The Universal Call to Holiness as a “Politics” for Our Time
By Larry Chapp
As St. Hilary wrote a thousand (or a few) days ago, “The less we ask of Caesar, the less we will have to render to Caesar.”
-Dorothy Day1
What we need now is a recovery of a healthy sense of the futility of earthly politics as an eschatological project. And to illustrate this I will begin with a personal story. I was in London in 2008 on the morning after Obama was elected President. Londoners were euphoric and giddy as school kids on holiday and were openly gushing about the new election as if we had just elected the Messiah himself. It struck me how strongly eschatological the tone of it all was; it was expressive of something that represented the end point of a historical teleology which had (finally!) been reached. The progressive, liberal reading of history had been vindicated; history does indeed have a goal and that goal is us. It was as if we had all rented a party bus and parked in Fukuyama’s cul de sac to await the coming utopian moment. And yet, after eight years of the President of “Si se puede!” not much changed, the status quo of power and wealth remained in place, all previous social inequities persisted, and the dear leader departed his office a rich man and has taken up residence in his new mansion on a beach in Hawaii.
Therefore, in this election year, when we are once again hearing the eschatological and apocalyptic pronouncement that “this is the most decisive election of modern times!!”, and where each candidate vilifies the other as the very embodiment of some kind of distilled essence of evil, it is more important than ever for Catholics to remember that electoral politics are of penultimate importance, and that when too much hope is placed within it, it can become a distorting idol. This apotheosis of intramundane politics can rob the Christian of a sense of the truly ultimate, and so we need reminding that no politics can even be truly political in a proper sense unless it is first animated by the leaven of sanctifying grace. But that can only happen when there are Christians who are indeed sanctified. And if there be no such Christians in significant numbers, then the Empire will fill that vacuum with secular sacraments and saints that will act as a simulacrum of the Church in an eschatological register.
There is nothing new about this. In the Church of apostolic times it was commonplace for Caesar to be addressed as “Lord.” And this was more than a simple honorific title acknowledging that Caesar was the supreme political authority in the land and “commander in chief.” It also had pagan religious connotations since the Roman Empire was viewed by most people at that time as a dynamic union of the realm of the gods and the earthly city. There was no separation of Church and State, of course, and the Empire was viewed as a sacred entity since it was expressive in microcosmic form of the macrocosmic world of the gods and the assorted “principalities and powers” that ruled the world as their subaltern agents. Thus, the affirmation “Caesar is Lord” was a statement of deep religious and political significance that affirmed, through an almost sacramental embodiment of the sacred realm in Caesar, the primacy of the Empire over all things.
Therefore, when Christians in the early Church made the public affirmation that “Christ is Lord,” they were engaging in an act which was much more than an expression of a private devotional piety. They were also making a dangerous, theo-political statement insofar as the doxological affirmation, “Christ is Lord,” was also an act of political defiance which indirectly denied that “Caesar is Lord.” And in so doing, those early Christians were developing the first outlines of a theological politics that affirmed the primacy of Christ’s Kingdom, already present in an inchoate and incomplete way in the Church, over the kingdoms of this world, necessary as such kingdoms are in their own limited way.
How easy it would have been for the early Church to affirm Christ as their “god” all the while affirming the existence of the Imperial gods! They could have placed Christ in the pantheon of Roman gods and then morphed into yet one more of the many mystery religions of that era. They would have retained their own unique religious devotion to Christ while avoiding the persecutions of the empire. This was surely a temptation, as some of the early heresies make clear, but it was a temptation that was resisted with a martyr’s fervor. And in so resisting, they created a form of Christian living wherein the pursuit of the holiness that Christ had gifted them was seen as a process of Kingdom building that had political consequences, in spite of the fact, or perhaps because of the fact, that they made no direct political claims. Indeed, in the end, the small band of resisters conquered the very empire that had attempted to snuff them out.
In the following quote by Joseph Ratzinger we see the future pontiff making a very similar claim. Namely, that faith in the one God is the only thing that will save us from political tyranny and the only thing that can give us a proper sense of what a true “politics” is.
In this sense the profession “There is only one God” is, precisely because it has itself no political aims, a program of decisive political importance; through the absoluteness that it lends the individual from his God, and through the relativization to which it relegates all political communities in comparison with the unity of the God who embraces them all, it forms the only definitive protection against the power of the collective and at the same time implies the complete abolition of any idea of exclusiveness in humanity as a whole.2
The great breakthrough in human consciousness created by the rise and the triumph of monotheism resides in the fact that the affirmation of the one, transcendent God relativizes all political regimes and all political “programs” and robs them of any pretentious claim to absolute authority. In other words, as the early Christians well knew, the Lordship of Christ cuts down to the marrow of everything and makes all things new. And that has implications not only for politics but for the living out of the Gospel as well.
