A Sacrament, Not a Contract: De Bonald, Donoso Cortés & the Centrality of Marriage in Christian Civilization
“…counter-revolutionary authors sensed from the very beginning — and legitimately so — that in all revolutionary formulations there was something that transcended the formulations themselves.”
Plinio Correa de Oliveria, Revolution and Counter-Revolution
Note: For citations and explanatory footnotes, please see the original version of this post.
There is perhaps no better measure of the acute depletion of social capital under liberalism than the collapse of marriage, the attendant disordering of family life, and the consequent decline in fertility, morality, and social stability. In the decades following the French Revolution, the most astute observers of early modernity saw this looming disaster for what it was, anticipating much of what would befall a fracturing society increasingly adrift under rationalist, secular rule. Among the most prescient of these defenders of the rapidly unravelling Christian civilization were Louis Vicomte de Bonald (1754–1840) and Juan Donoso Cortés, marqués de Valdegamas (1809–1853). Despite being ‘consigned to the dustbin’ for many decades as hopelessly simple-minded reactionaries, both retain significant contemporary relevance to those interested in exploring alternatives to a Liberal secularist regime. Today, they can offer a society almost wholly insulated from any defined sense of man’s ultimate end a refreshing glimpse of an alternative social order rooted in faith, family, and true Christian freedom.
In particular, by examining de Bonald and Donoso Cortés’ writings on the family, we can better understand the foundational role of Catholic marriage in Christendom and better understand what is meant in referring to marriage as a “pre-political” institution. While defenders of traditional marriage are correct in this assignment, the distinction can, if reduced to a slogan, obfuscate as much as it illuminates. Moreover, it may seem to ground the family on a functional, historical basis dismissible by the modern as an unnecessary anachronism, readily replaceable by public education and more contingent, liberated arrangements. Finally, this Aristotelian conception of the family and similar “intermediate” social institutions can fail to emphasizes the distinctive sacramental and social character of Christian marriage, obscuring the radical departure it presents from the pre-Christian idea of marriage. By drawing on de Bonald and Donoso Cortés, we can clarify the importance of the sacral family to a Christian society, and better understand the preeminent role played by the Church in legitimizing both parental and civil authority.
De Bonald’s Theory of the Family:
Of the two authors under consideration, it is de Bonald who most clearly expounds a comprehensive theory of political society, in which the family represents the central social institution and the proximate source of civil order. For de Bonald, marriage represents the “eventual society”, actualized in the birth, education, and moral formation of the child; by extension, anything that potentially endangers the family, endangers society as a whole. Like the more widely read Edmund Burke, de Bonald viewed society as an organic totality of intermediate associations, and strongly opposed the emerging liberal democratic vision of the individual, sovereign in his rights and free to articulate his own vision of the summum bonum. However, de Bonald’s formulation is ultimately a more coherent and workable scheme than Burke’s common law conservatism; here, the Burkean notion of an abstract, organically-emerging rule of law is replaced by a more clearly defined, horizontally-integrated order unified by the eternal verities of Catholic teaching and natural law.
“It was in the name of liberty, equality, and the rights of man that these madmen… began by introducing into the family the disorders that would soon penetrate the State…”
Louis de Bonald, On the Proposal to Return the Civil Registers to the Clergy
For de Bonald, it is the Catholic family that is the fundamental social unit; he conceives of marriage as not only historically prior to the state, but directly constitutive of it. As the lynchpin of what is now referred to as an ‘integralist’ order, the family is guided by the overlapping authorities of Church, state, and hereditary association. Marriage is “…at once a domestic, civil, and a religious act, which, in the public state of society, requires for its validity the concurrence of the three powers, domestic, civil, and religious.” Rather than standing as a contractual arrangement serving the interests of civil and economic function, it is the ground of moral formation and the incubator of local and national tradition. Moreover, it connects the individual to past and future generations through an ancestral bond of honor and duty, making “[the] end of marriage… the perpetuity of mankind.” This double bond of hereditary function and moral formation under the independent guidance of the Church underwrites the spirit of public service and limits the extent to which the civil authority may be co-opted by private self interest.
The Rationalist Polity of “dry axioms and abstract visions”:
For de Bonald, the Modernist attempt to replace a society bonded by immediate loyalties to one’s family and Parish would inevitably mean the “…replacement of lofty thought, generous sentiments, and colorful visions with [the] dry axioms and abstract visions” of a centralized state apparatus, which was redefining the meaning of liberty on the basis of a crude, narrowly rationalist conception of human nature. Moreover, by legalizing divorce and making marriage a purely civil institution, the French revolutionary state was consciously driving a wedge between religious and civil law, “[conspiring] with man’s passions against his reason, and with man himself against society”. In such circumstances, “the disorders of voluptuousness grow with the distaste for marriage, and our morals become, if it is possible, as weak as our laws.” For de Bonald, this was the most direct expression of the desires passions unleashed by the democratic spirit and “the senseless dogma of the sovereignty of man”. In replacing a society ordered by religious authority with one that gave free reign to the pursuit of individual desires, de Bonald keenly sensed that liberal democracy was undermining its very foundation, redefining liberty as mere license, and in so doing, reinstating “[that] hateful abuse of force that the Christian religion banished from the modern law of nations, [and which] was brought back by the revolution”
“… But for pity’s sake, tell me where I could find a family or a God in the individualistic and philosophical society, which you propose for my acceptance? Tell me, and I will follow you; if you cannot, do not take it amiss if I lay myself down in the tomb of Christ, the only refuge you left me when you abandoned me.”
