Grounding the State in the Christian Creed

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Grounding the State in the Christian Creed

A culture without public prayer is a culture that no political intervention can preserve.

Regis Martin

If the life of prayer is a vocation offered to all, then it follows that the practice of prayer must equally be within the reach of all. It is not an esoteric exercise, in other words, for which only the most gifted athletes of the spirit may qualify. There is no human being on the planet to whom God has ever refused the invitation to pray. 

But what exactly is prayer and why do we need it? The Catechism is wonderfully direct on the subject, calling it “a vital and personal relationship with the living and true God” (2558), followed by this charming little chestnut from the Little Flower, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, which is both brief and exquisite: “For me, prayer is a surge of the heart; it is a simple look turned toward heaven, it is a cry of recognition and of love, embracing both trial and joy.” 

Quite simply, then, prayer is what happens when we turn to God, talk to God, on whom our dependence remains absolute and unending. It is a dialogue we choose to enter into with God, destined not to end in this world but to deepen and expand over time until, on the other side of death, we join the company of God and His angels and saints—for all eternity, too. And because there is no one on earth whom God does not wish to have “a vital and personal relationship with,” we take it as a given that we were created by God in the first place in order that He might solicit our freedom to choose Him and to fall headlong in love with Him—always and everywhere.

However, a life of prayer is not only the most intimate and necessary experience we can have—and no human being should be denied access to God through the medium of prayer—but prayer is indispensable to the effort, the struggle even, to prevent an asphyxiation that would otherwise leave us all literally gasping for breath were we unable, or unwilling, to pray. We really are quite desperate for the oxygen on which our souls depend. Not to pray, therefore, is the most impoverishing condition of all, made far worse by so many who mistakenly believe they do not need to pray. It is the most corrupting of lies that we tell ourselves.  

“Destitution,” warns Daniélou, “is the condition of man left to himself, deprived of the energies of God.” To imagine oneself as “sound substantial flesh and blood,” as the poet Eliot puts it in Four Quartets—“and yet in spite of which we call this Friday good”—is to fall into the cleverest of traps set by the devil, that we really do not need God or grace in order to achieve the good life, to arrive at a condition of perfect harmony and happiness, what Aristotle meant by eudaemonia, which is a life governed by reason and an upright will.

Prayer is thus an absolutely necessary human experience; a means whereby we are given energy to survive spiritually. And because, as Daniélou will argue, it is so essential, so positively imperative both for our temporal well-being and for that final and eternal felicity we desire above all else, it remains a fundamental element in the common good which has always been the chief business of politics to secure. “No true polity can exist,” he says, “where there is no room for prayer.” It is surely among the key ingredients to the life of grace. “Man without grace,” Eric Voegelin once said, “is demonic nothingness.”

Again, without prayer and that access to God through adoration which yields the grace and repose of the soul, human society becomes a place where no true and lasting nourishment of the soul is possible—especially for the poor, the average and mediocre, whose strength of character cannot long survive a world impervious to prayer, to that “poetry of the transcendent” about which my old colleague and mentor Fritz Wilhelmsen would often speak. “If we accept a complete dissociation of the sacred and the profane worlds,” writes Daniélou, “we shall make access to prayer absolutely impossible to the mass of mankind. Only a few would be able to find God in a world organized without reference to him.”

Without prayer and that access to God through adoration which yields the grace and repose of the soul, human society becomes a place where no true and lasting nourishment of the soul is possible.

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Undeniably, therefore, religion remains a “mass problem.” That is to say, “There cannot be a personal Christianity unless there is also a social Christianity.” Or, putting it in its most succinct form, “there can be no mass Christianity outside Christendom.” It is the one medium most consequential to any sort of collective expression of the Catholic Thing. “Before the faith,” says Daniélou, “can be truly rooted in a country it must penetrate its civilization and bring into existence a Christendom.” And for such a thing, mirabile dictu, to happen, what is above all necessary is to have the faith recognized by Caesar as right and good and true.

Unless the temporal order, over which the Caesars of this world preside, makes suitable provision for God, for the truth of the Christian religion, the poor will remain sadly bereft. “To cleave to Christianity,” says Daniélou, recalling the world before res publica Christiana, “called then for a strength of character of which the majority of men are not capable.” And so, he argues, the conversion of Constantine, in removing those obstacles, the impediments to the public recognition of the reality of God and His Church, suddenly made the whole life of the Gospel accessible to the poor.

In other words, we must somehow get Caesar to ground the state, its ultimate sanction for being and for doing business, in God and in the Church Christ founded to be His extension and prolongation in the world. In short, we must obtain as a political principle of unity the public profession of the Christian Creed, the true faith of the Triune God. To which the alternative, of course, is that blood and beastliness which marked the pagan Roman world without Christ; an instructive example of which being the savage spectacles of torture and death performed in the Colosseum to amuse the corrupt citizenry of the empire and their depraved appetites.  

It is a setting which, even now, evokes those countless souls whose mortal agonies were staged to distract and divert the mob. Few acres on earth were drenched with so much human blood as this deadly oval. The ancient world, to be sure, was cruel; and human life was cheap. But no ancient people seemed more meticulous or systematic about organizing its cruelties, its floggings, tortures, burnings, crucifixions, and massacres of prisoners, or so openly enjoyed watching them, as the Romans did.

Set about baptizing Rome somehow, and see how much easier the practice of virtue becomes for men and women for whom the struggle to be good is seen as always arduous and unappealing.    

Author

Regis Martin

Regis Martin is Professor of Theology and Faculty Associate with the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. He earned a licentiate and a doctorate in sacred theology from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome. Martin is the author of a number of books, including Still Point: Loss, Longing, and Our Search for God (2012) and The Beggar’s Banquet (Emmaus Road). His most recent book, published by Sophia Institute Press, is March to Martyrdom: Seven Letters on Sanctity from St. Ignatius of Antioch.