state.
Instead, it claims to impose a mere procedure whereby unencumbered
selves may agree amongst themselves on substantive commitments. It is
a contractual vision of politics. Its citizens take for granted that politics,
for the most part, ought only to arbitrate freely chosen agreements. In
fact, it conceives of this very notion to be one upon which rational free
agents would contractually agree. The only good, besides freedom of choice,
upon which citizens contractually agree is the protection of citizens’
physical well-being. That is, physical protection is largely considered
the only warrant for a breach of citizens’ negative freedom from
governmental interference. It is also the only legal limit placed on citizens
as to how they may craft agreements amongst themselves.
Political reasoning of this kind bears a unique consequence. Political
obligation becomes oxymoronic. It makes no sense for a citizen to have
any obligation to the wider society, other than his or her obligation
not to endanger directly others’ physical well-being. Why? Because
it was never agreed to. Jane Citizen’s specific choices, for example,
have little to do with the particular systemic injustices which may or
may not compel Joe Citizen to live on the sidewalk. Why, then, should
she have to pay taxes to enable his education so that he might afford
shelter?
This is a politics void of solidarity, and it may be the plight in which
we find America’s political consciousness today. If it’s not,
all the better. It seems to me partially accurate, accurate from one,
nontrivial, descriptive point of view, and Section V speaks to the critique’s
potential relevance. For now, though, it is enough for the illustration
to show the general importance of solidarity for political life. Without
political solidarity, there exist insufficient resources for citizens
to collectively imagine and devote themselves to goals that require substantive
sacrifice. Without civic solidarity, society lacks adequate energies for
collective identification, for example, with citizens who may be victims
of systemic injustices of the market economy.
Solidarity, therefore, is to be politically desired. It is the means by
which a society can come together toward ends—conceived as common
goods—that no individual can accomplish by him or herself. Further,
it is the means by which a society transcends perniciously individualistic
accounts of politics, wherein politics becomes nothing more than tending
to one’s own self-interests without a sense of sacrifice or obligation
for the good of others affected by legislation.
While it may be politically desirable, solidarity is not automatically
commendable. It can be used for good or bad ends. Thus we may not simply
say that any solidarity is good solidarity. To the contrary, it can be
extremely dangerous. It is civic solidarity to which we may attribute
some of the most extreme instances of human cruelty in recent history.
We need only to remember the atrocities of German and Italian fascism
to substantiate this point.
Clearly, therefore, civic solidarity can be a source of tyranny and cruelty.
What is more, for the Christian it can also be a source of idolatry. Indeed,
even seemingly innocuous instances of civic solidarity may constitute
idolatrous loyalties. As Gilbert Meilaender writes:
If there is truth in St. Augustine’s assertion that the human
heart is restless until it rests in God, the human person can never belong
entirely to any historical community, and human virtue can never be defined
sufficiently in terms of good citizenship.[4]
To provide for civic solidarity, Sandel endorses a return (as he sees
it) to fostering civic virtue. Augustine’s work, however, suggests
Christians ought to be at least partially wary of exhortations to civic
virtue. The civitas terrena does not rest in God. Its loves and
desires lie elsewhere. Only the virtues of the civitas dei are
wholly upright. And because history will only recognize God’s city
in the eschaton, we can be sure that political virtues in interim history
are, at best, imperfect and, at worst, evil.
We find, therefore, that Sandel’s work demonstrates shortcomings
of politics without solidarity, but Augustine’s work and events
of recent history remind us that civic solidarity is not automatically
commendable. Furthermore, developing solidarity by way of civic virtue
appears at least potentially dangerous for the Christian citizen and for
others. Given this dialectic, how ought Christians, theologically speaking,
to understand the merits and demerits of solidarity, especially in the
context of America’s prevailing politics?
Part 3
Hauerwas speaks vociferously on just this issue. “My ire,”
he writes, is “against Christians who have confused Christianity
with liberalism.” [5] His ire, that is to say, is against Christians
whose “loyalties” to America and its prevailing views of liberalism
compromise more important loyalties to the particularity of the civitas
dei, the politics with desires and loves rightly directed toward
God.
