The Leaven of Conscience

by JACQUES MARITAIN

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THE spiritual essence and the genuine principle of democracy as it exists in the world today can be compared to a healthy tree which has been overgrown by parasites. When at the end of the eighteenth century the Rights of Man were proclaimed in America and in France, and the peoples bidden to partake of the ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, a great challenge of the people, of the plain man, of the spirit of childhood and faith, and at the same time of an ideal of universal generosity, was hurled, in the political domain itself, at the mighty of this world and their experienced skepticism.

The evangelical impulse which thus erupted bore the imprint of a secularized Christianity. Rationalist philosophy added to it illusions (which quickly became bloody) that assured mankind that the goodness of nature and reason alone would suffice for the coming of the great promise of justice and peace. But through these illusions the heart of man perceived a sacred truth: that the energies of the Gospel must pass into temporal life; that the good tidings heralded as throwing open heaven and eternal life ask also to transform the life of earthly societies in the very midst of its woes and its contradictions; that there are in the message of the Gospel political and social implications which must at all cost be unfurled in history.

And do you think that old Christian peoples would have gone to the trouble of starting revolutions and massacres, would have set out with all their household and the heritage of their labor, if it had not been for the promised and so long awaited beatitudes? If it is a mirage to believe them within reach of the hand, it is not a mirage to set out after them. The Middle Ages sought with the Holy Empire to erect a fortress for God on earth. Today the poor and the oppressed are setting out for the land of justice and fraternity.

To have awakened and then betrayed such a hope is a measure of the failure of the modern world. It would be a worse failure to renounce this hope, and to seek to uproot it from men’s hearts. Hard experience has taught us that the kingdom of God is not meant for earth, but at the same time we have become aware of this crucial truth: that it must be enigmatically prepared in the midst of the pains of earthly history.

Christianity announced to the peoples the kingdom of God and the life to come. It has taught them the unity of the human race; the natural equality of all men — children of the same God and redeemed by the same Christ; the inalienable dignity of every soul fashioned in the image of God; the dignity of labor and the dignity of the poor; the primacy of inner values and of good will over external values; the inviolability of consciences; the exact vigilance of God’s justice and providence over the great and the small. It has taught them the obligation imposed on those who govern, and on those who have possessions, to govern in justice, as ministers of God, and to manage the goods entrusted to them to the common advantage, as God’s stewards. It has taught them the submission of all to the law of work and the call to all to share in the freedom of the sons of God. It has taught them the sanctity of truth and the power of the Spirit, the communion of the saints, the divine supremacy of redeeming love and mercy, and the law of brotherly love which reaches out to all, even to those who arc our enemies, because all men, to whatever social group, race, nation, or class they may belong, are members of God’s family and adopted brothers of the son of God.

Christianity proclaimed that where love and charity are, there God is; and that it is up to us to make every man our neighbor, by loving him as ourselves and by having compassion for him — that is, in a sense, by dying unto ourselves for his sake. Christ cursed the rich and the Pharisees, He promised the poor, and those who suffer persecution for the sake of justice, that they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven, the meek that they shall inherit the earth, those who mourn that they shall be comforted, those that hunger and thirst after justice that they shall be satisfied, the merciful that they shall obtain mercy, the pure in heart that they shall see God, the peacemakers that they shall be called sons of God. He declared that everything that is done to the meanest of His brothers is done to Him; He gave to His disciples the new commandment: to love one another as He Himself has loved them.

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WHAT then are the thoughts and aspirations which the Christian message has by degrees awakened in the depths of the conscience of peoples, and which moved underground for centuries before becoming manifest? However misunderstood and distorted they may have become in the course of this hidden journey in the secular conscience, what are those truths of evangelical origin which this conscience henceforth linked and identified with the very idea of civilization?

If we consider these truths in themselves, separating them from any erroneous contexts, we can say that, by virtue of the hidden work of evangelical inspiration, the secular conscience has understood that human history does not go around in circles, but is set toward a goal and moves in a certain direction. Progress is not automatic and necessary, but threatened and thwarted; progress is not due to an advent of pure reason which would invalidate the entire heritage of the past; it is rather this very heritage which increases while it groans under the labor of all the human and divine energies in man.

Progress does not lead to the recovery of Paradise by revolution tomorrow; it tends to the carrying over of the structures of conscience and the structures of human life to better states — and this all through history up to the advent of the kingdom of God and the land of the resurrected, which is beyond history. Whether or not you believe in this advent, it is toward it that you are moving if you believe in the forward march of humanity. And what has at any rate been gained for the secular conscience, if it does not veer to barbarism, is faith in the forward march of humanity.

