Politics as Moral and Religious
The realm of politics has never seemed so disconnected from morality and religion, given the cynicism and corruption among those who govern and those who are governed; the sheer brutality, whether direct or indirect, of international politics; and the demoralization of peoples, who have been reduced to voluntary submission and who, moreover, have by and large been deprived of the moral framework of legislation that ought to guide their conduct.
While it is true that the presence of evil in the governance of men is as old as sinful humanity itself, the tethering of human law to the “transcendence” of the general will, through the principles of 1789, opened a wholly new chapter in the history of nations. This appears in its purest form, one might say, in the present-day legislation on matters regarding life, death, and the family, which excludes any reference to the natural law.
However, natural morality has also been trampled upon when it comes to international law, to the law of nations, and particularly to the law of war, ever since the Great War ‒ that horrific “total war” ‒ and subsequently with regard to bombing strategies, atomic or otherwise, aimed at the direct annihilation of civilian populations ‒ women, children, and the elderly ‒ or to nuclear deterrence, based on the threat of their extermination.
The Eminent Dignity of Politics
To understand that politics, as it was understood in principle up until the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, was inherently conceived as intrinsically linked to the moral and the religious, one should read the Prologue to the Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics[1] by Saint Thomas Aquinas, as Aquinas’s remarks present the advantage of providing a sort of standard interpretation.
Saint Thomas explains in this prologue that man, as a rational being, necessarily and primarily (and not merely by convention!) produces that which is more vital to him than water is to fish: the political society. And all other social constructions, associations of every kind, are ordered to this primary society ‒ let us call it the City ‒ which is by nature antecedent to the others, notably to the family (even if, in the order of generation, the family obviously comes first): “The City is indeed the most important among the things that can be constituted by human reason, for all other human societies are ordered to it.”
Borrowing from Aristotle the distinction between theoretical sciences (metaphysics, physics) and practical sciences oriented toward praxis, toward the action to be accomplished (politics, ethics), Aquinas affirms with the Philosopher that “it is in political science that philosophy, which has human affairs as its object, finds its perfection.” It is “the chief among the practical sciences, and their keystone, for it is concerned with the highest and most perfect good. It is the culmination of the philosophy of man.” Indeed, the political, writes Pierre Manent, “is what gives form to the life that is properly and simply human”[2].
The City provides “the highest among all human goods […], the common good, which is better and more divine than the good of one individual.” It gives men the means to live on two levels: it allows them to “find sufficiently that from which they might be able to live,” but also, and fundamentally, to live well ‒ that is, to live virtuously: “It [the City] is originally made for the sake of living, namely, that men might find sufficiently that from which they might be able to live; but from its existence it comes about that men not only live but that they live well, insofar as by the laws of the city, the life of men is ordered to the virtues.” The City makes the practice of virtue possible for the many, and thereby enables the attainment of happiness ‒ in other words, the highest fulfillment of man in this world[3]. This quest, says Aristotle, may even culminate in contemplation[4], which one might say is a steppingstone to Christianity, a “seed of the Word”.
This transition from mere life to the good life, from the economic to the ethical, is articulated through the concept of autarkeia, or self-sufficiency, in the sense of having sufficient means to achieve the desired end. The polis, the political society alone, as Saint Thomas always says when commenting on Aristotle, is “ordered toward the self-sufficiency of human life.” It alone possesses the means enabling man to attain his virtuous end within the natural order. In this sense, it is, within this order, the “most complete” human community, the “most perfect” society, in comparison with that other perfect society ‒ the supernatural one ‒ which is the Church.
Ethics and politics are thus intertwined: the latter is the culmination of the former, since, as we have said, its object is the common good, the supreme good of man in this world. It is therefore the highest practical science, oriented toward action, and “the most architectonic of all”[5]. Hence the equally architectonic character of political wisdom or political prudence.
If, moreover, politics ‒ Plato’s “royal art” ‒ is comparable to the work of an architect, it is because it shapes and assembles the stones of the edifice ‒ the citizens ‒ by ordering them toward the good through laws: “By the laws of the city,” St. Thomas continues, “the life of men is ordered to the virtues.” All the commands of the prince or the magistrates certainly have, in principle, this purpose, but especially those which give shape and structure to society, namely, the laws of the City, which bring enduring harmony and peace. They make it possible to bind the body of the City together through the friendship so dear to the Ancients[6]: “Indeed,” Saint Thomas continues in his Prologue, “it is commonly held that friendship is the greatest good to be found in the City.” This friendship is sublimated into Christian charity in a christened nation. As of a distant memory of this civic friendship, we speak today of “creating social bonds” in modern political societies, bonds which are, in reality, founded upon the maintaining of a delicate balance so as to avoid civil war.
