Mirror of Justice

I've been re-reading Rerum Novarum and Centesimus Annus in preparation for a presentation I'm giving at an upcoming conference on Human Ecology at CUA's School of Business and Economics. The late Fr. Ernest Fortin, political philosopher/theologian extraordinaire offers some keen analysis in volume 3 of Fortin's collected works, edited by Brian Benestad, Human Rights, Virtue, and the Common Good. The entire collection is worth reading and re-reading, as Fortin's comprehensive understanding of the tradition is much less common now, but for those of us particularly interested in the Catholic social teaching, volume 3 is a precious, untapped resource.

In his essay, "Sacred and Inviolable: Rerum Novarum and Natural Rights," Fr. Fortin applauds Pope Leo XIII's courageous insertion of the Church into the 'social question,' even as Fortin critiques what he takes to be an all too modern approach to questions concerning private property, the common good, and rights generally. Leo's attempt to synthesize these modern formulations with a more pre-modern return to "the nature and goals of civil society" is a difficult one, given the teleological starting point of the latter and the nonteleological starting point of the former. 

Here's a bit (find the entire essay online here): 

In a nutshell, what the encyclical calls for is nothing short of a wholesale return to a premodern and by and large Thomistic understanding of the nature and goals of civil society, whose insights are brought to bear on the new situation created by the rise of capitalism and the socialist reaction to it. That alone would be enough to set Rerum novarum apart as a document of unique theoretical and historical importance. One thing is certain: its publication marks the spectacular reentry of the Church into an arena from which it had been excluded as a major player by the great intellectual and political events of the Enlightenment and its aftermath. The other side of the story, and it is no less fascinating than the first, is that in elaborating its program for the reform of society Rerum novarum resorts to a number of categories that are proper to modern thought and not easily squared with its basic Thomism. Two of these merit special consideration: the overwhelming emphasis on the naturalness of private property and the doctrine of natural rights.

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[T]he teaching and the language of Rerum novarum stem from two distinct traditions, one premodern and the other modern. The first is teleological and stresses duties. It holds that human beings are naturally political and directed to some preestablished end in the attainment of which they find their perfection or happiness. The second is nonteleological and stresses rights. It denies that there is any supreme good to which human beings are ordered by nature and views them from the standpoint of their beginning or the passions by which most of them are habitually moved, namely, the desire for security, comfort, pleasure, and the various amenities of life. For the same reason, it denies that they are natural parts of a larger whole whose common good is superior to the private good of its individual parts. In the course of the discussion, I pointed to some of the difficulties involved in any attempt to blend the two approaches...Can the encyclical be said to have achieved a genuine synthesis?

 

The challenge that it faced was rendered particularly acute by the radical heterogeneity of the positions whose amalgamation was being sought. The heart of the modern project was from the beginning and has remained ever since its so-called "realism." Its originators had concluded on the basis of experience that premodern ethical and political thought had failed because it made impossibly high demands on people. It studied human nature in the light of its noblest possibilities and was thus compelled to speak about an ideal that is seldom if ever achieved among human beings. In a word, it was Utopian or, to use Descartes's image, quixotic. 

 

The best way to remedy the situation, it was decided, was to lower the standards of human behavior in order to increase their effectiveness or propose an ideal that was more easily attainable because less exacting. This led in due course to a recasting of all basic moral principles in terms of rights. Most people would rather be informed of their rights than reminded of their duties. Edmund Burke knew whereof he spoke when he said, "The little catechism of the rights of men is soon learned; and the inferences are in the passions."

 

The beauty of the new scheme is that it supposedly made it possible for everyone to enjoy the benefits of virtue without having to acquire it, that is, without undergoing a painful conversion from a premoral concern with worldly goods to a concern for the goodness of the soul. The intelligent pursuit of one's selfish interest would do more for the well-being of society than any concerted attempt to promote the common good. Mandeville, another bona fide Lockean, captured the spirit of the new enterprise as well as anyone else when, in The Fable of the Bees: Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1705), he argued that the day bees started worrying about moral virtue the hive would be ruined and that it would recover its prosperity only when each one returned to its vices. This, to a higher degree than it perhaps imagined, is the position that the encyclical would synthesize with its basic Thomistic outlook.

 

Syntheses, it has been aptly said, produce miracles. The miracle in this case consisted in using the categories of modern thought to restore something like the lofty morality they were originally calculated to replace. That miracle has yet to be attested. Catholics heard more about rights from Leo than they had from any other pope, and, thanks in large part to him, they were destined to hear more and more about them as time went on. Yet opinion continues to be divided as to whether this new emphasis has led to the spiritual renewal that Leo hoped to foster. Suffice it to say that in recent years the Church has had its hands full trying to resist the changes that are being urged upon it by some of its members in the name of the very rights it now promotes. In the best instance, the rights for which Leo pleaded had to do with the freedom to worship God and fulfill the rest of one's God given duties. Once these rights were granted independent status, however, it was only a matter of time before they were parlayed into a moral argument to criticize the law rather than to justify one's observance of it. 

 

This brings me to my last question, which is whether the drafters of the encyclical—Liberatore, Zigliara, Mazzella, Boccali, Pope Leo himself, and others—were fully aware of their dependence on modern modes of thought. The simplest answer is Yes. The Pope may have felt that the time had come to abandon the intransigence of his immediate predecessors and temper their inflexible principles with a more flexible policy, even if this meant adopting a terminology that is neither native nor congenial to the older Catholic tradition. Without capitulating to modernity, Catholics had to develop attitudes that were appropriate to living in the modern world. After all, there was much to be said for liberal or constitutional democracy, which, of the two viable alternatives on the contemporary horizon, is the one that came closest to what Christianity had always recommended. Moreover, something could be done to correct its defects, whereas the defects of socialism were seemingly irremediable....There is nonetheless reason to suspect that Leo and his mentors were invincibly blind to the theoretical implications of some of their statements.

 

In a later essay, "From Rerum Novarum to Centesimus Annus: Continuity or Discontinuity?" Fortin writes that JPII's "benevolent interpretation" of Rerum novarum enabled the prior to moderate the latter's unduly modern conception of rights (prepolitical rights dislodged from prior duties), even though Centesimus Annus was "demonstrably less Thomistic than that of Rerum novarum." This tighter link between rights and duties is especially true with regard to the 'ownership' of private property which JPII connects strongly with its 'use' in the "common destination of material goods." Still, Fortin points to other elements of Centesimus Annus which are beholden to modern formulations, most especially, human dignity. His conclusion (full essay here): 

Just as Rerum Novarum bears traces of the transition from late medieval to early modern thought, i.e., from the divine right of kings to the sacred right of private property, so Centesimus Annus bears traces of the transition from early modernity to late modernity, i.e., from the Lockean notion of the sacredness of private property to the eighteenth-century notion of the sacredness of the sovereign individual.