Living an Integrated Life

Editor’s Note: This is the 10th in a series on Catholic culture.

Have we still got a Christian consensus around which Americans of every possible persuasion can rally round? A public philosophy, that is, whose strength and wisdom continue to inspire support? And if so, what is the core principle that binds us together as a people? It is, I would argue, the belief that God—not doctors or lawyers or politicians—is the Author of life and that we are its custodians and shepherds. We are not arbiters of a gift which only God can give, but rather, beneficiaries of a blessing which we ought both to be grateful for and to defend.    

Is the house I live in free and clear because I paid for it, or does God still hold the mortgage? “God owns the world,” writes St. Josemaría Escrivá, “but he rents it out to the brave.” And so we need to be brave in order to defend the things of God, beginning with human life—especially the most innocent and vulnerable. And because life does not generate itself but issues forth from the loins of human love, situated within the matrix of a family subject to God as the Father of us all, we need to protect this most basic and necessary institution. 

Everything that touches upon human life is of supreme interest to God. Thus, there are things we must not do and there are other things we must do. The Church, as Bride and Body of Christ, remains guardian and guarantor of both. “She is,” to quote Vatican II, “a sign and safeguard of the transcendent dignity of the human person.” It is her job to keep the moral tablets, burnishing them, when necessary, with the blood of the martyrs.

All of which brings me to the following thesis, which is at the heart of a wonderful little book that first came out in 1965 by a French Jesuit and cardinal by the name of Jean Daniélou. It is called Prayer as a Political Problem, and it worked a great sea change in my life when I first came across it in Spain in the summer of 1970 beneath the shadow of the Escorial, “Spain’s massive poem in stone” as the philosopher Ortega y Gasset once described it.

The book begins with a question, the answer to which will, Daniélou says, “make the existence of a Christian people possible in the civilization of tomorrow.” However, it is a most contentious question, rooted in a recognition not widely shared these days—which is that “the religious problem is a mass problem” and that there is something “incongruous” about the “juxtaposition of a private religion and an irreligious society.” It is a question central to the task of doing civil theology, which consists of finding useful ways to graft the insights of the Gospel onto the institutions of a people, without doing the least violence to either the Gospel or to the institutions of the society in which people live.

It is, in point of fact, the very question which he has written the book to try and answer. “How,” he asks, “are society and religion to be joined without either making religion a tool of the secular power, or the secular power the tool of religion?” We certainly don’t want to instrumentalize one at the expense of the other, do we? No one, for instance, is in favor of having the mayor tell the bishop how to run his diocese, any more than we want the bishop instructing the mayor on how to run his city. 

None of us wants a theocracy, where every civic detail is nailed down by the Church. Nor do we wish to have a totally secularized order, in which the sacred, if it is to survive at all, must be privatized, which is to say, remain in the basement of the soul. But notice the planted axiom here: both secular and sacred are to be joined in some way, the only question being how and to what extent.

The axiom is an important one, by the way, because it needs to be understood at the outset that, for the generality of humankind, life is lived in two worlds, our membership belonging both to the order of nature and to that of grace, the City of Man and the City of God. The Christian component in the equation, therefore, requires that it be lived out, dramatized at every turn in one’s work and play—from the politics one practices, to the books one reads, to the movies one sees or the music one listens to, to the friends one makes, all the way over to the form of the city in which one chooses to live. We are not disincarnate beings, after all, for whom the encounter with God, with the whole realm of the sacred, must somehow take place in a totally dematerialized universe. We are, from the first moment of our existence, already in the body, both our own and the world’s body, which implies weight and extension. 

This is why any impediment placed upon the public expression of one’s faith, or one which will refuse any externalization of the life of interiority, becomes really an attack on the very possibility of living a completely integrated life. It disallows the soul access to an important part of the stage on which he or she is expected to live, to speak the lines that God has given one to say. A soul thus deprived of incarnate expression, constrained to assume an almost angelic state, would suffer great torment for want of that carnal companionship God intended from the beginning when He joined body and soul together. It is, quite simply, to force a man out into a condition of dissociation he was never created to have to endure.

Whether or not an integrated life is likely to happen, of course, will depend on the image or conception of the Church that one favors. Of which, says Daniélou, there are two available options and no room to maneuver between them. For some, he says, the Church should ideally serve as a kind of sign, “giving witness in the world to that which surpasses the world…keep it clear of civilization lest its purity be compromised.” 

This was, for example, the position taken by Kierkegaard, that fierce 19th-century Danish Lutheran, for whom there could never be a Christian culture, that only individual Christians could exist. “A Christian world,” he declared with dogmatic certitude, “is nonsense.” Or John Calvin, for that matter, who insisted that the Church “is the company of the faithful whom God has ordained and elected to eternal life” and that it can quite easily “exist without visible appearance at all.”  

So much for the first conception which, when offered as a paradigm of perfection, remains sublimely pure but, at the same time, suffers from a singular shortcoming, which is that it remains so narrowly sectarian, so exclusively spiritual, that few would ever care to belong to it. We will enlarge upon this in the following chapter…