Under the often misunderstood but active inspiration of the Gospel, the secular conscience has understood the dignity of the human person and has understood that the person, while being a part of the State, yet transcends the State, because of the inviolable mystery of his spiritual freedom and because of his call to the attainment of supraworldly possessions. The State’s reason for existing is to help man in the acquisition of these possessions and of a truly human life.

What has been gained for the secular conscience, if it does not veer to barbarism, is faith in the rights of the human person, as a human person, as a civic person, as a person engaged in social and economic life, and as a working person; and it is faith in justice as a necessary foundation for common life, and as an essential property of the law, which is not a law if it is unjust. Proudhon believed that thirst for justice is the privilege of Revolution, and the object of attentive dread for the Church. The thirst for justice was imprinted in the soul of the Christian ages by the Gospel and the Church; it is from the Gospel and the Church that we learned to obey only if it is just to do so.

Under the inspiration of the Gospel at work in history, the secular conscience has understood the dignity of the people and of the common man. Faithful people, God’s little people, kingly people called to share in the work of Christ; people in the sense of the community of the citizens of a country, united under just laws; people in the sense of the community of manual labor and of the stock and resource of humanity in those who toil close to nature — the notion of the people which the secular conscience has gradually formed stems from the meeting and mingling of all these elements, and it is from the heritage of Christendom that this notion proceeds.

The people are not God; the people do not have infallible reason and virtues without flaw; the will of the people or the spirit of the people is not the rule which decides what is just or unjust. But the people make up the slowly prepared and fashioned body of common humanity, the living patrimony of the common gifts and the common promises made to God’s creature — which are more profound and more essential than all the additional privileges and the social distinctions — and of the equal dignity and equal weakness of all as members of the human race. It is on the condition of existing in communion with the people that all efforts bear fruit in temporal history, and that the inspirational leadership which the people need keeps both its strength and its legitimacy.

Awakened to a consciousness of himself by the movement of civilization, the man of common humanity knows today that his day has dawned, if only he triumphs over totalitarian corruption and is not devoured by it; and he knows that the idea of a caste, of a class or a race hereditarily constituted as ruling and dominant, must give way to the notion of a community of free men, equal in rights and in labor, and to the notion of an elite of the mind and of labor which stems from the people without cutting itself off from them, and which would truly be the flower and luxury of their vital energies.

What has been gained for the secular conscience, if it does not veer to barbarism, is the sense of men’s equality in nature and the relative equality which justice must establish among them, and the conviction that by means of the functional inequalities demanded by social life, equality must be re-established on a higher level, and must fructify in giving to everyone the possibility of acceding to a life wort hy of man, in assuring to everyone enjoyment of the elementary possessions, both material and spiritual, of such a life, and in the true participation of each one, according to his capabilities and his worth, in the common task and the common heritage of civilization.

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BY VIRTUE of the hidden work of evangelical inspiration, the secular conscience has understood that the authority of the rulers, by the very fact that it emanates from the author of human nature, is addressed to free men who do not belong to a master, and is exercised by virtue of the consent of the governed. The dictates of authority are binding in conscience because authority has its source in God; but from the very fact that authority has its source in God and not in man, no man and no particular group of men has an inherent right to rule others. The leaders of the people receive this right from the creative and conservative principle of nature through the channels of nature itself; that is, through the consent or will of the people or of the body of the community, through which authority always passes before being invested in the leaders.

And it. is as vicars of representatives of the multitude that the holders of authority lead the multitude, and it is toward the common good of the multitude that they must lead it. It is contrary to nature for men, members of the same species, all equal before God and death, to be simple tools of political power — tools of a dictator, the only human person among a flock of organized slaves, or tools of a paternalist power, the only adult among a regiment of children. Once the man of common humanity has understood that he is born with the right to conduct his own life by himself, as a being responsible for his acts before God and the law of the community, how can the people be expected to obey those who govern unless it is because the latter have received from the people themselves the custody of the people’s common good?

What has been gained for the secular conscience, if it does not veer to barbarism, is the conviction that authority, or the right to exercise power, is held by the rulers of the earthly community only because the common consent has been manifested in them, and because they have received their trust from the people; and it is the conviction that the normal state to which human societies ought to aspire is a state in which the people will act as grownups or those come of age in political life.

