Pope Gregory I (the Great), Pope from 590 to 604. He is Writing in his Study. The Holy Spirit as a Pentecostal Dove Whispers in His Ear. Below, Scribes Copy His Work. A Tenth-Century Ivory, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
I have long argued that the desire for religious understanding is one of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature. If the good is the desirable, then we can judge the goodness of a social order by how well it secures the conditions for human beings to pursue the satisfaction of those natural desires.
The Catholic Integralists say that a Catholic Integralist regime is the best social order because it enforces belief in the one true religion in a Catholic confessional state, and thus satisfies the natural desire for religious understanding. But they are mistaken because they fail to see that the evolved natural desire for religious understanding is pluralistic in that human beings will always disagree in what they believe to be the true religious experience of the transcendent world. And there has never been a divine revelation of the religious truth clear enough to bring religious believers to agreement. Whatever the Holy Spirit might have whispered to Pope Gregory the Great was not clearly heard by others.
The evolutionary science of religious pluralism supports John Locke's liberal theology of Christianity--that since "everyone is orthodox to himself," and "every Church is orthodox to itself," there is no set of universal doctrines binding on all Christians, except perhaps the belief that Jesus is the Messiah; and therefore, there is no one orthodoxy strictly speaking that can be properly enforced by government.
For this reason, a Lockean liberal social order that secures religious liberty and religious toleration is the best regime for promoting the pluralistic pursuit of religious happiness. It does this by creating a marketplace of religion in which churches compete for customers, and those churches that best satisfy the desire for religious experience increase their share of the market. I have elaborated this argument in some previous posts.
But I haven't yet responded to Derek Remus's integralist critique of Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration. This was originally published at the website for The Josias, the main online outlet for integralism, and then published in print in Integralism and the Common Good: Selected Essays from The Josias, volume 2: The Two Powers, edited by P. Edmund Waldstein (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2022), 335-371. Remus first wrote this paper as an undergraduate thesis at Thomas Aquinas College (Santa Paula, California). Father Remus is now an Associate Pastor at St. Luke's Catholic Church in Calgary, Canada.
Remus's introduction to his paper is a brief history of Christianity and the relation between church and state. He then states his thesis--that the Catholic Church is right about the proper relation between church and state, and Locke is wrong.
To support this thesis, the main body of his paper has three parts: a summary of Locke's claims in A Letter Concerning Toleration, an exposition and defense of the Catholic Church's position on church and state that relies largely on Thomas Aquinas's teaching, and then a Catholic refutation of Locke's position.
Finally, Remus adds an Appendix on the question of whether the Catholic integralist understanding of church and state can be defended in the modern world where Catholics are in the minority in many Western countries (such as the United States).
I will respond to each of these parts of his paper. My references to Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration will be to the Liberty Fund edition edited by Mark Goldie (2010).
THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE STATE
Remus's first two paragraphs survey the first 1600 years of the history of Christianity in relation to the state:
"The first three centuries of the Catholic Church's existence were a period of violent and bloody persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire--that is, the state. The Church persevered through this trial, however, and, instead of diminishing, increased in proportion to the persecutions she suffered, until at last she was granted freedom of worship and hers was made the official religion of the Empire. This was the beginning of that harmonious union between Church and state which gave rise to Christendom--a union in which the state recognized that its proper good was ordered toward a higher good, namely, eternal beatitude, and the Church, to the extent that affairs of state bore upon the salvation of souls, was solicitous about those affairs."
"This union lasted throughout Europe for twelve hundred years. Then came the Protestant Reformation. The divine origin of the papacy was challenged; the religious unity of Europe was shattered; Christendom unraveled. The Church still existed, however, and the question of how governments ought to deal with her under the new order of things became an urgent problem for political philosophers" (335).
Remus then notes that while political philosophers like Hobbes and Spinoza thought the head of state should also be the head of the Church to ensure religious peace, Locke thought there should be a separation of church and state, with the church devoted to the salvation of souls in the afterlife, and the state devoted to securing the earthly goods of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Moreover, Locke thought the state should tolerate all religions except when religious doctrines or practices threatened the peace of the community.
