Christianity, Culture, and the Real: From Maritain’s Integral Humanism to a New Integralism?

Abstract

Jacques Maritain’s understanding of integral humanism influenced the relationship between Christianity and culture at the Second Vatican Council, yet soon afterward, Maritain recognised that in many instances it was misinterpreted, leading Catholics and Catholic theology to a radical accommodation to secular culture. Yet Maritain continued to believe in his approach as a middle way for Christianity between integralism and liberalism. He responded to these misinterpretations by recalling the pre-political foundations of his new type of humanism and the unquestioning need for holiness to transform the culture. This article revisits Maritain’s integral humanism and restates the importance of the metaphysical foundations he articulates for dialogue with culture and politics but also argues that perhaps Maritain put too much trust in the liberal state to protect Christianity and recognise its usefulness to society. This article enquires furthermore how, in an increasingly secular culture, a more specifically public and ecclesial form of integral humanism may be needed and asks whether this means a new form of integralism. It argues to the contrary but also that to maintain her identity and transformative potential in the culture for all humanity, the Church needs to actively consider how best to connect with both her metaphysical and revelatory sources in Christian faith and manifest these publicly in the culture. It concludes by offering examples of how the Church as a sacrament of salvation in the secular world can witness to Christ at various levels of association and also accept the inevitability of providing a counter-cultural witness.

1. Introduction

This article will critically explore Jacques Maritain’s understanding of integral humanism in some key selected texts and ask whether it is still a relevant approach to the dialogue between Christianity and culture today. Maritain developed this approach as a “third” way beyond the impasse between left and right politics and later between liberal and integralist Catholicism. It is of specific interest due to similar divides in Catholicism today and also because of Maritain’s evaluation immediately after the Second Vatican Council that unless the pre-philosophical or metaphysical foundations for such a dialogical approach are maintained, it will be misinterpreted, leading the Church to an uncritical embrace of secular culture within a liberal context. Building on these pre-philosophical foundations, this article also asks what else Christianity might need in order to maintain its specific public identity within secular culture today by considering various levels of public and visible witness, particularly in ways that enable Christians to form associations and build virtuous communities for their sustainability. It critically evaluates some of these approaches which go beyond an integral humanism, including creating “small platoons”, the Benedict Option, Schindler’s new type of integralism, and counter-cultural holiness, and finally lists brief considerations for the Church to live her identity as a sacrament of salvation in that culture.

2. Jacques Maritain and Integral Humanism

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) was a French Thomist philosopher who became Catholic after he and his future wife Raïssa experienced an existential crisis that prompted a spiritual and intellectual conversion through the influence of Léon Bloy at the Sorbonne University, Paris. Maritain’s work was extremely influential on the thought of the Second Vatican Council, particularly its understanding of the relationship between the Church and the Modern World. His thinking indirectly influenced an understanding of the government’s role in promoting the common good seen in Gaudium et Spes as well as Dignitatis Humanae (McCauliff 2011, p. 601) and in the thinking of the latter that the state would “grant the Church freedom rather than juridical privilege” (Pink 2015, p. 7). As a political approach, it was prophetic and stirred up a lot of opposition in 1930s France, and as his biographer noted, it was only by the Council that it could be accepted (McCauliff 2011, p. 605).

Although beginning as an integralist, Maritain’s political philosophy evolved after Pius XI condemned the Catholic, conservative, and integralist group Action Française, of which Maritain was a member. Maritain began to see that true Christianity had a living tradition that was always developing and could not be confined to particular historical manifestations as in integralism. In his particular historical context of 1930s Paris, Maritain saw a polarisation in politics between the left and the right and was now aware of something similar happening within the Church, which was calling for a new approach to move beyond this impasse. Referring to his position at that particular time, his description of himself was “neither left nor right … even though by temperament I am what people call a man of the left” (Maritain 1968, pp. 22, 25).

In his Pour le Bien Commun and Lettre sur L’Independence, Maritain advocated for a new middle way between communism and integralism (Maritain 2019a, p. 38). By focusing on universal goals such as the common good and human dignity, Catholics, other Christians, and all people of goodwill could work together to build a society for the common good (“ibid., p. 40”). Christians had to learn how to cooperate with the secular state, and Maritain’s approach served as a manifesto for Christian politics as it emerged after the war in the shadow of Nazism and Fascism (McCauliff 2011, p. 598).

By adopting a humanistic approach, Maritain was sending a signal that he was taking a positive view of the culture. This was a radically new approach at the time, as the Church during the pontificates of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had been content only to issue condemnations of aspects of the culture and false thinking from rationalism and liberalism to modernism. The Second Vatican Council would eventually reject this condemnatory approach in its calling for the Council and its Opening Address. The sentiments in both these documents would focus on the power and light of Christ in the world to bring salvation to the culture, rather than the negative currents of thought which were leading believers away from the faith.1

Maritain’s humanism is a theocentric one, which neither rejects God (as in an atheistic secularism) nor annihilates the human in him (an integralist approach). Rather, as Maritain puts it, it is transformative because it is “in God” (Maritain 2019a, p. 197). This approach is not about creating a new utopia (Maritain 2019b, p. 97) but about a genuine transformation of society through a new type of human action. He argued that this new approach to being Catholic would be something entirely different from previous approaches like that of the movement Catholic Action. Whereas it tended to separate the temporal and the spiritual orders, Maritain’s approach would be an “integral humanist renovation of the temporal order” (“ibid., p. 102”), which would emphasise that both orders can work together.

Maritain was clear about how aberrations of humanism developed in history because of a false separation of grace and freedom. He classified them as false since they either erred on the side of a “theology of grace without freedom” or a “theology or metaphysic of freedom without grace” (Maritain 2019a, p. 165). Yet Maritain carefully distinguished his understanding of humanism from these deviations. Christian humanism differed from Enlightenment humanism as expressed in Rousseau, Comte, and later in Hegel, all of whom had an anthropology with a concept of pure nature without grace at all (“ibid., p. 167”). It also differed from a Darwinian and Freudian humanism where culture had excluded grace completely.2 Nevertheless, his desire to engage with humanism highlighted his belief in the goodness of human nature after the Fall, which distinguished his Catholic approach from that of Calvin and Jansenius where human nature was viewed too pessimistically (p. 167).

Maritain’s integral humanism is based on the idea of the incarnation. Since Christ extends himself by taking flesh and entering the world, Christianity must not be afraid of the culture and bring Christ to it. Integral humanism is a new type of theocracy that is built when “divine love inhabits the heart” (p. 83). This Christo-centric humanism will build “an age that is more human than humanism and more divine than theocracy” (“ibid.”). It is a softer way of transforming the social order. Maritain also clarifies in a footnote here that by theocracy he does not mean in a political sense but a moral attitude and that the Middle Ages never advocated a political theocracy anyhow, since it always “affirmed the distinction of the two powers” (“ibid.”).

As God-centred, he argued that integral humanism does not destroy but includes man’s freedom and an emphasis on human self-consciousness. He drew heavily on Thomist philosophy to better articulate the relationship between God’s divine will and man’s cooperation with it in freedom (p. 199). Another key idea underpinning his work was his understanding of grace. Interpreting Aquinas, Maritain argued that since all humans are made in God’s image and likeness there is no such thing as pure nature. Grace is operating and moving in all human beings in a prevenient way, and grace does not destroy but enhances nature and reason. In these early decades of the twentieth century, the revival of this Thomistic understanding of grace was emerging, which would impact the theology of the Second Vatican Council and particularly the relationship between the Church and the world. De Lubac would later publish his Surnaturel (De Lubac 1946), which although critiqued by some neo-Thomists, such as Garrigou Lagrange, would lead to a fundamental optimism towards the understanding of grace at work outside the visible bonds of the Catholic Church and in all people of goodwill (De Lubac et al. 2021; Bonino 2009; Rogers 2019). Maritain argues that liberal society needs this understanding of how God is at work in humanity to replace a type of sham “moralism and spiritualism” born of trying to exclude God. That is because any understanding of God that survives in a liberal society is deist, confining God to the private sphere. However, Maritain is clear that for any understanding of the relationship between Christianity and culture, the principle of analogy must be properly understood. Accepting that creation participates in God enables the secular world to be reclaimed for him (Maritain 2019a, pp. 197–98).

Maritain also reflected on the importance of culture for a properly human life since it includes the development of speculative and practical (artistic and ethical) activities and the moral life (“ibid., p. 212”). However, more important for Maritain was how he saw a central role for religion as part of culture since religion is the “soul of the city”. While militant atheism aims to substitute itself for Christianity as a type of universal religion and liberalism sees religion as a type of private affair, Christianity represents God and the role of the supernatural in the culture and protects human beings and societies from destruction as seen in atheistic humanisms (p. 213).