By virtue of the hidden work of evangelical inspiration the secular conscience has understood that the political realm and the flesh and blood paraphernalia of the things that are Caesar’s must nevertheless be subject to God and to justice. It has understood that the entire art of domination and all the crimes which the princes and the heads of nations carry out to conquer and consolidate their power can certainly give them power but inevitably turn out for the misfortune of the peoples. Christianity cast the net of the Gospel upon the Pagan Empire and the Pagan Empire died of it, for there is no quarter given between the evangelical law of the Son of God and the law of the Empire which sets itself up as God.

Once man has understood that, in the truth of things, politics depends upon morality because its aim is the human good of the community, once he has understood that political life must conform to natural law and, according to the special conditions of its temporal object, even to the law of the Gospel, he sees at the same moment that to call for justice and law in politics is to call for a great revolution which will substitute for the power politics of the masters, men, states, or nations the politics of the common good over which the people themselves must watch as the chief interested parties. A community of free men cannot live if its spiritual base is not solely law. Machiavellianism and the politics of domination, in the sight of which justice and law are a sure means of ruining everything, are the born enemies of a community of free men.

What has been gained for the secular conscience, if it does not veer to barbarism, is the condemnation of the politics of domination and of iniquitous and perverse means in the guidance of nations, the profound feeling that justice fosters order, and injustice the worst disorder, and the conviction that the cause of the welfare and freedom of the people and the cause of political justice are substantially linked.

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UNDER the often misunderstood or disfigured but active inspiration of the Gospel, the secular conscience has awakened not only to the dignity of the human person, but also to the aspirations and the élan which are at work in his depths. The person, in itself a root of independence, but immersed in the constraints emanating from material nature within and outside man, tends to transcend these constraints and gain freedom of autonomy and expansion.

In the very realm of spiritual life the message of the Gospel has revealed that the person is called to the perfect freedom of those who have become a single spirit and love with God; but in the realm of temporal life the repercussions of the Gospel’s message were to stimulate the natural aspiration of the person to liberation from misery, servitude, and the exploitation of man by man. When you know that we are all made for blessedness, death no longer holds any terror; but you cannot become resigned to the oppression and enslavement of your brothers, and you aspire, for the earthly life of humanity, to a state of emancipation consonant with the dignity of this life.

What has been gained for the secular conscience, if it does not veer to barbarism, is the sense of freedom, and the conviction that the forward march of human societies is a march toward the conquest of a freedom consonant with the vocation of our nature.

Finally, under the inspiration of the Gospel at work in history, the secular conscience has understood that in the misfortunes and suffering of our existence, crushed by the iron laws of biological necessity and by the weight of the pride, injustice, and wickedness of men, a single principle of liberation, a single principle of hope, a single principle of peace, can stir up the mass of servitude and iniquity and triumph over it, because this principle comes down to us from the creative source of the world, stronger than the world: that brotherly love whose law was promulgated by the Gospel to the scandal of the mighty, and which is, as the Christian well knows, God’s own charity diffused into the hearts of men.

And the secular conscience has understood that in the temporal social and political order itself, not only is civic friendship, as the ancient philosophers knew it, the soul and the constitutive link of the social community — if justice is first of all an essential requirement, it is as a necessary condition which makes friendship possible — but this very friendship between citizens cannot prevail in actual fact within the social group if a stronger and more universal love, brotherly love, is not instilled in it, and if civic friendship, itself becoming brotherhood, does not overflow the bounds of the social group to extend to the entire human race.

Once the heart of man has felt the freshness of that terrible hope, it is troubled for all time. If it fails to recognize its supra-human origins and exigencies, this hope runs the risk of becoming perverted and of changing into violence to impose upon all “brotherhood or death.” But woe to us if we scorn this hope itself, and succeed in delivering the human race from the promise of brotherhood. The human race has been exalted by it; it will give up the hope only at the cost of becoming more fierce than before. This hope is holy in itself; it corresponds to the deepest and most ineradicable desires of human nature; it places souls in a communion of pain and longing with all the oppressed and the persecuted; it calls for heroism; it has a divine power for transforming human history.

What has been gained for the secular conscience, if it does not veer to barbarism, is faith in the brotherhood of man, a sense of the social duty of compassion for mankind in the person of the weak and the suffering, the conviction that the political work par excellence is that of rendering common life better and more brotherly, and of working to make of the structure of laws, institutions, and customs of this common life a house for brothers to live in.