Remus observes that the United States has clearly adopted the Lockean position through Locke's influence on American Founders like Thomas Jefferson who insisted on "a wall of separation between Church and State." Consequently, many American Catholics have adopted the Lockean view of church-state relations as the ideal that all nations should follow.
But this kind of thinking, Remus asserts, is "clearly opposed to that of the Church's Magisterium." The "Magisterium" of the Catholic Church is its "teaching" function--the authority of the Church through the popes and the bishops to truthfully interpret the revealed Word of God as conveyed through the Bible and the Church's tradition. So, here, Remus interprets the Church's Magisterium on the relation between Church and state by quoting from the papal pronouncements of three popes--Pius IX (1846-1878), Leo XIII (1878-1903), and Pius XI (1922-1939). They all agree, in the words of Leo XIII, that the state is bound by divine law to support the "public profession of religion . . . not such religion as [men] may have a preference for, but the religion which God enjoins, and which certain and most clear marks show to be the only true religion"--the religion of the Catholic Church (337). Here Remus is quoting from the encyclical Immortale Dei (par. 6). This shows, then, that Locke is wrong in arguing for the separation of church and state, because this contradicts the Catholic Church's teaching.
In this introductory section of his paper, Remus makes three dubious claims. The first is that from the beginning of Christianity, the Catholic Church has been "the Church," the only Church, because it is the only truly Christian Church, or even "the only true religion," as Leo XIII declared, as confirmed by "certain and most clear marks."
This denies the historical fact of religious pluralism in Christianity. Contrary to Remus's assumption that there was no religious pluralism in Christianity prior to the Protestant Reformation, the history of Christianity beginning with the first Christians has been a history of disagreement over Christian doctrines and practices as manifest in the many schisms and heresies among Christians. A Christian schism is when one Christian group divides into two groups that cannot live together as one religious community. A Christian heresy is one Christian's religious belief that is considered false by other Christians.
Beginning in the early history of the Christian Church, there have been constant battles with one group of heretics after another. For example, between AD 150 (with the Marcionist schism) and 1054 (with the Great Schism that separated the Latin Church in the West from the Greek Orthodox Church in the East), there were at least twenty-two major schisms in Christianity.
The Church Councils that met during the first five centuries of Christianity were called to rule against the numerous heresies that sprang up, many of which had to do with how to understand the place of Jesus Christ in the Trinity. The first Council of Nicaea in 325 ruled against Arianism--the anti-Trinitarianism of Arius, an Alexandrian priest, who believed that while Jesus was the Son of God, he was not equal to God. The Council of Ephesus in 431 ruled against Nestorianism--the teaching of Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople, that the incarnate Christ had two separate natures--one divine and the other human--and that Mary was only the mother of the human Jesus, and thus not the Mother of God. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 ruled against the view of the Coptic Churches that Christ had only one divine nature (monophysitism) and in favor of the view that Christ had two distinct natures, one divine and one human, but united in one person (dyophysitism). The Coptic Churches continue today in North Africa, the Near East, and Ethiopia.
Surveying the entire history of Christianity, Wikipedia has lists of over 50 schisms and over 40 heresies. That's what I mean by religious pluralism in Christianity. Later in his paper, Remus speaks of "that great achievement of contemporary man called religious pluralism" (370), as if there had been no religious pluralism until recently. But that is obviously not true.
This religious pluralism in Christianity also denies Remus's second dubious claim in his introductory section--that there was a "harmonious union between Church and state" that sustained Christendom for twelve hundred years prior to the Protestant Reformation. Beginning with Constantine, rulers who tried to enforce Catholic orthodoxy, often through violent coercion, were frustrated by the heresies and schisms that made it impossible to sustain any "harmonious union" of Christians.
