Christian faith & human understanding: studies on the Eucharist, Trinity, and the human person

12. The Human Person and Political Life

[ 1 2 ] THE HUMAN PERSON AND POLITICAL LIFE I wish to discuss the relationship between the human person and political life, with some reference to the way this relationship has been understood by Catholic thinkers. My remarks will be a venture into political philosophy , but it would be appropriate to begin with a few comments about our present historical situation. Political philosophy in recent Catholic thought Political philosophy has been short-changed in Catholic thought in the past century, during the Thomistic revival following the encyclical Aeterni Patris of Pope Leo XIII in 1879. In the departmental structure and the philosophical curricula that prevailed in many Catholic colleges and universities during the first two thirds of the twentieth century, political philosophy would usually be located not in philosophy departments but in political science. In seminary programs, there was eVectively no political philosophy whatsoever.The philosophy manuals of the early and middle part of the century covered political philosophy, if they treated it at all, as a division of ethics .In the great manual written by Joseph Gredt,O.S.B.,for example,which was entitled Elementa Philosophiae Aristotelico-Thomisticae,1 one finds extensive treatments of logic, epistemology, philosophy of nature, philosophical psychology,metaphysics,theodicy,and ethics,but in the nearly one thousand pages of the two volumes,there are only some twenty pages,at the very end  1.Joseph Gredt,O.S.B.,Elementa PhilosophiaeAristotelico-Thomisticae, 2 vols.(Freiburg:Herder, 1953). of the second volume, devoted to “civil society,” and this brief section terminates with a two-page treatment de bello, on war.This long philosophical work, therefore, does not end peacefully, and it clearly does not oVer a solution to the political problem. It is true that some of the most important twentieth-century Catholic philosophers devoted much of their work to political philosophy: Jacques Maritain wrote such books as Man and the State,The Person and the Common Good,ThingsThat Are Not Caesar’s, Integral Humanism, Freedom in the Modern World (the French title was Du régime temporel et de la liberté),and Scholasticism and Politics (Principes d’une politique humaniste), all of which deal with politics, and Yves R. Simon wrote The Philosophy of Democratic Government, among other titles in political thought, but these two authors were the exception rather than the rule. At Louvain’s Higher Institute for Philosophy, for example , there was no representation of political philosophy. Jacques LeClercq wrote in social ethics and social philosophy, but not political thought as such.What was done in political philosophy added up to a relatively small achievement in this field, compared, say, with the work that was done in metaphysics, philosophy of science, ethics, and the philosophy of man.This lack of interest is rather strange, since political life originally provided the context for philosophy, in the life of Socrates and in the writings of both Plato and Aristotle.The lack of concern with political philosophy should provoke our curiosity and perhaps even our wonder. Recently, at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, a number of important Catholic thinkers in Paris have addressed issues in political philosophy.Pierre Manent is the most conspicuous of these,but one must also mention Rémi Brague,Alain Besançon,andTerence Marshall.Their work has been influenced by Raymond Aron and Leo Strauss.We should also call to mind the work, in the United States, of Ernest Fortin,A.A. (Boston College), James Schall, S.J. (Georgetown), Francis Canavan, S.J. (Fordham), and Charles N. R. McCoy (Catholic University), but it is interesting to note that all these persons were or are academically “housed” not in philosophy but in departments of politics, or, in the case of Fortin, in theology.There were other thinkers who approached social and political problems, such as John Courtney Murray, S.J., and John A. Ryan in the United States and Denis Fahey and Edward Cahill in Ireland, but again they tended to discuss these issues in terms of Church-State relations and  the human person moral theology, and did so in a somewhat more deductive manner than would be appropriate for political philosophy.2 I should add that Pope John Paul II, in his philosophical writings on the human person, does address the phenomenon of community in his article “The Person: Subject and Community,”3 and in the last chapter of his book The Acting...