Introduction
John Neville Figgis, CR (1866–1919), predates the twentieth-century rise of French personalist philosophy, as developed, for instance, by Jacques Maritain in The Person and the Common Good (1947) and Emmanuel Mounier in Personalism (1950).Footnote 1 Catholic personalist philosophers and theologians define personalism with various emphases but generally agree in contrasting personalism with modern individualism, collectivism and naturalistic reductivism. Most maintain that personality is a philosophical, theological belief that God makes human persons in his image in a gift of love, and he makes them for relationships of love and communion. Created persons possess irreducible dignity and freedom to choose to participate in relationships of love and communion through their responsible knowledge, choices and actions. Human persons, a corporeal spiritual union made for temporal and eternal life, transcend deterministic chains of causation to reciprocate, or refuse, union in the Trinitarian order of love.
In the recent book, Neville Figgis, CR: His Life, Thought and Significance, three contributors refer to Figgis as a personalist.Footnote 2 First, Rowan Williams insists on Figgis’s importance as an apologist for the uniqueness and freedom of human persons over and against voguish philosophical and scientific theories, or progressive theology, that disregards ‘moral intuitions about the reality and significance of our agency, how far it does justice to the agency and moral claim of others, not least those who are too readily seen as either superfluous or naturally subordinate in a world of privilege and inequality’.Footnote 3 Williams contends, moreover, that Figgis’s personalism informs his conception of faith, and faithful conclusions depend on ‘tradition, trust, education in simple shared perception, and the sheer cumulative force of lived experience[.]’Footnote 4 Because God makes human persons for relationships, their pursuit of knowledge depends on right relationships with individual persons and corporate persons in right relationship with the personal God. Paul Avis, likewise, discovers a personalist relationship between individual persons and corporate persons existing across time in Figgis’s social thought: ‘Although Figgis was a political philosopher, rather than a philosopher of human nature and personal identity, he was unquestionably a personalist thinker, and his work is guided by a personalist anthropology’.Footnote 5 Avis argues that Figgis finds precedent for his conception of the essential unity of humanity in Augustine’s City of God, and his conception of persons, whether individual, familial, associational or national, entails their shared purpose and responsible and accountable action: ‘Human society at any level – from the family to the state itself – is, for Figgis, following Gierke, a living, organic, moral community, with a power of self-direction and development’.Footnote 6 Thus, Figgis’s theological anthropology centres on the nature of individual persons in relation to real group persons, an organic interplay of the free associative instinct resulting in shared beliefs, purposes and actions.
The third contributor to Neville Figgis to conceive of Figgis as a personalist is Andrew Grosso. In his exploration of Figgis’s theory of agency, Grosso concludes that ‘Figgis’ consistent preoccupation with agency, very much in evidence not only in his exposition of Nietzsche but throughout many of his writings, demonstrates Figgis’ tendencies as a personalist thinker’.Footnote 7 Grosso sees Figgis’s personalism undergirding his belief that real group persons stand at the centre of the universe and personal action, with its concomitant belief in the responsible freedom of humans contrast with a wide array of mechanistic and deterministic philosophies. Given each of these three important interpreters of Figgis attend to different aspects of his personalism and each agrees on the centrality of the theory of real group personality in his unique contributions to personalist philosophy, this article attends to Figgis’s account of the freedom intrinsic to personality and how this relates to his theory of corporate personhood and pluralism.
Figgis read history at the University of Cambridge with the scholars F.W. Maitland and John Acton, and their interpretations of the history of freedom and associations informed his own theory of how individuals, groups and states should and do relate – first in The Theory of the Divine Right of Kings (1896), after his conversion in works such as Civilization at the Crossroads (1913), and, most influentially, in his seminal contribution to the theory of classical pluralism, Churches in the Modern State (1913). ‘Figgis advocated a participatory view of authority’, observes Rowan Williams, ‘one that respects the conscience of individuals and the integrity of the communities and institutions, including the churches, that make up civil society’.Footnote 8 In works of history and theology, Figgis insists that social progress depends on the flourishing of associations and the influence of Christ and his Church on the persons determining the trajectory of a civilization.
If studies with Acton and Maitland can be said to have left a decisive mark on Figgis’s political imagination, his ordination to the priesthood by Mandell Creighton in 1895 and his admission into the Community of the Resurrection in 1907 gave him first-hand experience of the associations integral to his theology and social theory. Figgis entered the Church of England as a modernist who doubted many of the supernatural claims of Christianity. His experiences as a parish priest, along with his reading in philosophy and theology, informed his conversion to Orthodox Catholic Anglicanism. This intellectual conversion manifested externally in Figgis’s turn to apologetics and his decision to join the Community of the Resurrection.
In the first section of this article, ‘The Freedom Intrinsic to Personhood’, I consider how Figgis responds to an increasing number of different religious and philosophical ideas and competing ways of life confronting Christians in England in the early twentieth century. Figgis sees the problem in both its apologetical and political dimensions, and in this section, I introduce his theory of pluralism and the concept of personhood that underlies it. Figgis contends that Christians in this diverse culture must be willing to adapt their laws and political structures to tolerate the beliefs and practices of groups with different convictions about the nature of the good. He believes, in turn, that Christians should be allowed to act politically to ensure that they can maintain their own faith and way of life as Catholic Christians in the Church of England. Andrew Grosso argues that Figgis’s personalism explains the centrality of freedom throughout Figgis’s broader work and theological anthropology. Figgis argues that modern mechanistic conceptions of humans and the cosmos tend towards pantheism and determinism. Christians, in contrast, believe that human persons are made in the image of the God who is love and express that love in free actions. God gives human persons the freedom to make choices and take actions that reciprocate or refuse the love revealed in the incarnation and crucifixion. This freedom appears in the potential to give the self as a gift in commitment to others, apparent in commitment and the bonds that unite humans as members of corporate persons. The Church Catholic is the archetypal corporate person, and other corporate persons exist as types of the Body of Christ.
