Abstract
Mehmet Y. Ciftci seizes the difficult question of church-state relations by the horns and argues that the guidance provided by the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) hindered rather than helped conceptualise church-state relations in a way that would effectuate the witness the church must make towards political regimes. Guidance from Vatican II through documents such as Dignitatis Humanae, Lumen Gentium, Apostolicam Actuositatem and Gaudium et Spes represent the authority of the Catholic Church for its doctrines on divine revelation, faith and morals (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, ‘Doctrinal Commentary on the Concluding Formula of the Professio fidei’, 29 June 1998). While church-state relations are a topic featured in these outputs of the Council, it is not a topic that amounts to a doctrine of divine revelation, faith and morals, except for the adjacent question of how the church itself is defined and understood. As such, there is no ‘ideal form’ church-state relation promulgated by the Catholic Church as a necessary commitment of the faith, even if there is moral and intellectual advice on ways to live out the faith in the contemporary world. It is therefore possible for a Catholic to complain that such advice on church-state relations is ill-fitting and to demand improvement, without that having consequence for the eternal and inalterable truths of the Christian faith.
At the same time, any council guidance is owed the good practice of presuming good intention and wisdom, as part of a hermeneutics of continuity. Ciftci views Vatican II teaching on church-state relations as having conceded too much ground to a modern, liberal order by working with a separation of the spiritual and temporal planes that is both inaccurate and damaging to the church’s evangelising mission. As he states, ‘the strategy’s conceptual distinctions (especially between religion and politics, the spiritual and social, supernatural and natural) threaten to undermine the church’s intentions, which were to improve its mission of evangelisation and to enable the laity to bring Christian values to bear upon political and social life’ (p. 243). Ciftci’s suggestion is to instead allow ‘a ressourcement of scripture and the tradition of Patristic and mediaeval political thought to refine its teaching on church-state relations’ (ibid., emphasis original). What follows is an example of receptive ecumenism whereby refined discussion of the church’s mission in the world is nurtured through penetrating reflection on Scripture, the Church Fathers, mediaeval political thought, and the recent rejuvenation in attention towards Christ’s threefold office of prophet, priest and king. Ciftci is particularly reliant on dialogue with Stanley Hauerwas, William T. Cavanaugh and Oliver O’Donovan, but also improves on their contributions by identifying in Hauerwas and Cavanaugh a lack of understanding of the political as a site for legitimate missional opportunities, and developing within O’Donovan’s framework an appreciation of a hierarchical, ministerial church structure with a clarity of authority more definitive than that of the state (pp. 204–205). Throughout, Ciftci’s aim is ‘to present an ecclesiology able to understand church-state relations without relying on the dichotomy between religion and politics, which undermines Christians’ ability to see the church as a unique kind of social and political community’ (p. 186, emphasis added).
Such is the seriousness of Ciftci’s contribution that I would like to respond by offering two objections. The first is a counter from John Locke that kingship is a concession by God to our demands but otherwise not God’s design; if Ciftci agrees with this view, then he can also accept that secular, liberal democracy is the best way to structure human authority. That is more of a fundamental critique of Ciftci’s project but the second objection is more complementary, I hope, and may be the basis for further work and reflection in line with the book’s overall contribution. The second is that St Thomas Aquinas is very much a student of St Augustine such that there is no need to create an impasse between political theology and the natural law tradition. For every account of society there is a need to identify the end of politics taken on its own terms, which offers routes of possible harmony in understanding natural politics as part of salvation history.