In 313, the Roman Emperor Constantine I issued the Edict of Milan that granted religious freedom: Christianity and all other religions would be free from persecution. Later, in 380, the Emperor Theodosius I issued the Edict of Thessalonica that declared Christianity as defined by the Nicene Creed of 325 as the official religion of the Empire; and those who disagreed with any part of the Nicene Creed--such as the Arians who denied that Jesus was of "the same essence" as God--could be punished by the Church and the state. But the debate over trinitarian theology--often a violent debate--continued to fester for centuries. These and other theological disputes created a religious pluralism among Christians that neither the Church nor the state could suppress. Remus is silent about all of this theological conflict within Christianity.
The irresolvable problem of religious pluralism in Christianity eventually forced the Catholic Church in the Second Vatican Council to issue the "Declaration on Religious Freedom" or Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, which endorsed the human right to religious liberty and thus embraced the Lockean argument for religious toleration. This denied the teaching of Leo XIII that divine law requires the state to enforce Catholicism as the true religion.
This refutes the third dubious claim in Remus's introduction to this paper--the claim that the Church's Magisterium opposes Lockean religious liberty. Strangely, however, Remus never even mentions Dignitatis Humanae anywhere in his paper.
Remus might agree with Thomas Pink's argument that Dignitatis Humanae was a change in policy but not a change in doctrine. Pink explains: "The Church is now refusing to license the state to act as her coercive agent, and it is from that policy change, and not from any change in underlying doctrine, that the wrongfulness of religious coercion by the state follows." The unchanged doctrine is that while the state has no authority on its own to coerce religious belief, because the ultimate authority over religious belief belongs to the Church, the Church can authorize the state to act as the "secular arm" of the Church in enforcing religious belief. In particular, the Church can ask the state to punish those baptized Christians who have been condemned by the Church as heretics, apostates, or schismatics.
Pink relies heavily on a passage in the first section of Dignitatis Humanae: "Religious freedom, in turn, which men demand as necessary to fulfill their duty to worship God, has to do with immunity from coercion in civil society. Therefore, it leaves unchanged (integram) traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion and toward the one Church of Christ." Pink infers that if "traditional Catholic doctrine" remains "unchanged" by Dignitatis Humanae, that must mean that the traditional doctrine about the Church's authority to use the state as the "secular arm" of the Church in coercing religious belief has not been changed by Vatican II. That Remus agrees with Pink about this is perhaps suggested by the fact that Remus's paper in Integralism and the Common Good is immediately preceded by a paper by Pink, and both papers are in a section of the book with the title "Religious Liberty."
As I have argued, there are lots of problems with Pink's reading of Dignitatis Humanae. One is that there is no reference anywhere in Dignitatis Humanae to the "secular arm" doctrine of the Catholic Church. Another problem is that when the Catechism of the Catholic Church (2105) quotes the passage about the "unchanged traditional Catholic doctrine on the moral duty of men and societies toward the true religion," the Catechism explains this as affirming the moral duty of the Church to be "constantly evangelizing men," and nothing is said about the possibility of using a "secular arm" to coerce Catholic faith. Remus is silent about all of this.
LOCKE'S FIVE ARGUMENTS FOR TOLERATION
In summarizing Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, Remus correctly identifies four of Locke's main arguments (341-42). But he fails to recognize the importance of a fifth argument, which is actually Locke's primary argument.
Remus also fails to see the importance of Locke's numerous references to the New Testament as providing crucial scriptural support for his arguments. Unlike Locke, Remus provides almost no scriptural support for his arguments--he quotes from the New Testament only once. Consequently, Remus seems unwilling or unable to refute Locke's claim that the New Testament teaches liberal toleration.
Locke makes four arguments for why the state (or "Commonwealth" as Locke calls it) secures only the "civil interests" or "civil goods" in caring for "the things of this World," and therefore it must be separated from the churches that secure the salvation of souls in "the World to come."
First, the care of souls has not be committed to any civil magistrate by anyone--neither by God nor by consent of the people (LCT, 13).
Second, "the care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate, because his Power consists only in outward force: But true and saving Religion consists in the inward persuasion of the Mind; without which nothing can be acceptable to God" (LCT, 13).