2.1. Maritain on the Place of Christianity in a Free Democracy

Maritain looked to America as the place that exemplified best his understanding of the relationship between Christianity and politics, in a way differing from Rousseau’s “religion civile” exemplified in France (Peters 2022). In his books Christianity and Democracy, Man and the State, and Reflections on America, he elaborated on the positive relationship possible between them (Maritain 1945a, 1954, 1958). He saw that since democracy was based on the freedom and dignity of the human person, Christian theology could strengthen democracies without them becoming theocracies in the sense of a Christian political state. His ideas influenced the founding ideals of the European Coal and Steel Community, particularly through a fellow Thomist and one of the founding members, Robert Schuman (Kerr 2019, pp. 3–4). They also influenced the UN Declaration on Human Rights through his work on the UNESCO philosophical committee which explored how human rights could be the foundation of dialogue between states and nations of different confessional backgrounds. He put forward the idea of a “practical points of convergence” between nations on these rights even if they disagreed on the different philosophical premises behind them. Many philosophers have taken issue with this approach (Maritain 1954, p. 101; Sweet 2020; McInerny 1988).3

2.1.1. The Natural Law

As a Thomist, Maritain recognises the importance of the natural law as a foundation for politics and a basis for dialogue between Christianity, society and politics. In his book Scholasticism and Politics, he argues that even those thinkers of positivistic or dialectical persuasion can reach metaphysical principles underlying reality (Maritain 1945b, pp. 42–44). In Christianity and Democracy, he argues that natural law principles should sustain the moral order in democracies so governments can protect justice and human dignity and avoid political tyranny (Maritain 1945a, 32–37, 45). In Man and the State, he explains how the natural law underpins human rights theory (Maritain 1954, pp. 92–96). However, this order built on natural law is not an order built on Kantian reason. Rather, natural law connects to eternal law and is then exercised at a prudential level in day-to-day practical decision-making through conscience (Maritain 1954, p. 87). Unfortunately, today, as McInerny points out, many of the human rights given in liberal societies do not have this openness to the eternal order (McInerny 1988), and it is difficult for the Church to build any bridges with the culture based on natural rights with no connection to the divine order.

Ratzinger argues similarly that while natural law is still an excellent foundation for democracies today and for building bridges in pluralistic societies attempting to come to common ideas based on common understandings of human nature, problems are arising in its use since society is rejecting belief in universal human nature (Ratzinger et al. 2006, p. 69). However, Ratzinger looks to human rights theory as maintaining the remnants of a natural law approach (“ibid.”, p. 71) and states that these rights continue to show how reason and religion are connected. They also build dialogue across the main religious traditions (“ibid.”, p. 79). In the field of inter-religious dialogue on common moral principles such as human dignity, the sanctity of life, the protection of the vulnerable, and the importance of family and marriage, an appeal can still be made to principles of the natural law across the main religions. Jonathan Sacks, in Morality, supports this view, arguing that Judaism and Christianity share similar values, which connect to reason within their religious traditions (Sacks 2020).

2.1.2. Building a Gentler Christendom

Maritain’s new type of Christendom in a Christian secular society is to be distinguished from a medieval model where Church and state were too closely intertwined. Yet in the transition to this new model, Maritain recognised that it would be difficult for Christians to envisage since the idea of the Holy Roman Empire and a distinctly political Christian state lingers in most Christian imaginations (Maritain 2019a, p. 56). Yet Maritain clarifies his understanding that even in the Holy Roman Empire, the temporal also served the spiritual, and the rulers were “an instrumental cause in relation to the Church” (“ibid.”, p. 57). Although not in favour of any contemporary public manifestation of Christianity in a political party, Maritain believed the secular state today would be best served by having a Christian orientation and leader, since otherwise the state would invoke its “neutrality” but become “anti-religious” at the service of ends that are purely material (“ibid.”).

For Maritain, this new vision of Christendom is dependent on the principle of analogy, which enables a view of eternal values of God at work in temporal things (p. 59). While a philosophy of equivocity would advocate that Christianity’s rules should change over time in the same way that culture and history change (not recognising any difference between the divine and the human realms), and while a philosophy of univocity would mean that over time supreme rules and principles apply in the same way across time, Maritain applies the principle of analogy so that the principles of the Christian civilisation can be applied in new ways for new times (p. 240).

Based on this principle, the aim is not to restore an earthly Christian kingdom but to build the kingdom of God in the world by transforming it with Christian values, so it becomes ”truly and fully human” (p. 221). In this way, it is truly incarnational and sacramental. This transformation is about Christians taking back the place that Socialism found vacant in the economic, political, and social spheres (p. 225) through the application of Gospel values and Christian philosophy (p. 226). The Christian will be engaged as “leaven” by infusing the temporal sphere with Christian values and applying Christian social, political, and economic philosophy to concrete realizations (p. 227).

• Holiness in the sphere of the Profane

Maritain’s understanding of engagement in the social realm is completely non-dualistic. Christians will get fully involved in the temporal sphere, transforming it not by revolution but by Christian heroism (228) and holiness. This new type of holiness echoes the universal call to holiness expressed in Lumen Gentium, now opened beyond the religious to extend to the laity. It is an everyday holiness characterised by “simplicity”, “love”, and the uncreated love of God, the Holy Spirit dwelling in the depths of human persons. It transforms human nature by grace rather than annihilating it (231). It is understated and low-key, which, he argues, might even begin in the most contemplative orders before spreading into secular life itself (Maritain 2019a, p. 231).4 This is because of its inner and authentically spiritual nature, rather than any visible and publicly institutional or pious form.

• Pluralism and the Christian ruler

Maritain favoured pluralistic states for the new Christendom to take root (p. 255) respecting other religions and spiritual families (p. 258). Just as St Thomas saw the need for the prince to be a good man to direct his citizens towards the common good, Maritain believed that the leader in this new understanding would be best being Christian, not in an obvious way but in his inner life and in terms of his actions (p. 259). This is because he must be good—and for Maritain, true goodness is Christian, based on the infused virtues, particularly charity.

Whereas in the past, Christendom was formed by the exercise of temporal power and legal constraints, now it does so by integrating Christian activities in the temporal work itself (p. 266). Maritain was convinced of the possibilities of this new approach based on living an authentically spiritual Christian life. He believed in the “spiritual energy” and “political prudence” of Christians to demonstrate to non-Christians that they were ruling in “in conformity with sound reason and the common good” in a way that would “awaken… the confidence of others to win the moral authority of… leaders” (pp. 262–63).

• The priority of the spiritual in economics, politics, and society

Although Maritain does not use the language of direct and indirect papal power as is traditional in the Church, he nevertheless sees the state as subject indirectly to God. The task of the Christian engaged in politics is to allow this to happen through their wise and prudential decisions made in light of Christ. This new Christendom is a way to acknowledge that the state itself has duties to God and that the Church can therefore collaborate with the state and the state with the Church for its own good (p. 266).

This Christian understanding of the temporal order means it can never simply be understood as a pure economy nor simply as purely political (p. 286). For Maritain, since both these spheres are human, they are therefore implicitly moral and transformable through sanctity (287). He also articulates how we have neglected to understand how morality underpins the political and social spheres, nor have we considered morality when approaching economic and political problems (Maritain 2019b, p. 42), leading to a type of dualism of the spiritual and the temporal.

• Building God’s kingdom: the place of morality and spirituality

For Maritain, culture is the area of human life that includes intellectual, practical, and moral development (Maritain 2019a, p. 212). In antiquity, religion, understood as the “soul of the city”, was part of that culture. For Maritain, spirituality is not about withdrawing from the culture into a “purism of spirituality” but about engaging fully with temporal responsibilities (Maritain 2019b, p. 96), upholding the values of the common good and human dignity in the face of public ridicule (“ibid.”, p. 68). This follows the “logic of the incarnation” where Christians are to live in the world with the freedom won by Christ (“ibid.”). Although many will try to confine Christianity to the private sphere, Maritain calls the Christian to vivify the world, living by their new “spiritual instinct” (“ibid.”), and remain a witness and source of hope (p. 96) serving the common good by remaining faithful to truth, justice, and fraternal friendship” (p. 104).

Where previously the Church may have conquered by the sword, in this new approach, the cross gives the means to endure and the courage to suffer and transform the culture (Maritain 2019a, p. 91). For Maritain, if Christians are not successful in transforming the political system from within in this way, their suffering and patience in the face of injustice still bears witness to Christ, annihilating “the evil by accepting and dissolving it into love” (“ibid.”).

Thus, grace and “spiritual energy” can permeate political and social decision-making through Christians themselves, “enlightening intelligence” and “broaden[ing] our prudence” (Maritain 2019b, p. 42). A Christian’s words and deeds must be authentic, coming from a deep and truly human place (“ibid.”, 54) and from an inner source of prayer, fasting, and penance (p. 53). He calls these spiritual practices the “poor temporal means” of the spiritual life (ces moyens pauvres) (Maritain 2019a, p. 99; 2019b, p. 55), and the life of the soul is the key “practical activity” foundational for all other activities (Maritain 2019b, p. 55). Here the spiritual and political come together (“ibid.”, p. 56). Thus, Christianity will now influence society and politics by “gently” and “firmly” radiating its truth through its focus on the common good and the dignity of the human person, in contrast to the coercive unity of integralist or totalitarian systems (“ibid.”).

