Roman Catholicism and Political Form — Carl Schmitt

Schmitt examines how Catholic political form is intertwined with its religious and doctrinal aspects, often shaping and being shaped by the political contexts in which it exists.

There is an anti-Roman sentiment. It fuels the struggle against Papism, Jesuitism, and Clericalism, which has driven several centuries of European history with a profound mobilization of religious and political energies. Not only fanatical sectarians but entire generations of devout Protestants and Greek Orthodox Christians have seen in Rome the Antichrist or the Babylonian Whore of the Apocalypse. This image exerted a mythical power, deeper and more potent than any economic calculation. Its effects lingered for a long time: in Gladstone or in Bismarck's "Thoughts and Memories," there is still a nervous unease when mysterious, scheming Jesuits or prelates appear. However, the emotional or even, if I may say so, mythical arsenal of the Kulturkampf and the entire struggle against the Vatican, as well as that of the French separation of church and state, is harmless compared to Cromwell's demonic fury. The arguments increasingly become more rationalist or humanitarian, utilitarian, and superficial. Only in a Russian Orthodox believer like Dostoevsky does the anti-Roman sentiment once again rise to the secular grandeur of his depiction of the Grand Inquisitor.

In all the various shades and gradations, the fear of the incomprehensible political power of Roman Catholicism always remains. I can well imagine that a Protestant Englishman feels all the accessible antipathies towards the "papal machine" when he realizes that there is an enormous hierarchical administrative apparatus that aims to control religious life and is run by people who fundamentally reject having a family. So, a celibate bureaucracy. This must frighten him, given his sense of family and his aversion to any bureaucratic control. Nevertheless, this is more of an unspoken sentiment. The most common criticism, echoed throughout the 19th century, which was largely parliamentary and democratic, is that Catholic politics is nothing more than boundless opportunism. Its elasticity is indeed astonishing. It aligns with opposing currents and groups, and countless times it has been criticized for forming coalitions with various governments and parties in different countries; for allying, depending on the political constellation, with absolutists or monarchomachs; during the Holy Alliance after 1815, being a stronghold of reaction and an enemy of all liberal freedoms, while in other countries, advocating for the very same freedoms, especially press freedom and educational freedom, in fierce opposition; how it preaches the alliance of throne and altar on the European continent and knows how to stand entirely on the side of a committed democracy in the peasant democracies of Swiss cantons or in North America. Men of the stature of Montalembert, Tocqueville, Lacordaire already represented a liberal Catholicism, while many of their co-religionists still saw in liberalism the Antichrist or at least the forerunner of the Antichrist; Catholic royalists and legitimists appear arm in arm with Catholic defenders of the Republic; Catholics are tactical allies of a socialism that other Catholics consider the devil, and even negotiate with Bolshevists, while bourgeois advocates of the sanctity of private property still see them as a band of outlaws. With each change in the political situation, all principles seemingly change, except the one: the power of Catholicism. "One demands all freedoms from opponents in the name of their principles and denies them in the name of Catholic principles." How often does one see the image presented by bourgeois, socialist, and anarchist pacifists: high church prelates blessing the cannons of all warring nations; or the neo-Catholic writers who are partly monarchists and partly communists; or finally, to speak of a different type of sociological impressions: the abbé pampered by court ladies next to the Irish Franciscan who encourages striking workers to endure. Again and again, one is confronted with similarly contradictory figures and connections.

Some aspects of this diversity and ambiguity—the double face, the Janus head, the hermaphroditic nature (as Byron expressed it about Rome)—can be easily explained through political or sociological parallels. Any party with a firm worldview can form coalitions with the most diverse groups in the tactics of political struggle. This applies to committed socialism, as far as it holds a radical principle, just as it does to Catholicism. The national movement, too, depending on the situation in each country, has sometimes formed alliances with legitimate monarchy, and at other times with the democratic republic. From the perspective of a worldview, all political forms and possibilities become mere tools for realizing the idea. Furthermore, much of what appears contradictory is merely a consequence and accompanying phenomenon of a political universalism. The fact that the Roman Catholic Church, as a historical complex and as an administrative apparatus, continues the universalism of the Roman Empire is confirmed by all sides with remarkable agreement. Nationalistic Frenchmen, exemplified by Charles Maurras, Germanic race theorists like H. S. Chamberlain, German professors of liberal provenance like Max Weber, and a Pan-Slavist poet and visionary like Dostoevsky, all base their constructions on this continuity between the Catholic Church and the Roman Empire.

Every world empire naturally involves a certain relativism towards the diverse range of possible views, a ruthless superiority over local peculiarities, and at the same time, opportunistic tolerance in matters that are not of central importance. The Roman Empire, like the British Empire, shows enough similarities in this regard. Every imperialism that is more than mere rhetoric contains contradictions within itself—conservatism and liberalism, tradition and progress—even militarism and pacifism. In the history of English politics, this has been demonstrated almost in every generation, from the contrast between Burke and Warren Hastings to that between Lloyd George and Churchill or Lord Curzon. However, by pointing out the peculiarities of universalism, one has not yet defined the political idea of Catholicism. It must only be mentioned because the feeling of fear towards the universal administrative apparatus is often explained by a justified reaction of national and local sentiments. Particularly in the strongly centralized Roman system, many may feel sidelined and betrayed in their national patriotism. An Irishman, in the bitterness of his Gaelic national consciousness, declared that Ireland was merely "a pinch of snuff in the Roman snuff-box" (he would have preferred to say: a chicken the prelate would drop into the cauldron which he was boiling for the cosmopolitan restaurant). On the other hand, however, Catholic nations owe a significant part of their national resilience to Catholicism—Tyroleans, Spaniards, Poles, Irish—not only when the oppressor was an enemy of the Church. Cardinal Mercier of Mechelen and Bishop Korum of Trier have represented national dignity and self-consciousness more grandly and impressively than commerce and industry did, and that in the face of an opponent who was by no means an enemy of the Church, but rather sought an alliance with it.

Purely political or sociological explanations based on the nature of universalism will not be able to explain such phenomena, just as one cannot explain that anti-Roman sentiment solely as a national or local reaction against universalism and centralism, even though every world empire in world history has undoubtedly provoked such reactions.