In After Christendom?, Stanley Hauerwas’s cardinal concern
is to reconceive the church. Such a task is imperative because “outside
the church…there is no saving knowledge of God.”[6] Accordingly,
Hauerwas repudiates the idea that Christians have epistemic access to
“saving knowledge of God” outside of the unique practices
of the Christian church. The church, Hauerwas believes, is not merely
a “voluntary association” wherein pastors extend spiritual
wisdom to listeners who then determine its propriety by some independent
faculty of reason. Rightly conceived, the church is an integrative social
politics. It is a community of discipline to which adherents
are bound, constituted by unique practices and conceptions of sociality,
justice, salvation, and human flourishing. To be a Christian is to live,
breathe, and inhabit this community. It is, theologically speaking, to
become grafted to the Body of Christ, the witness of God’s Kingdom
on earth.
Bearing this unique mission, the church is “that community constituted
by practices by which all other politics are to be judged.”[7] As
the Body of Christ, it represents Christ’s Lordship on
earth. Representing lordship, it demands all other political, social loyalties
unreservedly defer to it. In this way, the church is to be a “counter-cultural
politics,” “a politics that is an alternative to the politics
[of the world] that otherwise dominates our lives.”[8]
That does not mean Christians ought simply to abandon the world outside
the church. Rather, After Christendom? is an attempt to try “to
find ways for Christians to recover the church as the locus of habits
of speech to sustain [their] lives in service to the world.”[9]
This being the case, what habits of speech ought Christians to avoid?
And how will avoiding them in effect serve the world?
Hauerwas suggests Christians ought to avoid the ingrained ‘liberal
language’ of justice and rights, believing that doing so will provide
society with a witness to a truer, more fulfilling, and holier way of
relating socially. According to Hauerwas, liberalism treats justice and
rights as if they are free-standing moral conceptions. It acts as if they
require no further clarification. Citizens of liberal democracies claim
rights against each other insouciantly, citing them as things they are
justly due. In doing so, however, they (and liberalism generally, Hauerwas
believes) fail to acknowledge a fundamental question. If rights are just
claims against another, and if justice is giving people their
due, who or what determines what persons are due? Philosophic forms of
liberalism attempt to answer this question in varying ways. Often these
attempts suggest the existence of a theory of justice to which all rational
individuals will naturally assent. Hauerwas, however, rejects this idea.
“The problem with such reasoning,” he writes, “is the
assumption that we share enough to even know what justice might mean.”[10]
If citizens fail to share a tradition of values and virtues, there is
no theory of justice or correlative list of rights upon which citizens
as rational agents can contractually agree. Moreover, the foundational
premise of this thinking—the human self as, fundamentally, an unencumbered,
monadic rational agent—is likely mistaken in the first place. Hauerwas
suggests humans are irreducibly social and therefore are encumbered rationally,
encumbered by the social contexts that provide the experiential raw material
for moral reasoning to obtain in the first place.
Implementing the fictional premise of ‘unencumbered’ moral
reasoning, the free-standing theory of justice attached to this version
of liberalism unsurprisingly stresses freedom. Freedom from interference,
it avers, is due everyone. Thus the negative freedoms of speech, religion,
and the like are the ‘rights’ citizens may claim from the
government and each other. Stopping there, however, Hauerwas believes
this account of justice leaves unanswered a pivotal question. To what
ends should humans fashion their negative freedoms? Liberal conceptions
of justice fail to answer this question precisely because, with Hauerwas,
they acknowledge that citizens do not “share enough” to posit
something substantive toward which to aim—a common good, so to speak.
Consequently, citizens often use their freedom from interference
to protect nothing but their individual interests. Positive freedom, freedom
to certain ends or for certain actions, becomes driven
almost entirely by self-interest, and without any semblance of shared
values or means of moral reasoning, politics degrades to who has the loudest
voice and can market his or her opinions most effectively. More, the “to
what end” question becomes largely dominated by the bedfellow of
liberalism: capitalism. Because liberalism refuses to ally itself with
ideas of to what end citizens should commit their freedom, that is, for
what responsibilities liberalism’s negative freedoms are intended,
capitalism fills in the gap. Besides protecting one’s own self-interests,
the purpose of citizens’ freedom becomes tacitly, if not explicitly,
understood as the acquisition of wealth. And distributive justice becomes
the only quasi-intelligible form of justice beyond negative freedoms.
