Church, State, and the Soul

There is a certain sensibility in the modern world which sees the structuring of political and economic life as something which is properly an amoral project. In America, we are all very familiar with this view of things, and many in our political class love to cite the neutrality of the institutions as a supposed virtue when faced with moral criticism from the Church. The Holy Angels, however, would find this a very foreign concept – especially the angel which visits King Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel. This angel – a watcher by role in the Heavenly Host – appears in a dream to the king to issue a very serious warning: while Nebuchadnezzar has achieved great things and amassed power for Babylon, something integral to the legitimate practice of government was missing. That missing thing was public virtue. The Prophet Daniel, who has already had to relay the meanings of other heavenly dreams to the king by this point in the book, explains it very clearly: while your kingdom is prospering, there is something deeply wrong with it, and soon you will be living with wild beasts, an outcast among men. Daniel the exhorts the king with a solution, a way to avoid what the watchers had decreed: “redeem thou thy sins with alms, and thy iniquities with works of mercy to the poor” (Daniel 4:24). It seems simple: manage your kingdom with the common good in sight, and bad tidings will not befall you. Nebuchadnezzar neither gives alms nor performs good works for the poor of Babylon, and in a year, he goes mad, cast out to live with wild beasts – and it is only at this point that he repents.

Babylon’s cruelty towards the People of God and its neglect of the poor were not premoral phenomena. They were choices made by Nebuchadnezzar. He chose to rule his kingdom as a wicked man, and that sin bore consequences. Likewise, those same moral evils, when they appear in the United States, are not unavoidable byproducts of human life. They are choices, and we would delude ourselves if we believed that, as citizens of a republic, we do not make the same choices when selecting our political leadership. Many policymakers would like us to believe that the constitutional order, or common decency towards the plurality of opinions among men, are more important than the worship of God and the relief of the poor in public life. These are private matters of conscience, the faithful are told, but aren’t the government’s business. The absurdity of this notion, that the promotion of virtue is not the goal of politics, can be seen when one considers that government was created for the human race, and so must be oriented towards the proper end of a human being, which is to live with God forever in Heaven. If the government operates from any first principle other than the benefit of virtue and opposition to vice, then it is not doing its job as a tool created by human beings. Furthermore, even discussing only matters of individual conscience, let us not forget that politicians have souls. Like Nebuchadnezzar, they will be held to personal account for the way they treat the poor under their sovereignty.

There is another objection raised by the enemies of the Good, namely that self-interest and moral apathy are actually the only ways to run a functioning government. This is a subconscious belief for many of us moderns – that utilitarians “win” in politics and business, and idealists, pursuing virtue, lose. We need only look at the illustrious history of Mother Church to see the inaccuracy of this notion. Constantine the Great, the first Christian Emperor of the Romans, venerated as a saint in the East and held up by all of Christendom as a model of public virtue during the Middle Ages, was a resounding political success. He united the Empire under a single government again, and won great victories over the barbarian hordes, all while pursuing Christian goodness. Ironically enough, Constantine had a very similar call to conversion as Nebuchadnezzar, a supernatural vision. The holy Emperor was, as a general fighting in the civil wars that plagued Rome, greeted with a vision of the Cross in the sky, and following this, was promised by Our Lord in a dream that, should he fight under the banner of the Church, he would win the Empire. After this great grace, Constantine ordered the Chi-Rho ( ) to be placed on his standards, and defeated the pagan Maxentius at Milvian Bridge, becoming Emperor of the Romans.

Upon ascending the throne, Constantine reshaped Roman policy to reflect the glories of Christian charity, even before his late-in-life baptism. After ending the persecution of the Church, he took a keen eye to improving the station of those in Roman society who were downtrodden and oppressed, ending the practice of damnatio ad ludum, in which prisoners would made to fight to the death in gladiatorial combat, greatly restricting the institution of slavery while creating easily accessible pathways towards freedom for those suffering under it, and ending the torturous practice of crucifixion, which was the means by which Pontius Pilate put Our Lord to death 300 years before this triumph of the Faith against the pagans. His charity towards slaves and prisoners was also reflected in his treatment towards the free poor, for whom he organized the donation of money, clothing, and food, desiring nobody in his Empire to suffer for lack of basic needs. In some cases, it was even recorded that he would give portions of the Imperial estates to the poor so they would have a place to start building their livelihoods. This zeal for Christ’s poor was matched in Constantine’s heart by zeal for Christ’s Church. Constantine was a heroic defender of public morality, providing funds for the building of new churches, including Saint Peter’s Basilica, the seat of the Papacy, and closing those pagan temples which had been supported by the government.