I believe that the emotional depth of this idea would be infinitely deepened if one fully grasped how much the Catholic Church is a **_complexio oppositorum_** (a union of opposites). There seems to be no contradiction that it does not embrace. For a long time, it has prided itself on uniting all forms of government and state, being an autocratic monarchy whose head is elected by the aristocracy of the cardinals, and yet containing so much democracy that, regardless of social class or origin, the humblest shepherd from the Abruzzi, as Dupanloup put it, has the potential to become this autocratic sovereign. Its history is full of astonishing adaptability, but also of rigid intransigence, capable of the most masculine resistance and the most feminine submission, pride and humility strangely mixed. It is almost unimaginable that a rigorous philosopher of authoritarian dictatorship, the Spanish diplomat Donoso Cortes, and a rebel like Padraic Pearse, who devoted himself to the poor Irish people and allied with syndicalists, were both devout Catholics. But this union of opposites also prevails theologically.

The Old and New Testaments are both upheld, answering Marcionite either-or with both-and. The Jewish monotheism and its absolute transcendence are supplemented by the doctrine of the Trinity with so many elements of God’s immanence that many mediations are conceivable. Due to the veneration of saints, French atheists and German metaphysicians who rediscovered polytheism in the 19th century praised the Church because they believed they found in it a healthy paganism. The fundamental thesis to which all teachings of a consistently anarchistic state and social philosophy can be reduced, namely the opposition between the "naturally evil" and the "naturally good" man—this question, decisive for political theory, is not answered simply with a yes or no in the Tridentine dogma. Rather, the dogma, unlike the Protestant doctrine of total corruption of natural man, speaks only of a wounding, weakening, or obscuring of human nature, allowing for various gradations and adaptations.

The connection of opposites extends to the very roots of social-psychological motivations and concepts. The Pope has his name as Father, and the Church is the Mother of believers and the Bride of Christ—a marvelous fusion of the patriarchal and the matriarchal, giving direction to the simplest complexes and instincts, leading them to Rome, to respect for the Father and love for the Mother—does rebellion against the Mother exist? And finally, most importantly, this infinite ambiguity is combined with the most precise dogmatism and a will to decision, culminating in the doctrine of papal infallibility.

From the political idea of Catholicism, the essence of this Roman Catholic **_complexio oppositorum_** lies in a specifically formal superiority over the material of human life, which no empire has ever known. Here, a substantial shaping of historical and social reality has succeeded, which, despite its formal character, has an existential ethos, full of life and yet highly rational.

This formal uniqueness of Roman Catholicism is based on the strict application of the principle of representation. This can be seen clearly in contrast to modern economic thought. But first, a misunderstanding must be cleared up—a misunderstanding born out of intellectual promiscuity, which seeks a romantic or Hegelian brotherhood with Catholicism, and, in making Catholicism one of its many syntheses, might prematurely believe it has constructed Catholicism. The metaphysicians of post-Kantian speculative philosophy were accustomed to viewing the essence of all organic and historical life as a process of eternal antitheses and syntheses. The roles can be distributed arbitrarily. When Görres presents Catholicism as the masculine and Protestantism as the feminine principle, he makes Catholicism merely an antithetical element and sees the synthesis in a "higher third." It goes without saying that Catholicism can just as easily be portrayed as the feminine and Protestantism as the masculine. It is also conceivable that speculative constructors occasionally viewed Catholicism as the "higher third." Catholicizing romantics are particularly inclined to this, although they are also reluctant to refrain from instructing the Church that it must free itself from Jesuitism and Scholasticism in order to make something "organic" higher out of the schematic externality of form and the invisible inwardness of Protestantism.

This is the basis of the seemingly typical misunderstanding, but such constructions are more than fantasies from thin air. They are, even if it sounds improbable, highly contemporary, for their intellectual structure corresponds to a reality. Their starting point is indeed a given split and division, an antithesis that needs a synthesis or a polarity that has an "indifference point," a state of problematic torn-apart-ness and deepest indecisiveness, for which no other development is possible than to negate itself in order to, by negating, arrive at positions. A radical dualism indeed prevails in every area of the present epoch; in the further course of this discussion, it will have to be mentioned in its various forms.

Its general foundation is a concept of nature that has found its realization in today’s world, changed by technology and industry. Today, nature appears as the polar opposite to the mechanical world of large cities, which lie on the earth like enormous cubist structures with their stone, iron, and glass crystals. The antithesis of this realm of technology is the wild, untouched, barbaric nature—a reservation into which "man does not come with his torment." Such a split into a rationalistically technologized world of human work and a romantically untouched nature is entirely foreign to the Roman Catholic concept of nature.

It seems that Catholic peoples have a different relationship to the earth than Protestant ones; perhaps because, in contrast to the Protestants, they are mostly peasant peoples who do not know large industries. This is generally true. How is it that there is no Catholic emigration, at least none of the grand type of the Huguenots or even the Puritans? There have been countless Catholic emigrants—Irish, Poles, Italians, Croats; most emigrants are probably Catholic because Catholic people were generally poorer than Protestant ones. Poverty, need, and persecution drove the Catholic emigrants, but they never lose their homesickness. The Huguenot and the Puritan, compared to these poor exiles, possess a strength and pride of often inhuman grandeur. They can live on any land. But it would be wrong to say they take root everywhere. They can build their industry anywhere, make any land the field of their professional work and their "inner-worldly asceticism," and finally have a comfortable home everywhere—all by making themselves masters of nature and subjugating it. Their type of mastery remains inaccessible to the Roman Catholic concept of nature.

Roman Catholic peoples seem to love the soil, the mother earth, differently; they all have their "terrisme." For them, nature is not the opposite of art and human work, nor the opposition between reason and emotion or heart, but human work and organic growth, nature and reason are one. Viticulture is the most beautiful symbol of this union, but the cities built with this spirit also appear as naturally grown products of the soil, fitting into the landscape and remaining true to their earth. In the essential concept of "the urban," they possess a humanity that remains eternally inaccessible to the precision mechanics of a modern industrial city. Just as the Tridentine dogma does not know the Protestant tearing apart of nature and grace, so Roman Catholicism does not understand all those dualisms of nature and spirit, nature and reason, nature and art, nature and machine, and their alternating pathos. Just as the opposition of empty form and shapeless matter, so the synthesis of such antitheses remains foreign to it, and the Catholic Church is by no means that (by the way, always absent) "higher third" of German nature and philosophy of history. It is not suited to either the despair of antitheses or the illusionary arrogance of their synthesis.