But what is this broader sense of the term “politics” that Ratzinger is appealing to here? As Americans we have grown accustomed to the reduction of the meaning of the word politics to a certain kind of participation in electoral processes. And such participation in electoral politics is all well and good as far as it goes. But in a more traditional Catholic sense, and following Catholic social teaching, politics is a much broader reality than mere voting and legislating. This broader Catholic sense of the political also encompasses all of the many ways that a society and culture are formed and constituted, up to and including a recognition of the divine law that Ratzinger is alluding to here. And it is only such a divine law, recognized in our natural law reasoning, that can act as a limiting principle on the powers of government. In this Catholic approach, which stands in contradiction to the political trends in modernity, society cannot be viewed as a beehive of disaggregated individuals held together by the raw force of governmental power, but rather as a nested hierarchy of ordered domains, each in reciprocal relation with the others according to their station in the hierarchy, and all of which, including the State, culminate in an affirmation of God as the ultimate source of the moral goods that we embrace.
Furthermore, this Catholic approach is not first and foremost about limiting State power, although that is certainly one of its side effects. Rather, it is primarily a more positive proposal concerning our vocation and mission as Christians in the world. We are not called as Christians to retreat into the desert like modern day Essenes awaiting doomsday and judgment for “those others.” We are not called to become survivalist “preppers for Jesus” as we stockpile Bibles, rosaries, and hand grenades in the buried school bus of our compound of apocalyptic doom. Saint Benedict founded monasteries as islands of holiness and learning because he wanted to promote such things in a disintegrating culture. But what he was not doing was offering up an “option” for late Roman Bohemian dilettantes to assuage their bourgeois anxieties. What he was proposing as an antidote to the problems of his day was not retreat or even, as might seem the case, mere separation from society in order to shake the dust of the latter off of our feet. What he was proposing was not an option but a mandate: “Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The fact that he chose a monastic setting for this mandate is only tangential to his root insight that holiness of life is the truest form of Christ’s Kingdom—a Kingdom that encompasses and transcends the rotting and disintegrating kingdoms of this world. And in so doing, St. Benedict was fulfilling the demands of charity since his project was not a gnostic rejection of the world but rather an affirmation of the world as redeemable.
Holiness therefore is not characterized first and foremost by an anti-world mentality, even if it often seeks the silence and solitude of a “desert place” in order to hear the voice of God more clearly. There are indeed many aspects of the world that must be shunned and rejected, but this is for the sake of an even more capacious embrace. Our Lord would often seek out solitude to pray. And then he returned to the crowds in order to preach and ended his life by boldly walking into the camp of his enemies in Jerusalem.
Saint Augustine wrote his famous text, The City of God, as the Roman empire, which was thought by many to be in some sense eternal, crumbled in ruins around him. The text is a long and complex argument that scopes out a theology that views history as the unfolding interplay between the City of God, which is characterized by an ascent into the divine love, and the City of Man, which is characterized by a tendency toward the libido dominandi, which can be roughly translated as the tendency of fallen human nature to use raw power in order to control and dominate others. On earth these two cities find a partial realization in the Church and in civil society.
But there are also deeper realizations of the two cities in the heart of each and every individual, both Christian and non-Christian. This invisible realm of the cities in our souls is really a completion of the psychology of belief that St. Augustine also described in his Confessions, wherein he makes it clear that the true struggle for the love of God takes place in the depths of the human heart. Saint Augustine had a robust sense of the depths of sin. Some would say he had an overly robust sense of sin, but the bottom line is that St. Augustine was surely correct to point out that there is a downward entropy in the human soul, an inward turn toward the self as the sole barometer of the moral law, and that this entropy operates on both an individual and on a social scale. A slave, if he is inwardly virtuous and moral, is truly free in a deeper sense and is oriented to the City of God. And a king, if he is a captive of the libido dominandi, is the biggest slave of all since he is now ruled over by his multitudinous vices. As St. Augustine puts it: “Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”3
And speaking of vices, the essence of all sin is that it is a lie. And the deeper the sin, the more profound the lie becomes and the more pervasive and compelling the illusions it generates. Saint Augustine therefore points out that entire civilizations, when they fall into depravity, must hide their perfidy in a fog of lies and deceptive illusions. They must spin the straw of sin into the gold of an alleged moral heroism. Good becomes evil and evil good in the grand reversal of values that the French historian Alain Besançon, following Soloviev, calls, “the falsification of the good.”4
Decadent cultures (such as ours) must always engage in a repristination of their vices by recasting them as virtues. Wars of bloody conquest are re-narrated as grand victories over the forces of darkness. Rapacious greed among the wealthy elites is transformed into entrepreneurial beneficence. Unfair judicial systems that distribute justice inequitably based on race or economic status are re-imagined as necessary “law and order” provisions for keeping “ordinary people” safe. Sexual licentiousness loses its patina of shame and is celebrated as a liberation from moral oppression. Pre-natal infanticide becomes “reproductive health and freedom.” Corruption in high places where money is the only language of discourse is reformulated as “lobbying.” And for St. Augustine this pattern of mendaciousness is pervasive in world history and explains why when great empires fall, it comes as a shock to those who have fallen under the spell of such deceptions.