Given Hauerwas’s view of the misplaced and misunderstood emphasis
on rights and justice today, he believes Christians “will speak
more truthfully to our society and be of greater service” by simply
refusing to use this language. [11] He believes the only theologically
warranted way of counteracting “the illusion that the larger social
order knows what it is talking about when it calls for justice”
is to refuse to take part in such talk and, instead, to bear witness as
the church to a truer, more holy way of relating socially.[12] He sees
this not as sectarian. He sees it as the theologically proper way of both
effecting social change and restoring the health of the church as a community
of upright discipline fostering Christian virtues. The church’s
witness was strongest when it was marginalized, he asserts. And this,
he believes, is no coincidence. “The current emphasis on justice
and rights as the primary norms guiding the social witness of Christians,”
he thinks, is endemic to the post-Christendom idea that it is Christianity’s
place to speak in the moral language of the world to help to get history
right. [13] Paradoxically, though, this plays right into liberalism’s
hand, furthering its injustices and perverse social relations by implicitly
ratifying its corrupt moral language and practices.
It is now clear that if civic solidarity requires a Christian to speak
in the language of rights and justice, Hauerwas renounces it. Indeed,
it seems civic solidarity is, in his eyes, a Constantinian mistake. It
may seem “friendly” on its surface, but it is ultimately detrimental
to the health of the church and the health of society.[14] In order to
achieve mutual understanding (a constitutive feature of solidarity, according
to Section II), Christians will likely be forced to talk in the corrupt
moral language of liberalism, furthering its insidious influence. Furthermore,
given that “the existence of the church is the necessary condition
for knowing the truth of the way things are,” efforts to agree on
common social goods will be, at best, ineffective and, at worst, spiritually
dangerous. Certainly the prospect of an inter-tradition understanding
of the value or worth of these goods is, in his eyes, to be doubted.
In Hauerwas’s lexicon, it is now evident why civic solidarity, as
articulated in Part I, is a ‘bad idea.’ How is a Christian
to foster solidarity in a pluralist, liberal society when that society,
in contrast to the politics of the church, encourages the development
of vices rather than virtues? How is a Christian to share a common history
with a nation when it is the narrative of the church with which she ought
discriminately to identify? How is a Christian to develop a mutual understanding
of shared goals with citizens when her goals are to be uniquely Christian
and her singular epistemic location precludes her from mutual understanding
with those outside of the church? Finally, how is a Christian to foster
a sense of shared identity, when it is precisely a witness to a different
political identity that is the proper (and perhaps only) way for the Christian
to impact the world positively?
Hauerwas’s rejection of civic solidarity rings clear in his endorsement,
in After Christendom?, of the following quote: “We only
distract ourselves from building a truly Christian society by trying to
make our nation into that society, rather than be content with living
as a community-in-exile.”[15] Authentic Christianity relies not
on civic solidarity. Quite the contrary: it entails living in a manner
of exile. It entails being a resident alien. As things are today, the
“church is no longer able to shape the desires and habits of those
who claim to be Christian,” writes Hauerwas.[16] An exilic approach
is the only way to restore that ecclesiastical power.
Part 4
Charles E. Curran’s Catholic approach to church-world
issues reads profoundly differently than this. It heartily endorses extramural
participation and cooperation in the manner of locked-arm citizenship
in the collective quest for greater social justice. This participation
is not for the sake of making the state into a Christian society. It is
for the sake of further realizing the intrinsic good of the social relation
currently denoted ‘the state.’ As the often-quoted encyclical,
Justitia in mundo, states, “Action on behalf of justice and
participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as
a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel.”[17] Curran
locates the theological warrant for this kind of civic participation and
political solidarity most significantly, in my opinion, in Catholic views
of 1) the goodness of creation, 2) human reason, and 3) grace.
In Catholic Social Teaching 1891-Present, Curran examines thirteen
papal documents and two documents of U.S. Catholic bishops. Together these
are generally recognized as the United States’ “canon”
of Catholic social thought. Curran synthesizes these documents’
content by addressing specific theological and social issues in turn,
tracing official Catholic stances on the issues through recent history.
Running like a thread through the documents is the doctrine of creation’s
goodness. This doctrine asserts that, as God’s creative work, the
earth and its creatures are inherently good. Consequently, the natural
predispositions of earthly creatures bear the mark of God’s creative
intention. Not to be ignored, of course, is the theological fact of the
fall; the earth and its creatures’ natural dispositions are clouded
by sin. Nevertheless, this clouding does not fully obscure God’s
intention in nature. Accordingly, humans can discern (more or less accurately,
depending upon their virtues of discernment) the authentically natural
features of humankind which are God given and therefore good.
One such natural feature is the dignity of the human individual. God crafted
each human individually and with a particular love for him or her. Hence,
God’s relation to individuals as individuals is precious and irreplaceable.