In the second section, ‘The Case for Classical Pluralism’, I observe that Figgis argues that membership in group persons and the flourishing of the arts of association are necessary parts of the good life of free humans. He contends, moreover, that a just society recognizes that group persons require the freedom to pursue the good and develop across generations in order to thrive, and an unjust society will structure its laws and customs to foster individualism or collectivism that frustrates the arts of association. The modern state, according to Figgis, tends to concentrate power and authority in itself in such a way as to undermine the freedom and self-government of corporate persons, and Figgis insists that Christians must oppose this concentration if they intend to foster a just society. The English Church, according to Figgis, has fostered the arts of association and respected the freedom and self-government of group persons in such a way as to foster a uniquely just society and the virtues associated with participation in corporate personhood. Nevertheless, the British state should not privilege any one group, and it should regulate associations in such a way as to ensure peace and justice between group persons with divergent conceptions of the highest good. I contrast Figgis’s critique of the theory of sovereignty with his own theory of classical pluralism. The theory of sovereignty imagines that a sovereign holds absolute power and authority in a region, and this misconception leads to acts of injustice against individual and group persons. Classical pluralism, as developed by Figgis, maintains that organic associations should govern themselves according to the vision of the good, and the theory of sovereignty and technological pressures to centralize do not warrant overthrowing this principle of justice. I conclude this section by explicating the story of classical pluralism that Patrick Nash derives from Figgis’s social thought. Nash argues that Figgis’s commitment to the state’s neutrality vis-à-vis group persons rests on a broader British cultural and legal consensus. This consensus derives from a Christian view of individual and group personhood that restrains the modern state’s tendency to concentrate power, and it insists that human persons are made for self-government. Nash’s attempt to synthesize the need for unity and plurality in a just society rests on the belief that citizens and their representatives must construct an accord between state coordination and self-government among group persons. Nash, therefore, contends that it is the task of just leaders and social theorists to contend for a free society in which associations flourish and the state maintains a common British culture that recognizes the role of corporate persons in fostering order and justice.
After discussing why Figgis and contemporary interpreters of his work support classical pluralism, I question whether classical pluralism provides a sufficient grounding for unity to promote the common good. Figgis considers other social theories, for instance, social contract theories of justice, and he argues that they originate in myths about relations among human persons. In contrast, he contends that classical pluralism and associational views of society and justice give a true count of history and the reality of human nature. Figgis contends that humans inevitably form groups and these organic group persons develop shared minds and ends that they should be free to exercise. The state does not create these group persons, nor does it have the authority to control their permanent ends. Figgis insists that a good society will prioritize the freedom and goals of persons, and the society that disregards the mind and will of group persons will become a tyranny that treats its citizens as slaves. Thereafter, I address the question implicit in Figgis’s theory of classical pluralism: should Christians promote state and broader institutional neutrality in support of diverse corporate persons, or should Christians try to influence the state and other coordinating institutions to foster Christian principles of justice? Figgis insists that the just state and other coordinating institutions will allow for the organic growth and self-government of the Church and Christian corporate persons such as families, schools, guilds and the like. Moreover, these group persons should include members who are free to act and speak in the public square in ways that align with their principles and ideal of the good, and other churches, other corporate persons holding to competing visions of the good, should also be free to express the organic life of their corporate personality in their associations and the public square. Given these premises, Figgis concludes that the modern state will contain heterogeneous religious groups and Christians should allow full play to the associative instinct among said groups. The modern state should not privilege Christian ideals in law or coordinating institutions. Instead, it should accept and affirm the good of the diverse organic group person knowing and acting in British society.
Figgis draws out the tension between unity and plurality for Christians seeking to promote classical pluralism without resolving it or addressing whether a permanent state of religious heterogeneity and tolerant pluralism is possible. I respond to this tension with the aid of Joseph Ratzinger, who explores the theory of the English pluralists in his exploration of the mission of theology after Christendom. Ratzinger sees the theory of sovereignty informing fascist, national socialist and communist forms of totalitarianism prevalent in the twentieth century, and he looks to the theory of the English pluralists for a more just alternative. Ratzinger affirms the classical pluralist critique of an all-powerful sovereign and the claim that human nature is such that persons are made for membership in a plurality of corporate persons, but Ratzinger contrasts the claims on persons by the corporate person of the Body of Christ, the Catholic Church, and all other group persons. H. Laski flattens the distinction between the Church and other associations in terms of their relationship with the truth and their role in informing the ethical and social consciences of their members. Laski’s belief that corporate persons should hold authority in their area of competence and nowhere else appears to imply that the Church should only speak to religious questions. Ratzinger rejects attempts to silo the Church’s authority and competency to the private and spiritual, and he insists on the public implications of the Decalogue informed by the teachings of Jesus Christ. God does give human persons freedom to associate and choose between good and evil. However, Christians should have ethical and social consciences transformed by faith, and their convictions about human nature, family and justice should influence law, politics and culture. It is in asking what is truth that Christians can discern how to balance the need to allow for individual and group persons to make free choices and also how Christians should seek to inform their communities and polities. Ratzinger concludes that Christian faith undergirds the just and free society that allows for the organic growth and flourishing of associations.
