Personalism Neo-Thomist Metaphysics and Human Rights

Personalism Neo-Thomist Metaphysics and Human Rights

This chapter explores the basic metaphysical premises on which the Christian Democratic ideology is based, focusing in particular on its conception of human nature. It does so through an engagement with the meaning this ideological tradition has historically assigned to the concept of the human "person."

The centrality of the doctrine of personalism for the Christian Democratic ideology has already been widely emphasized, both by Christian Democratic actors and thinkers themselves and by academic commentators. In his nineteen forty-six speech at the University of Cologne, outlining the first political platform of the German CDU, Konrad Adenauer stated that: "The fundamental theorem of the CDU's program, from which all our demands follow, is a core idea of Christian ethics: the human person has a unique dignity and the value of each human person is irreplaceable." Similarly, the Belgian PSC's nineteen forty-five Christmas program explains that: "The doctrine of the Christian Social Party is based entirely on the central conception of the human person ... Where there is a problem to be solved, the party has one standard for the choice of a solution: will the formula proposed lead to the full development of the greatest possible number of personalities?"

Analogous language was carried over in later articulations of Christian Democratic doctrine. In his nineteen sixty-one treatise expounding on the Christian Democratic conception of the social order, Pierre-Henri Teitgen stated that: "We are Christian Democrats because we believe in the eminent dignity of the human person." Similarly, the first political program drafted by the European EPP in nineteen seventy-eight states that: "Our policies are based on a conception of man which is inspired by the fundamental Christian values, and which finds its expression in the dignity and inalienable freedom of the human person." Finally, the German CDU's current party manifesto, adopted at the party's twenty-first congress in Hanover in two thousand seven, states that: "In our view, God created man in his own image and likeness. As a consequence of this Christian conception of mankind, we believe in the inviolable dignity of the human person."

It should therefore be unsurprising that in the introduction to a volume of collected essays on Christian Democracy in Europe, David Hanley refers to personalism as "the most consistent and articulate component of the Christian Democratic ideology." This echoes a point already made by Jean-Dominique Durand, when he noted that: "Within the framework of Christian Democratic discourse, the reference to personalism is a constant." Finally, in their two thousand ten overview of the existing academic literature on the topic of Christian Democracy, Stathis Kalyvas and Kees Van Kersbergen refer to personalism as "one of the core ideological concepts of Christian Democratic politics."

The main argument of this chapter is that in order to understand the significance historically attached by the Christian Democratic ideology to the doctrine of "personalism," it is necessary to situate it in the context of a broader metaphysical worldview, which implies a specific conception of human nature and its place within the universe. I will accordingly begin by outlining the main tenets of this overarching metaphysics, then describe the specific conception of human nature it implies and only after that turn to the political consequences that follow.

Although the heyday of the doctrine of personalism coincided with its contribution to the development of the Christian Democratic ideology during the middle part of the twentieth century, the notion had already "sprung up in motley and mostly disconnected and unrelated versions in several branches of modern thought." Indeed, as Samuel Moyn has noted in his recent overview of the concept's history over the past century and a half: "Not just the cacophony of voices starting in the early nineteen thirties, but the essential indeterminacy of the concept itself made personalism highly ambiguous: it was, after all, the common but deeply contentious cause of Christian and para-Christian intellectuals from the far right to the communitarian left."

For the purposes of this analysis, I will be focusing on a particular strand of the broader current (or set of currents) of thought that have adopted the label of personalism: the specifically Christian one, which

I take to have been most influential in the development of the Christian Democratic ideology, and which Moyn himself identifies as the most "durable," precisely for this reason.

The Christian Democratic doctrine of personalism developed as an offshoot of a particular strand of Catholic theology known as "Thomism" (or, more precisely: "neo-Thomism"), which was enshrined at the heart of official Vatican doctrine by the encyclical Aeterni Patris promulgated by Pope Leo the Thirteenth in eighteen seventy-nine. Its core tenet is that the whole universe has been created by God as a rational and purposive "order"; that is, as a system of necessary laws and relationships that assign a specific place and purpose to each individual object within it.