Therefore, it must seem like dubious praise to a Catholic if their church is made into the antithesis of the mechanistic age. It is a striking contradiction—again pointing to the curious *complexio oppositorum*—that one of the strongest Protestant feelings sees in Roman Catholicism a degeneration and misuse of Christianity because it mechanizes religion into a soulless formality, while at the same time, certain Protestants romantically flee back to the Catholic Church because they seek salvation from the soullessness of a rationalistic and mechanistic era. If the Church were to settle for being nothing more than the soulful polarity to soullessness, it would have forgotten itself. It would have become the desired complement to capitalism, a hygienic institute for the ailments of the competitive struggle, a Sunday outing or summer retreat for the city dweller. Naturally, the Church has a significant therapeutic effect, but that cannot be the essence of such an institution. Rousseauism and Romanticism can, like much else, also enjoy Catholicism—as one might appreciate a magnificent ruin or a genuine antique without doubt—and can, while sitting in "the armchair of the achievements of 1789," also turn this matter into a consumer item of a relativistic bourgeoisie. Many, especially German Catholics, seem proud to be discovered by art historians. Their, in itself, secondary joy need not be mentioned here if not for an original and thoughtful political thinker like Georges Sorel, who in the new connection of the Church with irrationalism, sought the crisis of Catholic thought. In his view, while the argumentation of church apologetics aimed to rationally demonstrate faith until the 18th century, in the 19th century, it became apparent that irrationalist currents were benefiting the Church. It is indeed correct that in the 19th century, various forms of opposition to Enlightenment and rationalism revitalized Catholicism. Traditionalist, mysticist, and romantic tendencies have made many converts. Even today, as far as I can judge, there is strong dissatisfaction among Catholics with the established apologetics, which some perceive as specious argumentation and empty schema. But all this misses the essence, because it identifies rationalism with scientific thinking and overlooks that Catholic argumentation is based on a distinct form of reasoning, one interested in the normative guidance of social human life, demonstrating with a specifically juridical logic. In almost every conversation, one can observe how deeply scientific-technical methods dominate today's thinking, such as when in traditional proofs of God's existence, the God who rules the world like a king governs a state is unconsciously made into a motor driving the cosmic machine. The imagination of the modern city dweller is filled to the core with technical and industrial concepts, projecting them into the cosmic or metaphysical. The world becomes, for this naïve mechanistic and mathematical mythology, a giant dynamo machine. Here, there is no difference in class either. The worldview of the modern industrial entrepreneur resembles that of the industrial proletarian as a twin resembles his brother. Therefore, they understand each other well when they fight together for economic thinking. Socialism, insofar as it has become the religion of the industrial proletariat of large cities, counters the great mechanism of the capitalist world with a fabulous anti-mechanism, and the class-conscious proletariat sees itself as the legitimate master of this apparatus—that is, the proper professional master—while it views the private property of the capitalist entrepreneur as an unprofessional remnant from a technically backward time. The great entrepreneur has no other ideal than Lenin, namely, an "electrified earth." Both essentially only argue over the correct method of electrification. American financiers and Russian Bolsheviks unite in the struggle for economic thinking, that is, in the struggle against politicians and jurists. In this alliance, Georges Sorel stands as well, and here, in economic thinking, lies a fundamental opposition of today's era to the political idea of Catholicism.

For this idea contradicts everything that economic thinking perceives as its objectivity, honesty, and rationality. The rationalism of the Roman Church grasps morally the psychological and sociological nature of man and does not concern itself, like industry and technology, with the domination and utilization of matter. The Church has its own distinct rationality. We are familiar with Renan's saying: *Toute victoire de Rome est une victoire de la raison* ("Every victory of Rome is a victory of reason"). In its struggle against sectarian fanaticism, the Church has always sided with common sense. Throughout the Middle Ages, as Duhem has beautifully demonstrated, it suppressed superstition and witchcraft. Even Max Weber acknowledges that Roman rationalism lives on within it, that it knew magnificently how to overcome Dionysian cults of intoxication, ecstasy, and dissolution in contemplation. This rationalism is institutional and essentially juridical; its great achievement lies in making the priesthood into an office, but again, in a particular way. The Pope is not a prophet but the Vicar of Christ. All the wild fanaticism of unrestrained prophetism is kept at bay by such formation. By making the office independent of charisma, the priest gains a dignity that seems to abstract entirely from his concrete person. Nevertheless, he is not a functionary or commissioner of republican thought, and his dignity is not impersonal like that of a modern bureaucrat; rather, his office traces, in an unbroken chain, back to the personal commission and person of Christ. This is perhaps the most astonishing *complexio oppositorum*. In such distinctions lies the rational creative power and, at the same time, the humanity of Catholicism. It remains within the human-spiritual realm; without dragging the irrational darkness of the human soul into the light, it gives it direction. Unlike economic-technological rationalism, it does not provide recipes for the manipulation of matter.

Economic rationalism is so far removed from Catholicism that it can evoke a specific Catholic fear against itself. Modern technology simply becomes a servant to any needs. In the modern economy, a highly rationalized production corresponds to a completely irrational consumption. A marvelous rational mechanism serves any demand, always with the same seriousness and precision, whether the demand is for silk blouses, poisonous gases, or something else. The rationalism of economic thought has become accustomed to considering certain needs and only seeing what it can "satisfy." In the modern metropolis, it has constructed a system where everything operates predictably. This system of unwavering objectivity can terrify a devout Catholic, precisely because of its rationality.

