of that society.^10 The church is able to fulfil everything its divine mission
requires. It is, however, untrue if understood as possessing the whole truth
about everything. The belief that all truth of whatever kind is contained in
divine revelation (‘fideism’), leaving no autonomous range of cognizance to
science, was rejected by the First Vatican Council.^11 However, for historical
reasons, Catholic social teaching retained the conviction that the church was
the universal legislator of all social phenomena. This conviction led to an
attitude that concrete norms for all political and economic behaviour could
simply be deduced from the general principles taught by the Catholic Church.
This perspective led to a method that distinguished between‘thesis’and
‘hypothesis’:‘thesis’referred to the way in which the Catholic principle should
be applied ideally in the existing historical circumstances by the Magisterium
behaving like a legislator enacting a law, whereas‘hypothesis’indicated the
field of practical possibilities offered by actual opposing circumstances that
required compromises and constrictions.^12
Second, when applied to individual ethics, the idea of deducing norms from
human nature can be maintained quite successfully, because human nature is
surprisingly uniform in time and geography. We all have bodies and souls,
passions and moral experience; we feel fear of death and joy in love, and so
forth. In social ethics, however, it is more difficult to deduce norms. Shall we
deduce them from theideaof an ideal state, or from thenatureof govern-
ment? Social formations depend on many contingent historical elements, and
therefore converting any existing polity into an ideal from which to draw
norms tends to be ideological.
Unfortunately, in Catholic social thought, the state was idealized as a
social body out of whose properties laws could be deduced. As a body has
one head, monarchy would be the ideal form of a Catholic state, some argued;
as all organs work together, corporatism would be the Catholic ideal, others
said. This resulted in a rejection of democracy and of the liberal system of
divided powers.^13 The Anglo-American notion was one of a pragmatic ap-
proach that refrained from deduction, arriving rather through trial and error
at solutions that really managed to harness the antagonistic political and
economic forces for the common good in a system of checks and balances
(^10) Jacques Maritain,Man and the State, ed. Richard O’Sullivan (London: Hollis & Carter,
1954), 181.
(^11) First Vatican Council, Dogmatic ConstitutionDei Filiuson the Catholic Faith, DH nr 3015:
‘there is a twofold order of knowledge, distinct not only in its principle but also in its object’.
(^12) The typical example was the church’s stance on religious freedom prior to the Second
Vatican Council. See Martin Rhonheimer,Christentum und säkularer Staat: Geschichte—
Gegenwart—Zukunft(Freiburg–Basel–Vienna: Herder, 2012), 149–63.
(^13) See Rudolf Uertz,Vom Gottesrecht zum Menschenrecht: Das katholische Staatsdenken in
Deutschland von der Französischen Revolution bis zum II. Vatikanischen Konzil (1789–1965)
(Paderborn: Schöningh, 2005), 197–280.
202 Martin Schlag