This idea is expressed clearly by Leo the Thirteenth when he states: "That a marvelous order predominates in the world of living beings and in the forces of nature, is the plain lesson which the progress of modern research and the discoveries of technology teach us." "Such an order," Leo the Thirteenth adds, "universal, absolute and immutable in its principles, finds its source and ultimate end in the true, personal and transcendent God ... He is the first truth, the Sovereign God and as such the final cause from which society, if it is to be properly constituted ... must draw its genuine vitality."

The notion of a "final cause" alluded to in the passage implies a reference to the idea that God created the temporal universe with a specific purpose in mind: that is, as a means or pathway for the redemption of humanity from its original sin. As we saw in Chapter one, human history is understood as a "providentially ordained" process through which humanity must pass in order to be reunited with God and achieve eternal salvation. This implies that "nature" is not assumed to be a mere collection of inert things, interacting with one another to produce a random - or at least meaningless - succession of events. Everything that is, is supposed to have an implicit telos, which corresponds to the fulfillment of God's providential plan for humanity. This is what Leo the Thirteenth means when he writes, echoing a formula that we also find in Thomas Aquinas himself, that the "ultimate end" of the "natural order" is the "eternal beatitude of mankind."

The characterization of nature as an "order" also implies that it is organically structured in a multitude of complementary parts that contribute in their own way to the fulfillment of its ultimate end. There is therefore assumed to be a structuring logic - or grammar - implicit in the teleological conception of the universe itself: a point that was clearly made by Pope Pius the twelfth in his nineteen forty-two Christmas address, when he stated that: "Order, which is fundamental in an association of men (of beings, that is, that strive to attain an end appropriate to their nature) is not merely an external linking of parts which are numerically distinct. It is rather, and must be, a tendency and an ever more perfect approach to an internal union; and this does not exclude differences founded in fact and sanctioned by the will of God, or by supernatural standard." "Reason enlightened by faith," the Pope added, "assigns to individuals and to particular societies a definite and exalted place in the natural order of society."

Both of the key features of this specific conception of the "natural order" - providential purposiveness and organic structure - were later summed up by the Italian neo-Thomist jurist and political theorist Giorgio La Pira (who was also one of the founding members of the country's Christian Democratic party, as well as a member of the postwar constituent assembly), when he stated that, according to the "Christian view of the world":

Nature is a unitas ordinis; that is, a hierarchically organized and providentially ordained unity of all created beings ... Hierarchically organized because all created beings are, so to speak, situated on a ladder: they rise in degree and value as their formal principle is intensified and we move from the mineral to the vegetal, to the animal and ultimately the human state ... Providentially ordained because the ultimate end of this hierarchical structure lies in constructing an instrument of salvation for man.

The specific conception of "natural law" that is at the heart of the neo-Thomist metaphysics follows as a logical implication from this overarching conception of the natural order. For, according to traditional Christian (and in particular Catholic) metaphysics, "natural law" is essentially the underlying grammar - or immanent logic - that defines the necessary relations amongst things (and orders of things) within the overarching natural order. Thus, in his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas defines natural law as "the rational creature's participation in eternal law." This implies that natural law is the aspect of God's providential plan for the salvation of humanity that is accessible to natural reason, and is for this reason morally binding on all rational creatures. The idea of "natural law" and that of "natural order"

The specific conception of "natural law" that is at the heart of the neo-Thomist metaphysics follows as a logical implication from this over- arching conception of the natural order. For, according to traditional Christian (and in particular Catholic) metaphysics, "natural law" is essentially the underlying grammar - or immanent logic - that defines the necessary relations amongst things (and orders of things) within the overarching natural order. Thus, in his Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas defines natural law as "the rational creature's participation in eternal law" (Aquinas 1274, Iallae91). This implies that natural law is the aspect of God's providential plan for the salvation of humanity that is accessible to natural reason, and is for this reason morally binding on all rational creatures. The idea of "natural law" and that of "natural order"

therefore reciprocally imply one another in Aquinas' thought, just as the ideas of system and structure are mutually interdependent.

