By Veronica Roberts Ogle, Public Discourse.
If Augustine’s two cities can’t be neatly mapped onto the modern distinction between Church and State, how can his thought help illumine Church-State relations?
If Augustine’s two cities can’t be neatly mapped onto the modern distinction between Church and State, how can his thought help illumine Church-State relations? Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) show us the Augustinian approach by beginning their reflections on Church and State with the question, “What is the Church?”
Writing in 1942 that this question had been too often neglected, de Lubac warns that if we only begin thinking about the Church in moments of contention, we will lose the theological perspective that would allow us to distinguish it from the State at the deepest level. Finding in Augustine a Eucharistic ecclesiology that sharpens this distinction, de Lubac goes on to develop it in ways that also deeply influence Ratzinger. At the core of this ecclesiology is the idea that “the Eucharist makes the Church and the Church makes the Eucharist;” or, as Augustine put it, Christ gave us the Eucharist “so that we might be the body of so great a head.” This means that the Church is intimately united with Christ, bound together in him by a communion that he initiates; but she is still in the process of becoming what she will be through this union.
Importantly, this ecclesiology allows both de Lubac and Ratzinger to critique ways of thinking about Church–State relations that begin with a political–juridical framework. While they both acknowledge the Church’s juridical structure as important, they insist that starting with it obscures the true nature of the Church’s spiritual authority. Reaching back to a theological starting point, Ratzinger, for his part, develops an account of spiritual authority rooted in Christ’s confession that he can “do nothing of himself” (John 5:19, 5:30).