The Baptism of Vajk by Gyula Benczúr
Now that might has been properly defined, in what right consists must be delineated. Right is justice: but then comes the question—what is justice? In order to discern this matter, it must be ascertained that any idea of an eternal justice—an absolute, unchangeable standard to which all men can appeal—ought to have an eternal source, or it is illusory. For the absolute sense for right which is inherent to all men cannot derive from the paradox of a universe that is morally indifferent or relative. The source of justice cannot then be the creation of mortal man, for he can change; the same can be said for civil society, for it is the natural result of the settlement of families in a given place and in a given time.
Justice must then reside in a higher source—and this source is religion, because it is transcendent: it appeals to an absolute being, force, or order higher than that of mere man. Maistre, further explaining this subject, argues that the remote past recorded in history stands as a witness to this truth:1
(Maistre 178)
All that nations relate to us about their origin proves that they are agreed in regarding sovereignty as divine in its essence: otherwise they would have told quite different tales. They never speak to us of a primordial contract, of voluntary association, of popular deliberation. No historian cites the primary assemblies of Memphis or Babylon.
Every ancient civilization regarded “sovereignty as divine in its essence” as Maistre tells us; for according to their own words—not the opinions of eighteenth-century sophists—divinities or a divinity were involved in the creation of their societies. The myth of the contest between Athena and Poseidon over Athens, the story of God’s mission to Moses to free the Israelites from bondage, and Virgil’s tale of Aeneas’ election by Juno to lead the survivors of Troy to Italian shores are all examples of this reality. Thus not only sovereignty, the ability for a nation to govern itself, but also morality, by which the actions of both men and their nations are governed, are essentially theocratic in foundation. Man’s desire to serve the Absolute is then proved as much by history as it is by the interior law of the soul. It follows then that, as Maistre points out, the state is not to take a merely indifferent position on the matter of religion:
(Maistre 204)
There must be a state religion as there is a state policy; or, rather, it is necessary that the religious and political dogmas be mingled and fused together to form a universal or national reason strong enough to repress the aberrations of individual reason which is, of its nature, the mortal enemy of any association whatsoever, because it produces only divergent opinions.
Without the unity that the public affirmation of a belief in an absolute spiritual system provides, the shared moral framework of a people falls away; in this vacuum, the “aberrations of individual reason” will polarize the populace—and given enough time, this process of polarization will guarantee the collapse of society. Though they have attempted to discard this principle, modern liberal democracies and communist states alike confirm it, albeit by substituting an absolute spiritual system for an absolute materialistic system with the trappings of spirituality. For if the communist sees man only as matter, why does he insist upon “equal rights” and “social justice”, two ideas, concepts that cannot be seen with the eyes of the body but only believed in and felt by a kind of faith? How can the liberal democrat believe in “freedom” if he cannot even answer what freedom is really for, or if it is meant for anything at all? What gives these opinions—for though they masquerade as “the truth”, they are precisely this in reality—the right to dominate others, if they cannot stand to reason? These systems end in moral contradiction, as they affirm the presence of an absolute that cannot be seen in service of utopian fantasies meant to be realized in the material world.
If man tries to make himself the moral center of the universe, he will end by contradicting the very idea of absolute morality he is attempting to pridefully claim for himself. The solution to these dead-ends is to return back to a belief in an absolute; or more plainly, a belief in God that places Him at the center of all things, rather than one that considers Him a distant entity to be sometimes invoked. Centuries before Christ, the eminent Plato recognized this truth, for as he wrote:2
(Laws 4.716c)
Now it is God who is, for you and me, of a truth the ‘measure of all things,’ much more truly than, as they say, ‘man.’