Unlike a Marxist approach, Maritain’s view of philosophy cannot be reduced to action, but it highlights an intrinsic relationship between philosophy and action, and a philosophy rooted in prudence can transform society (p. 65). Prudence is aligned with universal laws to protect the independence of philosophy for the good of politics and enable it to analyse political situations (p. 66).

2.2. Maritain’s Reflection on Integral Humanism After the Council

In the Peasant of the Garrone, written as the Second Vatican Council was ending and published in 1968, Maritain laments how, rather than his integral humanism prevailing, “Modernism” (his description) has gotten the upper hand and that the crisis was manifested by Christians “kneeling before the world” (Maritain 1968, p. 53) and “confusing the kingdom of God with the world” (p. 60). Rather than heed the call of the Council to transform the temporal sphere with Christian values, Christians have accommodated themselves to it. He wrote that Christians have succumbed to Comte’s world where science has replaced reason and myth represents the side of sentiment in religion (p. 7). He is also shocked at the “complete temporalization of Christianity” (“ibid., p. 56”) and how some Christians have knelt before the world of nature and its temporal structures and have left behind the cross, heaven, and sanctity (p. 57). In this book, he nevertheless continues to defend the teaching of Pope Paul VI in Gaudium et Spes on aggiornamento which was not to be an adaptation of the Church to the world. He defends it in light of his focus on the dignity of the human person versus worldly collectivism (p. 51). He explains that although the Council supported the key terms of “personalism and communitarian”, the personalist has been neglected at the expense of the communitarian (p. 52).

However, Maritain’s important contribution in this book is how he reasserts what he calls “pre-philosophical” foundations of his vision for the renewal of the Church which have been completely rejected. We shall continue by outlining them and then responding to them.

For Maritain, the whole of Western civilisation has been privileged to have been founded on the “pre-philosophy” of the logos, and it seems now to have been rejected (pp. 15; 19). It seems to Maritain that on the eve of the close of the Council, religion has lost its connection with metaphysics, reason, and truth (p. 17). He writes of the “true fire” needed by the Church to continue with the renewal of its vision (p. 65). Such a vision must continue as an interior work rather than a temptation to build the kingdom of God on Earth in a political way, as is the perennial temptation for the Christian. Maritain is convinced that renewal is still an inner work in the “deepest recesses of the soul” (p. 72). His vision continues to build up the kingdom through Ecumenism and dialogue in charity and authentic living faith, rather than structures. It begins with love, including the love of non-Christians because they are “at least potentially members of Christ” (p. 73), and calls for a demonstration of a real faith connected to love and charity (p. 75) and the renewal of mission rooted in genuine love (p. 77).

Secondly, Maritain upholds the intellectual nature of this renewal. He laments the abandonment of metaphysical knowledge, condemned as “utterly valueless” (p. 112) and now supplanted by Cartesianism, and thus that theology is now severed itself from the real (p. 109). For Maritain, the renewal of this approach to dialogue must return to reclaim its pre-philosophical foundations and begin with the understanding that the human being is made for truth (p. 95) and that the intellect has the capacity to connect with being (p. 110). For this to happen, he calls for a moral transformation as a premise. To receive reality in this way, the human being must become humble (p. 110).5

Maritain champions Thomistic philosophy and its turn to the real to be the foundation of this renewal since it upholds this metaphysics (p. 137). However, he is also aware that as Thomism developed after the canonisation of St Thomas, it perhaps no longer “maintained the studious humility” of the saint and instead had become “learnedly ossified” (p. 147). Although he continues to reject integralism (p. 160),6 which he says replaces truth with “human security” (p. 161), perhaps his project does not fully probe the attraction of integralism for some. With his unwillingness to engage these possible reasons, there is also perhaps unwittingly in Maritain a bias against any distinctive and even more doctrinal aspects of Christianity. Since Maritain was not a theologian, he also failed to connect with the new Ressourcement theology of the Church as sacrament, which called for the Church to explore how exactly its visible presence interacts in society with the invisible inner life. Such a view would argue that the Church needs to be in society not a political reality but be present as a unique divine–human reality in a way unique to itself. In this way, the Church can be a visible support to her members who are called to represent her as witnesses to Christ in the culture, infusing it with Christian values.

Another aberration of theology after the Council is what Maritain describes as “a fideism gone astray” (p. 145). Rather than seeing the connection between theology and metaphysics, he notes the rise of a fideism makes use of any fashionable philosophies of the age to reinterpret the faith in a way that accommodates the culture (p. 145). Whereas metaphysics was previously the “handmaid”, now fashionable philosophy has become “the mistress” (p. 145). In light of this accommodationist tendency, now the ultimate truth of theology has become not truth but “efficacy” (p. 145).

A third foundation stone of integral humanism that Maritain believes is being neglected is holiness. He believes that holiness is key for the renewal of the Church since it is the “true fire that the Holy Spirit has kindled” (p. 146). Influenced by the thoughts and writings of his wife, he came to see that the most important thing for our modern age is “the life of prayer and of union with God lived in the world” (p. 197). While he lauded certain new forms of holiness in new communities, such as the little brothers of Jesus or the third order of St Angela Ricci, what he was more interested in was a new type of universal lay holiness born of the ecclesiology of the Council (p. 197). Even in his lament of how the Council’s understanding of dialogue with the culture had been misinterpreted, he continued to subscribe fully to the Council’s understanding of the universal call to holiness for all the baptised which echoed his understanding. All the baptised are called to a real participation in the life of the Church and to “the perfection of charity” (LG 40) (p. 212). This lay spirituality was also to be a spirituality of the royal priesthood.7

For Maritain, the call to holiness was a call to a new type of contemplation for the many lay, active souls in the world (p. 221) so that all actions in the temporal sphere are to be plugged into the “divine source” in service of neighbour, and in this way, the whole temporal sphere could be reconciled to Christ. It moves away from an emphasis on the mystical life to one that is more accessible to all baptised Christians, a “life of the Spirit” (p. 230) and living the gifts of the Holy Spirit (p. 231). It is a very concrete holiness through practicing charity and humility, following the little way of St Thérèse (p. 234), yet is not about isolation from the world but about being in the midst of the world practicing perfect charity. He quotes from Raïssa’s journal and echoes her unpublished thoughts about contemplation “on the road”,

I have the feeling that what is asked of us is to live in the storm of life, without keeping back any of our substance, without keeping back anything for ourselves, neither rest nor friendships nor health nor leisure—to pray incessantly and that even without leisure—in fact to let ourselves pitch and toss in the waves of the divine will till the day when it will say: ‘It is enough’.

(Maritain 1968, p. 239)

Rather than enclosure as a means of separating the believer from the world to keep them holy, it is now the presence of sin around lay Christians that constantly reminds them to recall the work of redemption and keeps them dependent on Christ (p. 246). This call to holiness is also a call to be co-redeemers with Christ by sharing with Christ in transforming the world (pp. 247–48).8

3. Evaluating Maritain’s Understanding of the Relationship Between Christianity and Culture

Having summarised some aspects of Maritain’s understanding of integral humanism including its pre-philosophical foundations necessary for its correct application to the relationship between Christianity and culture, this section will attempt to analyse and evaluate its ongoing relevance today.

Maritain’s conviction that a gentler Christendom will transform society through Christian engagement in an authentic and interior way has many positive aspects, all of which are good in themselves; however, reading them in a contemporary context, they are also somewhat naive since they presume that developments in both Christianity and culture would happen in a way that retained essential Catholic aspects of the culture which are actually foundational for a proper interpretation of integral humanism. These aspects include the following:

3.1. Formation for Holiness as Counter-Cultural

Firstly, Maritain’s approach presupposes that Christians as Catholic laity live out this new form of holiness in the temporal sphere and that they will continue to live their faith under secular pressures. When Maritain was developing his understanding in 1930s, institutional Catholicism itself was strong. The Church had a strong visible presence in education and local cultures and communities both in America and even in Europe and a strong catechetical approach to mission. The idea of a more vibrant, authentic spiritual Catholicism which Maritain and Ressourcement theologians expressed was not to be a radical revolution but simply to ensure that institutional structures did not take away from a living faith. However, today, institutional structures in the Catholic Church are almost always spoken about in a way that is implicitly seen as detracting from the faith rather than supporting it.

Although the articulation of Christian faith in the past is often criticised from a post-conciliar perspective as “exterior” and “inauthentic”, it cannot merely be dismissed as such. It was confidentially expressed in visible, sacramental, and devotional forms. The fact that many chose religious life was also because holiness was seen as a more counter-cultural witness and possible because of a strong distinctively Catholic identity, partly due to separation from the culture. While this may be attributed to a false dualistic understanding of the relationship between grace and nature, perhaps now Catholicism has gone to the other extreme. Living holiness under the shadow of a misinterpreted integral humanism has become completely associated with just action in the temporal sphere alone, often in a way that disconnects it from grace, contemplation, or living a sacramental life. Many Catholics have fully embraced this new style of holiness in the temporal world and will only witness where they can support calls for social justice in the culture that are acceptable, for example, campaigning for the environment, animal rights, and opposing racism. While all of these are good in themselves, Christian holiness surely calls for a willingness to prophetically challenge as well as dialogue with the culture. For such a counter-cultural witness, the support of deeper intellectual and spiritual formation is needed, which up to now has often been lacking at every level in the Church.

