This article was written in response to Sohrab Ahmari’s “Escaping the ‘Torment Nexus.’” You can find the original article and all four responses here.
I am grateful to Sohrab Ahmari for the points of convergence we share, and his skillful elaboration of them: the inevitability of conflict, even in a Christian approach to politics; the primacy of politics over sheer economic (or military) might; and associationalism and class compromise as necessary to a just political life. But I would switch up the order of his three basic principles and bring out a fourth that is implicit in his vision of Catholic social teaching (CST), a vision with which I essentially agree.
First, there is a more basic question for this modern Catholic tradition: Is it realistic to hope that CST’s calls for social reform will have a significant impact on real-world politics? After more than a century of CST, the problems of war, forced migration, racism, sexism, and material inequality have hardly gotten better. In fact, we now have what is arguably an even bigger problem: climate change.
As an ecclesial and theological tradition, CST relies primarily on the theology and ethics of the great medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, who encourages trust in the human capacity for political justice. But the political experiences and theology of another major figure in the Christian tradition seem to strike a more pessimistic note. Augustine (who wrote just prior to the fall of the Roman Empire in 410 CE) believed that the fatal obstruction to justice is the reality of original sin—specifically in the form of the libido dominandi (the lust to dominate others).
For Augustine, even apparent social virtues are really no more than vices, because the ultimate motivator of ordinary political behavior is honor, glory, political success, and personal gain. As he states in his major work The City of God, “two cities have been formed by two loves.” The City of Man “glories in itself,” while the City of God glories “in the Lord” (Book XIV, chapter 28). This picture changes only when political leaders are men of grace and faith, ruling with love and justice because they love God above all things. Such rulers are rare. Many political analysts, from ancient times until our own, aver that “might makes right,” whether or not it should. Realpolitik, not justice and the common good, is the rule of politics.
Aquinas maintains, to the contrary, that political ethics is based on reason, the natural virtues (including justice), and “the common weal,” and that these carry transformative political power. After all, Aquinas argues, one of the basic inclinations of human nature is to live in political society (Summa Theologiae I-II.94.2). Indeed, the natural law even includes love of God and neighbor. Sin disrupts but does not destroy these natural capacities, which extend beyond the Church. Since the Vatican II era, Catholicism has also held that God’s grace is not limited to Christians. This makes a strong basis for a public and pluralistic political ethics that reaches across divisions, builds communities, avoids violence, and solves differences by dialogue and compromise. In consequence, Catholic social teaching insists that progress is possible toward a well-regulated economy, fair remuneration of workers, and cooperative relations among what earlier formulations of CST referred to as the “social classes.” Aquinas and CST take strong stands against the inevitability of “political realism,” the co-optation of politics by great power rivalries, and coercive transactionalism among unequally weighted parties.
As Pope John XXIII confidently wrote at the beginning of his appeal for an end to the arms race, “Peace on earth, which all men of every era have most eagerly yearned for, can be firmly established only if the order laid down by God [and evident to human reason] be dutifully observed” (Pacem in terris, 1). Pope John Paul II called for solidarity to defeat structural sin (Sollicitudo rei socialis), and Pope Francis reinforced that with a call to “fraternity” (Fratelli tutti). Yet political realities quickly remind us that what the “earthly city” knows as peace and justice are what Augustine calls “the solace of our misery,” not true virtue, much less “the positive enjoyment of felicity” (The City of God, XIX.27).
The fact is, Augustine and Aquinas both capture an angle on politics that rings true—explaining why they powerfully inspire yet continually challenge Christian politics today. It may be tempting to conflate the views of these two intellectual and theological giants, conscripting both for one’s favorite “take” on politics. But sometimes it’s the dissonance between them that is the most illuminating. Though Augustine and Aquinas belong within a common tradition and share important beliefs, they also disagree about some fundamental theological issues, and their views are fruitful in different ways at different times. From Aquinas, we find reasons to hope for historical justice; from Augustine, we learn that progress is profoundly difficult and never guaranteed. To homogenize their viewpoints is to deprive the Catholic theological tradition of the dynamism needed to negotiate the world’s contradictions and tensions.
It is primarily the Thomistic perspective that Sohrab Ahmari explicates for us, through the modern lens of CST. Yet the fact that Ahmari puts “constitutive antagonism” first in his list of basic principles is very Augustinian. It suggests that the earthly and heavenly cities will never agree on basic goals because of the clash of their ultimate desires and values. Pope Francis recognized the truth behind this worry in Laudato si’ when he called out UN climate accords for being completely “ineffectual” and lamented that efforts to address the problem had been undermined by selfish “national interests” (§169). Still, he did not give up on the goal of protecting our common home, and offered an interfaith prayer toward a better effort.
I believe that Ahmari’s paper, like Laudato si’, leans more toward Thomistic hope than Augustinian pessimism—and would therefore change the order of his three principles, giving the first place to “the primacy of politics.” Citing Leo XIII, Ahmari insists that the selfish interests driving global markets are not destined to dominate. For Leo, justice, the common good, and political community were the basic concepts of the Church’s social teaching. Ahmari’s premise is that there’s a political “we” that acts together for the good. He asks what sort of community and common goods we seek and how we can arrange our economy and class structure to uphold that kind of community and those kinds of goods. This implies a civil political debate that can produce constructive political action. If, instead of seeking the common good together, we just “let the market rip,” you’ll end up with fast-food workers and college adjunct teachers having to depend on welfare so that their employers can make more money. Augustine might not be too surprised that this is where we are now. Yet Ahmari, inspired by Leo XIII and his successors, is confident that this is not a permanent and unavoidable situation, but one that can be resolved by means of civil political discourse and solidarity. For CST, politics—not stark economic competition—is primary.