In the final section of this article, I consider the relationship between Figgis’s Christian personalism and classical pluralism. In doing so, I recall that Figgis believes that human freedom is grounded in the freedom of God and human persons reflect his image in their capacity to give themselves as an irrevocable gift. E.L. Mascall, influenced by the personalism of Figgis, argues that persons’ faculties of freedom and commitment reflect the image of God revealed in Christ and appear in the vows of marriage and religious life, in baptism and in a faithful death. Each of these choices and actions results in an indissoluble bond – the first two in this life and the third in the life to come. This capacity to give the self as a gift in union with the other results in the formation of a corporate person, or participation in an existing corporate person, as in the family, religious order or the church Catholic. Figgis’s theory of corporate persons and classical pluralism rests on his understanding of love. He contends that in giving the self as an irrevocable gift to the good of the other, persons express the love revealed in Christ incarnation and crucifixion. This union entails laying down the beliefs and practices of the individual that contradict the consensus of the whole corporate body. Moderns, according to Figgis, are redefining love to mean that all practices and beliefs should be equally affirmed. Figgis insists that without the form of Christ maintaining a standard for members within his body, Christians will fall into a sentimental pantheism and become indistinguishable from members of other religions and none. After considering Figgis’s robust defence of the need for group persons to maintain their own standards of belief and practice to retain an integrity that distinguishes them from the state and ascendant individualism of modern society, I turn to his personal reflection and actions modelling how individual persons should relate to such group persons. Figgis’s explanation for joining the Community of the Resurrection illustrates his theory of Christian personalism and classical pluralism. I conclude the article by noting the tension between Figgis’s affirmation of Christian truth in his apologetic and personal life and his call for political neutrality in the coordination of groups. Finally, I suggest that Ratzinger’s modified support of pluralism – a modification that admits that no government is neutral relative to the nature of justice and the good, and insistent on the need for Christians to exercise their faith in public life – appears as a possible resolution to the dilemma present in Figgis’s social thought.
The Freedom Intrinsic to Personhood
In the early twentieth century, Figgis believed that Christians were confronting a new social imaginary in the West: ‘What we have to face is a hurly-burly of competing opinions and strange moralities – “new thought” from the West, theosophies from the East, Pantheism all round us. Paganism revived, and unbelief in all its arrogance’.Footnote 9 A number of factors, including developments in technology, philosophy, travel and communication and the spread of the British Empire, contributed to Christians finding themselves as one religion among many others. The Church of England remained the established religion, but changing laws to increase tolerance for others’ faiths and naturalistic philosophies meant that people trying to understand the nature of reality and purpose of life struggled to discern the truth amid all of the noise. As Figgis saw the plausibility structures shifting, he insisted that Christians need to adopt new rhetorical and political stances to address the needs of the age: ‘All we can claim, all we can hope for, is freedom for ourselves as one society among many’.Footnote 10 Figgis saw the decline of the Church and the rise of other faiths as a sign that Christians should adopt a pluralist political theory, one that supports tolerance and diversity in the legal and political spheres. Anticipating disagreement from Christians long-accustomed to holding a position of power and influence in British culture, Figgis insists that ‘[I]t seems to me in a high degree dishonest, and even more imprudent to go about and proclaim the rights of freedom and variety in the matter of education, if in other matters we seek to deny it’.Footnote 11 The Christian imperative to treat others as we would have them treat us (Luke 6.31), suggests Figgis, demands that we afford their associations the same liberties that Anglicans claim for church schools. Violating the freedom of corporate persons to govern themselves, unduly regulating or dissolving them, represents a form of unjust violence: ‘Liberty does not mean the right to punch the heads of those who disagree with you’.Footnote 12 Figgis’s case for tolerance and inclusion of diverse associations, founded on the basis of competing philosophies and theories, appears to leave little room for Christian convictions about ethics, personhood or the common good to inform laws or public institutions. Figgis’s confidence in the truth of Christian revelation, as understood by the Church Catholic, implies a recognition that Christianity will shape consciences. Thus, there exists a tension at the heart of Figgis’s theology and social theory. Figgis’s understanding of individual and corporate personhood reflects Christian assumptions, and his robust defence of the freedom of choice throws the public expression of those assumptions into question.
Andrew Grosso turns to Figgis’s late work, The Will to Freedom: The Gospel of Nietzsche and the Gospel of Christ, to understand how Figgis’s theory of classical pluralism fits together with his theological anthropology. Grosso sees the themes central to The Will to Freedom anticipated in Figgis’s prior works of apologetics: ‘Figgis’s consistent preoccupation with agency, very much in evidence not only in his exposition of Nietzsche but throughout many of his writings, demonstrates Figgis’ tendencies as a personalist thinker’.Footnote 13 It is this Christian personalism, this conviction that Christianity maintains a conception of what it means to be human, that answers the dehumanizing tendencies of the modern world. The eclipse of a social consensus based on the Catholic Christian doctrine of humanity would entail far-reaching consequences for personal and social life. Figgis implies his commitment to personalism in Civilization at the Crossroads, ‘wherein he contrasted worldviews grounded in mechanistic or deterministic modes of thought with those grounded in “personal action”’.Footnote 14 Figgis, although critical of Nietzsche’s ethics and anthropology on many fronts, shares his rejection of the pantheistic tendencies of Hegel and Schopenhauer and agrees that freedom is integral to personhood. ‘Personalism – the doctrine of the universe as a world of spirits – is the point at issue in all the discussions’, explains Figgis, ‘[p]antheism is a creed the very opposite of this; it begins by denying human personality, it ends by denying Divine’.Footnote 15 Figgis sees an integral relationship between the freedom of God and the freedom of humans, and it is this faith in God as the basis for a true understanding of persons that sharply distinguishes him from Nietzsche.