Third, even if outward force could influence people's religious beliefs, this would not necessarily lead to the salvation of their souls, because given "the variety and contradiction of Opinions in Religion" among political rulers, most rulers would favor false religions that would lead to the eternal damnation of most people (LCT, 14-15).
Fourth, the duty of the magistrate to secure the civil interests of everyone does not require enforcing any religious belief, because my neighbor's religious beliefs do not affect my civil interests (LCT, 20, 37, 44-46). Thomas Jefferson expressed this Lockean argument for religious liberty in a memorable way: "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg" (Notes on Virginia, Query XVII).
Although Remus rightly identifies these four arguments, he ignores Locke's primary argument set forth in the first pages of the Letter Concerning Toleration--that toleration is "the chief Characteristical Mark of the True Church," because "every one is Orthodox to himself," and Jesus taught Christians to show "Charity, Meekness, and Good-will in general towards all Mankind," so that the "Toleration of those that differ from others in Matters of Religion, is . . . agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ" (7-12).
To prove this, Locke quotes from the New Testament 6 times in this introductory section, and a total of 14 times in the whole of the Letter Concerning Toleration. He also quotes from the Old Testament 5 times in order to contrast the Mosaic theocracy of the Old Testament and the religious liberty of the New Testament. The "Commonwealth of the Jews" was an "absolute Theocracy," so that there was no difference between the Commonwealth and the Church; and "God himself was the Legislator." "But there is absolutely no such thing, under the Gospel, as a Christian Commonwealth," because Jesus "instituted no Commonwealth." "Nor put he the Sword into any Magistrate's Hand, with Commission to make use of it in forcing men to forsake their former Religion, and receive his" (42).
As I have argued in previous posts, the proponents of early modern classical liberalism like Locke could plausibly read the New Testament as teaching religious toleration and religious liberty. Remarkably, Remus is silent about all this. He quotes from the Bible only once when he quotes Matthew 28:19: "Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost" (357). So, he never attempts to refute Locke's interpretation of the Bible.
Last year, I wrote about how the coronation of King Charles III of Great Britain showed the acceptance of Locke's liberal interpretation of New Testament Christianity as supporting toleration and religious liberty.
REMUS'S REDUCED INTEGRALISM
After explaining Locke's account of the separation of church and state, Remus turns to "the way things really are," or to "the truth about Church and state" as taught by the Catholic Church. This is a teaching about "the primacy of the common good," and defending this teaching must move through five steps, as explained by "the Common Doctor of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas" (337, 346-47).
First, Remus shows how the common good is preferable to the private good.
Second, he shows how the end of the state is the political common good.
Third, he shows how religion promotes the political common good.
Fourth, he shows how the end of the Church established by Christ is the common good of eternal beatitude.
Fifth, the rulers of the state are subject to the rulers of the Catholic Church in so far as the lower common good of politics must serve the higher common good of eternal beatitude.
Although Remus does not explicitly say that this teaching is Catholic Integralism, it clearly is. But what's remarkable about Remus's account of this teaching is that it is a reduced Catholic Integralism. A full Catholic Integralism, such as found in the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and in the history of the Catholic Church prior to Dignitatis Humanae in 1965, includes the claim that the Catholic Church has the divine right to employ the state as its secular arm in persecuting and even killing heretics. Remus rejects this claim because he agrees with Locke about "the unjustness of using the state to kill and persecute one's neighbor on account of religion" (338, 362). Although he does not explicitly explain to his reader what he is doing, Remus is reducing or revising the Catholic tradition of integralism by rejecting the traditional integralist claim that the Church is divinely commanded to persecute and even kill heretics.
The clearest indication of what Remus is doing is in his selective reading of Thomas Aquinas and of the history of the Catholic Church's persecution of heretics. Remus is silent about Aquinas's endorsement of the Inquisition. Aquinas taught that heretics--those who claim to be Christians but deny some of the doctrines of the Church--can be rightly compelled to keep the faith. Heretics must be given repeated chances to recant their heretical beliefs, but if they refuse, they can be rightly executed (ST, II-II, q. 10, aa. 8, 11; q. 11, a. 3). Aquinas cannot cite any passages from the New Testament that condone the killing of heretics, because as Locke pointed out, there are none. Remus says nothing about this.