Rightly does he refer to a singular deity here, and not a plurality of gods or the forces of nature. For neither could be the “measure of all things”—the source of justice. Both lack perfection because they lack unity in their essence, being pluralities of competing forces that have not a singular, perfect will. They moreover lack total power over the spiritual and natural realms; in a word, these answers to the question of the essence of the Absolute are insufficient because the gods lack omnipotence. Further expounding this matter, the saintly reformer Girolamo Savonarola, in illustrating the irrationality of supposing that the universe is the work of many gods, argues that:3
(Savonarola 22)
If there were more gods than one, they would differ from one another; and the cause of their difference would be, either some imperfection, or some perfection. Were the cause an imperfection, the god that had it would not be God, because God is wholly perfect. Were the cause a perfection, the God that had it not, would, for the same reason, not be God. Thus there cannot be more gods than one.
No man can appeal to Zeus or Odin as the “measure of all things”, for what is written of these kings of gods proves that they and their kin—much like mortal men—are unequal in their powers and knowledge. These gods are also depicted to have waged wars against each other, which further demonstrates their imperfect nature; for conflict arises only among those who have disagreements, and disagreements indicate the absence of a united will. None among them can therefore rightly be honored as the Absolute. Is it then any wonder that, following the rise of the Empire and the breakdown of the regionalistic cult system that accompanied it, even the great pagan minds of that new Roman world—such as Plutarch and Plotinus—tended to affirm a belief in one God?
Reason then testifies that the source of justice must be divine in order for it to be an everlasting standard, and that this divine source must be a God that is perfect, a being that is not only omnipotent but also possesses harmony in a unity of essence. But only faith can take us further to discover what this source has revealed about Himself.
Since faith is above reason, it cannot be proved by it alone; but the true religion can be demonstrated to be reasonable. And indeed there must only be one true religion, for truth is one—something cannot both be and not be at the same time. This true religion is the Catholic Faith, for it alone has been revealed by God. As was said of its divine founder: “Never did man speak like this man” (John 7:46). And not only did He speak like no other, but His deeds were as no other who had come before Him, or has come since. Otherwise, are we to assume that Jesus of Nazareth was a liar or a fool? Are we furthermore to suppose that His apostles were deceivers and flatterers, when we consider that they were persecuted by a world that would have gladly ended the humiliations and executions if they had only given up their teaching that “the gods of the Gentiles are devils” (Psalms 95:5) and that Christ alone is the Son of God? No, reason tells us that such propositions are preposterous!
It was the Catholic Church that was founded by Christ, as Scripture and Antiquity bear witness. For not only did Jesus give the keys of the kingdom of heaven to Saint Peter, as recorded in Holy Writ (Matthew 16:19), but also for around a millennia the entire Christian world accepted the interpretation of those words that this same Church today professes. Moreover, the Church recognizes that this Absolute is not simply an arbiter of justice, but is Justice—for as He told Moses “I AM WHO AM” (Exodus 3:14). Her sublime doctrine of Divine Simplicity thus recognizes that being and right are one.
If right is to have any real meaning at all it must be an eternal justice above mere human opinion; and because the Absolute can only be one and not many, the Christian God must be this Absolute. It then follows that the secular order must—if it is to have any true justice—obey and enforce this higher order the true God has established on earth. Thus civil governments and the kingdom of heaven must cooperate in the government of men. As the venerable fifth century Pope St. Gelasius declared to the Emperor Anastasius:4
(“Famuli Vestrae Pietatis.” §2)
For there are two, O emperor Augustus, by which the world is principally ruled: the sacred authority of pontiffs and the royal power.
But in no place did this pontiff state that his authority was equal to that of the royal power, for he asserts soon afterwards that:
(Ibid)
…in partaking of the celestial sacraments, and being disposed to them (as is appropriate), you must be submitted to the order of religion rather than rule over it.