Elsewhere, Figgis explains that the freedom of God to create and to send his Son to be made man and sacrifice himself on the cross to save humanity from sin reveals that God is love. The revelation that God exists beyond the causal chain of physical reality and acts freely to love persons, and they can love because he first loved them (1 Jn 4:19), indicates the nature of love and the characteristics necessary for it to occur, creative spirit acting outside the constraints of the chain of natural causation. ‘For this truth of God is renewing love is needful not only for the doctrine of God, but for that of man. If you surrender all faith in a power above and beyond Nature, as free and original and therefore prolific of the miraculous, the unique, you will in the long run be driven to deny man’s freedom too and be left with a world mechanically acting’.Footnote 16 Thus, the mature Figgis grounds his anthropology on the correspondence between the supernatural spirit of God and the supernatural spirit of man, the capacity of God to act freely and the human potential to choose to act in a reciprocal relationship of love to God and other persons. God’s revelation of miracles is not a hindrance to faith in the modern world. To the contrary, it grounds belief in a personal God who acts freely and in persons capable of analogous action. Christ stands at the centre of this theological anthropology: ‘[A bulwark to guard us against being lost in the sea of naturalism] is afforded by the idea of the miraculous and its content in the revelation of Jesus Christ’.Footnote 17 The twin revelations of God’s free action in the miraculous and in his saving work in the incarnation and on the cross ‘alone can save us from confusing God with the creation which is His will. This alone can point to a way of escape, to a sure refuge from the iron chain of cause and effect. For this alone assures us that we are not items in a series, cogs in a great machine; but free spirits living in society[.]’Footnote 18 Because a realistic anthropology and humanism must be grounded in a belief in the personal God revealed in Christ, it is not only freedom that is intrinsic to personhood but freedom to give one’s self in love, a freedom in which the individual person exists to relate to corporate persons and flourish as members of society.
In Churches in the Modern State, Figgis refers to all corporate persons, all associations, as ‘churches’. The implication appears to be that corporate persons achieve their proper end insofar as they act analogously to the Church, where individual members participate in the Body of Christ, with Christ as her head. Therefore, the reality of the Church speaks to the human potential and telos for membership in corporate persons: ‘man is a being who chooses, who loves, and who sins. If, and in so far as, the Christian Church ministers to man in his freedom, his struggles, his affections, and his failures, it must retain its power over his life’.Footnote 19 God made human persons free to make choices and act, and yet this freedom exists for membership in the Church. It is only the Church that can represent Christ to persons in such a way as to set them free from sin, and this transformative action requires persons to recognize the authority and power of the Church. Paradoxically, for Figgis, freedom exists in individual persons for the sake of membership in corporate persons, the archetype of which is the Church Catholic.
The Case for Classical Pluralism
Since Figgis believes that chosen and unchosen membership in corporate persons is an intrinsic part of what it means to be a free human person and the flourishing of group persons is essential in a just society, he criticizes the concentration of power in the individual and the state that he sees occurring around him: ‘The real problem is the relation of communities to that ‘communitas communitatum’ we call the State, and whether they have an existence of their own or are the mere creatures of the sovereign’.Footnote 20 The contest between people struggling to concentrate power and those committed to the arts of association and the freedom of corporate persons, according to Figgis, exists across the generations and in various cultures. The English, Figgis contends, maintain a relatively robust tradition of embedding their self-understanding and vision of personhood in associational life: ‘In England at least, it is these smaller associations which have always counted for most in the life of the individual. His school or college, his parish or county, his union or regiment, his wife or family is the most vitally formative part in the life of most men[.]’Footnote 21 The historical reality of observable social behaviour and self-understanding among the English supports Figgis’s social teaching on how individual persons, group persons and the state should relate. The formation of personal identity in participative associations that operate on a humane scale is observable and normative for Figgis. Human persons should grow in an environment of organic institutions that evolve across time to form good character and strong social bonds – ‘in so far as England has anything worthy in civic life to show to the world, it is the spectacle of individuals bred up or living within these small associations which mold the life of men more intimately than does the great collectivity we call the State’.Footnote 22 Figgis anticipates the modern tendency to concentrate power in the state and seek to reform society through collectivist planning. He argues that such an approach is contrary to human nature and justice, but he concedes the need for the state to keep peace, and he recognizes that this means that the state has some role to play in the oversight of corporate persons:
Between all these groups there will be relations, and not merely between the individuals composing them. To prevent injustice between them and to secure their rights, a strong power above them is needed. It is largely to regulate such groups and to ensure that they do not outstep the bounds of justice that the coercive force of the State exists. It does not create them; nor is it in many matters in direct and immediate contact with the individual.Footnote 23
Figgis concedes that the modern state needs to regulate associations to ensure that they do not act unjustly towards one another, but he also insists that the state should not overstep its bounds and claim authority over individuals in areas of life rightly overseen by intermediate institutions, say, the authority of parents over families, unions over union members or churches over parishioners. Figgis, while attempting to maintain an emphasis on the need to give liberty to individual and group persons, opens the door to the modern regulatory state in this part of his argument in a manner that contributes to divergent interpretations of his political theory by later theologians and political theorists.