Chateaubriand, Memoirs from Beyond the Grave
As the nursery of the Church, the family is the incubator of the ethical conscience of society and a superior defense against state tyranny than a contrived, top-down structure aiming to balance individual interests through enlightened institutional governance and secular public education. However, the family is not self-governing nor a wholly independent entity; for de Bonald, the Church must be present at all of the transitional phases of human life, guiding the individual from birth, through marriage, and into the next life in a simultaneous recognition of the individual as both a Christian and a citizen. To divide paternal, religious, and civil authority as the emerging democratic state so aimed was to leave the individual isolated and adrift, without a common culture or an authoritative moral standard to appeal to, whether in his moral deliberation or in resisting the encroachment of the state.
The Nursery of the Church & Wellspring of Social Authority:
“And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand”
Matthew 7:26
While the emerging system of secular public education could cultivate the rational faculties, “…[it] labor[s] only to affect the child’s organ of activities, without thinking at all of directing his reason toward objects more capable of extending and ennobling his intelligence.” Not only was this a dangerously narrow conception of education, enabling the child to learn “the most deadly errors in addition to useful truths” , it was to ignore that only in the domestic environment, under the parental authority and through the exemplification of virtuous habits in the familial tradition, that “mind, body, and affections” could grow in balanced proportion. Rejecting Rousseau’s vision of the natural goodness of man, de Bonald was under no illusions that public education could compensate for a disordered domestic environment, as “[the] child learns more or less equally from what is said and what is done in his presence… One must, therefore, greatly respect the eyes and the ears of children: Maxima debetur puero reverentia.” (“The child should be held in great reverence”) While this is a firmly Aristotelian conception of the family as the vehicle of moral formation, de Bonald correctly emphasizes the centrality of Catholic teaching for providing a coherent and binding framework for parental authority.
“If the Church, in the material sense, is in the State, then society is in religion, because in religion and religion alone does it discover the supreme justification for power and the final justification for duty and obedience… [Outside] of religion and without religion one cannot explain why one commands and another obeys, and, one would perceive in the world only the abuses committed by the strong and the suffering of the weak.”
Louis de Bonald, “On the Proposal to Return the Civil Registers to the Clergy”
Moreover, as the family is guided from generation to generation by the Church, so must be the state, as both parental and civil authority owe their moral legitimacy and restraint to religious truth. To so literally divorce the civil law from the source of their binding force is to invite chaos, as happy alone is the nation “whose laws are in conformity with the relations the Supreme Legislator has established among men for the conservation of society.” As a staunch critic of Kant and the Enlightenment project of reconstituting a secular morality grounded solely in rational self-interest, de Bonald keenly sensed the looming moral crisis prompted by abstract principles and free-standing “categorical imperatives” lacking in teleological import, anticipating a critique latterly expounded at length by Alasdair MacIntyre. Only by the mutually reinforcing institution of marriage as a physical union of man and woman, effected by the eternal moral bond of religion and “the empire it enjoys over our wills” could the family effectively serve as the “integral part of the great civil and political body of the State”
Property as Means of Familial Sustenance, Not an End for the Individual:
Like Hobbes and Locke, both de Bonald and Donoso Cortés emphasize that man’s natural proclivity towards association is matched only by his desire to rebel against the social order, but by drawing on Catholic teaching, they are better able to navigate this tension without having to resort to the fictions of Lockean contractarianism or the oppressive horrors of the Hobbesian Leviathan state. While for Locke the family is a contingent, utilitarian arrangement subordinated to a government ordered almost solely for the maintenance of private property, both de Bonald and Donoso Cortés see private property as a means of sustaining independent families so that may serve higher ends.
This view emphasizes private property as belonging to the family as a unit, rather than to the individual person of the father, a necessary pre-condition not only for its sustenance, but also for inculcating individual discipline and for the exercise of genuine Christian charity. For de Bonald, “[man] should find his sustenance in the family that gives birth to him, and when he seeks it from the state… the government can only give him one by taking away from others… Private charity then becomes a subsidy, and public beneficence resembles oppression.”. This Thomistic view of property as a means subordinated to a higher good is more sharply emphasized by Donoso Cortés, for whom “[the] institution of property is absurd without the institution of the family.”