Objection 1: The Honesty of Accepting a Liberal Order
Politics is not a very stable domain. Kingship is likewise susceptible to upheavals, meaning its use as an analogy for Christ’s rule may struggle. Ciftci takes this in his stride, endorsing the Pauline perspective that political and spiritual authorities each belong ‘to different eras of salvation history that overlap for the duration of the saeculum’ (p. 166). At the same time, Jesus Christ is king of kings and thus brings the model of kingship to perfection through his complete governance of creation in justice and mercy. Ciftci endorses O’Donovan’s way of squaring the circle by taking any legitimate political authority to be derivative of divine will. O’Donovan states: ‘That any regime should actually come to hold authority, and should continue to hold it, is a work of divine providence in history, not a mere accomplishment of the human task of political service’ (p. 169). For such an approach, both Ciftci and O’Donovan may find unexpected aid in the writings of Locke, albeit leading to conclusions that then dethrone their whole argument. Contrary to those who view Locke’s scriptural and theological debates as a way of dressing-up his political ideas in line with the customs and interlocutors of his time (Peter Laslett, ‘Introduction’ to John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 94), Locke’s understanding of God’s primacy is fundamental to his convictions in favour of human equality (Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, Cambridge University Press, 2002), and it is of the utmost significance that he rejects Sir Robert Filmer’s stance that the monarchy’s authority is neatly derived from the authority God gave Adam. In doing so, Locke adopts the point apparent in the book of Samuel that a king is given to the people of Israel reluctantly by God due to their insistence, even though it is an affront to the covenant (1 Sam. 8:4-20). The basis of the covenant is not obedience towards divinely instituted human authority but a more direct relationship between people and God. It is therefore fitting that Sir Robert was, among other things, an opponent of democracy, whereas Locke’s understanding of human equality and the right to private property instead leads him to reflect that all government must lie in the consent of the people. Locke is under no illusion that his principles of government will banish the evils associated with our fallen condition, but he does see the necessary binary of human authority as either instituted by God or not, such that it is deceitful to claim a certain monarchical arrangement as divinely ordained if it is not. Instead, we must find honest and rational grounds for the human enterprise of government, which is consent, in line with the practical need all communities have for trustworthy promise-making, given that the bonds of such communities are not akin to a divine covenant (John Dunn, ‘The Concept of “Trust” in the Politics of John Locke’, ch. 12 of Rorty, Schneewind and Skinner (eds.), Philosophy in History, Cambridge University Press, 1984; Stefan Eich, The Currency of Politics, Princeton University Press, 2022, ch. 2).
If we agree with Ciftci that God gives no divine authority to temporal regimes, rendering any of their goods necessarily explainable through reference to Jesus’ ultimate victory over evil (pp. 158, 178, 200), must we not also accept that their internal justification must rely on rational, man-made reasons, such as a theory of consent? And if the reply is—as meted out by David Hume to Locke—that consent is unrealistic, difficult to determine, and hard to establish (David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford University Press, 1978, Book III, Part II, §VII), is not all that fitting for a practice so thoroughly smothered by the ills of our fallen nature? To frame the question contemporaneously, is liberal democracy not the most honest way of doing politics badly in a bad world, such that it is never confused with something so pure as the heavenly city? Ciftci is deeply uneasy with modern liberal abandonment of objective notions of the good and the eschatological significance of history. He is well-versed in Alasdair MacIntyre’s observation of the modern state as attempting to demand complete obedience without offering a vision of life’s purpose (p. 113). But the older, perhaps classical, liberal tradition accepts ‘religious’ reasons for limited government: that human activity is flawed and tends to mistakenly either make the monarch God-like or create a civil religion that takes the place of true theology oriented to the eternal. While progressivist liberalism is incompatible with Christianity because of the way it requires that history be defined by the future it will have without God, it is not clear to me that older forms of liberalism are just so incompatible. To ask the same question from another direction, does the supremacy of Christ’s kingship not require us to foster forms of government that are openly and honestly limited, and of no religious intent?
