The State in Catholic Thought

·REVIEW ARTICLE THE STATE IN CATHOLIC THOUGHT* E. MuNZER / Hejnrich A. Rommen, an eminent .Catholic exile from Nazi Germany and at present a professor at Hartford, Connecticut, is no newcomer in the field of state philosophy and law. His German publications on The State Doctrine ofFrancis Suarez (1927), The Church and Her Right (1930), Human Rights, Law, and Judiciary in the United States and Other Common Law Countries (1931), The State in Catholic Ideology (1935), and The Eternal Recurrence of Natural Law (1936)-the latter will be published shortly in English-and his contributions to German and American periodicals have made him well known to an expectant circle of students. His latest book, The State in Catholic Thought, represents an outstanding summary of twenty years of penetrating study of social and political philosophy. Dr. Rommen's latest work is essentially a restatement and modernization of the Catholic doctrine of the state in contr~distinction especially to the Occamist-Lutheran and Rousseauistic political teachings and their modern formulations. The state is a moral organism grounded in natural law. Historically, the state originates in a status-contract; but contract means merely causa existentiae of the concrete institution, not, as Rousseau thought, causa essentiac, i.e., the origin of the idea of the state itself. The question whether or not the state should be, the essence of statal orderordo justitiae legalis-and the existence of authority are outside human discretion. Emile's speculations are wrong. To sustain these basic propositions Dr. Rommen reverts to traditional Catholic doctrine. The social community has a genuine reality of its own. In the order of being, man .is the only substance within the social. In the order of ends, the community precedes man, though it obtains its value only from'being linked to the perfection of persons. Owing to this function, in. the teleological order of the universe the community has an esse intentionale over and above the mere aggregation of the ends of the individuals who form it. These. prime deductions are moving within the order of reason. Although natural and supernatural · theology influence political thought, Catholic doctrine holds that political philosophy ·is not a reflex of dogma, and refutes the idea, e.g., that monarchy and monotheism are able to show more than a peripheral historical relationship. Thomist philosophy of the state in particular derives its conclusions from natural law and reason, not from revelation, and uses the distinction between theology and ph11osophy to controvert the deification of the state as an unfounded assumption of paganism. •The State in Catlwlic Thought. By HEn~RICH A. ROMMEN. London and St. Louis: Herde·r. 1945. Pp. viii, 747. ($6.00). 85 86 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY Within the realm of reason, social forms can be interpreted organically or mechanistically. The Catholic view may be considered as organic in the sense of teleological. "Organic" is thus used figuratively, for instance as modern metaphysics, such as Solovyov's, speaks of organic logics. Applied to the state, the organic view means solidarism: the human collective co-operates towards an end by means of state and other institutions for the perfection of man's rational nature. More concretely, the state is a moral, not a biological ·organism. This conception leaves room for the pluralism of social forms, for the whole compact of "irrational" (sympathetic) forces making for collective life, for a genuine balance ·between commutative, distributive, and legal justice, and for an equilibrium between freedom and authority, for it holds that the state is founded n~ither from below by individual contracts nor ·from above by imposition~ The metaphysical basis of the natural law is the Aristotelian propOsition that '(the very essence of a thing is at the same time its end." Since the hierarchy of ends determines the universal order of being, natural law ultimately means order.. An.d as order is something to be attained by free will, natural law-and with it politics as one of its emanations-belongs to the realm of ethics which together with logics encompasses the confines of reason. The opposing notions in politics are therefore order and disorder, notJ as Carl Schmitt wanted us to believe, friend and enemy. The friend-enemy...