It can be said today that perhaps it is the Catholics in whom the image of the Antichrist is still alive, and when Sorel sees in the ability to maintain such "myths" proof of vital force, he does an injustice to Catholicism with his claim that Catholics no longer believe in their eschatology and that none of them expect the Last Judgment anymore. This is indeed incorrect, although in the *Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg* De Maistre has a Russian senator say something similar. In a Spaniard like Donoso Cortés, in French Catholics like Louis Veuillot and Léon Bloy, in an English convert like Robert Hugh Benson, the expectation of the Last Judgment is as immediately alive as in any Protestant of the 16th and 17th centuries who saw the Antichrist in Rome.

However, it should be noted that it is precisely the modern economic-technical apparatus that causes widespread horror and dismay among Catholics. The genuine Catholic fear arises from the recognition that here the concept of the rational is fantastically twisted in a way that offends Catholic sensibilities because a production mechanism serving the satisfaction of any material needs is called "rational" without considering the essential rationality of the purpose for which this highly rational mechanism is available. Economic thinking is incapable of perceiving this Catholic fear; it is content as long as it can be supplied with the means of its technology. It knows nothing of an anti-Roman sentiment, nor of the Antichrist and the Apocalypse. The Church appears to it as a strange phenomenon, but no stranger than other "irrational" things. There are people who have religious needs—well, the task is to satisfy those needs realistically. This does not seem more irrational than some senseless whims of fashion, which are also catered to. Once the eternal lamps in front of all Catholic altars are powered by the same electricity plant that supplies the city's theaters and dance halls, then Catholicism will also become an understandable, self-evident matter to economic thinking.

This economic way of thinking has its own reality and honesty because it remains purely technical, meaning it stays focused on the material aspects. Politics, to it, seems unprofessional because it must appeal to values beyond the economic. However, Catholicism, in a highly significant sense, is political, in contrast to this absolute economic objectivity. Here, "political" does not mean the management and control of certain social and international power factors as the Machiavellian concept of politics would have it, which reduces politics to mere technique by isolating a single, external element of political life.

Political mechanics have their own laws, and Catholicism, like any other sociological force drawn into politics, is subject to them. Since the 16th century, the "apparatus" of the Church has become more rigid; despite or perhaps because of the need to digest Romanticism, it has become more centralized in bureaucracy and organization than in the Middle Ages. All of this, which sociologically is characterized as "Jesuitism," can be explained not only by the struggle with Protestantism but also as a reaction against the mechanism of the time.

The absolute prince and his "mercantilism" were the precursors of modern economic thinking and a political state that lies somewhere between dictatorship and anarchy. With the mechanistic view of nature in the seventeenth century, a state power apparatus developed, along with the often-described "objectification" of all social relationships, and in this environment, the church organization, like a protective armor, became firmer and more rigid.

This rigidity in itself is not proof of political weakness or age; the question is whether an idea still lives within it. No political system can last even a generation by relying solely on the technique of power maintenance. Politics requires an idea because there is no politics without authority and no authority without an ethos of conviction.

From the pretension of being more than just economic, the political realm derives the necessity to appeal to categories beyond production and consumption. It is peculiar, to say the least, that both capitalist entrepreneurs and socialist proletarians unanimously regard the pretensions of the political as presumptuous. From their economic perspective, they see the rule of politicians as "unprofessional." However, from a strictly political standpoint, this only means that certain social power groups—whether powerful private entrepreneurs or the organized labor force of specific industries—are using their positions in the production process to seize state power.

When they oppose politicians and politics as such, they are targeting a concrete political power that still stands in their way. Should they succeed in overthrowing it, the distinction between economic and political thinking will lose its relevance, and a new kind of politics will emerge, based on the new power rooted in economic foundations. But what they will be engaging in will still be politics, which implies a demand for a specific type of validity and authority. They will appeal to their social indispensability, to the "public good," and thus they are already invoking an idea. No major social conflict can be resolved economically.

When an entrepreneur says to the workers, "I feed you," the workers reply, "We feed you." This is not a dispute over production and consumption; it is not economic at all, but rather stems from differing moral or legal convictions. It concerns the moral or legal attribution of who is truly the producer, the creator, and consequently the master of modern wealth. Once production becomes entirely anonymous, with a veil of corporations and other legal entities making it impossible to attribute it to specific individuals, the private property of the "nothing-but-capitalist" will be cast aside as an inexplicable appendage. This will happen even though, at least today, there are still entrepreneurs who manage to assert their claims of personal indispensability.

The Catholic Church is likely to be largely disregarded in such a conflict as long as both parties think in economic terms. Its power does not rest on economic means, even though the Church may possess land and various "investments." Such holdings are trivial and idyllic compared to major industrial interests. The ownership of the Earth's oil reserves may potentially decide the battle for world dominance, but the Vicar of Christ on Earth will not participate in that struggle. The Pope insists on being the sovereign of the Papal States—what does that mean amid the loud clamor of global economies and imperialisms?

The political power of Catholicism is neither based on economic nor military power. The Church maintains an ethos of authority in its purest form, independent of these forces. While the Church is also a "juridical person," it differs fundamentally from a corporation. The latter, a typical product of the age of production, is merely a mode of accounting, whereas the Church is a concrete, personal representation of a concrete personality. Even those familiar with it have always acknowledged the Church as the supreme bearer of juridical spirit and the true heir of Roman jurisprudence. One of the Church's sociological secrets lies in its ability to master juridical form, but it possesses this power only because it also has the strength to represent.

The Church represents the *civitas humana*, continually embodying the historical continuity from the moment of the Incarnation and Christ's sacrifice on the cross. It represents Christ Himself, personally, the God who became man in historical reality. This representative function is where the Church's superiority over an era dominated by economic thinking lies.

In the present day, the Catholic Church stands as a unique, unified example of the medieval ability to create representative figures such as the Pope, Emperor, monk, knight, and merchant. Among the last four pillars Paul Bourget once listed (English upper house, Prussian general staff, French Academy, and the Vatican), the Church is the only remaining one. It is so unique that, to those who see only its outward form, it might seem to represent only representation itself. The 18th century had various representative figures, like the "legislator," and even the Goddess of Reason appeared somewhat representative compared to the unproductive 19th century.