The tendency to concentrate power in the state to such an extent that organic institutions wither and die becomes an acute problem in modernity. It finds a basis, however, in what seems to be a perennial theory of state authority: ‘The theory of sovereignty, whether proclaimed by John Austin or Justinian, or shouted in conflict by Pope Innocent or Thomas Hobbes, is in reality no more than a venerable superstition’.Footnote 24 The claim that the sovereign in a given region holds supreme authority and absolute power in that polity surfaces throughout history, and ‘[I]t is true to the facts only in a cozy, small and compact State, although by a certain amount of strained language and the use of the maxim, “whatever the sovereign permits he commands”, it can be made not logically untenable for any conditions of stable civilization’.Footnote 25 Figgis concedes that it is possible to adopt the language of the theory of sovereignty in this equivocal sense. But he much prefers the language, categories and concepts that future political theorists refer to as ‘classical pluralism:’ ‘As a fact it is as a series of groups that our social life presents itself, all having some of the qualities of public law and most of them showing clear signs of a life of their own, inherent and not derived from the concession of the State’.Footnote 26 The reality of group persons remains present throughout human history, and neither the modern technological reasons for concentrating power nor the theory of sovereignty should suppress this natural human capacity for, and practice of, self-government through membership in free associations. Figgis simultaneously laments the death of many corporate persons in modernity, while insisting that the nature of individual and group persons, as well as the demands of justice, provides hope for the renewal of the arts of association.
Patrick Nash synthesizes two apparently divergent aspects of Figgis’s thought – that of pluralism, calling for the state to act as a neutral arbiter between persons, and of a commitment to a British cultural inheritance, an understanding of rights and duties that rests on a Christian understanding of personhood. This synthesis requires that leaders strike a balance between centralized and decentralized authority: ‘[I]f unity dominates, intellectual life is stifled, human excellence atrophies and society descends into absolutism’, Nash warns.Footnote 27 Figgis sees this ‘unity’ fostered by state centralization as the primary danger threatening the flourishing of group persons. Nash also finds warnings about the opposite danger in Figgis’s social thought: ‘If plurality triumphs, social consensus becomes impracticable, intellectual life disintegrates and politics relapses into factionalism’.Footnote 28 Whether the faction favouring unity or plurality controls the state, the other will react and ‘tyrannize society mercilessly’ to ensure the suppression of its rival.Footnote 29 The groups favouring unity and plurality must adopt a political theory that synthesizes the merits of the two approaches to pursuing order and justice, and in doing so, they can prevent a regime from falling into violence and intractable partisan divisions. Nash’s integral reception of Figgis culminates in a case for balancing the claims of group persons and the need for coordinating action on the part of the state:
[A]n accord must be struck, and symmetry maintained between the two so that the particular can exist within the general, the state can defend the whole, civil society can flourish within the state, and individual liberty is protected by law. The state, the association, the individual – each has intrinsic worth, each its own rights and competencies, each keeps the others in check, and together they facilitate social progress.Footnote 30
Nash seeks to foster a political theory and laws that render unto individual and group persons what they are due, while still allowing the state enough power and authority to maintain order and a common culture. Nash champions a vision of classical pluralism meant to answer the centralization of power and fragmentation of culture in Britain. Figgis argues for classical pluralist reforms to English law, but it remains unclear whether his pluralism aims at forming a British cultural consensus in a manner that satisfies Nash’s call for an accord between plurality and unity.
Real Group Personhood and the Good Society
Does the classical pluralist society foster the common good and deliver justice by ensuring the rights of groups to govern themselves and develop their organic personality across time? Figgis insists that a just society cannot regulate group persons based on mere contracts among individuals. Contractarian society stands on a false anthropology, and this disconnect between theory and reality hampers it from executing justice. Figgis, moreover, argues that group persons develop a mind and will and that ‘this corporate life and personality grows up naturally and inevitably out of any union of men for permanent ends, and is not withheld or granted at the pleasure of the State’.Footnote 31 Churches, as Figgis refers to group persons, thus exist in a pre-legal state and constitute the state. The priority of persons stands as the foundation of a good society. Figgis warns that ‘[t]o deny this real life is to be false to the facts of social existence, and is of the same nature as that denial of human personality which we call slavery, and is always in its nature unjust and tyrannical’.Footnote 32 Moreover, a comprehensive vision of social reality requires the political theorist, or theologian, appreciate the relationship of parts to the whole: ‘it is perfectly plain to anybody who truly sees the world that the real world is composed of several communities, large and small, and that a community is something more than the sum of the persons composing it’.Footnote 33 This truth undergirds the just claims of nationalists, union members and churchmen to govern their respective groups. Figgis, according to Nash, demonstrates ‘the concept of real group personality means that when people organize, the emergent group acquires a will and personality of its own, over and above the distinct wills and personalities of its individual members’.Footnote 34 The universal development of corporate persons reveals that ‘group-persons are not fictions, symbols, aggregates, collective names or apparatuses of the state. Rather, they are living organisms arising naturally from man’s consciousness and associative urge’.Footnote 35 The individual persons who act as organs of the body of the corporate person create it. The state does not create group persons, nor do group persons rely on state governance to function, in a just society. This classical pluralist anthropology, according to Figgis, ensures an accurate and just view of associational life, while it remains an open question to what extent it can foster unity and common understanding of the good.Footnote 36
Figgis influenced classical pluralist theory and practice in England and elsewhere, and yet much of his writing centres on theology, more specifically Christian theology, and he makes the apologetic case for Christianity in the face of competing creeds and ways of life. Should the Christian pluralist seek the flourishing of diverse associations that hold to competing ideals of the good, or should the Christian in a pluralistic social order seek to evangelize, apologize and even influence the socio-political order to promote a Christian conception of the common good?