3.2. Thomism and Ressourcement

Secondly, the naivety of Maritain’s approach was part of the zeitgeist of trust in the new style of theology. It was easy for theologians to call for this renewal of theology when they (including Congar, Schillbeeckx, and De Lubac) were all rooted in the Thomist tradition as their foundation (both implicit and explicit), as Maritain was. The connection of faith with metaphysics and truth was all implicit in their thinking, and although they aimed to move away from a type of neo-scholasticism, which often stifled the life-giving potential of the faith to transform individuals and society, after the Council, not only neo-scholastic approaches to Thomism but all Thomism and its metaphysical foundations were confined to the scrap heap of theology. While the new life-giving approaches of Ressourcement theology served the Church well in her renewal, they needed to be combined with the metaphysical foundations that the Church had developed over centuries as essential.

Maritain somewhat naively believed that the “theology of St Thomas will dominate the new Christendom” (Maritain 2019a, 199), but his was not what he calls the “ossified” Thomism of the neo-scholastic schools (Maritain 1968, p. 147). Yet after the Second Vatican Council, the average priest in his approach to explaining the faith preferred to jettison St Thomas, probably because of the associations with this distorted Thomism of the seminary formation before the Council (Rowland 2010, p. 4).9

Thus, without understanding the roots of integral humanism in terms of Thomist realism, it was subject to misinterpretation. Therefore, in light of this realisation, Maritain notes that perhaps these foundations need to once again be spelt out explicitly.

3.3. Retaining the Connection Between Human Nature and the Natural Law

Thirdly, for Maritain’s approach to work, it involves a significant presence of “people of goodwill” in society—non-Christians who follow the natural law and can recognise how the values of Christianity accord with their own values. Maritain argued that this was possible since European nations were once part of the old Holy Roman Empire, and the natural law was foundational to societal and political forms (Peters 2022). However, today, this ability to recognise the natural law as a foundation for European societal or political norms is increasingly under threat, as ideologies, often imposed by the state, replace it with foundations that are completely opposed to the natural law or based on understanding it with different philosophical premises. As Ratzinger prophetically outlined, this is because most societies are advancing the autonomy of the secular state along the line of the French form. This shift is particularly evident in the field of anthropology, particularly in bioethics and gender, which frequently ignore the natural law in favour of rationalistic agendas imposed by the “might” of the state rather than what is “right” and true from a divine law perspective. As Pope Benedict XVI explains, human beings now believe in their own capacity to define themselves:

From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. … When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being (Benedict XVI 2012).

Others continue to believe that human rights discourse is the last vestige of the natural law to connect Christians and other people of goodwill. However, as Nick Spencer comments, this supposed unity between Christianity and secular culture based on human rights is very vulnerable since it is built on pragmatic foundations rather than on any solid reason.10 Also, while most countries who have signed up to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the past few generations have had a biblical grounding for their understanding of human dignity made in the image and likeness of God, as countries gradually move away from their Judaeo-Christian roots, the inviolability of these rights is being lost. They now become increasingly vulnerable to manipulation in service of the powerful. Without a Christian memory, will the rights of all human beings, particularly the most vulnerable, continue to be preserved (Spencer 2018, p. 78)?

Alasdair MacIntyre goes so far as to argue that emotivist philosophy has destroyed any hope for justifying social policies based on objective moral standards, even those based on Kant’s distinction between people as means and ends (MacIntyre 2014, p. 22). Even from a purely Kantian perspective, the relationship between intention, purpose, and reason for action is now detached from good or virtue (“ibid., p. 97”). Truth has been replaced by psychological effectiveness (Philip Rieff), or as Ratzinger says, orthopraxis has replaced orthodoxy (MacIntyre 2014, p. 35; Ratzinger 1985, p. 23). Today, the rise of sociology and a social constructivist approach to anthropology, politics, and society has impacted the acceptance of a homogenous understanding of human nature and the natural law (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Sociology has replaced the pre-philosophical foundation for social and political thinking, particularly Marxist and post-modern approaches. Reality is now constructed from the bottom up on sociological data rather than given as a truth inscribed in nature itself. The natural law and human nature have been subject to a hermeneutic of suspicion (Ricoeur 1970, p. 28), as “grand narratives”, which can no longer be applied. Thus, a unified metaphysical human nature has been replaced by multiple socially constructed “natures” explained entirely through their political and social contexts. “Truth” as “praxis” now comes from the “grassroots”, from the “bottom up”, and from gathering opinions and quantitative research. Politicians today are pressurised not to follow conscience and truth but micro-narratives, appealing to the rights of minorities in society rather than the common good, as seen in the case of issues like abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and same-sex marriage.11

3.4. A Naturalisation of Faith and a Loss of Doctrinal Confidence

Fourthly, Ross Douthat argues that because the Vatican II weakened doctrinal confidence and missionary zeal, Christianity today cannot appeal to those who implicitly hold Christian values in the way Maritain proposed a “gentler Christendom” (Douthat 2022). Without such doctrinal confidence, Christianity has fallen into the more “humanistic” or anthropocentric type of humanism which Maritain had tried to distance himself from (Maritain 2019a, p. 45).12 Without stating explicitly its theological and philosophical roots, the Church’s embrace of integral humanism as a way of dialogue seems to have secularised the Christian faith rather than Christianising humanism. It has reduced Christianity to a type of natural humanism.

Other influences on this naturalising development of humanism have been Rahner’s concept of the anonymous Christian. Maritain’s position has also been described as a type of “anonymous Christianity” (Crean 2018), although it is based more on the Thomist understanding of prevenient grace and the idea that all non-Christians are potentially related to Christ, but again, these theological premises are rarely handed on. The idea of the anonymous Christian has been misinterpreted in a way that disconnects it from its proper Thomistic foundations (White 2016). It has thus led to the optimistic view that all human beings are implicitly Christian and would align with Christian values just by accepting their own humanity and its openness to transcendence (Rahner 1969, p. 394). At the time Rahner and Maritain were writing, many “anonymous Christians” were lapsed Christians who still retained Christian values and basic doctrinal understanding. However, today, as the West moves further away from a practicing Christianity, the internal and gentle Christianity of Maritain is becoming less and less able to sustain itself in a society where the distinctiveness of grace and Christian revelation is not understood.

Since the Council, in the move towards a gentler Christendom, there seems also to have been a corresponding tendency to shift entirely away from a propositional or even doctrinal understanding of faith. The conciliar approach of a need to infuse propositional understandings with living, affective faith was often misinterpreted in some local Churches as a quasi-ideological quest to drop any intellectual, catechetical, or doctrinal components to Catholicism, replacing them with purely affective, experiential approaches (Dulles 1994).13 Maritain’s approach to living Christianity is based on living the virtues of faith, hope, and love in a way open to all, even those without a true doctrinal understanding of the faith (Crean 2018, p. 289). Unfortunately, this downplays the importance of doctrine or has been used as a defence to downplay its importance. Maritain goes so far as to believe implicit faith within doctrinal understanding is possible for an atheist who can “conceptualise this faith in the true God under formulas which deny him” (Maritain 1938, p. 163; Crean 2018, p. 289), in a similar way to Rahner, who separates the conceptual or categorical from the existential dimensions of faith so that one can deny God at a conceptual level yet still orient oneself positively to God with a fundamental “yes” to him at an existential level (Rahner 1978, p. 102). Reducing the understanding of being a person of faith to being “a good and virtuous man”, without a robust profession of the faith, means that it is increasingly difficult for Christian “believers” to withstand the secularisation of the culture.

Another influence on the gradual wiping away of the distinctive Christian foundations of integral humanism was due to a failure to grasp the nuances of the new understanding of the relationship between nature and grace which underpins it. When it was argued in Ressourcement and Conciliar theology that the sacred and secular could no longer be as rigidly separated and that God’s grace is found in the secular sphere, the distinctiveness of the Christian dispensation was no longer allowed to be spoken of for fear it would lead to the return of the “two-tier” understanding of nature and supernatural grace.

To address this balance and continue to support the work of grace in all human beings and cultures, while also recognising the distinctiveness of supernatural grace and the need for it for full human flourishing, it is important to revive the necessity of the need for doctrinal and intellectual formation and education in the faith for all Christians, including lay Christians engaging in the temporal sphere. Only then will they have the doctrinal knowledge needed to witness with conviction in the public square to Christianity as an intellectually coherent philosophy and means of salvation.

