Recovering the Origins of Catholic Social Teaching, Part Two

Editor’s note: You can read Part One of this essay here.

IV

The best way to describe how matrimony and the family animate Leo’s magisterial approach to the social question is to speak of their “proto-scendent” character. By this neologism “proto-scendent,” I mean something analogous to “transcendent,” yet having to do with the “other side” of the “scendent,” i.e., not the side of reaching forward and upward (which transcendent suggests), but the side of reaching backward and groundward. I know we all look askance at neologisms, but allow me to explain why this one is warranted.

In Catholic social teaching, it is crucial to see that the Ecclesia, the Church, transcends the political; it “goes beyond” the earthly city, ever pulling it toward what is higher and Divine, even as it finds itself in its midst. To transcend, generally speaking, suggests reaching toward a peak or a telos that opens up to another level or dimension. In this way, then, the Church transcends the present and experienceable social order; indeed, embedded within the present social order, through its sacraments in particular, the Church opens us up toward the dimension of eternal life.

Matrimony and the family occupy an analogous place in relation to the present social order, except that matrimony and the family exist on the “front end” of the social order, not its “back end.” Christian matrimony and the family, like the Church, continuously exercise influence on the present social order, but they do so from the side of origins or beginnings. Matrimony and the family do not so much surpass the nation as precede it, and in a way—and one has to be careful here—they precede even the Church.

Indeed, matrimony and the family prefigure both the nation and the Church, and they embody in the most primordial way the very principles of Catholic social teaching that ought to inspire these other two necessary societies. This is what I mean by speaking of the “proto-scendent” character of matrimony and the family, and to my mind, Leo’s decision to publish Arcanum Divinae right after Aeterni Patris suggests such proto-scendence, since he clearly decided to unfold the Church’s approach to the social question first through the lens of matrimony and the family.

In this light, then, consider the opening words of Arcanum divinae. Its full Latin title is sometimes given not just as the encyclical’s first two words, but as its first four words: Arcanum divinae sapientiae consilium, “the hidden counsel of divine wisdom.” Dare I say that matrimony and the family are, indeed, God’s hidden deliberative plan behind creation, the underlying secret that unlocks the intelligibility of the polity as well as the Church—and perhaps the intelligibility of all of existence itself?

If so, I would maintain that one can see that the thinking of Thomas Aquinas stands very much behind Arcanum Divinae. For Thomas sees the creation of man and woman, united in matrimony, as well as the family to which matrimony gives rise, owing to the deliberation and freedom of man and woman, as the telos of all God’s original creative activity. (On this, see especially Summa theologiae, I, qq. 90–92.) So, yes, matrimony and the family are the hidden counsel of divine wisdom from the start.

Indeed, does not Genesis itself reveal as much? In Chapter 2, we witness God the Creator taking counsel with himself, eventually putting the human to sleep and then building the woman out of the human’s rib, all because God sees that “it is not good for the human to exist alone.” What God creates in order to consummate his original creative activity, therefore, is not just another human, but a pair of human beings, a couple, two humans existing in relationship, able to share in one another’s life as a whole and, in turn, able to choose freely to collaborate as one flesh in an act of generation, giving rise thereby to the first society, the family.

In Arcanum Divinae, Leo unfolds the divine origin of man and woman and thus, in turn, the divine origin of matrimony. The family exists as the fruit of the freedom of man and woman, who activate their God-given natural powers and carry forward God’s creative activity in the world, first and foremost in the family and in the domestic life that constitutes the family’s actuality in the world.

Now, any alert philosophical soul considering the situation described in Genesis 2 would recognize that in creating the woman, God was simultaneously creating friendship, philia, amicitia, in the world. God was creating, in other words, that greatest of moral relationships of which humans are capable, the one philosophers have pondered and re-pondered throughout history—or at least until the arrival of modernity on our doorstep.

