Edward Goerner, RIP

Edward Goerner, a longtime member of the Government Department at Notre Dame, has passed away. His book Peter and Caesar: Political Authority and the Catholic Church (Herder & Herder, 1965) is an unduly neglected classic of Catholic political theory, and (though I disagree with them) his essays on Aquinas are learned and provocative. See "On Thomistic Natural Law: The Bad Man's View of Thomistic Natural Right," Political Theory 7 (1979): 101-22 and "Thomistic Natural Right: The Good Man's View of Thomistic Natural Law," Political Theory 11 (1983): 393-418. Here is an excerpt from the closing to Peter and Caesar:

[M]uch of the modern Western world is no longer characterized by religiously homogeneous political communities. The modern West has committed itself to technological objectives that break up such communities. That commitment is partly a product of a revulsion against religious fanaticism and the wars and massacres to which it led. That revulsion led to a powerful tendency to secularize political society radically by directing it to the maximization of exclusively private and/or pre-political goals. And the technological objectives that have come to dominate so much of our lives seem integrally to involve the regular shifting and mixture of individuals as interchangeable units in the perpetual and kaleidoscopic transformations of the economy. For the semi-nomadic populations produced in Europe and America by these forces, the religious pluralism inherent in this time before the harvest takes the form of religiously diverse individuals living in close proximity. Here the task of the magisterium is not only to teach the faithful that the gospel does not authorize them to oppress others in any way, but also to teach them that the gospel must in some way inform the structure of their public lives.

....

Different civilizational moments pose the pluralistic problem in different ways and require a different dialogue between integrist and prophetic critic. So perhaps someone will say: "There! At the very end you, too, have come to [John Courtney] Murray's historicism." But that is to miss the point. It is, no doubt, true as he argues that no historical realization is the Ideal Republic of Truth and Justice. That is a valid expression of the voice of prophetic criticism. But it may also be true that no Christian action in public affairs is possible without the pole star of the apocalyptic vision of the City of God. And no serious reflection on the significance of that vision for action in this world can avoid exploring the human possibilities for realizing crude images of that vision, as well as the dangers inherent in such attempts by men who are both bathed in grace and flawed by sin. And it would be absurd to pretend either that they are not arranged in a hierarchy--as are the states of individual life--or that any particular realization is possible or prudent as an objective for a given society.

It may not be an easy task to begin again, and there may be danger in it, but every Christian who is in the world must, at the level of his competence, ask the question how the structure of the common action in which he moves can be conformed to the archetypal Christian action. In it, the integrist's truth and the prophetic critic's truth are both present, and the tension symoblizes our time: to stretch out the arms to embrace one's brothers--and to receive the nails.