"Jacques Maritain and Leo XIII on the Problem of Church-State Relations"

My essay, “Jacques Maritain and Leo XIII on the Problem of Church-State Relations,” was just published in The Things That Matter: Essays Inspired by the Later Work of Jacques Maritain (Catholic University of America Press and the American Maritain Association). The abstract:

Jacques Maritain wrote in Man and the State (1951) that the “complete differentiation and full autonomy” of the temporal sphere found in the modern, secular age fulfilled the “very distinction between God’s and Caesar’s domains” found in the Gospel. Thomas Pink has argued that such a view is incompatible with what he calls the “Leonine model” of soul-body union articulated by Pope Leo XIII in Immortale Dei (1885). Pink’s claim that Maritain opposed Leonine teaching on Church-state relations, however, does not succeed for two reasons. Firstly, his conclusion overlooks critical qualifications in Man and the State that saves Maritain’s theory from advancing a strict separationist view of Church-state relations. Secondly, Pink ignores one of Maritain’s early works, Things that are not Caesar’s (1931), which reveals his full support of Leonine teaching in the tradition of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Robert Bellarmine. Nevertheless, Pink’s critique of Maritain occasions important reflections on the relationship between principles and practicalities in the debates over Church and state. While Maritain’s view does not contradict what he and Leo XIII considered to be the immutable principles of Church-state relations, it remains to be seen whether Maritain’s practically attainable ideal is still, in fact, practically attainable.

You can order a copy here.

I’m especially grateful to Janice Chik Breidenbach, Bill McCormick, Michael Pakaluk, Tom Pink, and the volume editor, Heidi Giebel.