Listen, then, to how Thomas Aquinas considers friendship between spouses in the Summa contra gentiles when arguing for the indissolubility of matrimony:

The greater the friendship, the firmer and longer-lasting it is. Now, between man and wife there seems to exist the greatest friendship; for they are brought-into-unity not only in the act of fleshly union—which even among animals brings about delightful society—but also with respect to the shared-lot of domestic life as a whole. Hence, as a sign of this, the human, on account of a wife, leaves even father and mother, as is said in Genesis 2:24. It is fitting, therefore, that matrimony be altogether indissoluble. (Summa contra gentiles, III.123, §6, my translation)

Thomas is justly hailed as a brilliant logician, but here he also shows how imaginative he can be; for here we behold a philosophical vision of marital friendship worthy of clarifying Genesis, which is the revelational source of the Church’s teaching on matrimony and the family. Indeed, by Leo’s deliberately putting Thomas back into action in the Church’s intellectual life, the Church recovered a robust philosophical understanding of nature and the naturalness of human society, deeply rooted in the Greek and Latin traditions, and especially in Aristotle’s works.

Thereby, the Church can begin to fill in the gaping holes of modern philosophical anthropology and political thought. Thereby, too, the Church can approach the social question more profoundly, holistically, and sapientially, precisely because of her deep, indeed, infallible insight into human nature and the human community, which she has been pondering in her heart for centuries.

The philosophical dimension of what Leo is doing in Aeterni Patris and Divinum Arcanum is crucial. Given the central place of marriage and the family in human experience, and given the way that the Church’s social teaching touches everyday living, the Church has to be particularly attentive to the contributions of philosophy when addressing these matters. With respect to matrimony and the family, this means recovering a vision of these foundational social realities that accords with the truth of their naturalness, their pre-existent character in relation to the civitas, and the indispensable role that they play in continuously giving rise to a healthy polity and a healthy Church.

Such a vision can be found in Thomas, certainly, but Leo knows that Thomas himself is mining the teachings of Aristotle and Cicero, whose thinking illuminates the nature of friendship, matrimony, and the family. The recovery of Thomas, then, means recovering through him the Greek and Roman philosophical heritage.

For example, what I just quoted regarding the friendship between spouses from Thomas’s Summa contra gentiles is clearly rooted in Aristotle’s thinking in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he expresses a similar insight into the relationship between man and woman:

The friendship between man and woman seems to be in accord with nature. For a human is by nature a coupling being more than a political one, inasmuch as a home is prior and more necessary than a city, and the begetting of children is more common to animals. Among other animals, then, community exists only to that extent, whereas humans share-a-home [“co-home”] not only for the sake of begetting children, but also for the sake of those things that contribute to life; for their tasks are divided in a straightforward way, those of a man being other than those of a woman. They suit one another, then, by putting what’s proper to each at the service of what’s common. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.12, 1162a16-24, my translation)

Again, here is a vision of man and woman and their relationship that provides the philosophical clarification of human experience that underlies the Church’s teaching on matrimony and the family in full accord with the hidden counsel of divine wisdom.

The Church, I might add, can find a philosophical friend in Cicero as well, the ancient master who teaches about the family as the “first society” and as “the nursery of civil society.” Much could be said on that score as well. I trust, however, that my general point is clear, namely, that when it comes to matrimony and the family, and to the Church’s social teaching in general, there’s much gold and silver to be plundered from philosophers, even pagan ones, whose insights run deeper than those found in modern philosophical and political thought.

For Leo, it was crucial that the Church acknowledge this and adjust her approach to the intellectual life accordingly. In this lies the significance of Aeterni patris and the recovery of Thomas Aquinas, the Common Doctor, as the opening salvo of Leo’s magisterial social teaching.

V

Matrimony and the family, then, have a principal and focal role in Leo XIII’s social teaching in light of their proto-scendent character in relation to both the polity and the Church. Indeed, when it comes to matrimony and the family, Leo’s fundamental concern is their metaphysical and theological status.

More concretely, in Arcanum Divinae, Leo deals with those whom he calls the “Naturalists,” who (despite their very name) were angling to subsume matrimony and the family under the purview and authority of the polity, i.e., to degrade the rightful honor and lineage of matrimony and the family altogether. This was clearly one of the aims of the Jacobins of the French Revolution and their intellectual and political progeny, and, of course, as both Leo and Newman knew so well, the malign influence of such aims was metastasizing throughout 19^th-century Europe and beyond. Certainly, throughout the century, more and more nations in Europe were beginning to treat matrimony merely as ‘civil marriage’—which is to say (in their thinking), as separate from and, practically speaking, as superior to that religious, ritualistic thing that the Church proffers.