Holiness is therefore no idle pastime of devotional sentimentalism, but rather it’s a deeply serious entering into the inner pathos of the world’s agonistic decline into the despair of nihilistic illusions. Only the truth of God will do. And the task of the Christian is to so conform ourselves to that truth that we become its transparent vessels for the life of the world. It is only such a holiness that can create the optics required to make the contrast clear. And that contrast, as the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart points out, is a contrast between “Christ and nothing.”5 And it is only a holiness rooted in conformity to Christ that can stand above the abyss below without falling in.
My claim is that the gods that animate our own culture are cut out of the same cloth as those of old, even if they are now dressed-up differently, and are now even more destructive since the power of modern technology only increases the reach of those who seek to control and to dominate. The noose of “surveillance capitalism” grows ever-tighter around our necks as big tech becomes the dominating power of our time.6 We now live in an age of even more terrifying myths, made more lethal by the fact that our myths posture as anti-myths and are thus more beguiling in their deceptive packaging as a form of sophisticated enlightenment. But the reality is that with the eclipse of the true God in our culture all of the older strong gods of Blut und Erde have returned with a vengeance.
Joseph Ratzinger saw this as well and envisioned a future where the Church has lost most of its influence as an agent of cultural change and has shrunk to a small remnant of devoted believers. He does not endorse this as preferable but predicts it as what is most likely to happen. He is merely pointing out that ours is a cultural moment characterized by unbelief and the unreality of God and we must acknowledge that fact and double-down on the pursuit of holiness, or we will perish. He states:
And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain in the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already… but the Church of faith. It may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that it once was until recently; but it will enjoy a fresh blossoming, and be seen as man’s home where he will find life and hope beyond death.7
And from where does Ratzinger think this “fresh blossoming” will arise? From the saints, which now must include all of us to the extent that we are able. As he puts it, “The future of the Church… will be reshaped by the saints, by men that is whose minds probe deeper than the slogans of the day, who see more than others see, because their lives embrace a wider reality.”8 Our future, in other words, hinges on the universal call to holiness as a kind of counter-politics to the political gods of modernity.
And since we live in an egalitarian age with an economy geared around a vast middle class, most of whom are now deeply interconnected via the internet, we live then in an ecclesial era where the hour of the laity has arrived. Holiness can no longer be the simple provenance of the celibates and the monks. We need, as Dorothy Day saw long ago, a revolution of the heart amongst the laity in order to foster a grand renewal of faith in the trenches of everyday life. In short, the era of being mere bystanders as we watch the few saints in our midst march by is over. It is now Christ or nothing.
So really, it doesn't matter who is in power—Democrats or Republicans—and it does not matter if we place more emphasis on the government to solve our problems or free enterprise economics in a secular, amoral, Malthusian register. Nor is this a cynical reading of our situation. It is rather who we are. I cannot emphasize enough that what I am talking about here is not just a few falsehoods in the modern worldview that we can just tweak and set them right which will make all of the boo boos better. What we can now see clearly is that modernity, freed from the last vestiges of its Christian hangover, and which now manifests its inner logic publicly, represents a total reworking of the fabric of the real, of how we construe what truth is. We are way beyond tweaking the mechanism of the modern world with a little St. Thomas Aquinas.
I am not here to tell people not to participate in the electoral process or for whom they should vote. But since our choice seems to be between Claudius or Domitian, what I am saying is that the transformation of our Empire is now, as it was back then, more a function of our holiness as a counter witness to the idolatries of power than it is about which apparatchik is in charge of things now.
Dr. Larry Chapp is a retired professor of theology who taught for twenty years at DeSales University. He now owns and manages, with his wife, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Harveys Lake, Pennsylvania. He can be visited online at Gaudium et Spes 22.
Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker (January 1973).
Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), p. 113.
Saint Augustine, The City of God (Book IV, chapter 3).
Alain Besançon, The Falsification of the Good: Soloviev and Orwell (London: Claridge Press, 1994).
David Bentley Hart, “Christ and Nothing,” First Things (October 2003).
For an enlightening and frightening analysis of how the alliance between “big tech” and the modern “nanny State” are leading to the total eclipse of freedom and privacy see, Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).
Joseph Ratzinger, Faith and the Future,(Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1971), pp. 105–106.
Ibid., pp. 101–102.