Remus also says nothing about the history of the Catholic Churches execution of heretics. For example, in 1415, Jan Hus, a Catholic priest who sought to reform the Church, was condemned by the Council of Constance to be burned at the stake for heresy. He sang hymns as he was burned to death. Hus was a charismatic priest who inspired his followers in Bohemia to defeat five consecutive papal crusades against them from 1420 to 1431--the Hussite Wars. Hus and the Hussites were intensely pious Christians. Similarly, Martin Luther and the other Protestant Reformers were all intensely pious. Thus does the mystical experience of grace--of being divinely inspired with an experience of the transcendent--often move Christians to dissent from Catholic orthodoxy.
Remus says nothing about this. He claims that God's revealed truth is conveyed to believers by the "grace of the Holy Spirit" (356). But he is silent about how pious Christians like Jan Hus and the Protestant Reformers were inspired by the Holy Spirit to dissent from the Catholic Church, which exposed them to the violence of the Inquisition. This shows that the grace of the Holy Spirit cannot overcome religious pluralism by conveying the message of revelation so clearly that all or most believers can agree on that revealed truth.
Remus also says nothing about how some of the recent popes--John Paul II and Benedict XVI--have asked forgiveness for the Church's history of violence against heretics.
A REFUTATION OF LOCKE'S "GODLESS STATE"?
Remus begins his paper by promising his readers that he will refute Locke's position on church and state in the light of the Church's position. But when Remus comes to that part of his paper, his supposed refutation of Locke's "godless state" actually agrees with Locke on some crucial points, which explains why his reduced Integralism is so different from the Church's traditional Integralism.
As already indicated, Remus agrees with Locke that it is unjust to persecute and kill people because of their religious beliefs. He also says that "the Catholic Church agrees with Locke that it is unjust for the state to force its citizens to perform acts whereby they become members of a given religion, even if that religion is the true one" (362). The reason for this is that Locke is right in saying that faith is not real if it depends on "outward force" without "inward and full persuasion of the mind."
But still, Remus observes, Locke is wrong not to see how even though the coercive force of the state cannot influence the mind and will directly, that force can influence the mind and will indirectly by creating social conditions that help Catholic citizens fortify their faith and become more effective in persuading non-Catholic citizens to become Catholics.
Remus says that "in a nation where most people are Catholic," and the rulers are Catholic, there are four ways in which the state can rightly use force to indirectly favor the Catholic Church without directly forcing anyone to become a Catholic (360, 362). The state can refuse to give marriage licenses to Catholics who have been married in a non-Catholic marriage ceremony, because according to the Catholic Church, this is not a real marriage. The state can require that students in state schools are instructed in the Catholic faith. The state can prohibit the building of non-Catholic schools. And, finally, "the state also has the right to prohibit the propagation of opinions in the press which are opposed to its citizens' attainment of heaven, such as opinions that are blasphemous or constitute an attack on the Church" (360). This is what I mean by Remus's reduced Catholic Integralism: the state uses force to favor the Catholic Church, but without the killing of people for public heresy and blasphemy that was part of traditional Integralism.
But notice that Remus recommends this only for countries where the majority of the citizens are Catholic, and the rulers are Catholic. Why couldn't Protestants turn this argument around to say that these same four ways for the state to enforce religious belief could be used to enforce a Protestant religion in countries where most of the people and the rulers are Protestant?
In fact, that was the argument of the High Church Anglican Protestant Jonas Proast, who wrote three tracts criticizing Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, which provoked a prolonged debate between Proast and Locke. Like Remus, Proast argued that while Locke was right in saying that the mind cannot directly be coerced into religious belief, Locke failed to see how legal coercion with moderate penalties without persecution could indirectly dispose men's minds to submit to religious instruction. Also like Remus, Proast insisted that this use of legal coercion to enforce religion was proper only for enforcing the "true religion." But, of course, for Proast, the evidence clearly showed that Anglicanism was the true religion, and Catholicism was a false religion. (Proast's three tracts are available in the 5th volume of The Reception of Locke's Politics, edited by Mark Goldie [London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999], 25-128.)
