Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 14.djvu/98

 SOCIETY

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SOCIETY

which they thus freely accept is determined for them by the natural law according to Nature's full purpose. Husband and wife may see to their personal benefit in choosing to establish a domestic communitj', but the interests of the child and of the future race are safeguarded by the law. The essential purpose of this society we have stated above. The essential requisite of authority takes on a divided character of partnership, because of the separate functions of husband and wife requiring authority as well as calling for harmonious agreement upon details of common interest: but the headship of final decision is put by the law, as a matter of ordinary course, in the man, as is shown by his natural characteristics marking him for the preference. The essential limitations forlDid plural marriage, race-suicide, sexual excess, unnecessary separation, and absolute divorce.

The State a Natural Society. — On the same principle of human aptitude, propensity, and need for the individual and the race, we find the larger social unit of civil society manifested to us as part of the Divine set purpose with regard to human nature, and go under precept of the natural law. Again, the ex- ceptional individual may take to solitude for some ennobling purpose; but he is an exception, and the bulk of mankind will not hesitate to fulfil Nature's bidding and accomplish Nature's purpose. In the concrete instance civil society, though morally in- cumbent on man to establish, still comes into existence by the exercise of his free activity. We have seen the same of domestic society, which begins by the mutual free consent of man and woman to the accept- ance of the bond involving all the natural rights and duties of the permanent matrimonial relation. The beginning of civil society as an historical fact has taken on divers colours, far different at different times and places. It has arisen by peaceful expansion of a family into a widespread kindred eventually linked together in a civil union. It has sprung from the multiplication of independent families in the colonizing of undeveloped lands. It has come into being under the strong hand of conquest enforcing law, order, and civil organization, not always justly, upon a people. There have been rare instances of its birth through the tutoring efforts of the gentler type of civilizers, who came to spread the Gospel. But the juridical origin is not obviously identical with this. History alone exhibits only the manifold confluent causes which moved men into an organized civil unit. The juridical cause is quite another matter. This is the cause which of its character under the natural law puts the actual moral bond of civil union upon the many in the concrete, imposes the concrete obligation involving all the rights, duties, and powers native to a State, even as the mutual consent of the contracting parties creates the mutual bond of initial domestic society. This determinant has been under dispute among Catholic teachers.

The common view of Scholastic philosophy, so ably developed by Francis Suarez, S.J., sets it in the con- sent of the constituent members, whether given ex- Elicitly in the acceptance of a constitution, or tacitly y submitting to an organization of another's making, even if this consent be not given by immediate sur- render, but by gradual process of slow and often reluc- tant acquiescence in the stability of a common union for the essential civil jiurpose. In the early fifties of the nineteenth century Luigi Taparelli, S.J., borrowing an idea from C. de Haller of Berne, brilliantly developed a theory of the juridical origin of civil government, which has dominated in the Italian Catholic schools even to the present day, as well as in Catholic schools in Europe, whose professors of ethics have been of Italian training. In this theory civil society has grown into being from the natural multiplication of cognate families, and the gradual extension of parental power. The patriarchal State

is the primitive form, the normal type, though by accident of circumstance States may begin here or there from occupation of the same wide territory un- der feudal ownership; by organization consequent upon conquest; or in rarer instances by the common consent of independent colonial freeholders. These two Catholic views part company also in declaring the primitive juridical determinant of the concrete subject of supreme authority (see Authority, Civil). To-day the Catholic schools are divided between these two positions. We shall subjoin below other theories of the juridical origin of the State, which have no place in Catholic thought for the simple reason that they exclude the natural character of civil society and- throw to the winds the principles logically inseparable from the existing natural law.

With regard to the essential elements in civil so- ciety fixed by the natural law, it is first to be noted that the normal unit is the family: for not only has the family come historically before the common- wealth, but the natural needs of man lead him first to that social combination, in pursuit of a natural result only to be obtained thereby; and it is logically only subsequent that the purpose of civil society comes into human fife. Of course this does not mean that indi- viduals actually outside of the surroundings of family life cannot be constituent members of ci\dl society with full civic rights and duties, but they are not the primary unit; they are in the nature of things the ex- ception, however numerous they may be, and beyond the family limit of perfectibihty it is in the interest of complementary development that ci\'il activity is exercised. The State cannot eliminate the family; neither can it rob it of its inalienable rights, nor bar the fulfilment of its inseparable duties, though it may restrict the exercise of certain family activities so as to co-ordinate them to the benefit of the body politic.

Secondly, the natural object pursued by man in his ultimate social activity is perfect temporal happiness, the satisfacton, to wit, of his natural faculties to the full power of their development within his capacity, on his way, of course, to eternal felicity beyond earth. Man's happiness carmot be handed over to him, or thrust upon him by another here on earth; for his na- ture supposes that his possession of it, and so too in large measure his achievement of it, shall be by the exercise of his native faculties. Hence, civil society is destined by the natural law to give him his opportu- nity, i. e. to give it to all who share its citizenship. This shows the proximate natural purpose of the State to be: first, to estabUsh and preserve social or- der, a condition, namely, wherein everj- man, as far as may be, is secured in the possession and free exercise of all his rights, natural and legal, and is held up to the fulfilment of his duties as far as they bear upon the common weal; secondly, to put within reasonable reach of all citizens a fair allowance of the means of temporal happiness. This is what is known as external peace and prosperity, prosperity being also denomi- nated the relatively perfect sufficiency of life. There are misconceptions enough about the generic purpose native to all civil society. De Haller thought that there is none such; that civil purposes are all specific, peculiar to each specific State. Kant limited it to external peace. The Manchester School did the same, leaving the citizen to work out his subsistence and de- velopment as best he may. The Evolutionist con- sistently makes it the sur\-ival of the fittest, on the way to developing a better t^^5e. The modern peril is to treat the citizen merely as an industrial unit, niis- taking national material progress for the goal of civic energy; or as a military unit, looking to self-preserva- tion as the nation's first if not only aim. Neither material progress nor martial power, nor merely in- tellectual civilization, can fill the requirements of ex- isting and expanding human nature. The State, while protecting a man's rights, must put liim in the