Another, equally important, feature of humans is their social character.
Humans are not meant to be alone. They are meant to communicate with each
other, to work with each other, and to love each other. They are meant
to form relationships of diverse kinds in equally diverse social contexts.
Given this disposition, conceptions of the human self which fail to account
sufficiently for sociality are inadequate. As Curran writes, Catholics
“understand the person not as an isolated monad but as existing
in multiple relationships.”[18] According to this natural fact,
persons are “called to live and work with others in the basic communities
of the family, the church, broader human social communities, and the state.”[19]
Including the state in this list is significant. It implies that social
ordering on the level of statehood is God-intended and part of natural
creation. It is not, as some believe, a product of creation’s fall.
The state is not fundamentally a coercive social relation necessary only
because of the postlapsarian sinfulness of man. To the contrary, politics
at a state level is natural, necessary, and fundamentally good. In fact,
it is something “to which the individual is called by one’s
very nature to belong to achieve one’s own happiness and fulfillment.”[20]
Thus human flourishing, the realization of humans’ God-given natural
dispositions, depends on governmental participation. It insists on belonging
and contributing to a civic level of sociality. Humans, by their very
nature, crave identification and membership of a civic-state kind.
Consequently, from a Catholic point of view, civic solidarity is not simply
to be politically or practically desired; it is to be theologically valued.
A source of civic identification with common goals and a common history
is a natural need of humankind. To ignore it is naïve and potentially
destructive. The extent to which political liberalism, stressing monadic
individualism, ignores or is silent on this natural human disposition
is an important question, alluded to above in Sandel’s analysis
of America’s regnant political consciousness. Section V examines
this matter more fully.
Given the theological desirability of civic solidarity according to Catholic
social teaching, what, theologically speaking, should it look like? As
Section II made clear, not just any solidarity is good solidarity. This
being the case, what ought Christians to be wary of in their participation
and membership in civic social relations? On this question, Curran breaks
ranks with Hauerwas, claiming that Christians’ participation in
political give and take need not be uniquely Christian in any discursive
or epistemic sense. While Hauerwas stresses the incommensurability of
Christian language, discursive practice, and knowledge with extramural
practices of the same, Curran writes:
The documents of Catholic social teaching [claim] that Christians
should work with all others for the same basic human rights and common
good and imply that there is no unique content that calls for Christians
to act in different ways from non-Christians.[21]
Curran and Hauerwas’s marked disagreement on this issue boils down,
largely, to different views of human reason.
Catholic social thought since Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum
cites Aquinas’s doctrine of natural law as its view of human reason.
According to Curran, “the theological aspect of natural law justifies
human reason as a source of moral wisdom for Christians and Christian
ethics by recognizing natural law as the participation of eternal law
in the rational creature.”[22] Consequently, Catholics have a theological
warrant for appealing to human reason qua human reason. They have a theological
warrant for a discipline called Christian ethics, which does not appeal
insularly to divine positive law (scripture) or ecclesiastical practices,
but appeals also to human reason on its own terms as a source of moral
wisdom.
Hauerwas, as is now clear, rejects this kind of thinking. What, he would
ask, is human reason ‘on its own terms?’ Are there any set
terms for human reason that are not, in truth, terms posited by the
cultural and historical contexts of an individuals’ social surroundings?
Curran indirectly addresses this critique. He does so not by way of a
direct rejoinder. He adds nuance to his portrayal of papal encyclicals’
moral methodology. And these nuances may parry some of the force of Hauerwas’s
critique.
Catholics call the kind of ethical methodology with which Hauerwas takes
issue their “philosophical methodology,” in contradistinction
to their theological methodology.[23] Curran finds Catholics’ philosophical
methodology to be more sophisticated than the often adduced, ‘narrow-minded’
interpretations of Thomistic natural law in which its sole purpose is
to produce inflexible, juridical moral rules. These interpretations he
dubs the “classicist” approach,[24] and he claims Catholic
doctrine is not merely classicist. It employs a “historical consciousness”
that adds a level of subtlety to cruder formulations of natural law.[25]
Rerum novarum, the very document to declare Thomistic methodology
official, “responds to new circumstances that had arisen concerning
the social question and the role of workers.”[26] This reflects
a non-trivial historical pliability to Catholic doctrine’s use of
natural law. And it is this pliability which Curran calls the doctrine’s
“historical consciousness.” John Paul II articulates instructively
the kind of dialectic which obtains between the transhistorical truth-value
of Catholic doctrine and the different historical contexts to which it
must apply:
On the one hand it is constant, for it remains identical in its fundamental
inspiration, in its ‘principles of reflection,’ in its ‘criteria
of judgment,’ in its basic ‘directives for action,’
and above all in its vital link with the Gospel of the Lord. On the other
hand it is ever new, because it is subject to the necessary and opportune
adaptations suggested by the changes in historical conditions and by the
unceasing flow of the events which are the setting of the life of people
and society.[27]
Is this a case of John Paul II wanting to have his cake and eat it too?