The attempt to counter the Catholic Church with a modern scientific institution, such as Auguste Comte's positivist church, resulted in a clumsy imitation. Even though Comte's efforts are admirable and his imitation grand in comparison to other similar attempts, it fails to grasp the essence of representation. Comte recognized the medieval representative types—the cleric and the knight—and compared them with the modern types—the scholar and the industrial merchant. However, he was mistaken in considering modern scholars and merchants as representative types. The scholar was only representative during the transitional period and the struggle with the Church, and the merchant only as a puritanical individual.

Since the advent of the modern economic system, both scholars and merchants have become operators within the large machine of economic life. It is difficult to say what they truly represent. The old social estates no longer exist. The 18th-century French bourgeoisie, the third estate, declared itself as "the nation." The famous phrase "le tiers état c'est la Nation" was more revolutionary than anticipated because when one estate identifies itself with the nation, it negates the idea of multiple estates required for social order. Bourgeois society thus lost its capacity for representation and fell into the dualism of the era, manifesting as polarities: the bourgeois and the Bohemian, who only represents himself.

The concept of the proletariat emerged as a direct response. It categorizes society based on its role in the production process, aligning with economic thinking, and thus proves that its essence involves renouncing representation. Scholars and merchants have become either suppliers or leading workers. They work in their offices or laboratories and serve businesses if they are truly modern. They are anonymous, making it pointless to expect them to represent anything. They are private individuals or representatives, not representatives in the true sense.

Economic thinking recognizes only one form: technical precision, which is the furthest from the idea of representation. Economic and technical thinking demands a real presence of things. Concepts like "reflection," "radiation," or "mirroring" denote material connections and different states of the same matter. Such images aim to make the ideal clear by incorporating it into the material realm. According to the renowned "economic" historical perspective, political and religious views are ideological "reflections" of production relationships. This implies that in their social hierarchy, economic producers stand above the "intellectuals." Psychological discussions often use terms like "projection." Metaphors like projection, reflection, mirroring, and radiation seek an "immanent" technical basis.

The idea of representation, however, is dominated by the thought of personal authority. Both the representative and the represented must assert personal dignity. Representation is not a material concept. Only a person, an authoritative person or an idea that personifies when represented, can represent in the eminent sense. God, or in democratic ideology, the people, or abstract ideas like freedom and equality, are conceivable themes for representation, but not production and consumption. Representation gives the representative a unique dignity because a high-value representative cannot be worthless. Not only does the representative and the represented demand worth, but so does the third party, the addressed audience. One cannot represent machines or be represented by them. If the state becomes a Leviathan, it disappears from the world of representation. This world has its hierarchy of values and its humanity, in which the political idea of Catholicism lives, manifesting in the threefold form: the aesthetic form of the artistic, the juridical legal form, and the glorious shine of a world-historical power.

In a modern age focused on artistic enjoyment, the last aspect of natural and historical growth is the aesthetic beauty of form, which stands out prominently. From grand representation, shape, figure, and visible symbols naturally arise. The representationless starkness of the modern business world draws its symbols from an earlier era, as machines are traditionless and lack imagery. For instance, even the Russian Soviet Republic found no other symbol for its coat of arms than the hammer and sickle, which correspond to a bygone stage of technology and do not represent the world of industrial proletariat. This emblem could be viewed satirically as a reflection that the private property of economically reactionary peasants triumphed over the communism of industrial workers, and that agrarian small-scale production surpassed technologically advanced machine industry. Nevertheless, this primitive symbolism has a humane quality that the highest machine technology lacks because it possesses a language.

It is not surprising that in the era of economic thinking, the beautiful externals are the most noticeable because they are most lacking. Yet, even in aesthetics, it often remains superficial. The true essence of form involves a capacity for grand rhetoric. This is what should be considered, rather than the aristocratic garments of cardinals or the external splendor of a beautiful procession, with all the poetic beauty that accompanies them. Likewise, grand architecture, ecclesiastical painting and music, or significant poetic works are not the criteria for the form being discussed here. Today, there is a clear separation between the Church and creative art. Francis Thompson, one of the few great Catholic poets of recent generations, expressed this in his wonderful essay on Shelley: the Church, once the mother of poets as much as saints, Dante as much as Saint Dominic, now retains the glory of holiness for itself and leaves art to outsiders. "The separation has been ill for poetry; it has not been well for religion." This is true, and no one could express it more beautifully and accurately: the current state is not good for religion, but it is not a terminal illness for the Church.

However, the power of words and speech is a criterion of human life, rhetoric in its grand sense. It may be dangerous to speak this way today. The misunderstanding of the rhetorical significance is a result of the polarizing dualism of the time, manifesting as extravagant music on one side and mute factuality on the other, attempting to turn "true" art into something romantic, mystical, and irrational. It is known that a close relationship exists between rhetoric and classical esprit, recognized and described by Taine. Yet, Taine's antithesis of classical and romantic killed the living concept of the classical, and he, despite not fully believing it, sought to prove the classical as rhetorical and thus, as he saw it, as future, empty symmetry, and affected liveliness. A whole game of antithesis! In the opposition between rationalism and something "irrational," classical is assigned to the rationalistic and romantic to the irrational, and rhetoric to the classical-rationalistic. Yet, it is precisely the non-discursive and non-rational, but rather the, if one may call it so, representative speech that is decisive.

It moves in antitheses, but these are not contradictions, rather the different elements that are shaped into a complexio so that speech has life. Can Bossuet be grasped with Taine's categories? He has more understanding than many rationalists and more intuitive power than many romantics. But his speech is only possible against the backdrop of an imposing authority. It neither falls into a discourse nor a dictation but moves in its architecture. Its grand diction is more than music; it is the visible human dignity made manifest in the rationality of self-forming speech. All this presupposes a hierarchy, as the spiritual resonance of great rhetoric comes from the belief in the representation claimed by the speaker. Here, it becomes evident that, for world history, the priest belongs to the soldier and the statesman. Next to them, he can stand as a representative figure because they themselves are such figures, unlike the economically minded merchant and technician, who merely provide him with simple accommodations and confuse his representation with decoration.