Here's Remus's response: "To say that the state has a care of souls and that it has a duty to worship God, however, is not to say that the state may adopt whatever religion it happens to like or even judges to be true. Rather, it is to say that the state has a duty to adopt the religion which has truly been revealed by God, namely, the Catholic religion" (363). Remus then quotes from Leo XIII's Immortale Dei (1885), saying that "it is evident that the only true religion is the one established by Jesus Christ Himself, and which He committed to His Church to protect and to propagate." Remus does not notice, however, that Leo cited many New Testament verses as supporting this claim.
The most important New Testament text for Leo and other Integralists as establishing Catholicism as the true religion was Matthew 16:18-19, where Jesus says to Peter: "And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." The Latin version of these words is inscribed around the base of the dome of the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome, in letters six feet high. On these few words rests the entire structure of the Roman Catholic Church. Catholics interpret these words as teaching that the Apostle Peter was chosen by Jesus Christ Himself to be the first pope--the Bishop of Rome--and all the other popes have been the direct successors of Peter as the Bishop of Rome, and thus have had the papal authority granted originally by Jesus.
The Dome of St. Peter's Basilica
Remarkably, Remus says nothing about Matthew 16:18-19. Locke denies that Jesus ever conferred on any bishop of a church "Ruling Authority derived from the very Apostles, and continued down unto the present times by an uninterrup0ted Succession" (16). But, oddly, Locke never mentions Matthew 16:18-19.
Locke could have argued that there are good reasons to doubt the Catholic interpretation of these verses. First of all, these words in the Gospel of Matthew do not appear in any of the other Gospels, which should make one suspicious. Secondly, it's not clear what Jesus meant by these words. The word for "church" (ecclesia) occurs only twice in the four Gospels, and it's not clear that Jesus was really thinking about founding a church. Moreover, Jesus says nothing about Peter having an endless number of successors who would inherit his apostolic authority; and Jesus says nothing about there being bishops in Rome. And one would think that Jerusalem would be more important than Rome for Jesus. Furthermore, there is no evidence in the New Testament that Peter ever went to Rome. There is no contemporary reference to Peter as having been a bishop in Rome. And the first indications of there being a bishop in Rome come from the second century.
What is said in the New Testament about the first Christian churches confirm Locke's claim that they were "voluntary and free societies" that did not use violent coercion to enforce belief, although they did excommunicate those they deemed deviants from church norms. And while these churches had bishops, there is no evidence that there was a strict hierarchy of bishops with the bishop of Rome enforcing orthodoxy on all the churches.
So, again, it seems that the New Testament teaches the classical liberal principles of religious liberty and religious toleration.
INTEGRALIST CATHOLICS ARE INTOLERABLE
In his Appendix, Remus responds to the objection that in modern countries like the United States with religious pluralism, and where Catholics are in the minority, it seems absurd to propose that the Catholic Church should be the established church enforced by the state. Remus's answer is that yes, in these circumstances, a Catholic confessional state is not practicable, and so it would be imprudent for the Catholic Church to insist that the governments in these countries should subject themselves to the religious rule of the Catholic Church.
Nevertheless, Remus argues, the imprudence of doing this does not deny the truth of what he has said about the proper relationship between the Church and the state. Consequently, Catholics are obligated to strive to win as many converts to Catholicism as they can, as they work toward achieving the social and political power over their societies that will someday allow the Catholics to establish the rule of the Catholic Church and to use legal force to restrict the religious freedom of non-Catholics.
Locke argued that churches that do not teach and practice religious tolerance of other religions cannot themselves be tolerated. Remus agrees! "A government which holds in principle that it must treat all religions within its domain equally and that those religions must in turn refrain from any intervention in politics cannot tolerate the Catholic Church and be consistent with itself" (371).
Amazingly, the final conclusion of Remus's argument for Catholic Integralism and against Lockean toleration is that Lockean liberal regimes like the United States must not tolerate Catholic Integralists.