How may Catholic doctrine posit constants of the kind John Paul II cites
and at the same time have a viable means of adaptation? Moreover, what,
more specifically, are the “principles of reflection,” “criteria
of judgment,” and so on which are constant, and in what sense are
they both sufficiently determinate to provide non-trivial constancy and
sufficiently indeterminate to provide for historical sensitivity?
Well-articulated natural law theory provides an answer. It suggests there
are general principles of human nature which are transhistorical and transcultural.
These principles, however, are indeed general. Accordingly, historical
and cultural circumstances warrant rigorous consideration in one’s
moral reasoning. The issue becomes how to read the applicability of natural
law’s general principles to historical and cultural contexts which
are irreducibly particular and unique. This takes wisdom and discernment.
That is why Aquinas’s discussion of natural law follows his discussion
of virtues in the Summa Theologica. Virtues condition one’s
epistemic access to natural laws. In particular, the virtues of discernment
do so. And these virtues are perverted or perspicacious according to,
among other things, the community in which they develop and the relative
success one achieves habitually developing them. With this, Thomas’s
and Hauerwas’s moral methodologies share ideas one might not expect.
Accordingly, a refined articulation of natural law theory may begin to
respond to Hauerwas’s critiques regarding the extent to which natural
law suggests human reason has transhistorical and transcultural ‘terms
of its own.’ Natural law theory claims there are non-trivial transhistorical
and transcultural features of human reason, and it is these to which Catholic
doctrine appeals as grounds for addressing its encyclicals not only to
the Church, but also to “all people of good will.” However,
those universal features of human reason are impossible to specify wholly
determinately, and divine positive law and a righteous community do condition
one’s ability to discern natural law well.[28] Divine positive law
and a righteous community sharpen one’s epistemic access to natural
laws, but humans are not utterly morally blind without them. Consequently,
according to Catholic social teaching, the discursive practices and epistemic
contexts of the church are not as incommensurable with the extra-ecclesiastical
world as Hauerwas makes them out to be.
And it’s a good thing, too. If Christians and non-Christians had
no means of talking morally together, there would be no way of obtaining
the civic-social end of human nature necessary for human flourishing.
Aquinas writes that “the state is a perfect community.”[29]
By this he means it is a basically good social relation of humanity in
which Christians ought to participate. And we now see they need not fear
that moralizing with non-Christians necessarily furthers a corrupt moral
language utterly alien to the church. The eternal law leavens natural
law, and true natural laws are such only because of this divine leavening
influence. But this dependence on divine leavening does not suggest that
moral language failing to be conspicuously Christian is necessarily corrupt.
It may bear an unwitting witness to the eternal source of truth that is
God, as all created nature does to varying degrees and in varying ways.
Accordingly, appealing to human reason qua human reason for the sake of
communication is not eminently taboo; it simply ought to be done with
care. One need not speak in such a way that is self-consciously indecipherable
to non-Christians or, as Yoder suggests, in such a way that is always
in some manner subversive.[30] When the truth is spoken, it will resonate
with all people of good will, inside or outside of the church, because
all people, as created, participate in nature and, consequently, necessarily
participate (granted to varying degrees) in God’s intention for
creation that is the leavening influence of eternal law. As an important
aside, if this were not the case, natural law doctrine suggests that morality
would not have the “binding force” of law. As Aquinas explains,
“in order that a law obtain the binding force which is proper to
a law, it must needs be applied to the men who have to be ruled by it.