A union of the Catholic Church with the current form of capitalist industrialism is impossible. The combination of throne and altar will not be followed by office and altar, nor by factory and altar. This situation may have unavoidable consequences if the Roman Catholic clergy in Europe are no longer primarily recruited from peasant populations but from the masses of urban clergy. This change will not alter the fundamental impossibility. However, it remains true that Catholicism will adapt to any societal and state order, including those where capitalist entrepreneurs or unions and works councils hold power. It can only adapt if the economically based power has become political, meaning that capitalists or workers in power take on state representation and responsibility. The new regime will then be compelled to present something other than merely economic and private legal conditions. The new order cannot be confined to the realm of production and consumption processes; it must be formal because every order is a legal order, and every state is a state governed by law.

Once this occurs, the Church can align itself with it, as it has with every order throughout history. The Church is not dependent on states where the foundational nobility or peasantry are the ruling class. It needs a state form because otherwise, there is nothing to correspond to its essentially representative stance. The behind-the-scenes rule of "capital" is not yet a form; it can indeed undermine an existing political form and turn it into a mere facade. If successful, it would leave the state "depoliticized," and if economic thinking achieves its utopian goal of creating an entirely apolitical state of human society, the Church would remain the sole bearer of political thought and political form. It would have an enormous monopoly, and its hierarchy would be closer to political world domination than ever before in the Middle Ages. According to its own theory and ideal structure, the Church would, however, not wish for such a state because it supposes the political state, a "societas perfecta," and not an interest-based corporation alongside it. It aims to live in a special community with the state, where two representations stand as partners opposite each other.

With the spread of economic thinking, the understanding of all forms of representation is diminishing. Nevertheless, today's parliamentarism still, at least according to its ideal and theoretical foundation, contains the concept of representation. It relies on the so-called "representative principle." If nothing is explicitly stated except the designation of representation, namely that of the electing individuals, it would not be particularly characteristic. In the constitutional and political literature of the last century, this term was thought to represent a popular representation, a representation of the people vis-à-vis another representative, namely the king; or, where the constitution is republican, the parliament alone represents "the nation." It is said that the Church has "no representative institutions" because it does not have a parliament and its representatives do not derive their authority from the people. It represents "from above."

German state theory of the Second Empire developed a learned mythology that is both monstrous and complicated: the parliament represents, as a secondary state organ, another primary organ (namely the people), but this primary organ has no other will than the secondary one, except what is "specifically reserved" to it. Both are only one and form two organs and yet only one person, and so on. One can read about this in Georg Jellinek's "General Theory of the State," specifically the chapter "Representation and Representative Organs." The simple meaning of the representative principle is that the deputies are representatives of the entire people and thus have an independent dignity in relation to the voters, without ceasing to derive their dignity from the people (not from individual voters). "The representative is not bound by instructions and orders and is only responsible to his conscience." This means, in the personification of the people and the unity of parliament as its representative, at least in theory, a complexio oppositorum, that is, the multitude of interests and parties into one unity, and is representative and not economically conceived.

The proletarian council system thus seeks to eliminate this remnant of a non-economic thinking time and emphasizes that the delegates are merely messengers and agents, revocable at any time, administrative servants of the production process, with a "mandate imperatif." The "whole" of the people is merely an idea; the whole of the economic process is a real thing. The intellectual consequence of anti-spiritual thinking, with which young Bolsheviks in the flood of socialism fought against the idea, against any idea at all, is impressive. As long as an idea exists, there is also the notion that something preexists the given material reality, transcendent, which always means an authority from above. A thinking that wants to derive its norms from the immanence of economic-technical processes sees this as an external intervention, a disturbance of the self-running machine. A spiritual person with political instinct, fighting against politicians, immediately sees in the appeal to the idea a representation of authority, an arrogance that does not remain in the proletarian formality and not in the compact mass of "corporeal" reality, in which people do not need a government and where "things govern themselves."

In the context of economic thinking, political and legal forms are considered both incidental and disruptive, particularly where the paradox arises that there are fanatics of this thinking. This phenomenon is most evident in Russia, where their hostility towards ideas and all non-economic and non-technical intellect becomes apparent. Sociologically, this indicates the correct instinct of the revolution: intelligence and rationalism are not inherently revolutionary.

Economic thinking, however, is purely technical; it is foreign to all social traditions. The machine is traditionless. Karl Marx's significant sociological insight was recognizing that technology is truly revolutionary, and any natural law revolution alongside it is merely archaic play. A society built solely on advancing technology would, therefore, be entirely revolutionary but would soon destroy itself and its technology. In contrast, economic thinking is not radical; it reveals its opposition to absolute technicism. The economic sphere includes certain legal concepts such as property or contract, but it limits them to a minimum and, above all, to private law.

The striking contradiction between the goal of making the economic principle a social one and the effort to remain within private law, particularly private property, can only be hinted at here. The private law tendency of economics signifies a limitation of legal formation. The expectation is that public life will govern itself, dominated by the public opinion of individuals, which is in turn controlled by a press standing in private ownership. Nothing in this system is representative; everything is private.

Historically, privatization starts at the foundation, with religion. The first individual right in the bourgeois societal order was religious freedom. In the historical development of the catalog of freedoms—freedom of religion and conscience, freedom of association and assembly, press freedom, freedom of trade and industry—religious freedom represents the beginning and principle. Wherever religion is placed, it shows its absorbing, absolutizing effect. When religion is private, the private is religiously sanctified. Both aspects are inseparable. Private property is thus sacred precisely because it is private. This barely conscious connection explains the sociological development of modern European society.

Even in this society, there is a religion, namely that of the private; without it, the structure of this social order would collapse. The fact that religion is private gives the private a religious sanction, and the absolute guarantee of private property exists only where religion is private. This is true everywhere. When the Erfurt Program of the German Social Democracy states that religion is a private matter, it represents an interesting deviation from liberalism. The theologian of this program, Karl Kautsky, thus notes (in his 1906 work on the Catholic Church and Christianity) a symptomatically significant correction in its casualness, stating that religion is less a private matter than actually only a matter of the heart.

In contrast to the liberal foundation of private matters, the juridical structuring of the Catholic Church is publicly visible. This aspect is part of its representative nature and enables it to legally embody the religious sphere to such an extent that the Protestant scholar Rudolf Sohm could define the Catholic Church as fundamentally juridical, whereas he viewed Christian religiosity as fundamentally non-juridical. The Church's integration of juridical elements is indeed extensive, and its seemingly contradictory political behavior can often be explained by its formal, juridical nature.