Ahmari presents “associationalism and class compromise” as the third of his three principles, but I think it ought to be his second. Forming associations for the purpose of collective action and working out compromises with other associations are basic elements of politics as CST envisions it and as Ahmari defines it. A politics of collective action and compromise frames and controls economic relations and many other facets of the common life. In explaining associationalism and compromise, Ahmari uses the word “contestation,” not antagonism. This is appropriate to CST, which values constructive conflict that advances the common good. Leo XIII viewed labor unions as an important part of such contestation. Yet, because he was worried about Marxist-inspired class warfare, the pope reassured his readers that the Church was trying to “bind class to class in friendliness and good feeling” (Rerum novarum, §21). He insisted that the social classes should “exist in harmony and agreement,” so as to “maintain the equilibrium of the body politic” (§19). If every class fulfilled its duties, he asked, would not that be sufficient to abolish “all strife and all its causes?” (§20). Again, a note of Augustinian skepticism is appropriate, not only about whether social conflict will ever disappear completely, but also about who gets to decide which duties belong to whom, and about whether upsetting the equilibrium may sometimes be necessary.
For CST, conflict can be socially constructive, but that does not mean that antagonism is an inescapable part of politics. Leo believed (perhaps too optimistically?) that associational political activity can harmonize opposing factions. Ahmari calls the state the “umpire” that, through subsidiary bodies (like state labor boards) or legislation (like minimum-wage laws), achieves Leo XIII’s goal of “safeguarding the interests of wage-earners” (Rerum novarum, §45). But this necessary and fruitful process may not always operate as smoothly and peacefully as Leo supposes, which leads us to the principle that Ahmari puts first on his list: “Constitutive antagonism.”
In my schema, that principle would be demoted to third place and given a slightly different name: constructive conflict. But Augustine might prefer Ahmari’s original choice of words, believing as he did that the earthly city was built on antagonisms. Christians had to scheme within the “miserable necessities” of politics to gain modest adjustments to an unjust status quo (hence Augustine’s own various letter-writing campaigns for moderation of imperial policies). Ahmari cites Leo XIII’s declaration that “the elements of the conflict now raging are unmistakable,” including greatly unequal and now adversarial “relations between masters and workmen,” and “the enormous fortunes of some few individuals, and the utter poverty of the masses.” As Ahmari notes, Leo did not see the “conflict now raging” as unavoidable, much less constitutive; in fact, he concluded that it could and should be settled by principles of “truth and justice” (Rerum novarum, §1). Still, from Leo XIII onward, CST has acknowledged the reality of structural sin. This is why the political process inevitably involves conflict.
In sum, I affirm Ahmari’s representation of CST, but would prioritize his principles somewhat differently: politics is first; associationalism is the necessary form of politics; constructive conflict is also a necessary feature of politics but not, pace Augustine, constitutive.
Finally, I want to add a fourth principle—namely, the “preferential option for” or “love of” the poor, which does not merely include social groups that have historically had less power but prioritizes them. The option for the poor already appears in Rerum novarum, where Leo insists that the Church “intervenes directly [on] behalf of the poor” (§29) and where justice demands “that the interests of the working classes should be carefully watched over by the administration, so that they who contribute so largely to the advantage of the community may themselves share in the benefits which they create” (§34). In Rerum novarum and other early documents of Catholic social teaching, however, the poor seemed to be under the guardianship of the heads of Church, state, and industry; in mid-twentieth-century CST—the era of Vatican II, as well as of Catholic liberationist movements in Latin America—the poor are presented as social agents in their own right, to be respected, empowered, and heard. This is especially clear in Pope Francis’s convocation of synods on the family and on the Amazon, where he summons “the poor” to represent themselves and calls the worldwide Church to listen to their “wisdom” (Querida Amazonia).
Pope Leo XIV is an Augustinian priest but does not have what I would call an “Augustinian” social vision. Rather, he seems to hope for, and work toward, radical social change—to be achieved nonviolently through “politics,” understood as a process of engagement and conversion. He is, famously, an American, but he is also our first Peruvian pope. This new Leo is recasting the living tradition of CST from the perspective of the global poor and disenfranchised, upon whom the global economy presses down even more harshly than industrialization pressed down on European workers a century ago. For Leo XIV as for John Paul II and Francis, the preferential option for the poor is required precisely because of the libido dominandi; and it is most definitely a constitutive element of CST.
In September, at a Mass in an Augustinian church in the Vatican, Pope Leo prayed that world leaders would use their resources to promote the common good instead of turning wealth “into weapons that destroy peoples or monopolies that humiliate workers.” He warned that “whoever seeks domination turns the common good into prey for their own greed.” It is up to everyone “to create networks of friendship and solidarity, to work for the common good, and to build a world that is more just, equitable, and fraternal.” Earlier, at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Leo had urged listeners to see the poor “as protagonists with a voice, capable of discernment, contribution, and construction.”
The CST tradition is consistent with Aquinas’s politics of reasonableness, the natural virtue of justice, and the common good. Yet the tradition also benefits from Augustine’s insistence that sin is resilient, and that libido dominandiremains a pervasive feature of our political experience. Nevertheless, CST reassures us that human empathy, compassion, and justice do survive sin—and that they make a politics of compromise and constructive conflict possible. It is the job of Catholic pastors, theologians, political actors, and theorists—and indeed all Catholic citizens—to inspire hope in a civil politics for the common good by modeling it ourselves.