But such application is made by its being made known to them by promulgation.”[31]
For general moral principles to bind all humans, they must be promulgated
to all humans. This being the case, God has, indeed, promulgated general
moral principles to all humans: “The natural law is promulgated
by the very fact that God instilled it into man’s mind so as to
be known by him naturally.”[32]
It is God’s intention for all humans, Christians and non-Christians
alike, to live together peacefully and to flourish by way of the laws
of humans’ individual and social nature. Thus all moral laws are
natural laws, to be known not exclusively via divine positive law or ecclesiastical
practices, but also by way of nature, which is revelatory itself. Moreover,
all laws of practical reasoning necessarily have as their end the common
good of all, not only of those currently in the church. As Aquinas
writes, God has ensured that “nothing stands firm with regard to
practical reason [moral reasoning], unless it be directed to the last
end which is the common good. Now whatever stands to reason in
this sense has the nature of a law.”[33]
Because all have a measure of access to God’s laws of nature and
because God intends for the common good of all in a perfect community
of the state, Christians in history bear the task of speaking the truth
to power to realize a more perfect civic community. And they need not
do this by focusing myopically on the use of speech that sounds distinctively
Christian. Because God, by God’s grace, has endued nature with a
shadowed reflection of the eternal law, Christians may speak in a way
that resonates with all people of good will.
And we are fortunate this is the case. As John XXIII writes, “The
grave problems caused by industrial society [can] be solved only by cooperation
of all forces…[including] all people of good will.”[34] The
state is a natural social relation because there exist natural needs of
humanity which more intimate social relations, like the family, cannot
adequately address by themselves. Consequently, a better society, a society
increasingly equipped to satisfy these needs, requires extramural solidarity.
It requires “all people of different religions, races, cultures,
and languages to work together for the common good.”[35]
This is one way of understanding why Catholics do not shy away from appealing
to the categories of justice and rights. These categories are accessible
to all people of good will, however incomplete they may be as moral guides
if taken alone. Justice and rights surely do not exhaust Catholics’
moral reasoning. Theologically they can’t. But they do provide a
good means by which to talk morally with the wider society. And, in themselves,
they are not bad. They are simply shadows of the eternal law. As shadows,
they may be abused. But their insufficiencies as moral categories, if
used alone, need not preclude Christians from using them correctly
and cautiously for the sake of civic solidarity towards greater
social progress.
This is precisely what Catholic social thought strives to do. With rights
it professes responsibilities. In so doing, it self-consciously rejects
the more anemic rights and justice talk of ‘less mature’ forms
of liberalism. It doesn’t endorse negative freedoms without answering
“to what end.” Freedoms are for the end of the common
good. And this common good has substance; it is not mere physical
protection and acquisitiveness—the only goods citizens of contractual
liberalism seem to be able to take for granted as commonly recognizable.
By exhorting Christians and non-Christians to adopt a fuller
vision of the common good, Catholic social teaching actively competes
with the provincial vision (or, even, lack of vision) of many theories
of political liberalism. It exhorts citizens to adopt a fuller vision
of mutual understanding of reciprocal sacrifice for the sake of shared
interest in the society’s common good. And this is what we found
in Section II to be solidarity. Thus we may understand Catholic social
thought to be an active attempt to offer a competing vision of social
solidarity to the narrowly self-serving solidarity of fear and acquisitiveness
prevailing in the United States today.
Part 4
I find elements of both Hauerwas and Curran’s views
convincing. I think Catholic social thought is right to believe the state
is natural and basically good, and that Christians, in the spirit of neighbor-love
and with the assurance of God’s grace, have a theological duty to
actively participate in the betterment of public society. On the other
hand, I find Hauerwas’s critique of civic solidarity worthwhile
also. Political liberalism can indeed be subtle charmer. Without thinking
twice, Christians today seem to use reprehensibly narrow conceptions of
rights and justice, and these prevailing conceptions can, undoubtedly,
corrupt ecclesiastical practice and belief.
What, then, is the answer? How should Christians comport themselves in
public, and what manner of civic solidarity can they rightfully endorse,
if any? Let us further crystallize the difference between Hauerwas and
Curran’s approaches before passing judgment on which seems theologically
advisable and what that may mean for Christians living in the United States
today.
