Necessary Societies

On the Dignity of Society:
Catholic Social Teaching and Natural Law
by f. russell hittinger,
edited by scott j. roniger
catholic university of america, 490 pages, $39.95

On the Dignity of Society is an anthology of Russell Hittinger’s previously published articles, organized into three parts: Catholic social teaching, natural law, and “First Truths.” Like Hittinger’s previous work, the essays are exhaustively researched, carefully reasoned, and beautifully written. And they remind us of his most important scholarly accomplishment, which—as the editor, Scott Roniger, rightly says—­concerns the dignity of society.

We are more familiar with the dignity of the person, but the two concepts are closely related. Where there are plural rational agents aiming at common ends through united action, and where unity is one of the intrinsic goods aimed at, we have a “group-person,” or society. The individual has dignity—he is made in the image of God—both because of the excellence of his rational nature and because he is able to cause good in others. The same, Hittinger argues, is true of the social order. A society is not a mere aggregate.

This understanding of what makes a society is crucial for explaining the relationships among the “three necessary societies,” namely, family, polity, and Church. Each of these societies is grounded in the natural social tendency of the human person; each has ends that are given either by nature or by grace, rather than by human will; and each has a distinctive mode of authority. According to Hittinger, one flaw of political modernity is the failure of states to recognize or respect diverse modes of authority in civil society. The modern state reduces group-persons to mere partnerships, disregarding the principle of subsidiarity, on which different societies—family, Church, and so on—have their own proper functions and their own authority. (Importantly, as Hittinger insists, subsidiarity is about doing things not at the “lowest” level, but at the “proper” level.)

Hittinger’s philosophical acumen is matched by his skill as a historian. He claims that modern Catholic social teaching originated not, as is often assumed, with Rerum Novarum’s response to the labor movement, but rather with the French Revolution and its challenge to the integrity, even the very existence, of Catholic institutions. Perhaps surprisingly, the basic model of state superintendence of these institutions under the ancien régime survived into the post-1815 world on both sides of the Atlantic, with the Church mostly pursuing a legitimist strategy. Yet many Catholic intellectuals at the time protested, making their battle cry the “freedom of the Church”—an idea that can be traced back to the eleventh-century Investiture Controversy.

Subsequent revolutions, along with the conquest of the Papal States in the 1860s, largely put an end to political Christendom and led Pius IX to assert papal prerogatives over and against lay patronage of the Church. Yet Pius lacked a positive social doctrine to match his fulminations, which in any event presented interpretive problems of their own and failed to stem the revolutionary tide.

It was left to his successor, Leo XIII, to transform the papal office into a bully pulpit for direct instruction of the Catholic world on sociopolitical matters—a development that George Weigel terms the “Leonine Revolution.” Leo authored some 110 teaching letters; the bulk of them were concerned with articulating a social doctrine on the basis of a revived Thomism, with considerable help from the Society of Jesus. This corpus was all the more impressive in view of Leo’s lack of experience as a writer or ­intellectual, as well as the paucity of existing authoritative sources on which to rely. Hittinger refers to the period from 1878 to about 1950 as the time of the “Leonine synthesis,” when the key concepts and standard vocabulary of the social doctrine were ­established. Pius XI was the first to speak of social doctrine as a unified body of teachings, and even John XXIII, often regarded as inaugurating a new era, was in fact summarizing the work of previous decades.

The second part of On the Dignity of Society, concerning natural law, brings to the fore two later popes: John Paul II and Benedict XVI. ­Hittinger credits these two pontiffs with numerous accomplishments. John Paul recognized the significance of the anthropological question for the late twentieth century. Since 1775, previous popes had dedicated their inaugural encyclicals to political issues; the Polish pope, by contrast, wrote his first encyclical on the subject of human nature. In meditating on “Adamic solitude” in Eden, John Paul sought to counter modernity’s negative anthropologies with a deeper understanding of divine imaging, and of God’s resolution of that solitude through sexual ­differentiation.

Joseph Ratzinger helped him produce two encyclicals, Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio, that tied anthropology, theology, and natural law more closely together. The principles of moral order are both derived from human nature, and clarified by and integrated into the teaching of Christ. These encyclicals emphasized natural law as a seeking or a path, in the manner of a wisdom tradition. For Hittinger, these encyclicals helped to complete the philosophical work left undone—though hinted at—in the Vatican II document Gaudium et spes (too vague on this point, Hittinger thinks) and Paul VI’s encyclical ­Humanae vitae.