The same point was then made by Jacques Maritain in his treatise The Rights of Man and Natural Law, where he writes that: "Natural law, or natural right, is nothing more than ... an order or disposition that human reason can discover, and according to which the human will must act in order to attune itself with the necessary ends of the natural order."

In order to grasp the theoretical distinctiveness - and historical significance - of this broadly "neo-Thomist" conception of the "natural order" (and the attendant conception of natural law), it is useful to contrast it with another extremely influential theological strand that, according to Michel Villey, has been chiefly responsible for the "fateful break" within the Christian metaphysical tradition that ultimately set the conditions for the emergence of modern naturalist philosophy: the "nominalist" theology that has its origins in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century thought of authors such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, but that also implicitly underscores the thought of more recent thinkers, such as, most notably, Thomas Hobbes, Francis Bacon and Immanuel Kant.

According to Villey, the core tenet of this "nominalist" theology is the idea that the only things that truly and fully exist - in the sense that they have been created directly by God - are "individual entities." The relations amongst things, and especially the abstract concepts that allow us to refer to multiple individual things in a single category (and which in the language of medieval scholastic theology were referred to as "universals") are assumed to be artificial entities, created ex post by human beings: mere "names" we give to bundles of things when we are incapable of obtaining more specific knowledge of them in their particularity.

As Villey points out, this theological strand first developed out of concern that the "rationalism" implicit in the Thomistic conception of the "natural order" might potentially undermine God's absolute sovereignty and freedom. For if there are what Aquinas would have called "universals" (for instance, the idea that "triangles must necessarily have three sides"), it would seem that God would not have been able to create the universe any differently than he actually did. Conversely, if all that really exists are particulars, and the relations amongst them are mere names applied ex post by human beings, God remains free to create the universe as he pleases (since there would strictly be no "triangles," but only this or that particular shape).

Out of this concern to preserve the absolute sovereignty and freedom of God, Villey further notes, the "nominalist" theology ultimately ended up undercutting the condition of possibility for the very idea of a "natural order" in the Thomistic sense, since nominalism involves denying any objectivity to the structure of the relations that link things to one another in the natural world. This theological strand can therefore serve as a useful "foil" to capture what is both historically and theoretically distinctive in the Thomistic conception of the "natural order." This is how Villey himself sums up the core tenets of what he calls Aquinas' "realism":

The Aquinate, a disciple of Aristotle, talks of reality primarily in relation to individuals, but he also considered the so-called "universals" to be objectively real. The types and species - such as "animal", "man", "citizen" etc. - are not just abstract concepts. They have a concrete existence beyond the human mind ... The objective world is therefore not just a mere assemblage of disordered atoms, just as society isn't a mere collection of

THE NATURE OF THE HUMAN PERSON

Within the outlined framework of this overarching conception of the "natural order," the human person is understood as a particular category of created entities. This implies that it is assigned a specific place - and therefore a specific value, or rank - within the overarching hierarchy of beings, and a corresponding end - or finality - with respect to God's providential plan. The scriptural foundation for this is the idea that man was created "in God's image and likeness." This is perhaps the core principle of the Christian doctrine of personalism, but it has nonetheless been interpreted rather differently by some of its most prominent intellectual exponents, giving rise to a plurality of different inflections of the same basic doctrine.

Drawing most closely on Aquinas' gloss on the Biblical precept - which assumes that personality is one of the essential attributes of God, inasmuch as a person is that which "subsists by its own rational nature" - Jacques Maritain claims that what makes human beings most similar to God is that they participate in His rationality and therefore do not exist merely as a "piece of matter" or an "individual element in the world," but rather "hold themselves in hand by their intelligence and will." From this Maritain infers that the key feature of human personality is rational self-subsistence, which in turn implies that the human person is "a whole in itself, not just a part." "The human person," he writes, "is a universe unto itself, a microcosm in which the whole great universe can be encompassed through knowledge and love."