3.5. A Nominalist Christian Theology: Losing Access to the Real

Fifthly, a problem already highlighted by Maritain is that Christian faith has become disconnected from pre-philosophical foundations and universal truth. As he explained in The Peasant of the Garrone, the more it moved to embrace historical and social criticism, the more it moved to a nominalist understanding. Nominalism has been defined by David Schindler as a movement away from the real since theology is no longer concerned with man’s true good, God (Schindler 2021, p. 168). Ironically, this shift has not enabled it to connect more with people across cultures but compromised that ability, making it too easy to take a correlationist approach to culture which accommodates itself to changing and contextual cultural realities.

In his Regensburg address, Pope Benedict XVI spoke out against a nominalist articulation of Christian faith because it divorced theology from philosophy, truth, and reason. This has also led to a voluntaristic reformulation of the doctrine of God as one far away from us and thus ineffective in acting for us in our world. Pope Benedict described the three stages of de-Hellenisation which led to this divorce and which took place firstly through the Reformation of the sixteenth century, secondly, through the liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and thirdly, through modern cultural pluralism. In this third phase, the understanding of the importance of Greek metaphysics for Catholic theology was seen as merely extrinsic and arbitrary to its development. Metaphysics was only relevant to its initial inculturation, but it was argued that it could then be replaced with other arbitrary and current cultural expressions going forward (Benedict XVI 2006). In Truth and Tolerance, Ratzinger explains the roots of this shift from metaphysics in the philosophy of Ockham and Kant (Ratzinger 2004, p. 119). The theology of the Reformation grew out of this anti-metaphysical and anti-doctrinal approach (Kant 1960).14 In a similar way to Maritain, Pope Benedict explains that in order for Christianity to overcome this ineffective understanding of God for the benefit of its dialogue with the culture, “reason and faith must come together in a new way” to “overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable and if we once more disclose its vast horizons” (Benedict XVI 2006).

A more cultural and contextual approach to theology has recently been encouraged by Pope Francis and the Pontifical Academy for theology. In promulgating new norms for theologians, the motu propio Ad Theologiam Provedendam has called for “epistemological and methodological rethinking” of theological method and not just adapting contents to new situations (Francis 2023, p. 3). It calls for a “fundamentally contextual theology capable of reading and interpreting the Gospel in the conditions in which men and women live daily, in different geographical, social and cultural environments” (4). In this way, he argues that theology can develop a “culture of dialogue and encounter” that points human beings to God (4). While the document argues that “in order to advance” theology cannot simply repeat outdated formulas, it is also important to note that there are means of doing this appropriately, as articulated by Newman in his criteria for true and false development (Newman 1994).

We would agree with Ratzinger that maintaining the relationship between Christianity and metaphysics is not simply a historical contextualisation that was appropriate then but not now. Rather, recognising the metaphysical context from which it was born is intrinsic to it and also protects it from the weakness of a correlationist approach. If the articulation of the Christian faith becomes more focused on contexts rather than universal metaphysical truths about the possibilities of human participation in God’s divine nature (based on the principle of analogy Maritain advocates), it weakens itself and its salvific effectiveness as transformative. Furthermore, I would argue that paradoxically, the Gospel can only appeal to all cultures when it remembers that its basic message is transcendent and above all culture. This is because of the incarnation itself, which is not just about the divine being becoming human while leaving behind his divinity but rather so that through the human and created sphere there is access to the divine. Inculturation is about enabling and facilitating members of each culture to look upwards, beyond their cultural specificities (while meeting them in their cultural specificity), to the salvific power of God rather than shape God to their specific contexts and, in doing so, reduce him. As Matthew Lamb explains so well,

The transcultural dimension of the gospel is in no way antithetical from but makes really possible, the inculturation of the gospel in myriad cultures. Because the gospel is absolutely supernatural and totally the free gift of an all-living triune God, the gospel must be proclaimed and inculturated among all nations and cultures.

(Lamb 1994, p. 130)

3.6. A Private, Fideistic Spirituality

Sixthly, for some, the issue with building a “gentle Christendom” in the public square has played into a liberal conception of religion which confines it to the private sphere and undermines its true power. Christianity has accepted the terms and language of liberalism, including its individualistic frames of reference (Deneen 2018; Craycroft 2024). In the sphere of liberal politics, as Maritain was well aware and articulated well (Maritain 1968), many accept a role for religion only as spirituality when it fits the individualistic agenda of a liberal culture politically, economically, and socially.

A Catholicism that naively enters the public square by operating on the terms of political liberalism has taken on both a false understanding of secularity and a false duality between the secular state and religion. It has therefore willingly allowed the state to be completely non-religious, rather than hold, like Maritain and De Lubac, that all human beings are open to God at the deepest level of their being and, therefore, that the message of religion and specifically Christianity is a universal one.

Like Maritain and his belief in the positive relationship possible between Christianity and democracy in America, Ratzinger sees Christian values as absolutely “antecedent” to modern democracies, protecting them from relativism, scepticism, and bureaucracy (Ratzinger 2006, p. 56). He saw this embodied in America, Germany, and England, all of which built their states on moral (albeit Protestant) foundations (“ibid., p. 142”). For Ratzinger, Christianity and its view of the common good, protected culture and society from sliding into nihilism (p. 52) or the temptation to sacrifice human beings in the name of economic progress (p. 157). Ratzinger, like Maritain, argues therefore that Christianity needs to be proclaimed in a way that testifies to its universal roots in order to protect humanity and even the true functioning of democracy itself.

Although Maritain is clear that his understanding of integral humanism is incarnational and therefore engaged with the world (Maritain 1939), since he accepts the terms of dialogue set by a liberal democratic state, some have accused Maritain of rejecting institutional Christianity (Peters 2022). Since Maritain advocates a witness of holiness only at a personal level in a hidden way, critics argue that his model is ineffective in transforming culture. Others continue to argue that it is precisely the mystical nature of Maritain’s understanding of holiness that is transformative in the world (Haynes 2022). Morrison would also argue to the contrary that Maritain’s spirituality is one of “boldness” since it is radically oriented towards others rather than self (Morrison 2023, p. 8). For Maritain, suffering is an inevitable part of Christian spirituality, and since it is a co-redemptive sharing in Christ’s passion, it is transformative for the world (Maritain 1968, p. 249).

However, Douthat argues that under the watch of Maritain’s “gentle Christendom”, Christian faith has been replaced by a Gnostic version of religion, a “therapeutic form of spirituality” (Douthat 2022; Bellah 1985).15 Interestingly, Douthat argues that the way this “new religion” has convinced so many is not through strong imposition but rather through the type of cultural hegemony that Maritain had advocated (Douthat 2022). Shea also argues that today we are experiencing not the absence of religion but a new type of religion which uses religious language and concepts (including even Christian ones) but which masks a dualistically secular worldview (Shea 2023), but it is so pervasive and insidious that even Christians have succumbed to it. I would agree that the misinterpretation of Maritain’s integral humanism has left Christian spirituality vulnerable in these ways described by Douthat and Shea.

The problem with Maritain’s integral humanism is that without understanding the metaphysical roots of its mysticism, it can be interpreted as an individualistic spirituality that ends up in private Gnosticism or ends up trusting and imbibing the culture without adequate discernment. Christianity confined to a private witness alone loses its power to speak the universal message of salvation and shape the social order in a transformative way. Ratzinger explains how Christianity is more than a private belief and gives citizens the freedom to orient their lives to choose the good both in this life as God’s will for humans in community as well as beyond this life (Ratzinger 2006, p. 119). However, moving Christian spirituality from the private to a public emphasis is not to be conducted in a way that understands action as merely action in a temporal way, without grace (as in a type of Marxism), which led to errors in Liberation theology. Thus, Christian spirituality is about prayerful communion with God but also individuals exercising their freedom to work with God and shape human reality in accord with his will. This can ask them to do so in a way that can often be completely opposed to what is proposed by governments or society, as can be seen particularly in terms of the Catholic view of marriage, family, and bioethical issues.

4. Beyond Integral Humanism

This section of this paper asks how Maritain’s integral humanism can be reshaped and interpreted for the contemporary Church not only by incorporating more explicitly its metaphysical, pre-political foundations to address some of the weaknesses we have highlighted but also by engaging with other approaches to the relationship of Christianity with the culture today as well as other developments in political philosophy.

Enculturating Christianity in Small Communities

Like Maritain, Alasdair MacIntyre understands that politics and social action are related to morality and relationships (MacIntyre 2014, p. 226). It is a history of “virtues and vices” (“ibid.”, p. 227). However, MacIntyre critiqued Maritain for implying that the natural law is primordial and can exist abstractly, as he believed it is only passed on in tangible and socially embodied ways. The individual finds their moral identity through social communities such as “family, the neighbourhood, the city and the tribe” (p. 257), and virtues are transmitted through stories and sagas, virtues, and traditions (p. 145).