Leo’s response to this diminished conception of marriage is, unsurprisingly, a resounding ‘No!’ But it’s a ‘No!’ rooted in an even more resounding ‘Yes!’ This ‘Yes!’ is to God, not to civil society, as the primary author of matrimony and the family. Indeed, even in non-Christian societies, Leo notes, there are hints of a special connection of matrimony and the family to the divine and thus to religion, even prior to their relationship to the polity. Yet it is in the pages of the Scriptures, especially the early chapters of Genesis, that we are taught this truth most potently and beautifully—and, I would add, Thomas Aquinas explicates these Scriptures comprehensively and clearly, both philosophically and theologically, in a manner that undergirds, clarifies, and complements the Church’s teaching.

What, then, has God authored in creation that gives him and, by extension, the Church ultimate authority over matrimony and the family?

God created these primordial social realities with both a natural and a sacramental dimension precisely because both dimensions share a social form. After all, that social form is a divinely-created natural reality in the world, not the artifice of human beings or their conventions. Leo teaches that God authoritatively intended from the beginning what I would call the “sacralized naturalness” of marriage and the family as basic and determinate realities of the social order. In fact, it is precisely their sacralized naturalness that makes matrimony and the family proto-scendent in relation to the polity and the Church. Matrimony and the family bring together the natural and the sacramental in a manner that bespeaks the hidden intelligible structure of the whole social order as God intends it.

Or, to put a finer point on it, the sacralized naturalness of matrimony and the family, which openly hints at the ‘logic’ of both the Incarnation and the Trinity, is the arcanum divinae sapientiae consilum, the hidden counsel of divine wisdom, that underlies and suffuses all of creation. Such, I believe, is Leo’s compelling vision of matrimony and the family at the outset of his magisterial social teaching, and he encourages us to recognize them as sacralized natural realities whose intelligibility ought to embed itself deeply in the ways we think about the social order and navigate that order prudentially.

VI

To conclude, Christian faithful who are married and, indeed, any believers who have experienced family life in some fashion—that is, all of us!—live unawares, perhaps, of the mysteries we have touched and still touch every day by dwelling within these primordial social realities. Leo XIII, however, seemed aware of this, and he taught us that precisely these primordial realities, clarified philosophically and illuminated by Revelation, make manifest the deepest intelligibility and the first principles of the social order.

Thus, they can serve as an interpretive key that unlocks Catholic social teaching. We can glean this from Leo XIII’s Arcanum Divinae, published right on the heels of Aeterni Patris. These two encyclicals, early in Leo XIII’s pontificate, established a philosophical and theological core that unfolded over the course of the next century and beyond, especially in Pius XI’s Casti connubii, in the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on matrimony, the family, and the laity, and, most profoundly, in all that John Paul II accomplished in bringing to light the hidden counsel of divine wisdom discoverable in matrimony and the family.

To my mind, these profound unfoldings underscore the truth of what Leo says near the end of Aeterni Patris:

In truth, domestic society as well as civil society—which, as all see, are involved in a crisis owing to the plague of perverse opinions—would indeed exist much more peacefully and securely were a sounder teaching handed down in academies and schools, a teaching more in conformity with the magisterium of the Church, of the sort contained in the works of Thomas Aquinas. (§28, my translation).

Early in his pontificate, our current Pontiff, Leo XIV, indicated that he chose his name because,

Pope Leo XIII in his historic encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice, and labor.

However, if our contemporary situation is to be addressed effectively, the current Leo will not fail to recognize, as this essay has argued, that Rerum Novarum finds its roots in Aeterni Patris and Arcanum Divinae. In doing so, Leo XIV will advance a truly Leonine vision of Catholic social teaching by giving pride of place to the proto-scendent realities of matrimony and the family, even as he attends to our latest industrial revolution.

To be sure, it is up to all faithful Catholics, especially the lay faithful, to carry out our social responsibilities and obligations—familial, political, and ecclesial—in accordance with the Church’s magisterial teachings. To do so in accord with Leo XIII’s original vision, as I have argued here, we should be especially conscientious, personally and culturally, of the vitality of matrimony and the family, rooted in the recognition of their sacralized naturalness, along the lines taught by Thomas Aquinas. Only then will we Christians of the 21st century be able instaurare omnia in Christo, “to restore all things in Christ,” as Leo XIII himself so justly hoped and prayed.