Objection 2: Possible Allegiance between Political Theology and the Natural Law Tradition
Ciftci sees little merit in an argument from natural law for the church-state relationship. The stance is understandable, because the natural law operates outside the realm of the sacramental goods, which are the church’s regular alteration of history. Ciftci’s ressourcement approach leads him to affirm the transformative roles of baptism and the Eucharist, which cannot be confined to a spiritual realm set apart from the natural realm. By their very nature, baptism necessarily unites us to Christ’s victory, and the Eucharist makes the baptised into the body of Christ in the world (p. 198). Ciftci’s approach is thoroughly Augustinian in that the church is an agent for the transformation of history, with the whole world a yearning for a perfection to be found in God. What good, therefore, is the natural order for interpreting ethics and politics? Is it even an ‘order’ when separated from divine order and divine ordering? Separated from Christ’s reign, is it not a form of disorder? Ciftci thus decries the reliance of many Catholic thinkers on natural law theory (pp. 153–54) and is unequivocal in his dismissal of its utility: the church must seize the opportunity of its post-Christendom situation to regain its awareness of being in eschatological tension with all political authorities during the saeculum. The possibility of being called to martyrdom is never ruled out. Political authorities are not just expressions of our natural sociality that can be understood exhaustively through reason or natural law alone. (p. 244)
Ciftci avoids the common mistake of misunderstanding the relationship between grace and nature (p. 101), so it would be incorrect to simply counter that because grace fulfils nature it is possible to have one’s cake and eat it, responding that natural law theory is just one way of looking at society fully commensurate with a view that the natural can find new levels of perfection through grace. Rather, there is a very specific incompatibility of accounts between political theology and the natural law tradition for assessing church-state relations. (Indeed, this is part of what makes Ciftci’s critique nuanced both internally and externally for the Catholic intellectual tradition.) The incompatibility is overinterpretations of coercion, which is at the core of contemporary political thought from Weber onwards, and an essential feature of the Augustinian account of political futility. As Ciftci explains: Following the Aristotelian-Thomistic approach common in Catholic writings about politics, GS [Gaudium et Spes] presents coercive political rule as ‘founded in human nature’ and hence as part of the created order. Cavanaugh, Oliver O’Donovan, and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan have all drawn attention to the difference between this view, that has its origins in the ‘rediscovery of Aristotle and Roman law in the eleventh and twelfth centuries’, and the earlier view, represented pre-eminently by Augustine, that remained dominant from the Patristic period until the fourteenth century. According to the second view, ‘coercive government was not natural to human being, but with the fall became necessary because of human sinfulness’. (pp. 100–101)
There is much more work that needs to be done in this area, but I will confine myself to the following objection: as an activity, politics has a telos, whereas coercion is a description of means. As Aristotle describes at the start of the Nicomachean Ethics, an activity makes sense with respect to its end. Even if the means of politics, in this fallen world, is one of coercion, that is not its end. There may have been an over-reliance on the Summa Theologica in interpreting Aquinas’s thought here, whereby the scholastic question and answer style presents each topic as a standalone item of rational inquiry. That may give the impression that the precepts of just law can be considered independently of salvation history. But in the Summa contra Gentiles it is clear that all human activities form an inseparable part of the single act of creation of the universe, such that the ends of everything are inextricable from the divine will, be they natural or supernatural. Then in De Regno we have the telos of politics brought out into the open: ‘pacis unitatem’, ‘the unity of peace’ (Thomas Aquinas, De Regno ad regem Cypri, Divine Providence Press, 2014, p. 17). So the natural law account of politics—while unfortunately primitive at present—does accept our recourse to coercion as a consequence of the fall, but maintains a conceptualisation of human authority and therefore the ends of politics that is the same pre- and post-fall. The same is is true of the life of the good person, which must realise the virtues and participate in God’s love both before and after the fall, though the means used following the fall often differ, such as self-denial, penance, sacrifice, and the journey of the dark night. In this sense, the tension between political and ecclesial is part of a broader yearning for harmony that we find in the interior life too, a harmony that is properly and virtuously hoped for. It is not the permanent tension (e.g. p. 229) of Hegelian dialectics, which seeks to transcend the natural through false affirmation of chaos as a way of knowing, and amounts to nihilism, a way of not knowing and of denying the good, based as it is on a commitment that ‘reason necessarily generates contradictions’ (Julie E. Maybee, ‘Hegel’s Dialectics’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020). MacIntyre’s insistence that we must choose between Nietzsche and Aristotle is true here too (Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, Duckworth, 1985, ch. 18), because affirmation of constant tension between church and politics, body and soul, mind and body, are as if the unity of creation’s goodness was never encountered.
Ciftci provides a careful and thought-provoking critique of Vatican II’s guidance on church-state relations from the perspective of key debates within political theology and Augustinianism. These two objections are meant to help signify the penetrating provocation of Ciftci’s argument and may only amount to ideas for future debate and direction. It is a signal achievement of the book that Ciftci exposes assumptions within church teaching that are relevant for wider scrutiny in the fields of theology and political theory at the same time, and so I look forward to seeing the debate unfold under the influence of this intervention.