Although he credits ­Ratzinger with leaving the natural law tradition better than he found it, ­Hittinger also discusses the German theologian’s relative lack of interest in the subject in his early years. Ratzinger came to a deeper ­appreciation of the natural law in a perhaps surprising context: interreligious dialogue. As cardinal, and later as pope, Ratzinger understood that secular moderns understand the adjective “natural” as conveying the idea of a lower order of biological foundations, rather than the higher order of what is uniquely human. As a consequence, the language of natural law has not been very effective at communicating Catholic moral insights to secular moderns, and it is now more commonly a language used by Catholics among themselves. Secular commentators today routinely understand appeals to natural law as code for “Catholic,” rather than as referring to moral truths that are available to everyone. Ratzinger saw more of a future for natural-law philosophy in dialogue with religions that retain a wisdom tradition—that is, religions that recognize the insights of reason and appropriate them as an organic part of their theology.

Hittinger has more to say about the natural law than just its place in papal teaching. He reflects on the “three foci” of natural law in the thought of Yves Simon, and on the difficulties of finding a sufficient analogate that explains why natural law is a true law. Hittinger has a deep grasp of the intellectual problems of natural law and a rare ability to make them intelligible to non-specialists.

On the Dignity of Society is a major accomplishment. It presents the distilled wisdom of a scholar whose work is essential to the study of Catholic social thought and natural law. He supplies a careful account of the dignity of society, without which the “dignity of the person” risks individualist distortions. “Unity of order,” as ­Hittinger explains better than anyone else, is not a mere platitude. It is an intrinsic feature of human social life, and it persists despite the misunderstandings of a mechanistic and contractarian mindset. Meanwhile, the achievements of the Church’s social doctrine appear all the more impressive in light of Hittinger’s historical research, without which one might easily misconstrue its origins, development, and ­significance.

I have two criticisms, the first of which is relatively minor. I wonder whether Hittinger always gets right the historical balance of continuity and discontinuity. He sometimes gives the impression that Leo XIII was almost singly responsible for bringing forth a new era of Catholic social teaching. Yet it was Pius IX who established La Civiltà Cattolica, whose Jesuit authors were helping to promote Thomism and articulate the new social thought prior to 1878. In a similar vein, Hittinger downplays the significance of Vatican II for the arc of social teaching. As he acknowledges, interpreting Dignitatis humanae is “tricky business,” but one could go further: The decision to place religious liberty at the forefront of papal thought and external policy with states was a major shift from Leonine origins. I would say that there is more of the earlier nineteenth century in Leo, and less of Leo in the late twentieth century, than Hittinger acknowledges.

My more substantive criticism concerns the section on “First Truths.” For the most part, ^­Hittinger wisely approaches hot topics, such as contemporary Catholic political thought and the hermeneutics of Vatican II, in a subtle and indirect way. His implicit suggestion seems to be that such questions require deeper and more serious thought than they often receive, and he certainly sets an example in this regard. I had hoped for more, however, from Chapter 13, “How to Inherit a Kingdom: Reflections on the Situation of Catholic Political Thought,” co-written with Roniger. Here, the authors make “separation” their coordinating concept. Relying on Ratzinger’s work, they explain how Christianity de-divinized the state by separating politics and eschatology; furthermore, they emphasize that the kingdom of heaven and the kingdoms of the earth have different foundational principles and ends. Warning against the pitfall of “pagan integralism,” Hittinger and Roniger argue that the Church assists the state by teaching and living according to the principles of the moral order, which themselves reflect a natural wisdom higher than the political order.

These are all true and salutary reminders, but a critical question seems to go unanswered: How can the three necessary societies of family, polity, and Church be correctly understood, much less function well together, without the mutual recognition that is characteristic of political Christendom, and that has been uncharacteristic of political and social life since Christendom’s demise in the modern era?

Perhaps the answer may be found elsewhere in On the Dignity of Society, when Hittinger identifies Leo XIII as an antiseparationist. 

In his world, antiseparationism did not mean a state church. It meant rather a rich and proactive concordia in which each power recognizes the other’s theological title to rule. Civil authorities ought not to be epistemically blind about their place in the order of providence. 

Is this “epistemic blindness” what “separation” has become in the twenty-first century, when civil authorities give no credence to Church teaching, and in some cases adopt ­antithetical first principles? Presumably ­Hittinger would argue that “separation” today should mean something else; but his proposal remains hard to reconcile with Leo’s view, expressed in Immortale Dei, that public recognition and observance of the Catholic religion is the key not ­only to everlasting life, but also to the preservation of temporal ­welfare and the integrity of the family. Today’s Catholic political thought has grown more receptive to Leo’s diagnosis.

Reservations notwithstanding, On the Dignity of Society should be read and reread by students of Catholic social teaching, politics, and natural law. Seldom is a lifetime of learning communicated so lucidly as in this volume.