The prince and the magistrates thus educate other men. “Man must receive from man the discipline that leads to virtue. […] This discipline, which subdues man through the fear of punishment, is the discipline of the laws; laws are therefore necessary to ensure that peace and virtue reign among men.” This is what the New Testament also says in order to establish obedience to those who exercise authority; the latter comes from God and is exercised to punish those who do evil and encourage those who do good (Rom 13:1; 1 Pet 2:14).
Such are human laws, insofar as they derive from the law inscribed by God in the heart of every man (Rom 2:15), the natural law (Summa Theologica, I ‒ II, q. 95, a. 1 and 2). The latter is thus eminently political, since it serves as the standard for the laws of the City.
Human laws partake in Divine Providence
We will refer here to a seminal study by Jean-Rémi Lanavère: Loi naturelle et politique chez saint Thomas d’Aquin [Natural Law and Politics in Saint Thomas Aquinas][7]. In this study, he discusses, in particular, Divine Providence, through which God guides his creatures toward perfection, and which can be conceptualized according to the model of the human virtue of prudence. Conversely, political prudence will be an authentic virtue only if it takes Divine Providence as its model.
God, in his regulation of all things ‒ that is, through the eternal law, which can be identified with Divine Providence ‒ provides for the needs of all his creatures. He does so in a specific way for his rational creature, who becomes a free agent of Divine Providence and who, in turn, provides:
- man receives in his heart the deposit of the divine law, the natural law which is “a participation of the eternal law [that is, of Divine Providence] in the rational creature” (ST, I ‒ II, q. 91, a. 2);
- and he becomes providential for himself and for other men through the human laws he enacts or contributes to enacting: the rational creature “participates in this providence by providing for himself and for others” (ST, ibid.).
Natural law thus serves as the bond between Divine Providence and political prudence, especially in the governing body’s legislative activity. It is important to note that this activity ‒ and this is a very significant point ‒ does not belong solely to the governing body alone, but also to all citizens, who are involved in the pursuit of the common good. Because he is political by nature, man appropriates this law inscribed in his heart by God’s Providence and applies it to others just as he is aided by them: “Man’s political nature is fulfilled not only because man naturally needs the assistance of others, but because his natural desire is satisfied only on the condition that he comes to their aid. […] By virtue of the natural law within him, man is more in the image of God by being providential for others than by being providential for himself. He becomes more godly by striving for the common good than by striving for his own good. […] It is by being a lawmaker that man is most perfectly in the image of the provident God, and it is when he himself is the source of laws that the natural law is best manifested in him.”[8] Not that every citizen must, strictly speaking, exercise the function of a lawmaker, but by desiring the order that is brought about by the law, by strictly obeying it, and by supporting its application in others, the citizen imitates the provident God.
The role of human law is to move from the generality of the natural law to its application to practical situations. “But derivation does not in any way mean deduction,” Michel Villey states: human laws have their own content depending on time and place[9]. They are, to a certain extent, relative; we will return to this point.
The political system that emerged from the Revolution effectively sidelined the transcendence of the natural law, leading moralists ‒ whether out of conviction or due to an expedient alignment between Catholicism and liberalism ‒ to embrace this shift and depoliticize the natural law. In this new framework, the natural law applies directly to individuals, without the mediation of human legislation which is ordinarily required[10]. Jean-Rémi Lanavère draws on Leo Strauss to hold Hobbes responsible for this modern upheaval, which contributed to making the natural law a rule applicable to human beings outside of society, in the “state of nature”. It thus becomes the law of the individual, the law of human rights and duties, situated both below and beyond politics, as a corpus of universal norms: the natural law, detached from the religious and metaphysical apparatus that had traditionally undergirded it, had now become secularized.
Let us add that above the political sphere, which has become amoral and areligious, there are the “declarations of human rights”, which delimit the political sphere more than they transcend it: human laws are no longer intended to prescribe virtuous acts to citizens, but only to prevent the rights of individuals from being infringed upon. This new conception of natural law is accessible to reason, but in an immanent way, as a matter of self-evidence. However, it is subject to variation, as we can see if we consider, for instance, the status of the unborn child, who is entitled to be the beneficiary of an inheritance under the Civil Code, but who is also subject to being eliminated under the law which has decriminalized abortion.
From the Natural City to the Christian City
The subversion of the natural law through legislation regarding life, death, and the family, which we mentioned at the outset, must not obscure the subversion of the natural law by state secularism ‒ be it a “hard” secularism, enforcing a strict separation between Church and State, as in France, or a sort of pseudo-confessionalism or a “soft” secularism, favoring “religious liberty”, as is the case in other countries[11]. One of the theologians who served as a source of inspiration for Leo XIII’s encyclicals, Fr. Luigi Taparelli d’Azeglio, S.J., explained in his Essai théorique de Droit naturel [Theoretical Treatise on Natural Law] that “external worship is by its very nature a necessity, a need, a duty for the individual,” but that it is also “a need, a duty for society, whose unity must consist principally in the union of minds and wills”[12].