In The Fellowship of the Mystery, Figgis contends that ‘[t]he church is not a mere collection of individual believers but is the Body of Christ. The Christian is a Christian by dint of union with Christ and “could never have secured that union were it not for those institutions which have expressed His Personality on earth”’.Footnote 37 The individual Christian cannot carry out his vocation in a society that forecloses the possibility of the public expression of the Christian faith in the institutional life of the Church. The atomized individual, alone with a Christian podcast, television programme, Bible and prayer closet, does not truly represent the Christian way of life. Since Christ commissioned the Apostles, it is members of the Church who preached the gospel and administered the sacraments to form disciples baptized in the Church and confessing the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds formulated and propagated by the Church. Thus, the good society must allow for Christians to evangelize and teach in the public square, as well as propagate their faith through schools, hospitals, monasteries and convents, families and guilds that accord with the creeds and commandments central to the Christian faith.
To claim that Christians must be allowed to express their faith publicly through membership in the Church and its corresponding associations appears to place the propagation of the Christian faith at the centre of classical pluralist societies, such as England envisioned by Figgis. Yet, Figgis is clear that those who hold to competing creeds and commandments must be given the same liberties for their ‘churches’ to express themselves in a self-governing and organic life:
We must seek to make our theories grow out of and co-ordinate with the life of men in society as it is lived. We must distrust abstract doctrines of sovereignty, with which the facts can be made to square only by elaborate sophistry. Above all, we must be willing to put liberty above other ends as a political goal, and to learn that true liberty will be found by allowing full play to the uncounted forms of the associative instinct. We are fighting not only our own battle but that of the liberty of all smaller societies against the tendency to mere concentration, which in one way is a marked feature of our time. Much has to be learnt both by ourselves and others from the medieval guild system. Further, we must learn to allow to others that liberty we claim for ourselves as a corporate society, and fairly face the fact which I have called ‘the religious heterogeneity of the modern State’.Footnote 38
When Figgis claims that Christians must face ‘the heterogeneity of the modern state’, he seems to imply that people in post-Christendom nations such as England should come to terms with their new status as a modest majority (or even a minority). Such a cultural shift might well entail refraining from inscribing Christian morality in the laws of the land and accepting freedom for the Church among other churches as the new normal. If the Church puts liberty above other goals and allows full play to the associative instinct, this requires Christianity to play a less normative role in legislation and education. Figgis concedes this point when he expresses his desire to distinguish between his personal allegiance to the Church and the public application of his Christian principles: ‘[w]hat I object to being asked to do is to vote one way or the other on account of my Churchmanship in matters which concern the life of millions of people, many of whom have not the smallest intention of ever being Churchmen’.Footnote 39 Christian revelation and tradition appear as illegitimate sources of normative truth in a heterogeneous society such as that of European societies after Christendom. Legislating morality regarding controverted matters, it seems, violates the claims of group persons other than the Church. These other churches and their members should be left to follow their own vision of the good life – ‘[t]he Christian law is the law of Christians; what may be wise and right for a body of all faiths and every fad is no matter for the Christian Church to decide’.Footnote 40 Thus, Figgis calls Christians to restrain from mandating Christian laws for non-Christians. He calls for the group person of the Church to treat other group persons, other churches, as they would want to be treated. This classical pluralist political theory imagines a tolerant and liberal society where diverse self-governing groups pursue their respective goods, while restraining themselves from voting or legislating in such a way as to unjustly intervene in the organic life of other corporate bodies.
Joseph Ratzinger on Catholic Orthodoxy and Political Pluralism
The decline of Christendom and the rise of religious heterogeneity altered the relationship between the Church and state across the West. Pope Benedict XVI read and responded to the teaching of the English pluralists. The pluralist theory of the relationship between individual persons, group persons and the state influenced his social teaching, but he maintained a clear distinction between political and religious pluralism. The religious heterogeneity of the late modern state calls for prudential tolerance and freedom for self-governing persons, but it does not permit Catholic Christians to revise the apostolic deposit to accommodate non-Christian groups or contemporary social theory.
Ratzinger sets out to distinguish the insights of English pluralism from its errors in The Nature and Mission of Theology: ‘[t]he catchword ‘pluralism’ was elaborated in turn-of-the-century England – in particular by H. Laski – for use in the political-social sphere’.Footnote 41 Laski, one of Figgis’s more influential progeny, acts as Ratzinger’s principal interlocutor as he elaborates the goods of pluralism and the extent to which it facilitates the mission of theology. Ratzinger sees that ‘[pluralism] was set in opposition to a doctrine of sovereignty according to which separate individuals stood alone before the state and its pretensions to supreme power’.Footnote 42 Modern totalitarian regimes adopted this doctrine of sovereignty, if not in word, then in deed, and Ratzinger recognizes the dangers of such centralization in these extreme forms, as well as in lesser forms. He defines pluralism as an alternative to the absolute pretensions of the state: ‘pluralism means that each individual belongs to a plurality of social groupings and that this plurality gives rise to a multiplicity of social roles, none of which can absorb man entirely’.Footnote 43 The claim that no social role can entirely absorb man implies a critique of Figgis’s analogy between the Catholic Church and other churches. Christians are born again by water and the spirit, such that they experience an ontological change when they join this paradigmatic group person. The baptized and born-again Christian enters into membership in the Body of Christ, and it is incorporation into Christ that should orient all subsequent relationships and actions. Ratzinger sees a tension between this new life in Christ and the relativizing of the claims of any particular group person. Laski’s flattening of distinctions between the Church and other churches causes Ratzinger to question whether pluralism means that the church can no longer teach authoritatively on matters of ethical and social life. The pluralist notion that each person enters into membership that forms his or her conscience and guides actions in its particular area of competency appears to imply that Christianity should only speak to the strictly defined religious needs of individual persons. The state, therefore, should regulate religious group persons so as not to enter into conflict with other corporate bodies that speak to other human needs.Footnote 44
