Augustinian Lessons on Spiritual Authority in Church–State Relations
Editors’ Note: This is a truncated version of the author’s argument in “Following the Movement of Augustine’s Thought: De Lubac and Ratzinger’s Augustinian Approach to Church-State Questions” in Augustinian Studies Vol. 56 (1): 193-216.
If Augustine’s two cities can’t be neatly mapped onto the modern distinction between Church and State, how can his thought help illumine Church-State relations? Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) show us the Augustinian approach by beginning their reflections on Church and State with the question, “What is the Church?”
Writing in 1942 that this question had been too often neglected, de Lubac warns that if we only begin thinking about the Church in moments of contention, we will lose the theological perspective that would allow us to distinguish it from the State at the deepest level. Finding in Augustine a Eucharistic ecclesiology that sharpens this distinction, de Lubac goes on to develop it in ways that also deeply influence Ratzinger. At the core of this ecclesiology is the idea that “the Eucharist makes the Church and the Church makes the Eucharist;” or, as Augustine put it, Christ gave us the Eucharist “so that we might be the body of so great a head.” This means that the Church is intimately united with Christ, bound together in him by a communion that he initiates; but she is still in the process of becoming what she will be through this union.
Importantly, this ecclesiology allows both de Lubac and Ratzinger to critique ways of thinking about Church–State relations that begin with a political–juridical framework. While they both acknowledge the Church’s juridical structure as important, they insist that starting with it obscures the true nature of the Church’s spiritual authority. Reaching back to a theological starting point, Ratzinger, for his part, develops an account of spiritual authority rooted in Christ’s confession that he can “do nothing of himself” (John 5:19, 5:30). Writing in Called to Communion that apostles are called to realize that they too can do nothing of themselves (cf. John 15:5), Ratzinger insists that their spiritual authority constitutes a call to self-dispossession. He also finds this teaching in Matt. 16:13-23: the scene where Peter confesses that Jesus is the Christ, but quickly elicits the famous, “Get behind me, Satan” for suggesting that Jesus was not to suffer. For Ratzinger, this story does not just “furnish a prooftext” for papal authority but reveals its true “criterion and task.” In it, Peter stands at the crossroads between “skandalon and rock,” highlighting the perennial “tension between the gift coming from the Lord and man’s own capacity.” With God’s help, he recognizes the Messiah, but mistaking this for his own insight, he is emboldened to think he knows the messianic mission better than Jesus himself.
Echoing Augustine’s Sermon 183, Ratzinger concludes that to tend Christ’s sheep is ultimately to step into a spiritual authority that is not one’s own. For both him and de Lubac, thinking about spiritual authority in this way is vital for thinking well about Church–State relations. When one forgets its giftedness, it is all too easy to begin thinking of spiritual authority in worldly terms. This very Augustinian concern decisively shapes their respective approaches to Church–State questions.
Turning to de Lubac’s scholarship on these questions, two essays from the 1930s emerge as paramount: “Political Augustinism” and “The Authority of the Church in Temporal Matters.” The first reveals that de Lubac views a rehabilitation of Augustine as central to the task of thinking well about Church and State. Against the contention that Augustinianism led to the temporal realm’s being swallowed up by the spiritual, he argues that it is actually the loss of an Augustinian worldview that is largely to blame for the way the power struggle between popes and kings played out. Augustine taught us precisely not to think of spiritual authority as worldly power. It is, rather, service, and it operates on a different plane than political power.
In “The Authority of the Church in Temporal Matters,” de Lubac expands on this idea by intervening in a conversation that assumes the Church has direct, indirect, or directive power over earthly affairs. Revealing his Augustinian training, de Lubac masterfully flips the script by asking why we should be thinking about spiritual authority in juridical terms at all. Augustine, after, all, viewed spiritual authority through the analogy of God’s fatherhood. Drawing his readers back to this starting point instead, de Lubac asks: if God displays his authority through the “commandment addressed to the consciences of the faithful . . . should the Church not do the same?” What is more, if God’s grace “seizes nature from the inside” and “lifts it up to have it serve its ends,” the Church must do likewise. It must learn to act as “Christ’s messenger” to the state, rather than acting as its “guardian.”