The shift from an “integralist” to an “integral humanist” account of the relationship between Christian faith and culture unfortunately seemed to lose the need to discuss the vitally important distinctively visible and social elements of Christianity and the Church which are needed for integral humanism to retain its Christian distinctiveness. The idea of communities and living tradition that MacIntyre identifies can be used to acknowledge the need for specifically visible and tangible elements of Christian culture to nourish the Christian faith in a secular environment, without falling back into an integralist approach for a sure identity.

This visible rootedness is important since the Gospel is always to be passed on incarnationally, not only through orthodoxy but through orthopraxis. MacIntyre gives examples of conversations, seminars, family gatherings, and other discussions (p. 246). A true understanding of inculturation then is about discipleship rather than simply sociological aspects of cultural context. Similarly, a true understanding of the Church’s place in politics will be through reasoned discussion and true discipleship. As Lamb points out, quoting von Balthasar, this was how the Gospel was spread in the early Church, both East and West (Lamb 1994, p. 137; Von Balthasar 1991, pp. 305–20). He notes how it was the monasteries who succeeded in preserving and spreading the Gospel by “genuine discipleship, not by the word and dominative power”.

In the final chapter of After Virtue, MacIntyre writes of how society needs something beyond Marxian politics and even Aristotelianism as a way of accounting for social elements. He argues instead that just as an important turning point in early history was the coming of St Benedict after the Dark Ages and the witness of Benedictine communities, so today there is a need for a similar turn. He writes,

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of goodwill turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages that are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope”.

(MacIntyre 2014, p. 305)

Thus, as well as connecting Maritain’s Christian understanding of integral humanism to its doctrinal foundations, there is also a need to root it or “enculturate it” in specific communities and associations to foster the virtues and morality it needs. Christianity needs to be enculturated in order for its values be passed on and its members socialised both formally and informally. Without the support of these communities over time, the Christian will be either isolated or gradually absorbed into secular culture. Maritain also takes the idea of the importance of “little teams and small flocks to struggle most effectively for man and the spirit”, for Christianity to hold its own in a secular context. This is because he argues they can provide “the most effective witness to those truths for which men so desperately long and which…are in such short supply…since they can muster around something which completely escapes technique and the process of massification…which is the love of wisdom and the intellect” (Maritain 1968). Edmund Burke saw a similar purpose for small units of society or “little platoons”. He noted that supporting these smaller associations was the only way for society to overcome the destructive impact of the Enlightenment values of the French revolution on family and tradition and its aim to replace them with the sterile “rights of man”. Without these groups, he prophesied correctly that those rights which the French Revolution advocated would end in violence and terror, as the new political society aimed to wipe out those opposed to its revolution (Burke 1988). In a similar way today, the natural law can only be protected from state misinterpretations and manipulations within such smaller associations.

Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, which was inspired by this quote from MacIntyre, raised controversy for his insistence that the only way the Church can survive is by withdrawing from an increasingly secular culture and building its own communities for education supportive of the faith. He argues that only religion understood as community or a plurality of communities can survive a strong state with the imposition of contrary values (Dreher 2018, p. 124). James Shea also advocates the importance of finding new ways to incarnate the counter-cultural Christian vision (Shea 2020, p. 49). Dreher’s approach has raised much opposition, not only because it has named the importance of Christianity being counter-cultural but because he has dared to suggest the idea of pulling away from society, therefore a completely different vision to the Council’s positive openness to the culture. He has named what many are experiencing, that secular culture has become increasingly toxic and that in order to maintain the fullness of their faith, perhaps Christians have no choice again (as in ancient times) but to live in exile from it, facing even the possibilities of martyrdom (“Dreher, p. 120”). Since democratic society and culture is no longer marked by the “stability and order” that Christianity provides, the aim is to pull away from it lest the culture “makes us forget” (“ibid., p. 121”).

Dreher has a non-conformist approach to culture, looking to examples in Judaism and the Latter-Day Saints (pp. 130–31). It has become an increasingly popular option for Christian families who do not believe that Christianity and liberal society are compatible. This has been evident in the rise of the home-school education movement as well as private Catholic university schools, particularly in the USA, with an emphasis on building virtuous Christian communities founded on a Catholic (and classical) education, where people of faith flourish through intellectual formation and immersion in smaller platoons of strong Christianity. Other European countries, including Ireland (where almost 90% of the official primary school provision is offered under Catholic patronage) (Department of Education, Ireland (DoE) 2023), are also experiencing an increasing turn to home-schooling for religious reasons (echoing the “Benedict Option”) as parents are dissatisfied with Catholic education’s compromise with secular values justified in the name of Christian inclusiveness.

In a similar way to MacIntyre, Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher and social theorist, argued in dialogue with Ratzinger that the concept of a universal good, although it cannot be expressed in the post-metaphysical thinking of modernity, can still be expressed today in the communal and personal fellowships which continue to contain evidence of these truths. He thus called for secular states to support religious fellowships as part of strengthening the cultural sources that nourish human solidarity (Habermas 2006, p. 48). Habermas argues that the liberal state must go beyond the accommodation of religious groups to supporting them so that they can be true to their identity and so that society can actually benefit from their “fellowship ethos” (“ibid.”, p. 49). Yet he warns that these fellowships will contribute to creating a new culture only if they “avoid dogmatism” and the “coercion of consciences” (p. 43).

The idea of forming “small platoons” connects to Catholic Social Teaching on subsidiarity and the rights of conscience. Such an approach also connects with new strands in secular political philosophy and economic theory. As Paul Collier and John Kay argue in their book Greed is Dead, while state provision is important, this should complement and not replace other forms of social provision (Collier and Kay 2020, p. 34). In supporting the Church in this way, particularly through its support of smaller family and community associations, the state can enable the Church to be what it is, the sign of salvation for society. However, through this support for subsidiarity and smaller associations, the state is also implicitly supporting itself and the health of democracy.

Alexis de Tocqueville praised how democracy in America is intrinsically connected to such associations. He writes, “Americans of all ages, all stations of life and all types of disposition are forever forming associations”. Although sociologists have shown an unfortunate reduction in civic engagement in America documented by sociologists, economists, and political sciences (Skocpol and Fiorina 1999),16 perhaps associations are now happening in new ways. As the recent election in the US has shown, smaller associations expressed in Christian families and communities can collectively also have a big impact in overcoming the prevailing political and cultural narratives. While at the policy level, certain values such as reproductive rights, lax immigration laws, and upholding environmental sustainability took precedence, at a community and private level, there was a significant majority who did not adhere to these values, and yet these voices were disparaged by those in power. As Eatwell and Goodwin (2018, p. 123) have discovered in their exploration of the collapse of liberalism and the rise of national populism, the belief that governments are being run for “a few small interests” and that politicians are “not interested in people like me” has risen to 58% in the UK, 67% in the US, and 78% in France (Eatwell and Goodwin 2018, p. 123). While national populist movements are often critiqued as irrationally impacting society, there might also be an alternative sense, similar to what McIntyre suggests, where “small platoons” of families and communities are expressing natural law thinking. Perhaps Christianity can have more of an impact in handing on Christian values in social, cultural, and political spheres at this level of association in order for its members to be better formed to witness to Christianity in the public square.

The positive relationships between Christianity and democracy had become strained in recent years due to secularisation. However, since the pandemic of 2020, I would argue that what is emerging is a change in the understanding of the relationship between Christianity, democracy, and culture. Countries like the US or Germany, which have moved from a type of Christian spirituality more shaped by integral humanism and compatible with liberal democracy to a completely secularised Christian humanism, are the ones who are now revisiting Christianity for entirely new reasons. It is precisely those who have lost their Christianity by engaging positively with the culture to the point of embracing secularism that are now discovering the importance of religion, particularly in protecting conscience and therefore their individual dignity. For example, in the aftermath of governmental impositions of COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates, people began to question the place of conscience with regard to the state’s understanding of the common good. It could be argued that the mandate which had begun to be imposed in too collectivist a manner neglected to account for lower levels of wisdom in society and thus contrary to a Catholic vision of subsidiarity. In Germany, it was instantly internalised as reminiscent of the horrors of totalitarian collectivism, and lockdowns evoked a strong resistance movement (Scally 2020). To many secularised Christians in Germany and America, it began to become apparent (ironically via social media, as a source of grassroots “truth”) that believing Christians had the courage to use their consciences and had the support of their Christian communities to make wise and prudent decisions about their freedom. This became very attractive for others who, while having left their faith behind, had begun to look only to the state as their decision-making compass but whose conscience was somehow alive, provoking them to think again—perhaps this time for themselves and finding others who thought the same. This link between strengthening conscience through communities of resistance has had many expressions historically (Pearce and Durham 2020; Holland 2025).17

In light of these developments, the Church and the wisdom of subsidiarity offer important lessons for the state. Democratic states can learn from the Church that government support of the common good has to be conducted in a way that gives due regard not only to the dignity of the individual (as Maritain advocated) but specifically to individual conscience and freedom to form associations, building up levels of subsidiarity and the virtue of practical wisdom in decision-making. In living out ecclesial communion within an increasingly individualistic and autonomous culture, the depth of practical wisdom and charity will be more apparent with regard to nihilistic and often anti-human elements of secular culture. While acknowledging that not every Christian community gives this witness, nevertheless, such strong communities will attract non-Christians to ask the reasons for the charity and hope lived by Christians (1 Pet 3:5). Also, unless Christian conviction is embodied confidently in a visible communion with institutional, doctrinal, and sacramental purposefulness and clarity, how can Christianity receive those who are searching to find the salvific light of faith?