Religion stands at the summit of the good life, even if that religion is merely natural. Ensuring that citizens fulfill their duties toward God is therefore the most important act of human legislative activity. It is a “civic duty”, as we say today, to incite people to praise their Creator, especially through the major religious act of sacrifice, by which man relinquishes material goods in order to acknowledge God’s absolute sovereignty.
It is clear, however, that sin and the blindness that results from it, have constantly diverted man’s natural religious inclination toward a multitude of errors, lies, and even crimes. The fact that one can nevertheless discern, amidst the unspeakable chaos of false religions, the vestiges of natural religion and the seeds of the Word, is something God alone can fathom. But it is certainly more pertinent to seek these vestiges and seeds in philosophy: “Plato paves the way for Christianity,” writes Pascal.
The City of Man fulfills its natural common good all the more effectively insofar as it thus leads to the supernatural common good of the City of God. “If man is bound by nature and duty to seek the truth, he is even more bound to give his assent to it when the truth makes itself manifest,” writes Taparelli[13]. And Leo XIII, in Immortale Dei, an encyclical on the Christian constitution of states, affirms that the: “proofs are abundant and striking [thanks to which] it is evident that the only true religion is the one established by Jesus Christ Himself, and which He committed to His Church to protect and to propagate.”
A utopia of the Christian City? Not at all, but rather a historical fact harkening back to Constantine’s conversion in 312 and continuing up until the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789. The historian Paul Veyne ‒ a non-believer it must be noted ‒ wrote in Quand notre monde est devenu chrétien [When Our World Became Christian] regarding Constantine’s adoption, as monarch, of a religion that was still that of a minority within the empire, that “far from being the cynical schemer or the superstitious man that he was still claimed to be until recently,” he intended “to participate in what he considered a supernatural epic, to take the lead in it, and to thus ensure the salvation of humanity”[14]. Marie-Françoise Baslez, in a book whose very title, Comment notre monde est devenu chrétien [How Our World Became Christian][15], announces that she wanted to qualify Paul Veyne’s account by describing the unstoppable rise of Christianity during the first three centuries, also sees in Constantine the one who gave it “the status of a ‘religion’ in the Roman sense of the term, capable of creating social bonds and giving meaning to collective history”, a social bond to which Christianity gave a specific meaning: “Christianity is no longer the religion of a people, nor merely of a book, but also of a Church, with a unifying principle independent of the state.”[16]
The Two Democracies
St. Thomas’s writings on politics were composed in the13th century, at a time that can be considered the high point of the Christian city-state, but it is clear that the reality he had in mind has been shattered by the one in which we now live. This latter reality goes by the name of democracy, which is one of the classical forms of government conceivably suitable for the legitimate governance of the state, but this term no longer has the same meaning as that of the Greek democracies or the Italian republics of the Middle Ages. For just as ‒ to refer to Jean de Viguerie’s Les deux patries [The Two Fatherlands] ‒ there are two meanings of the word fatherland which are foreign to one another, so too is the democracy born of the Revolution entirely alien to classical democracy. This is an obvious truth, yet one of which even the finest Thomists who discuss the political thought of St. Thomas often seem to be unaware.
For the thinkers of classical antiquity as well as of the medieval era, democracy was characterized by the government of the people, possibly combined with other forms so as to form a “mixed regime”, but in which the power of the people’s representatives ‒ or even of the people themselves in a direct democracy ‒ remained, like all power, founded upon “divine right”, being of transcendent origin. According to the modern conception, democracy, having become the only conceivable regime, is one in which “the principle of any sovereignty lies primarily in the Nation” (Art. 3 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man). Consequently, the law, having become the expression of the general will of this nation, is no longer grounded in right reason, in accordance with nature, and present in all beings, as Cicero maintains in The Republic. Therefore, even though Christian traditions, the dictates of natural common sense, and the slowness of change mean that modern democracy retains vestiges of the common good, it nonetheless fundamentally undermines, in its very principle, the natural political society. Thus, contrary to what liberal Catholics had intended, and unlike a classical usurpation, it cannot acquire legitimacy through the dictates of the law.
The elimination of any reference to a transcendent natural law is so unnatural that an author like Geoffroy de Lagasnerie (who, to put it briefly, is nearly as leftward-leaning as Jean-Luc Mélenchon), in his pamphlet L’âme noire del a démocratie. Manifeste pour un autre idéal politique [The Dark Soul of Democracy. Manifesto for another Political Ideal][17], and in opposition to the aberrations to which the general will leads, calls for an “idea of justice [that] must come first” ‒ statement which bears all the hallmarks of the reminiscence of a catechism lesson.
