Humans were created for social relationships.
Among the implications of the creation accounts in the first two chapters of Genesis is that the human person is a social creature in the very essence of his being. The human is created in and for social relationships. In the first creation account, the human person is created as “male and female”, indicating that neither is complete without the other. This is made even more emphatic in the second creation account, where God says: “It is not good for the man to be alone”, and in which the author indicates that the completion of the one is the creation of the other. Thus, each knows himself and herself, respectively, only in relation to the other. This social nature of the human person is an aspect of what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God, an eternal community of three persons in one being. This “dynamic of reciprocity that gives life to the ‘we’ in the human couple, is an image of God”, as the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (CSDC) puts it.
Thus, as Vatican II’s Gaudium et Spes notes, “by his innermost nature man is a social being, and unless he relates himself to others, he can neither live nor develop his potential” (Sec. 12). The natural state of the human person is in relationship with others, sustained by truthful witness to the good. Society is not something extraneous or incidental to human life, but rather is intrinsic to what it means to be human. We are created in and for community. We know ourselves most fully in relationship to others around us. The obverse, of course, is that we do not know ourselves authentically apart from the presence of our fellow human creatures. The “I” is only intelligible in relation to another “I”, who becomes “Thou”. Surely, this must be at least one implication of the command, “Love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:31).
It naturally follows that the full integrity of the human person is achieved and recognised only to the extent that his social nature is affirmed and fostered. Thus, while we recognise and protect individual moral agency as the necessary condition for moral action, we also affirm that our moral lives are necessarily entwined with the moral lives of our fellows. This implies that the Church’s moral thinking is always concerned with the human person in community with others. Put another way, all moral doctrine is social doctrine.
Historically, this might sound somewhat anomalous. The body of teaching that we call Catholic Social Doctrine is a relatively late development. Most scholars recognise that CSD began as a distinct body of theological reflection as recently as 1891 with the promulgation of Pope Leo XIII’s landmark encyclical, Rerum Novarum. And, indeed, the Church’s deliberative application of its doctrine to concrete questions of labour and employment, economic structures, environmental issues, political life and war and peace, among other issues, is a recent development. But the fundamental anthropology that informs this new body of doctrine is at the very heart of Christian moral thought from its beginning. While the specific, sustained applications of these truths to social institutions are relatively new, the truths themselves are as ancient as all Christian doctrine, whose foundation is the creation accounts of Genesis.
Thus, an exploration of the application of Catholic moral teaching to social and political issues will be framed within this body of moral reflection known as Catholic Social Doctrine. This doctrine is built upon a foundation of four central pillars: the inherent dignity of the human person, the solidarity of all humankind, the subsidiary nature of social structures, and the common good.
Dignity is found in the unalienable image of God in every human person. Solidarity and subsidiarity are mirror doctrines that recognise and protect our common dignity through the development of moral agency. Common good is both the set of conditions in which dignity, solidarity and subsidiarity can flourish, and the product of their observation. Because one cannot make any moral judgement apart these pillars, all moral doctrine is social doctrine. In the Catholic tradition, there’s no such thing as “private” morality.
Understood together, these doctrines present a coherent body of teaching that transcends the individualism of modern liberal democracies, in both their left and right variations. Catholic social doctrine is not a “middle way” between the extremes of modern secular political rhetoric and policy, because it is not on the same continuum. Catholic social doctrine is neither “liberal” nor “conservative”, because it does not correspond to the political noun that these partisan adjectives typically modify. Rather, the Church’s social teaching offers a different moral language. It is a language consistent with the nature of the human person, while recognising that that nature is fallen. This teaching recognises and protects the integrity of the human person as a moral agent. But it avoids the false story of autonomous individualism that informs the broad spectrum of contemporary liberal politics.
This month’s column is adapted from Chapter Three of Dr Craycraft’s forthcoming book, Citizens Yet Strangers: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America (Our Sunday Visitor Press), and printed with permission.
This article first appeared in the February 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, go here.
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