5. Conclusions: Christianity Becoming Real in the Public Square—A New Integralism?

As we have seen, Maritain’s integral humanism was an entirely new approach for the Catholic Church engaging with culture, one that was consistent with her view on the Modern World and her ecclesiology from the Council onwards. No longer could the Church assert herself as a political power over rulers and citizens but, as Maritain articulated, she now had to attract people to Christianity not through imposing it, but through attraction. Only a vibrant and dynamic faith lived authentically by her members had the potential to transform society from within through Christian virtue and holiness. Maritain focused on recognising where God’s grace was at work in both the sacred and secular spheres to bring all parts of the world to Christ.

While this method has brought about significant dialogue between the Church and secular culture, as Maritain quickly realised, after the Second Vatican Council, it seemed that Christianity was succumbing to the secular world rather than transforming it. In his Peasant of the Garrone, he thus clarified that the pre-philosophical foundations needed for integral humanism had become obscured in most post-conciliar theological developments. As we have elaborated, he argued that the means to reinvigorate the integral humanist project is to reconnect faith with metaphysics, truth, and reason as well as demonstrate how the faith must be lived authentically in a holy life that permeates everyday life in little but transformative ways through charity and justice.

In this final section of this paper, we build on Maritain’s pre-political foundations and argue, using David C. Schindler’s The Politics of the Real, for a greater public presence of the Church in society. This is not to return to the type of integralism that Maritain rejected. It is not advocating a return to Leo XIII’s understanding that the state is the secular arm of the Church as articulated in Immortale Dei (Leo XIII 1885) and impossible today (Pink 2015, p. 11). However, Schindler, like Maritain, calls for a third way between liberalism on the one hand and integralism on the other and centres his ideas on similar pre-philosophical foundations to Maritain (Schindler 2021). In his later book God and the City, Schindler argues again that politics needs to rediscover its metaphysical moorings, connecting it back to being and allowing it to be fully itself (Schindler 2023, pp. 20–29). However, like Maritain and authors such as Deneen and Craycroft in the American context, Schindler is not hesitant in calling out the liberalist political project as inherently hostile to Catholicism since it essentially continues to confine religion to the private sphere. He would not believe, therefore, that Maritain’s incarnational project can be realised entirely in a liberal state unless major changes are made to the conditions of play, beginning by re-stating what we mean by ‘nature’ (Schindler 2021, p. 84). He knows (like Maritain ultimately had to admit) that the only Christian faith tolerated by liberal Christianity has no bearing on political or cultural institutions such as academics or education (“ibid., p. 253”).

Like Maritain had warned and Schindler states plainly, the liberal state embraces only a deist God and a voluntaristically conceived religion disconnected from metaphysics. It also penalises any religion with strong doctrinal content (263). Also, Schindler is not afraid to side with scholars like McInerny who critique how natural rights theory as conceived in a liberal state has fundamentally different philosophical foundations than a Christian one and thus a common understanding is only achieved at a pragmatic level which is completely vulnerable to manipulation.

It seems to me that Schindler goes beyond Maritain in recognising that Christianity must be able to reclaim a physical and visible place in the public square on its own terms. He wants it to reshape the conversation by reclaiming the Catholic meaning behind the common good and rights theory by highlighting its metaphysical roots. In this way, what is “Catholic” is also what is universally applicable. The Catholic understanding of the common good, for example, is more than that of secular theorists since it is based on human flourishing, which can only be achieved with God (p. 118). Also, the Catholic understanding of natural rights theory reconnects with tradition and the teleological character of nature (p. 178).

While Maritain championed dialogue with liberal politics and was always radical in his critique of integralism, it seems to me that one of his main failures is that he did not move beyond that critique to ask whether it might be important for the Church to have a more visible and specific influence in society. However, as we have mentioned, perhaps it was never seen as a necessary discussion at the time when institutional Catholicism was so strong. Schindler, by contrast, while also rejecting integralism, has sympathy for the desire of integralists to extend the Church into society. Schindler, more than Maritain, takes the same pre-philosophical foundations as a way for Christianity to take its rightful place in secular society on its own terms. For Schindler, the faith reconnected with metaphysical truth is called to testify in society to the “good that fulfills human nature” (p. 250). The Church and Christianity must offer politics and culture a new metaphysical understanding of man and the whole of reality (p. 250). The Church can explain in a more specific way that the human pursuit of the good is actually the pursuit of God. Like MacIntyre, Schindler calls for prudence but not as a type of pragmatism that chooses the best good from among some goods but rather as an intellectual virtue that chooses the good as the end (p. 401).18 The Church has that prudence and gift of discernment in abundance and has it to offer to society to help its citizens choose the good (Lamb 1994, p. 133). As Schindler argues, it is only when social and political ideas are expressed in “real” (metaphysical) ways that Christianity can have any impact on societal and political transformation. As we have argued, this can be expressed by Christians at the level of real associations at various levels, including the Church, family, and communities. Yet this should be conducted not in an isolationist way, since, to feed into societal transformation, it needs a corresponding more specific visible and sacramental intensity to prepare Christians to take their place in society as a witness.

For Schindler, a new gentle type of Christendom actually calls for the Church to be much more courageous in putting forward this message about God as the final end of humanity, since without it, society is in danger of falling into a form of totalitarian oppression by the state (p. 313). Like Maritain, he argues that unless the state recognises the importance of religion in this way, the state will seek to move in and take the place of religion itself (p. 376). Schindler goes so far as to call this a new type of integralism, a “political order … founded in the ecclesial order” since at its centre is the “ultimate and eternal destiny of man” (p. 367). Maritain’s approach also clearly understood the need for the state to recognise that the Church is superior to it since it represents a higher good (Pink 2015, p. 12), but it stands or falls on the goodwill of the liberal state towards religion.

Schindler (similar to Maritain) is not calling for a new type of theocratic Christendom that imposes a type of direct rule over humanity but rather a gentle Christendom in the sense that the Church is reclaiming its indirect power over humanity to bring it back to its identity, namely, true communion with God. In this sense, he agrees with Maritain, but he still goes beyond him in two ways. Firstly, he has seen how the liberal state today is evolving from a Christian form of secularism to a form more similar to that of French laïcité (and something Maritain warned against). Therefore, he clearly argues that the liberal state today increasingly expects religion to be solely contained to the private sphere. Secondly, he goes further than Maritain in his Christendom in that he argues that the state needs to endorse the metaphysical aspects of religion precisely because “the political opens up ‘naturally’ to the ecclesial, which transcends it” since “political community is ordered to the comprehensive common good” (Schindler 2023, p. 66). Thus, he argues that the state is responsible for ensuring that those who live in the “City of Man” are also living “in the City of God” by “institutionalizing the proper relation to God so conceived” (“ibid.”, p. 72–73). Rather than see the Church as one part of the temporal “city”, the Church is the “soul” that infuses the city, as in an Aristotelian metaphysics, the soul infuses the whole body (“ibid., p. 161”). The state needs the Church for her survival and to remind her that God’s grace cannot be excluded from his own creation, including the “City of Man”. The principles of grace which Maritain also recognised mean that the operations of the temporal sphere (“the city”) cannot be dualistically conceived as operating without reference to the spiritual, even through the temporal (“ibid., p. 158”).

From this vision then, when the Church speaks and witnesses confidently in society according to her own theological and metaphysical principles, she can also indirectly help the state. It is when the transcendental, metaphysical aspects of the human being are acknowledged that the political, economic, and social spheres function in a way that upholds the inviolable dignity of the human being and conscience and so avoids a sliding tendency to totalitarianism. As Pink states, since people within modern society have lost the ability to reason correctly and think according to the natural law, the state needs the Church more than ever, to assist people in doing so (Pink 2015, p. 33).

Building on the pre-philosophical foundations articulated by Maritain, Ratzinger, and Schindler, I wish to conclude by outlining some key points for a more public expression of Christian faith in secular culture. I do not use the word integralism to evoke even a “gentle” version of it, nor even the indirect power of Bellarmine, nor argue that the Church must seek to impose herself in a pluralistic society (Douthat 2022). Rather, I begin with the idea that the Church needs to change how she understands herself theologically in relation to society and therefore reconceptualise how she understands integral humanism. The transcendent truths the Church represents are divine and therefore above the culture, but these are metaphysically true for all humanity. Only when the Church is convinced of this can she succeed in witnessing in a public way so that the state might be open to the idea of it for the reasons we have just articulated. Immediately, we are reminded of the importance of interpreting the incarnation properly—as the Christ of Chalcedon with divine and human natures united hypostatically. Another more contemporary articulation of the ongoing incarnation is the concept of Christ the sacrament of God and specifically the Church as the sacrament of Christ articulated by the ecclesiology of the Council (LG 1).