Caesar then also must pay his due to God, as the subjects of Caesar must pay their dues to him. What is higher cannot rightly be enjoined to obey that which is lower; for if the absolute authority of the Church, granted by God Himself, is subordinated by the state—a temporal society—such a relationship will lead to the corruption of doctrine in the service of a worldly aim. It will moreover produce disunity not only within the state itself, for justice itself will seem to men to be an arbitrary pawn of a temporal power, but on a larger scale will create discord among Christian nations.5
Is not one of the many ill consequences of autocephaly in the Eastern schismatic world that, on account of the nationalization of the churches, what is termed the Eastern Orthodox Church is practically splintered? This multitude of institutions cannot even unite Eastern Europe or the Levant, or either of these regions to the other, because they have consistently fought amongst themselves over the question of authority. The Catholic Church, however, united the entire Western world before the Protestant Revolution—precisely because in this half of Christendom the pope neither was believed to be a “first among equals” nor acted in such a manner.
Though it is true that since the Second Vatican pseudo-Council the popes have sadly turned away from their role as the highest human authority in the Church in favor of “democratizing” the kingdom of God, the Holy Ghost has not abandoned the Catholic Church. Did not the world once groan under Arianism while the spotless bride remained Catholic? Has she not known the great scandal of the Borgia popes of the so-called Renaissance and the revolt of Luther? Yet in these cases the Church ultimately triumphed as she always does; after the seeming defeat of Calvary comes the victory of Easter Sunday, just as after the seeming death of Christendom in the sixteenth century came the glorious reforms of the Council of Trent.
So too does the Church and the civilization built by her seem to be undergoing death throes in our time—we are tempted to cry out with Christ, who allowed Himself to feel abandonment on the Cross as we feel it today: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). But we must not sink into the sterility and despair we see all around us, for these are only the prelude to a true restoration of throne and altar. For despite the mass violence and perversion the Revolution has unleashed upon mankind in these past two centuries, it cannot destroy the Church because she is a kingdom not of this world. As Pope St. Gelasius wisely remarked:
(“Famuli Vestrae Pietatis.” §3)
Those things which have been constituted by divine judgement can be attacked by human presumption, but they cannot be conquered by any power.
The corruption in the Church and the breakdown of social life are the consequence of a mass apostasy from the absolute of revealed truth to the vacuum of secular morality. Both elite and citizen, and priest and layman alike have given into their “itching ears” (2 Timothy 4:3); they have listened to Rousseau, Marx, and Foucault instead of Plato, Aquinas, and Maistre. Whether this “progressive” morality comes in the form of Liberalism, Marxism, or Liberal-Marxism (the fusion of these sects), the result is practically the same: the displacement of God as the standard of justice in favor of man. Thus man, who is finite and prone to error, is judged competent to be his own absolute! But since what has been miserably cast aside by so many has been “constituted by divine judgement”, authentic morality can never be “conquered” by the forces of selfish opinion that parrot the language of the Absolute to deny Him.
In order for true justice to reign in a state, the civil authority must therefore adopt the Catholic religion and defend it; and in like turn, the Church must uphold the sovereignty of the state and the dignity of the nation. The nation must submit to the Absolute, for this alone is the remedy against the polarization of society that inevitably follows from the imposition of one faulty absolute system or the tolerance for many false absolutes to wage war in the “free marketplace of ideas”. Might must be joined to right and right must be joined to might, or else a tyranny shall prevail that will only end in the eradication of our civilization.
(The previous article in this two-part series can be read here.)
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Study on Sovereignty. Translated by Edward Maxwell III. Maistre: Major Works, Volume I. Imperium Press. -
Laws. Translated by A E. Taylor. Plato: The Collected Dialogues edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Princeton University Press. p. 1307. -
Savonarola, Girolamo. The Triumph of the Cross. Translated by John Procter, O.P. p. 22.
https://archive.org/details/triumphofcross0000savo/page/22/mode/2up.
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Pope St. Gelasius. “Famuli Vestrae Pietatis.” Translated by HHG et al.
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See for reference this prescient work:
Maistre, Joseph de. Russia and the Christian West. Translated by Béla Menczer. Catholic Political Thought: 1789-1848. University of Notre Dame Press. 1962. pp. 72-76.