In making this case, de Lubac wants to challenge the idea that all “real” authority is backed up with the same kind of coercive force that governments use. Critiquing a set of positions he views as too entangled with “the idea of political domination,” he again calls his readers to remember what makes spiritual authority distinctive. To believe that the institutional subordination of state to Church is necessary is to forget this distinctiveness. It is to inadvertently demean spiritual authority “under the pretext” of exalting it. Whether the argument is that this institutional arrangement is necessary for society to function well, or because “the survival of religion demands it,” de Lubac insists that the Church must regain faith in the way her spiritual authority has been given to her. Believing that “without certain measures taken in the temporal order the Church might fail” betrays a lack of confidence in God’s ways. Paradoxically, de Lubac insists, it is only by remaining true through the self-emptying posture of Christ that the Church has a real chance of ennobling the state. Using the same kind of coercive measures that political authorities use to preserve their position only causes a scandal that has “nothing in common” with the scandal of the Cross.
Notably, this message is also at the heart of Ratzinger’s writings on faith and politics. Worrying that the Church has too often “confused faith in the absolute truth manifest in Christ with insistence on an absolute secular status for the institutional Church,” Ratzinger welcomes the developments of Vatican II as a recovery of the Church’s self-understanding in Eucharistic terms. Yet, he thinks, the temptation to forget remains. Describing Church history as the drama of a people falling into forgetfulness about who they are, Ratzinger insists that the battle “to avoid identifying Jesus’ Kingdom with any political structure” must be waged in every age. For this reason, he views it as his responsibility to remind the Church of the scandal of the Cross. Perhaps the most poignant of these reminders is his reflection in Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two: “Christ endured a “total loss of all external power,” and “radical stripping away” to lay bare the deepest message of his mission. The Kingdom of God is not to be “worldly power,” as he says in Part I of Jesus of Nazareth, but “the radically different community that comes into being through the Cross.” For both de Lubac and Ratzinger, then, the scandal of the Cross is the decisive touchstone for understanding Church’s mission in the world. Through it, Christ shaped the authority he gave to the Church in an unworldly way.
Rooting this point in their Eucharistic ecclesiology, both ultimately gravitate to an Augustinian interpretation of the Church’s civic task: one that emphasizes the role that the whole people of God must play in announcing his kingdom. Writing that the task of the Church is to penetrate “political society [ever] more intimately through the conscience of its citizens,” de Lubac foreshadows what Ratzinger says much later: “The Church must exert itself with all its vigor so that in it there may shine forth the moral truth that it offers to the state and that ought to become evident to the citizens of the state.” Here, notably, both understand the Church as the whole body of Christ. While Church leaders are called in a special way to help form the faithful, ultimately, it is the whole Church that is called upon to engage and elevate political culture. The Church as a whole must become leaven.
Crucial to this task, Ratzinger suggests, is the duty to avoid causing undue scandal by mistaking ourselves for God’s spokespersons. Members of the Church must humbly recall that we are on a shared quest for truth, even as we propose the truth that has been handed on to us as gift. In a culture inundated with what Ratzinger calls the “babble of self-constructed values,” this amounts to a very difficult task. There is immense pressure to inhabit a discourse of domination. Recalling us again to the self-emptying posture of Christ, who wore his spiritual authority not with the robes of power, but with the crown of thorns, Ratzinger insist that love alone can help us act as the “advocate of creation” our society needs.
Drawing together the many strains of Ratzinger’s argument, one can clearly see their Augustinian provenance. Like Augustine, Ratzinger urges the pilgrim city to bear witness to Christ in the world. He also presents the Church as a font of the very virtues needed for healthy political life. Yet, at the same time, he expects ongoing tensions between the two cities because of the difference between where they set their sights. He worries, too, that the Church can all too easily forget what it means to be set apart from the world. In the face of such tensions, he bids the members of the Church to be conformed to Christ. Only in this way can they become leaven, elevating the shared life of their political community by enriching its deliberation and humanizing its practices.
All this is to say, in following Augustine’s approach to Scripture and the ecclesiology he builds on it, both de Lubac and Ratzinger emphasize how the Church exists as a being from, remaining tied to the God who abased himself to bring her into being. By placing the question of the Church’s authority within this sacramental context, both distinguish a construal of spiritual authority that follows from the scandal of the cross from one that causes undue scandal. The latter, they suggest, results from a politicized reading of the Church, which seeks to understand her on the wrong level. All told, both insist that the Church must resist the temptation to function as an “organ of power” if it is to perform the service that the state requires.
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