With reference to the concept of the Church as the sacrament of salvation (building on the pre-philosophical or metaphysical foundations mentioned), we recognise that the Church has a task and purpose to bring all humanity, and not just Catholics, into communion with God and others since the Church is both the sign and the instrument of that reality. As a sacramental sign, she represents that reality for others, and as an instrument, she is also the means for others to come into that full communion through Christ the author of all salvation and her head and source of grace. Since, as the sacrament of Christ, she is composed of both divine and human elements in the image of her Spouse (LG 8), she is therefore that sacrament of the real which Schindler speaks of. The idea of sacrament is a way of holding together both the Church’s divine origin whilst also recognising her specific incarnational place in the temporal sphere of creation as a way of leading Christians and all human beings (through the culture) to their true identity in God (beyond it). This perhaps also allows for a more visible and slightly separate means of distinguishing how the Church relates to the temporal sphere. Using the Augustinian analogy, the visible Church cannot be equated to the City of God since many in the visible Church are not in union with God, just as the social and political spheres are not purely equated to the City of Man, since many in the City of Man are in grace. However, the Church as sacrament represents and must be the instrument of the City of God (union with God) for both the ecclesial and socio-political spheres.19

Thus, for the Church to specifically bring human beings to Christ, she must, as Maritain would acknowledge, be missionary in an incarnational way of living holiness in the temporal sphere. Yet I would argue furthermore that she cannot do this solely in hidden ways through charity, humility, and ultimately suffering (as Maritain advocates). Rather, I would argue that being incarnational as the sacrament of salvation from the understanding of grace as non-dualistic, the Church must engage human beings at every level: humanly, spiritually, pastorally, and intellectually. David L. Schindler speaks of a new mindset to be embodied in every aspect of liberal society, to reawaken in it the memory of God. This, he argues, will happen by our living “more profoundly our reality as from-and-for God and others … in a way that draws eternity into every moment and place in our life” (Schindler 2011, p. 165). Building a more visible public witness of the Church and Christ in society calls for an intellectual as well as existential explanation of how Christianity and Christ offer the answer to that quest for meaning, in a way similar to how Pope St John Paul developed the understanding of the Christo-centric fulfilment of culture from Gaudium et Spes, 22 (Saward 1995).

Going beyond Maritain’s integral humanism to the Church as a sacramental sign of salvation must allow the Church not only to point to metaphysical truths but to do this in a way that draws on revelation. The Church needs to be a more concrete and specifically Christian sign to fulfil her identity as a universal sign for others of their identity and destiny. Since the Church is the sacrament of Christ, her explicit testimony must be Christ who is to be visibly, doctrinally, and sacramentally enculturated in the Church as a sacrament for all cultures. To be that specific sacrament of salvation in the public, social, and political sphere, I offer the following ideas, in the briefest form but as a point of departure for discussion.

Firstly, building on Maritain’s vision of integral humanism grounded in metaphysics, Christianity and the Church must be confident in entering public conversation knowing that its faith is something that provides a light for society and yet is not contradictory to reason which is open to truth. It thus does not simply provide an anthropology for believers alone but for all humanity. The faith must therefore connect with the deeper questions faced by all human beings—to do with life, meaning, death, suffering, and love (Second Vatican Council 1965).20 Christianity must move beyond the secular terms offered for supposedly common ideas and rather offer society its specific understanding of the common good, the dignity of the person, and human rights based on this inviolable dignity of creatures in God. It must articulate the revealed understanding that the human being is made for goodness, the natural law, ultimately God. Also, as James Shea explains, the Church’s specific teachings, for example, its moral teachings, only make sense when articulated within its entire sacramental vision of created reality mediating God’s presence (Shea 2020, p. 68). The current age that has led Christians astray through forms of secular humanism does not mean that the Church should react by attempting to rebuild a Christendom in the political sphere (not that she could) but rather that she believes in its message and proclaims it. As Shea puts it, “The Church in an apostolic time [as distinct from a time of a strongly visible Christendom] needs to have the same confidence in the power and goodness of the message she bears, in its life-changing potency, in the Church’s power of regeneration and growth” (“ibid., p. 37”).

Secondly, Christianity can offer to secular culture not only ideas about the relation between God and man but also embody them incarnationally and visibly, paralleling what MacIntyre advocates about handing on virtues in communities. As Schindler puts it, in the sphere of politics, the good that man “loves” will be more attractive the more it is perceived as lived in a community (Schindler 2023, p. 81). The Church as sacrament reveals human destiny as communion with God and others in a way that testifies to it in her parish communities, her schools, her universities, and at all the levels of subsidiarity and association that we have discussed. Secular society is perishing due to individuality, isolation, and idolised autonomy, and the Church offers a tangible “sacrament” of fellowship that is not fleeting but rooted in divine eternal love. It is perfected through the Eucharist, and thus, the Church is the most inclusive reality transcending all sociological and political conceptions of community. While “the Benedict option” has been criticised for opting out of society, the idea of trying to rebuild a Catholic identity by re-grouping apart from the secular culture is what might be needed to adequately form and imbibe Catholic culture intellectually, humanly, and spiritually to then contribute to secular culture. In this way, these Catholic communities become ecclesial “signs of salvation” for others in very tangible, visible ways to better embody for society what society needs for its flourishing.

Thirdly, theology connecting with the metaphysical order must have the confidence to take its place in the public square for the sake of human wisdom. By failing to do this, it is allowing the empirical sciences to dominate conversation about anthropology, culture, society, educational pedagogy, and politics on its own terms and become ideological at worst. Of course, ideologically empirical stances will make it increasingly difficult for the voice of the Church, and even the voice of reason, to be given a chance to speak in a secular public forum. Thus, the establishment of separate Catholic colleges and universities (again to be the “sign of salvation” in the culture) may be the only way to hand on Catholic culture and form consciences adequately to witness to society the true understanding of humans in community. The highest intellectual resources and means within the Christian culture need to be put at the service of a strong intellectual articulation of the faith. Without advocating an over-rationalistic approach, we nevertheless argue for the return of some of the precision of a scholastic culture that engages, excites, and draws the intellect. This will also be handed on only by the tangible witness of virtuous communities and the valuing of debate and discussion as in a type of Socratic academy.

Fourthly, we agree with Maritain that the heart of true authentic faith is holiness and that ultimately it is the holiness of the saints that transforms the world. Being holy also connects to the actualisation of the understanding of the Church as the sacrament of Christ in the world through its members in a truly ontological way that touches the depths of being and in this way is truly “real”. It also connects to love and the fire of the Holy Spirit, which the world needs. As Pope Benedict XVI points out, the distinctive “loving personal concern” offered by Christians in the world is much more than the sterile justice that the state can provide but yet what the world needs (Benedict XVI 2005, n. 28; Schindler 2011, p. 147).

As Maritain states and Pope Francis agrees, the “little way” of St Thérèse is the perfect way of lay holiness for the Church today to infuse all temporal actions with charity (Francis 2023). St Francis of Assisi, another saint beloved of Maritain and Pope Francis, advocated dialogue based on charity rather than intellectual debate. There is no doubt that St Francis, in particular, was very relevant for the immediate post-conciliar period with its emphasis on dialogue and affective rather than propositional faith. Yet there are different saints for different stages of the Church’s development. Just as there is not just one way of transforming the temporal culture and infusing it with Christian values, so integral humanism’s development needs new models to testify to the Church as a sacrament today. As history has revealed, every renewal of the Church took place not from “the top” but through those whose lives “anticipated most perfectly the City of God” (Jones 2021, p. 346).

The Church’s work of opening causes for sainthood must listen carefully to the call of the People of God who choose witnesses among them to encourage them to more perfectly engage with contemporary culture in radically Christ-like ways. The Church needs witnesses of saints who live authentically at the level of “being” (living communion with God and fellow humanity) in ordinary temporal spheres,21 including saints who witness to the Church as sacrament through their marriages and families, “the domestic Church”, but also needs saints who will have the courage to more directly challenge and confront ideological thinking where it exists in secular culture. Like Maritain advocated, integral humanism is at its heart Christian humanism radically different to atheistic humanism. Christian integral humanism expressed in the Church exists to inform secular humanism to rediscover the meaning of conscience, truth, beauty, and true life, including eternal life. Some prophetic examples have emerged among contemporary academics, writers, and even Church leaders, who are not afraid to call for a truly intellectual debate with advocates of a “neutral” secularity. Also needed are examples of social political leaders with courage to speak metaphysical truths to the culture (Dicastery for the Causes of the Saints 2024; Zenit 2024).22 These witnesses will testify counter-culturally in a cruciform way rather than an “anonymously Christian” way (Von Balthasar 1969). Let us allow ourselves to be surprised by new expressions of God’s grace in his saints to reconcile culture to himself in these times (2 Cor 5: 19).