As mentioned, Hauerwas endorses “living as a community-in-exile.”[36]
Only an exilic church can maintain the “kind of discipline that
might make it identifiable as a distinct body of people with a mission
to perform in the world.”[37] This mission is the development of
disciples. As a unique community of discipline, the church provides Christians
with the social relations necessary to develop true virtues. Indeed, it
provides the only means by which Christians can obtain the virtues necessary
for salvation. Without proper direction, an individual cannot know on
her own how properly to pray, to worship, or to accept forgiveness. These
practices require supervision. And this supervision must come from a community
of discipline determined by a narrative un-chosen by any of its
members. This recognition that a Christian is “constituted by [a]
more determinative narrative that has been given to [her] rather than
created by [her]” is “antithetical to the very spirit of modernity,”
Hauerwas believes.[38] Consequently, he writes:
the great problem of modernity for the church is how we are to survive
as disciplined communities in democratic societies. For the fundamental
presumption behind [them] is that the consciousness of something called
the common citizen is privileged no matter what kind of formation it may
or may not have had… the task of the ethicist [is] to explicate
the presuppositions shared by anyone. Ethics is the attempt at the systemization
of what we all perhaps only inchoately know or which we have perhaps failed
to make sufficiently explicit.[39]
Catholic social thought, on the other hand, believes there is indeed a
common epistemological ground upon which citizens qua citizens can stand.
This is natural law. Upon it, all humans as humans may converse morally.
Aretaic formation and divine positive law are important in sharpening
one’s vision of natural law, but non-Christians lacking this “formation,”
as Hauerwas would call it, are not precluded entirely from perceiving
moral truths. Differing “formations” do not yield an impenetrable
epistemological wall between Christian citizens and non-Christian citizens.
Hauerwas responds to Curran, among others, on Catholic social thought
in an essay entitled “A Recall to Christian Life.” There,
he and Jana Bennett claim “natural law makes sense only against
a theological background.”[40] Therefore when John XXIII exhorts
his readers to a “‘solidarity of the human race,’ a
solidarity anticipated by the Church which is by divine right universal
and capable of embracing all people,” he does not suggest that this
solidarity is somehow ‘outside God.’[41] To the contrary,
John XXIII believes “Such solidarity depends on the recognition
of the moral order which has no existence except from God.”[42]
This is incontestably correct regarding John XXIII’s writing. But
I think it fails to counter Curran’s view of natural law in the
way Hauerwas may think it does. Of course, theologically speaking, there
is no moral order which has an existence except from God. Curran does
not suggest otherwise. What he does suggest is that natural law is, to
varying degrees, epistemically available to all humans as humans. This
need not imply that it is somehow separate from God. To the contrary,
it is precisely natural law’s participation in the eternal law that
gives it its general transhistorical and transcultural characteristics.
That is to say, it is precisely because the moral order has no
existence except from God that natural law doctrine may claim that all
humans as humans have some degree of access to it, regardless of their
social contexts. The eternal law’s immutable leavening influence
on natural law is the grace of God that allows humans of varying “formations”
to talk morally together in a quasi-coherent manner. The coherence of
that talk will undoubtedly vary from context to context and from person
to person. And agreement will have to come about piecemeal according to
the particular premises the interlocutors may happen to share. However,
Christians have, by way of the power of God’s grace, the theological
right to believe that their moral discussions with non-Christians for
the sake of a better society are not necessarily performed in vain. Christians
have a theological warrant for a measure of social optimism. In Sollicitudo
rei socialis, John Paul II insists that “despite evil and sinfulness,
the church has confidence in humanity.”[43] This confidence is based
theologically on “the fact of creation by a good and gracious God”
and “the redemptive influence of Christ who united himself in some
fashion with every human being, and because the efficacious action of
the Holy Spirit fills the earth.”[44]
Thus, in our final analysis, we must grant, first, that Hauerwas seems
right regarding the condition of civic morality today. It is, in many
ways, wanting. Sandel’s account of modern America appears to a significant
degree accurate. Modern liberalism’s “vision of political
discourse is [in many ways] too spare to contain the moral energies”
necessary for robust civic life.[45] “A politics that brackets morality
and religion too completely soon generates its own disenchantment. Where
political discourse lacks moral resonance, the yearning for a public life
of larger meaning finds undesirable expression.”[46] Rather than
coming together in solidarity for the sake of a mutually recognized common
good, citizens, legislators, and judges often cast political discourse
as the mere practice of voting for self-interests. Many Americans today
tend to take this for granted as the general substance of politics. And
such, it appears, may be partially attributable to the implicit “liberal
conception of citizens as freely choosing, independent selves, unencumbered
by moral or civic ties antecedent to choice.”[47]
While Hauerwas is likely right to critique this state of politics today,
his method to then serve the world, exilic witness, seems to me to be
overly reactionary. I find Catholic social thought’s more hopeful
view of the contingent commensurability of Christian and non-Christian
moral discussion more compelling—theologically, philosophically,
and intuitively. Catholics’ approach to serve the world by offering
its own take on the common good and its own take on righteous civic solidarity,
in terms ‘the world’ might understand, appears both politically
and theologically desirable.