Ratzinger recognizes the moral agency given by God to each individual person and the responsibility accompanying a person’s judgement, choices and actions. The responsible will therefore plays an integral role in each person’s decision to enter given associations and the development of conscience that follows from such membership. He does not, however, accept the claim that the Church should regulate the religious need in the same way that the local food cooperative should answer a person’s nutritional needs. ‘Faith orients man at the deepest level’, Ratzinger insists, and nevertheless, ‘it does not prescribe to him his individual social roles[.]’Footnote 45 The Church is not a state, and it should not directly control the coercive power of the state to manipulate the associative instinct. Human persons wholly need Christ, and their transformation in the Body of Christ affects them in their entirety. But his primary influence of the Church on the consciences of Christians exists within the context of Ratzinger’s Christian personalist and conviction that freedom and responsibility are integral in societies seeking to promote the common good. Neither Catholic theocracies nor integralist states appear to answer the just imperative to allow persons to make responsible moral choices:
Faith is by all means an ‘option’, to which the Decalogue, interpreted in the light of the New Testament, gives very definite contours. It is an option for the equal right of all men and therefore for the inviolability of right by power. It is an option for the unconditional authority of the truth and of man’s bond to the truth. It is an option for marital fidelity and for the family as the basic cell of society. It is an option for the sacredness of human life and for the right to life. Hence, it was from the earliest beginning an option for the disenfranchised and oppressed or, as the Bible expresses it, for the widows, the orphans and the sojourners. In this sense it contains unequivocal political and social imperatives which will repeatedly bring Christians into conflict with the powers that be.Footnote 46
God has revealed definite commandments, doctrines and social teachings in the Decalogue, as interpreted in the New Testament. The Catholic Church presents these immutable and universal teachings to the faithful, as well as those considering conversion, as options between good and evil, truth and falsehood and light and darkness. Ratzinger inherits the traditional rule of faith and applies it in a heterogeneous society. In order to provide people with a choice that differs from the assumptions of their neighbours, the state or followers of teachings contrary to the Apostolic deposit, Christians cannot revise their beliefs and practices in an indeterminate and open-ended way. Finally, in order to provide individuals and groups with the option of protecting the rights of the pre-born, elderly, disabled and poor, as well as conforming their lives and associations with the natural realities about the human person and family revealed in Scripture and explained by the Catholic Church, Christians must maintain the authority of truth and the need for man to live a life bonded to the truth. Ratzinger follows the pluralist in seeing a genuine good promoted by allowing persons to choose between right and wrong and then face the consequences of their choices. Christian convictions about the sanctity of life and the nature of the family are not mere models or questions that can progress with each new generation or each new encounter with difference. They are permanent things and present a permanent stumbling block to people in pursuit of truth. Will they choose the way of Jesus, or will they choose another way of life?
Ratzinger goes on to explain that it is by answering the question ‘What is truth?’ that Christianity reconciles the claims of personal freedom and the common good. It is possible to legislate in such a way as to promote self-government for individual and corporate persons while also fostering a common culture through spiritual, ethical and political forms of persuasion. ‘Because faith signifies an ultimate bond to God, who is truth’, Ratzinger observes, ‘it does indeed furnish man with norms for his concrete action in society[.]’Footnote 47 Because of this reality, Christians must act in such a way as to conform their lives, families, churches and the laws to accord with the good. This does not mean that Christians should collapse the distinction between Church and state or the Church and other churches: ‘the community of believers does not find its centre of unity in social or political praxis but only in the authentic binding force of the truth itself’.Footnote 48 It is through commitment to Jesus Christ, who is himself the way, the truth and the life (Jn 14:6), that Christians develop rightly formed consciences in themselves and their associations that act as salt and light in culture and the state (Matt 5:13–16). Ratzinger believes that commitment to eternal truths revealed in Scripture fosters flourishing Christian societies that have the confidence to give persons options about how they will act and what they will believe. Genuine Christian faith entails a bond to the truth of Christ: ‘Whenever this bond is dissolved, new constraints arise in its place. ‘The truth will make you free:’ the bond to the truth is a release of politics from sacral bonds. In this regard, pluralism is not only compatible with faith but is in conformity with it and, to a certain degree, even necessary for it’.Footnote 49
Christian Personalism and Classical Pluralism
Figgis remains committed to the truth revealed in Scripture, and he argues that Christ’s gift of himself to save the people whom he loves from sin and death reveals the purpose of freedom. God calls persons to exercise their freedom to imitate Christ and give themselves for the sake of God and their neighbours in a sacrifice of love. E.L. Mascall, a theologian profoundly influenced by Figgis’s Christian personalism, argues that freedom and commitment are integral to what it means to be human: ‘Two of the noblest characteristics that personality involves’, he argues, ‘are the capacity to make free and responsible decisions, and the capacity to give oneself in them’.Footnote 50 Modern theories of determinism cannot explain Christ’s sacrificial life or other free acts of the responsible will that aim at ends beyond this physical life – ‘as God’s vicegerent, bearing on himself the seal of God’s image, man has been given a kind of finite and relative participation in the creative activity of God. And the sphere in which this freedom is supremely operative is that of his own inner life’.Footnote 51 The personal freedom to judge, choose and act in irrevocable decisions that carry eternal weight distinguishes human persons from other animals. The creativity and love manifest in God becoming man and binding himself to human nature in the person of Christ stands as a paradigm for our greatest capacity to love or hate: ‘[I]t is because it holds this exalted conception of man, and not because it is callous to human suffering, that the great Christian tradition has maintained that a man can bind himself by irrevocable vows in marriage or the religious life, and has dared to insist on the awful doctrine of hell’.Footnote 52 Christian personalism, as understood by Figgis and Mascall, rests on the belief that God makes human persons in his image and gives them the capacity to imitate, or reject, his love. Humans reveal their unique capacity to give themselves in love in choices that carry lifelong, or even eternal, consequences. The expression of human freedom, rightly understood, results in individual persons giving of themselves to irrevocably enter into membership in a marriage, religious order or the Church Catholic. Freedom to love expresses itself as individuals give of their autonomy to enter into union with corporate persons.