Worldly jurisprudence also demonstrates a certain mix of traditional conservatism and natural law-revolutionary resistance, similar to the Catholic Church. In every revolutionary movement, one can observe that it regards jurists—the "theologians of the existing order"—as particular adversaries, while jurists themselves may support the revolution, providing it with a pathos of suppressed and injured rights. From its formal superiority, jurisprudence can adopt a similar stance to the Catholic Church concerning shifting political forms, provided that a minimum level of form is met and "order" is established. Once a new situation recognizes an authority, it provides a basis for jurisprudence, which in turn forms a substantial framework.

However, the Catholic Church goes further because it represents not only the idea of justice but also the person of Christ. Thus, it claims its own power and honor, negotiating as an equal party with the state and creating new laws, while jurisprudence only mediates existing law. Within the state, the judge applies laws given by the national community, adding a more or less formal norm between the idea of justice and individual cases. An international court, independent of political instructions and bound only by legal principles, would be closer to the idea of justice. Its authority would rest on the direct representation of this idea rather than delegation by individual states, even if it were established through a treaty among states. Consequently, it would need to act as an original and universal instance.

This represents the natural expansion of the logical consequence and psychological result of original legal status. Today's concerns, expressed by powerful states' commentators in 1922, stem from the concept of sovereignty. The power to decide who is sovereign would imply a new sovereignty, and a court with such powers would be an over-state and over-sovereign, potentially creating a new order if, for example, it had to decide on the recognition of a new state. A League of Nations, not a court, should have such pretensions. This self-sufficiency would imply that, in addition to its judicial function, it might manage administration, have a budget, and other attributes, which also signifies something for itself. Its activity would not be limited to applying existing legal norms like a court, but it would also represent its own interest in self-assertion, making it more than a mere arbitrator. It would have to decide, based on its own power, what constitutes a new order or state, potentially creating a conflict between law and self-assertion. Such an institution would represent not only the idea of impersonal justice but also its own powerful personality.

In the grand history of the Roman Church, alongside the ethos of justice, stands the ethos of its own power, further augmented by notions of glory, splendor, and honor. The Church aspires to be the royal bride of Christ, representing the ruling, sovereign, triumphant Christ. This claim to glory and honor is fundamentally based on the idea of representation, which perpetuates the eternal opposition between justice and glorious splendor. This antagonism is generally human, though devout Christians may view it in a more specific, particular manner.

The Church's transformation of Christianity from a personal and inner spirituality into a visible institution is often criticized as a profound betrayal. Rudolf Sohm saw the fall in the juridical aspect of the Church, while others view it as a grand, deep-seated will to world dominance. The Church, like any global imperialism, might bring peace to the world upon achieving its goals, but some perceive this as the victory of evil, as described by Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Dostoevsky projects his own potential atheism into the Roman Church, portraying power as inherently evil and inhumane, reflecting an anarchistic and atheistic instinct.

The great Pope Innocent III, in a sermon (Sermo XIII, Migne 217, p. 371), addressed the same temptation of Christ that Dostoevsky discusses. This sermon presents a scholastic psychology of sin that is as penetrating as Dostoevsky's vision but maintains a human touch alongside its terrifying vision. In temporal terms, the antagonism remains eternal, and only in God is it resolved; attempting to escape it would be the utmost inhumanity. A pervasive sentiment sees the institutional coldness of Catholicism as evil, while Dostoevsky’s boundless expansiveness is considered true Christianity. This is as superficial as any sentiment and feeling can be.

A French Catholic thinker, with more nuance than Dostoevsky but still encompassing the entire tension of the antagonism, found an image that captures this conflict. By formulating an appeal against the justice of God, this thinker drives the dialectic of justice to its extreme, preserving the juridical category with the forms of judgment and appeal. The scene of the Last Judgment, as described by Hello, is striking: when the judgment of the world is pronounced, a damned soul, covered in crimes, stands and, to the terror of the universe, addresses the judge with "J'en appelle" ("I appeal"). At this word, the stars fade. According to the idea of the Last Judgment, this verdict is infinitely definitive and "horribly without appeal." When the damned soul appeals from Christ’s judgment, Christ, in a terrible silence, asks: "Who do you appeal to from my justice?" and the damned responds: "I appeal from your justice to your glory."

In every one of the three major forms of representation, the complexio of contradictory life is shaped within the unity of personal representation. Each of these forms can thus also evoke a particular unease and confusion, potentially rekindling anti-Roman sentiment. All sectarians and heretics have failed to recognize how deeply the concept of representation is rooted in human personalism. Thus, it was a unique and new kind of struggle when the Catholic Church encountered an opponent who challenged it with the very idea of humanity. This opponent’s enthusiasm was of a noble fire. However, when this idea achieved historical significance, it again fell prey to the fate of its antagonism, which had already mobilized many energies against the Church.

As long as the idea of humanity retained its original strength, its proponents had the courage to impose it with inhumane grandeur. The humanitarian philosophers of the 18th century preached enlightened despotism and dictatorship of reason, i.e., their reason. They were self-aware aristocrats. Their authority was founded on representing the idea of humanity, but the secret societies—sociologically the bearers of this movement—remained secret societies, strictly esoteric associations. This esotericism, characterized by an inhumane superiority over the uninitiated, over the average person, and democracy, was intrinsic to all esotericism. Who today still possesses such courage?

It would be exceptionally enlightening to examine the fate of a particularly German monument of great humanitarian spirit, such as Mozart’s *The Magic Flute*. Is it today anything other than cozy German music, an idyll, and a precursor to Viennese operetta? It is certainly seen as a song of enlightenment, the battle of the sun against the night, of light against darkness. Up to this point, everything might seem in better order for the sentiments of a democratic age. It is more worrying that the Queen of the Night, particularly as the mother, fights against the Masonic priests. Ultimately, the terrifying masculine self-assurance and authoritative confidence of these priests, in contrast to the average person, the good family man Papageno, who is dealt with by having his wishes fulfilled and needs satisfied, is striking. This beloved opera becomes even more frightening when viewed from a grand ideational perspective. It must be compared with Shakespeare’s *The Tempest* and understood how Prospero becomes a Masonic priest and Caliban becomes a Papageno.