Regarding this rupture, Bernard Dumont, in his contribution to the collective work Actualidad política de santo Tomás [The Present-Day Relevance of Thomism][18], mentioned above, draws attention to the fundamental Article 3, Question 91, I-II, of the Summa Theologica. Therein, Saint Thomas explains how human reason derives, from the precepts of the natural law, those particular provisions that are human laws. In responding to an objection (the 3rd) regarding the seemingly relative nature of human laws, which cannot be infallible, St. Thomas explains that this fallibility stems from the fact that they fall under practical reason: laws have as their object human action ‒ particular and contingent ‒ and not the necessary realities with which speculative reason deals. Among various possible options, the legislator chooses the one that, in concreto, seems best, whether it concerns the provisions of the Highway Code or the penalty to be applied for a given category of crime. This is because legislative activity, as Bernard Dumont notes, belongs to the realm of realism and the virtue of prudence. It is “that architectonic virtue that gives order to collective life, and which is at the antipodes of modern Prometheanism and of the instrumental role of the legal norm that claims to fulfill it.”
Hence this paradox: unlike the traditional role of the legislator ‒ who does not claim infallibility but seeks to best assess the possible application of God’s law ‒ political modernity, which is essentially relativist, asserts, on the contrary, the indisputability of a law that expresses the will of the majority of individuals, or at least of the most influential minority among them. Modern legal positivism, which subverts the principle of the intertwining of the legal and the divine (the moral, the religious), leads to a relativism that claims to be infallible.
* * *
Not as a conclusion, but as a final remark, we will say that the exposition of principles regarding the bonds between the political, the moral, and the religious, with the help of St. Thomas, cannot, however, answer the question: “What is to be done?” ‒ question which served as the title of Lenin’s famous treatise, and which is obviously the essential question: What is to be done in order to reestablish this bond? However, attempting to articulate these principles is already an action ‒ dare we say a political one ‒ or at least the very first step toward the reestablishing of this bond.
Fr. Claude Barthe
[1] Nouvelles Éditions Latines, 1974.
[2] Preface to Jean-Rémi Lanavère, Loi naturelle et politique chez saint Thomas d’Aquin, Vrin, 2024, p. 10.
[3] “The happiness pursued in political life is distinct from political life itself, but it is by means of political life that we seek it,” Juan Fernando Segovia, « Realeza y soberanía. La realeza de la política en santo Tomás de Aquino. Participación y analogía »,in Miguel Ayuso (ed.), Actualidad política de santo Tomás, Dykinson, 2026.
[4] He attributes this to the wise person who attains supreme happiness through “the knowledge of the beautiful and divine realities,” by means of “the most divine part of ourselves” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1177a–1178a, “The Contemplative or Theoretical Life.”
[5] Nicomachean Ethics, I, 1, 1094a 27–28.
[6] Anne Merker, « Faire un à plusieurs : l’amitié comme disposition éthique et politique. Réflexions à partir d’Aristote », Lecture given at the University of Lyon III for the Rhône Society of Philosophy, December 2, 2015.
[7] Op. cit., Vrin, 2024.
[8] Jean-Rémi Lanavère, op. cit., pp. 159, 166, 173.
[9] Michel Villey, Questions de saint Thomas sur le droit et la politique, PUF, 1987, p. 99, cited by J.-R. Lanavère, p. 226.
[10] The fact remains that the scope of the natural law is by nature broader and more fundamental than that of human laws: on the one hand, human law cannot prohibit all sins, but must show a certain tolerance for the sake of general peace, in imitation of Divine Providence, which sometimes allows evil to exist in consideration of the greater good (Mt 13:24–30); and on the other hand, it may happen that the legitimate authority issues laws contrary to right reason, in other words to the natural law—unjust laws that are acts of violence rather than laws (ST, I–II, q. 93, a. 3, ad 2, and q. 95, a. 2). In such cases, one might say that every man becomes, in a sense, a self-legislator.
[11] Claude Barthe, “Secularism, a Monstrosity. Reflections for the Centenary of the Encyclical on Christ the King”, Res novæ, September 22, 2025.
[12] Essai théorique de Droit naturel, Casterman, 1883, vol. 1, p. 102.
[13] Op. cit., p. 103.
[14] Paul Veyne, Quand notre monde est devenu chrétien (312–394), Albin Michel,1st edition 2007, p. 11 of the 2024 edition.
[15] Marie-Françoise Baslez, Comment notre monde est devenu chrétien, CLD, 2008.
[16] Op. cit., pp. 188, 189.
[17] Flammarion, 2026.
[18] Dykinson, 2026, “Las formas de gobierno”, pp. 143–152.