What does membership in such a group person require? Figgis contends that in the case of the paradigmatic association, the Church, it requires informing oneself to the essential beliefs and practices of the group:
[i]f the Church, however loosely compact, be the society of those inspired by the Christian spirit, clearly she must have some limits; else, in a world which contains men and women of any religion and of none, there will be no way of distinguishing such a body from people with whom Christ, so far from being an object of worship, is not even one of reverence.Footnote 53
Figgis argues that love calls persons to make a free gift of themselves and conform their beliefs and practices to Jesus Christ, as revealed in Scripture and as interpreted by the great tradition of the Church. This act of union and transformation is an act of love. Figgis sees modern society redefining love to mean that all actions and beliefs are equally amiable and should be equally affirmed. He warns that if Christians adopt this definition of love, they will replace the religion of Christianity, a faith that calls for believers to conform themselves to the form of Christ, with a sentimental pantheism that claims Christ is in every human way of life, such that all human thoughts and actions are equally good.Footnote 54 This turn to sentimental pantheism rejects the teaching that Christ is the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by him (John 14:6).
The truth places limits on believers in Christ. Figgis accepts this reality and its implications in individual lives and the lives of group persons, including the Church and her associated institutions, but his political and social thought fails to explain how Christians can maintain a society that allows for the sort of genuine Christian faith championed by Ratzinger. Figgis does not clearly distinguish to what extent Christian beliefs about doctrine and ethics should inform laws and politics. But his personal witness demonstrates his belief in the sacrifices that each individual should reflect the sacrifice of Christ and the transformation that God requires from those seeking freedom in personhood.
The religious heterogeneity of the modern state means that Christians will need to persuade members to join their corporate body rather than another. The privileges of Christians in governments formed in Christendom are passing away, and Figgis’s pluralism suggests that this might be a good development, empowering individual persons to choose to sacrifice themselves for different group persons. In this competitive public square, Figgis believed that the faithful Christian must be willing to sacrifice for his beliefs and sell everything that he had to follow Christ (Matt 19:21–24). If not, what separates him from other expressive individuals making lifestyle choices? Figgis’s convictions about the need to find freedom and purpose through membership in associations with authoritative limits appears in his decision to leave his comfortable life as a Cambridge don to join the Community of the Resurrection, as he reflects, ‘I have come to see that if Christians are to convince the world of their seriousness they must be prepared to live as though they meant the creed which they profess’.Footnote 55 Classical pluralists and other religious and political proponents of the arts of association often cite Figgis’s Churches and the Modern State approvingly in defence of the self-governing life of intermediate institutions. But Figgis ties his case for the renewal of associational life to his Christian personalism, particularly his conviction that God gives each person a choice as to enter into union with God and other persons, and such membership requires sacrifice:
My dear friends, In wishing you all the joy of this season, I must tell you that this Easter is the last in which I shall speak to you as Rector. The reason is, that I have agreed to join the Community of the Resurrection shortly after Midsummer. This is a society of men (founded by Bishop Gore) occupied in prayer, teaching, and preaching, who strive to live a life of self-denial both inward and outward, and in the spirit of those early Christians who had ‘all things in common, neither did any man say that aught he possessed was his own’. The idea has long been with me. Yet I need not tell you it has cost me many a struggle to make a choice. Now, however, the call is quite clear and no one could refuse to hear it without being the worst of cowards. […] [W]ill you pray for me, that I may have the strength to persevere in the path of poverty, and to serve God wholly until death?Footnote 56
Membership in the Community of the Resurrection requires that Figgis take religious vows and sacrifice his autonomous freedom of choice. This self-denial appears to limit Figgis’s liberty and material well-being. Having discerned a clear call from God, though, Figgis contends that by committing his skills as a writer and teacher to communal ‘prayer, teaching and preaching’, he is free to fulfil his purpose in life, and by denying certain physical and worldly desires for money or status, he finds a paradoxical freedom from the love of wealth or prestige. The existence of such an option for Figgis depends on the Church fostering the religious life and the state recognizing the just claims of self-governing associations to require certain practices and beliefs of their members. In order to flourish amid the ‘hurley burley of competing opinions’ in the West, Christians must lay down their lives and sell everything that they have to enter into union with Christ, and membership in Christ requires membership in the parts of his body, the group persons, that compose it. Figgis, although refusing to clearly delineate the limits of pluralism in politics, shares Ratzinger’s conviction that the truth of Christ requires persons to bond themselves to the truth and sacrifice their erroneous opinions and desires to conform to the form of Christ. Figgis, in his life and theological anthropology, contends that God makes persons with the capacity to choose and to love. He also gives them a purpose – to become free members of associations, and that paradigmatic association, the Church. Persons are made with the freedom to love. And a person finds freedom through chosen and unchosen membership in corporate persons – perfect freedom, can only be found through the paradigmatic corporate body, the Church.
Clinton Collister is Assistant Professor of Theology and Humanities at the University of Northwestern, St. Paul and Research Associate at the Centre for Theology, Law, and Culture at Pusey House, Oxford.