The 18th century still dared such self-assurance and the aristocratic concept of secrecy. In a society that no longer has such courage, there will be no more "arcana," no hierarchy, no secret diplomacy, and no real politics, as great politics always involves the "arcanum." Everything will play out behind the scenes (on a stage of Papagenos). Will there still be business and trade secrets? This type of secrecy seems to find particular understanding in economic-technical thinking, and therein might lie the beginning of a new, uncontrolled power. For now, it remains purely economic, minimally representative, and only proletarian works councils have so far thought to rebel against such secrets. One will always hear only of humanity and thus fail to see that even the idea of humanity, once realized, is subject to the dialectic of every realization and must cease to be nothing but human.

Today, the Catholic Church in Europe faces no opponent who, with the same enthusiasm as the spirit of the 18th century, confronts it as a refined enemy. Humanitarian pacifism is incapable of true enmity because its ideals of justice and peace are undermined. For many, even among the best pacifists, it amounts to a plausible calculation that war is usually a poor business, driven by a rationalistic frustration with the energy and material wasted in conflict.

The League of Nations, as it exists today, may be a useful institution, but it does not confront the universal Church as a rival nor does it act as an ideal leader of humanity. The last significant European opponent was Freemasonry. Whether the fire of its heroic era still burns within it is uncertain. Whatever ideological pretensions it may have, its commitment to consistent economic thinking is likely as indifferent to both Catholicism and the League of Nations as they are to it. This thinking regards them all as mere shadows—one perhaps a shadow of the future, the other a shadow of the past. Whether one shadow extends a hand to the other or they fight amongst themselves is quite irrelevant.

Humanity is such an abstract idea that Catholicism appears more understandable in comparison, as it can at least be of interest for aesthetic consumption. Similarly, the third form of radical economic thinking, closely related to radical communism, finds its counterpart in the practicality of economic thinkers. Neither people nor things need a "government" when the mechanisms of the economic and technical realms are left to their inherent laws. In such arguments, any political authority is rejected, making Bakunin—the great anarchist of the 19th century—seem like a naïve visionary who, in his struggle against ideas and spirits, was ahead of his time, clearing the way from all metaphysical and ideological constraints, and now attacks religion, politics, theology, and jurisprudence with a scathing force.

Bakunin’s struggle against the Italian Mazzini can be seen as a symbolic prelude to a colossal historical upheaval, larger in scale than the migrations of peoples. For Bakunin, Mazzini's belief in God, like any belief in God, was merely a proof of subservience and the root cause of all evil and political authority; it represented metaphysical centralism. Although Marx and Engels were atheists, their educational contrasts remained a crucial factor. The profound antipathy that arose between these Western Germans and the more public figures was more than a mere quirk. It became evident in their struggle within the First International.

Conversely, everything in the anarchist camp was outraged by the “German Jew” (who was actually from Trier) and Engels. What continually provoked the anarchists was their intellectualism. They had too many “ideas” and too much “brain.” Bakunin could only utter the word “cervelle” with a certain bitterness; he perceived it, rightly, as an expression of claims to authority, discipline, and hierarchy. Any form of cerebralism was to him an enemy of life. His barbaric, unbroken instinct had sharply highlighted a seemingly incidental yet crucial concept, which German revolutionaries, when they created the fighting class of the “proletariat,” had stigmatized with a certain moral pathos: the “lumpenproletariat.”

This term (both contemptuous and picturesque) can truly be seen as a symptom because it is inextricably linked with evaluations. From all sides of social thought, there are connections to this peculiar mass: the “proletariat,” which also includes the bohemian of the bourgeois era, the Christian beggar, and all the degraded and insulted. It has played a somewhat unclear but essential role in all revolutions and rebellions. Bolshevik writers have recently granted it a sort of redemption. When Marx and Engels were concerned with distinguishing their true proletariat from this “decayed” element, they revealed how strongly traditional moral and educational notions influenced them. They aimed to give their proletariat a social dignity, which could only be achieved with moral concepts. Here, however, Bakunin had the audacious courage to see the carrier of future changes precisely in the lumpenproletariat, calling upon the canaille.

Bakunin’s rhetoric is striking: “By ‘flower of the proletariat,’ I mean above all this great mass, these millions of uncivilized, dispossessed, miserable, and illiterate people whom Mr. Engels and Mr. Marx claim to submit to the paternal regime of a very strong government... By ‘flower of the proletariat,’ I mean precisely this eternal government fodder, this great popular canaille, which, being almost untouched by bourgeois civilization, carries within it, in its passions, in its instincts... all the germs of the socialism of the future, and which alone is powerful enough today to inaugurate and make triumphant the social revolution.”

Nowhere is the decisive contrast of education more powerfully revealed than in this passage. It opens the scene for what is essentially current and shows where Catholicism stands as a political force.

Since the nineteenth century, Europe has seen two major forces confronting Western European tradition and its foreignness: the militant industrial proletariat and the Russian element turning away from Europe. Both view the Western European education as barbaric, and where they have self-awareness, they proudly call themselves barbarians. Their meeting on the grounds of the Russian Soviet Republic has a profound ideological significance. This connection is not a coincidence of world history, despite the differences and even oppositions between the two elements, and the entire process is inexplicable according to previous constructions and Marxist theory itself.

I know that the Russian hatred of Western European education may contain more Christianity than liberalism and German Marxism, that many prominent Catholics considered liberalism a worse enemy than open socialist atheism, and that in its formlessness might lie the potential for a new form that could shape the economic-technological age. From the perspective of its enduring permanence, the Catholic Church does not need to make a decision here; it will still represent the essence of all that survives. It is the heir. However, there is still an unavoidable decision of the present day, the current constellation, and the current generation. Here, the Church, even if it cannot declare itself for any of the warring parties, must actually stand on one side, as it did, for example, in the first half of the nineteenth century on the counter-revolutionary side. And here I believe: in that front-line battle of Bakunin, the Catholic Church and the Catholic concept of humanity were on the side of the idea and Western European civilization, alongside Mazzini and not alongside the atheistic socialism of the anarchistic Russians.