Inspired by natural law theory, the grace of God, and the fact that the
state, as part of God’s original creation, is meant for good, Catholics
have a powerful theological warrant for sympathetic conversation with
non-Christians and for an expectation to make progress. Accordingly, Christians
may properly expect to achieve mutual understanding for the need of reciprocal
sacrifice for the sake of shared interests no one citizen can realize
on her own. That is to say, Christians may properly and rightfully expect
to foster good civic solidarity in extra-ecclesiastical contexts. Moreover,
given the current moral crisis of American politics, in which substantive
moral discussion of this kind is largely lacking, it seems the social
hope of Catholic teaching is not only theologically warranted, it may
be just the right medicine to correct the moral anemia of modern liberalism
that Hauerwas critiques so vociferously.
Given the temptations of the world’s politics, Hauerwas calls Christians
to recognize “the world cannot be made safe, that there are no solutions”
and that Christians ought to learn to “live without answers.”[48]
The world will surely never be wholly safe. And there are no ultimate
solutions, theologically speaking, short of the ‘Solution’
who will bring the Kingdom of God to earth at the eschaton. Nevertheless,
in the final analysis, I feel Catholic social thought is right to see
“action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation
of the world” to be “a constitutive dimension of the preaching
of [and witnessing to] the Gospel.”[49]
The world will always present temptations to the Christian. The answer
to this reality is not to refuse to seek common grounds of solidarity
with the world. It is not pessimistically to learn the political “art
of dying.”[50] It is, by the power and assurance of God’s
grace, to embrace hope and the political “art of living.”
It is to recognize that grace is precisely that which allows the Christian
to seek, with fervor, grounds of solidarity with the extramural world
in the spirit of neighbor-love. Grace frees the Christian to love her
neighbor without wringing her hands about the health of the church, which,
ultimately, is subject to God’s sovereignty and graciousness in
the first place. Let us, accordingly, not be complacent with or cynical
about either the health of the church or the health of the wider society.
God’s grace allows us to pursue both, and apart from God’s
grace, we are bound to achieve neither.
Endnotes
[1] Yoder, 40.
[2] Ibid, 11.
[3] Sandel, 14.
[4] Meilaender, 130.
[5] Performing, 232.
[6] After, 16.
[7] Ibid, 6.
[8] Performing, 236; After, 7.
[9] After, 7, my emphasis.
[10] Ibid, 60.
[11] Ibid, 68.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid, 47.
[14] Ibid, 42.
[15] Ibid, 7.
[16] Ibid, 9.
[17] Curran, 12.
[18] Ibid, 3.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid, 40.
[22] Ibid, 53.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid, 54.
[25] Ibid, 55.
[26] Ibid, 57.
[27] Ibid, 64.
[28] Ibid, 49.
[29] Summa Theologica, XC.III.
[30] Yoder, 40.
[31] Ibid, XC.IV.
[32] Ibid, XC.IV.r1.
[33] Ibid, XC.II.r3, my emphasis.
[34] Curran, 47.
[35] Ibid, 42.
[36] After, 7.
[37] Ibid, 93, 95.
[38] Ibid, 109.
[39] Ibid, 97.
[40] “Recall,” sect. 1.
[41] Ibid, sect. 2.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Curran, 42.
[44] Ibid, 43. (Wis 1:7)
[45] Sandel, 323.
[46] Ibid, 322.
[47] Ibid.
[48] After, 12.
[49] Curran, 12.
[50] After, 43.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aquinas, Thomas. Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas. The Summa Theologica.
Ed. Anton C. Pegis. New York: Random House, Inc. 1948.
Curran, Charles E. Catholic Social Teaching 1891-Present: Historical,
Theological, and Ethical Analysis. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University
Press. 2002.
Hauerwas, Stanley. After Christendom?: How the Church is to Behave
if Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation are Bad Ideas. Nashville:
Abingdon Press. 1991.
-------. Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence.
Grand Rapids: Brazos Press. 2004.
------- and Jana Bennett. “‘A Recall to Christian Life’:
What is Social about the Catholic Social Teachings?” Unpublished
MSS.
Meilaender, Gilbert. The Limits of Love: Some Theological Explorations.
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. 1987.
Sandel, Michael J. Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search
of a Public Philosophy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1996.
Yoder, John Howard. The Priestly Kingdom: Social Ethics as Gospel.
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 1984.
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