Subsidiarity and Participated Theonomy

For any capacity it may have to advance the argument, I am grateful for Rob's invitation to clarify where he and I diverge in our understandings of subsidiarity.  I am not hopeful, though, as the disagreement, which has been aired here many times, goes to whether things -- individuals and societies -- have goods that are for them a natural law. 

Rob's work on subsidiarity (in, e.g., "Subsidiarity as a Principle of Governance: Beyond Devolution," 35 Indiana Law Revew 103 (2001)  and "Subsidiarity as Subversion," 2 Journal of Catholic Social Thought 309 (2005)), which I admire, proceeds, as his recent post reiterates, from a concern lest we "limit subsidiarity based on the (highly contested) contours of the natural law."  I deny the dilemma. 

Subsidiarity, as I understand the principle, is a correlative of the natural law of human individuals and societies, a principle of coordination and non-absorption among various seekers, individual and societal, of the good.  More important than my holding this view of subsidiarity is the fact that, as I read them, this is the view advanced in the encyclicals.  Subsidiarity is the principle governing our participated, natural-law shares in the divine governance; subsidiarity simply doesn't apply except as principle of social justice reflective of the true common good.  It's not a question of, as Rob writes, "local empowerment" ex nihilo.  The question, as I understand it, concerns where certain ruling powers having already been located by nature (or supernature).  Marriage is one of those places, and subsidiarity calls for its respect and nurturance.  Subsidiarity is not "self-serving;" it serves the proper goods of individuals and of societies, and it seves the common good.  That, at least, is how I read the Roman teachings.  They affirm a certain sort of pluralism by affirming that the authority of societies seeking their respective goods is natural, not a contingent concession of a totalitarian or centralizing state.   

Rather than quote the encyclicals, which everyone has easy access to, this excerpt from Joahnnes Messner's influential Social Ethics: Natual Law in the Western World (1949, 1965) nicely captures what the Church has, I think, been prosposing:

"The common good principle and the principle of subsidiary function are concerned with two sides of one and the same thing.  Thus it was that Pius XI, when he coined the term 'subsidiary function', called it the 'fundamental principle of social philosophy.'. . .   If the principle of subsidiary function were only a formal principle, then all natural law principles would have only a formal nature. . . .  The principle of subsidiarity is what brings the functions of the state into the perspective of the actual common good.  This is characterized by the fact that the political community is an association of invidivual and social persons with their own existential ends and their corresponding tasks, rights, and powers, who can reach their essential self-fulfillment only by complying with the corresponding responsibilities implied in these ends" (pp. 209, 211, 630). 

I understand that this won't satisfy sceptics about the natural law.  But, needless to say, the encyclicals that advanced the modern Catholic concept of subsidiarity entertained no scepticism regarding the bindingness (and knowability) of the natural law.  For the origin of the term subsidiarity, as folded into the tradition by Leo XIII and Pius XI, Luigi Taparelli's work is the place to go.   

A given body politic may not be up to the task of implementing the natural law, but this would not be with subsidiarity's blessing.  And, as often happens, I'm reminded of this line spoken by Maritain:  "Men know [the natural law] with greater or less difficulty, and in different degrees, running the risk of error here as elesewhere."