Maritain also adds that "in philosophical terms, this implies that in the flesh and bones of the human being there resides a soul, which is of a spiritual nature, and which is worth more than the whole material universe itself." The emphasis here falls more on the spiritual - rather than the rational - element of human personality. This idea was then taken up and developed further by several other prominent Christian personalists in the postwar period. Giorgio La Pira, for instance, writes that: "The human person is a composite of matter and spirit; that is, of separate individuals. It contains an order within itself and therefore involves different categories in which individual entities (the formal causes) and their natures (the final causes) are classed. This involves a whole system of relationships amongst entities that exists objectively, and therefore independently of the intellect that discovers such things.

body and soul, which form a unity and are reciprocally ordained to one another." Similarly, Jean Lacroix states that: "The human is the result of the substantial unity between a spiritual soul and a material body."

Finally, perhaps the greatest Christian personalist thinker of the middle part of the twentieth century, Emmanuel Mounier, insisted more on the dimension of subjectivity (or, as he would say, the "process of subjectivation") that distinguishes human beings from mere objects, and thereby elevates them towards God. "The person," he writes, "is not a mere object. It is indeed precisely that which in each human being cannot be treated as a mere object ... It is a lived activity of self-creation, of communication and commitment, which grasps itself and understands itself in its own act as a movement of progressive personalization." As Mounier himself points out, the core features that all these different inflections of the doctrine of the human person have in common is the idea that the human being is characterized by a certain duality: on one hand, it is assumed to be a created entity, that is, a material object - or individual - in the natural world; but on the other hand, it is also assumed to be capable of elevating itself above its merely material or objective existence, though an exercise of the spiritual faculties it has in common with God:

The emergence of the human person from the sphere of mere materiality can be read in the history of the world as the outcome of the interplay between two tendencies: one is the permanent tendency towards "depersonalization", which attacks life, stifles its energy, and reduces all beings to infinitely repeatable species; the other is the movement of personalization, which strictly begins only with man, but whose prior preparation can be discerned in the whole history of the universe.

From this particular conception of the nature of man - as a sort of intermediate, or rather transitional figure between materiality (and in particular animality) and divinity - there follows a conception of his particular dignity within the overarching natural order created by God. For instance, in this respect Mounier writes that: "The personal mode of existence is the highest form of being, whereas impersonal or more or less depersonalized entities are nothing but decelerations or languors of nature." Similarly, in The Rights of Man and Natural Law, Jacques Maritain writes that: "To say that the human being is a person means that he has a certain dignity, i.e. that he is worthy of respect as the bearer of certain inalienable rights and duties." The Christian idea of the inherent dignity of the human person therefore proves to be inextricably tied to the idea that the human person occupies a specific place - or rank - within the overarching hierarchy of beings that constitutes the natural order willed by God.

In turn, this specific place or rank is also assumed to assign a distinctive finality to the human person. For one of the fundamental principles of the neo-Thomist metaphysics in which the Christian doctrine of the human person is inscribed is that a thing's nature also defines its overarching end. Thus, to say that the human being occupies a determinate place in the natural order (between animality and divinity) implies that it must also have a certain finality, which is assumed to consist in the fulfillment of the specific qualities that man shares with God, i.e., rationality, subjectivity and spirituality. Maritain expresses this by saying that: "Because it alone is the image of God, the human person alone is capable of Grace ... In the beatific vision, each blessed soul, knowing God as He is and as it itself is known by Him, grasps the divine essence and becomes God intentionally in the most immediate act conceivable." Even more explicitly, La Pira writes that:

Natural reason shows that the ultimate end of human personality cannot but be God. For, God is the final cause of all beings; and He is so in particular for the human person, since the latter is a rational entity which is therefore by definition ordained towards the direct consciousness of God ... This end is reached through the incorporation in Christ; that is, by becoming a member of the mystical body of Christ that is the Church.