Luceat!

Archbishop Chaput is at it again, delivering another powerful speech on the absolute necessity for Christians to take their role as a disciple of Jesus Christ more seriously than anything else in their lives.  I completely recommend reading the entire speech, you can view it here: http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/ by scrolling down until you find the article entitled, “Religious Tolerance and the Common Good.”

The Archbishop said the following which caught my particular attention: “But if we remove God from public discourse, we also remove the only authority higher than political authority, and the only authority that guarantees the sanctity of the individual. If the twentieth century taught us anything, it’s that modern states tend to eat their own people, and the only thing stopping this is a resistance based in the human spirit but anchored in a higher authority—which almost always means religious witness.”

In his book, The Person and the Common Good, Jacques Maritain explains that the common good must serve the whole society and the individual.  If it fails to do either it is not true common good.  The earthly good of a society is superior to the earthly good of an individual, but that earthly good of the society “flows back upon each” individual.  A true common good is one that recognizes that, “a single human soul is worth more than the whole universe of material goods.”  Therefore, while Man as an individual is a part of the whole of society he must serve the community, but while Man as a person transcends the community the common good must help each person along their path towards perfection.

As the Archbishop points out, when God is taken out of the equation of public life, “the only authority that guarantees the sanctity of the individual,” history shows that, “modern states tend to eat their own people.”  This truth is one that Maritain illustrates by looking at three contemporary forms of political philosophy: “bourgeois individualism,” “communistic anti-individualism,” and “totalitarian or dictatorial.”

The first leads each person to turn over responsibility and care for their own destiny through a social contract to an “artificial whole” that is meant to give each person total liberty in property, business and pleasure.  Inevitably “society is driven to the insurrection of the parts against the whole…to the tragic isolation of each one in his own selfishness or helplessness.” 

The second is a reaction against individualism with the stated goal of the “absolute emancipation of man,” and to make him the, “God of history.”  The reaction against individualism is too aggresseive and the dignity of the individual is nearly impossible distinguish from the group.  Nothing in this system guides, directs, or points Man towards his final vocation of communion with the Ultimate and Transcendent Good.   

The last only recognizes the material individualism of man and not his personhood.  In this format the state has the monopoly on dignity.  The only person above it is the ‘master’ and anyone else is either a part of the “‘organized’ aggregate of material individualities,” or the enemy. 

What Jacques Maritain and Archbishop Chaput are trying to make clear to “those who have ears” is that God is not a hobby.  He cannot be left at home while you go to work, only to be picked back up whenever their is some time to kill.   God is the only guarantor of the dignity of each individual.  Archbishop Chaput makes this clear.  A society that fails to acknowledge the eternal spiritual personhood of man cannot exist without grievous error.  Maritain makes that clear. Christians have to bring God into the public square.  This is required by the very essence of the common good.

Without it there can be no common good.  With it the common good can trimph and each individual that subordinates himself to the community, that is, he sacrficies his time, material positions, even his life for the temporal good of the whole, actually serves the highest good of each person, including himself.