A Sacramental, Authoritative Bond:
“The family, divine in its institution and in its essence, has everywhere followed the vicissitudes of Catholic civilization…”
Juan Donoso Cortes, Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism
De Bonald and Donoso Cortés both recognized that the sacral character of marriage imported an august ceremony that would be absent from secularized civil marriage, which would be liberated not just from religious authority, but also from the moral constraint necessary to produce a genuinely free society. Stripped of the moral legitimacy drawn from religious convictions, the family would degenerate amidst a “sacrilegious familiarity [that] suppresses the bond God placed between children and parents, destroying the bond of reverence.” This leads to an inevitable fraying of the core social unit and scatters the individual to the shifting winds, depriving him of a clear view of his own end and leaving him in the contingent care of the “artificial family” of “the clubs… and the casino”.
While de Bonald was the superior theorist, Donoso Cortés perhaps more clearly recognized that the emerging crisis was not a local disturbance, but the beginning of a world historical revolution that was necessarily theological in its implications. In Donoso Cortés, we find a similarly explicit recognition of the errors of the Enlightenment project of the self-defining individual, but with a greater emphasis on the fact that by so rejecting Catholic dogma, man was increasingly making an explicit denial of God; there was no illusion here that secularism meant a state ‘neutral’ to Christianity. Given this rejection of the “source and origin of all authority, logic demands the absolute negation of authority. The denial of universal paternity carries with it the denial of domestic paternity; the relation of religious authority carries with it the negation of political authority.”
“Theology is the science of all”:
“…in temporal law there is nothing just and lawful, but what man has drawn from the eternal law.”
St. Augustine of Hippo, De libero arbitrio
While de Bonald was able to look back at the stability of the recently eviscerated ancien régime and could point to a discrete break in the recent past, as a Spaniard, Donoso Cortés was born in a nation well advanced in its political decline, and he saw the emerging crisis as an epochal rejection of Catholic universality. Denying the Liberal dream of a society able to flourish absent a consciously-held, common vision of its ultimate end, as well as the emerging Socialist and Communist vision of a purely immanent end, he came to believe that “political science and theology do not exist, except as arbitrary classifications of the human understanding”; by extension, all political truths are necessarily derived from religious truths. Like de Bonald, but with more explicit emphasis, Donoso Cortés saw that it was not just the family and the customs of the hearth that were threatened by the new vision of man, but the entirety of Catholic order.
The rhetoric of Donoso Cortés, which, if at times verging towards the polemical, more overtly recognized that the Enlightenment notion of the sovereign individual, if taken to its full logical entailment, would mean the destruction of all intermediate forms of social association, “the dissolution of the family”, with the “suppression of property [following] as a necessary consequence.”. It is this dramatic extrapolation from first principles that lends Donoso Cortés his contemporary relevance, but which later led him to be reviled as a Cassandra by those who viewed his conclusions as hysterical reductions.
Christian Marriage — Pre-Political, Post-Pagan:
“In the peoples forgetful of the great Biblical traditions, paternity was never else but the proper name for domestic tyranny.”
Juan Donoso Cortés, Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism
Donoso Cortés saw the Enlightenment divinization of the individual as a return to the Pagan conception of man, which threatened to reverse the fundamental advances of a Catholic Christian civilization that had “left the forms [of society] intact and changed the essences”. De Bonald similarly emphasizes how it was Christianity that had tempered the crude morals of Classical society, a moral revolution that “[soon]… passed from hearth and home to the throne of the Caesars”, and in so doing, “…changed the nations as it changed men, [as] domestic morals became public laws.”
It is here that we are able to emphasize the unique, sacral character of Christian marriage, born in the domestic religious community and standing radically apart from the prevailing values of the cruel, extractive empire that harbored it. The notion that marriage should be a consensual union embarked upon solely on the basis of mutual love, rather than an arranged alliance for economic and social expediency, is itself a Christian notion.
Furthermore, although pagan society periodically attempted to restrain divorce and sexual promiscuity, it took only indirect interest in domestic life and viewed the marriage bond as a binding restraint applying largely to the woman alone. While a chaste woman was lauded as “univira” (a “one-man” woman), married men were encouraged to seek a sexual outlets in prostitutes, including the exploitation of young boys, a practice celebrated by authors like Juvenal, Petronious, Horace, Strato, Lucian, and Philostratus.
Moreover, as de Bonald references in alluding to the expression to “raise a child” (the act by which the Roman paterfamilias signaled his decision to keep a child), “[the] infant is sacred only in the eyes of [the Christian] religion.” The early Church’s almost single-handed role in exterminating the widespread practice of abortion and infant exposure in Classical civilization represented another key aspect of the civilizing influence of Christianity on the family. In an age in which on-demand full-term abortion is increasingly viewed as an essential human right by left-liberals, we may find Donoso Cortés’ prediction that “…when Christian societies prevaricate and fall… ideas, customs, institutions and the societies themselves, become pagan” eerily prescient.
In contrast to the patriarchal, exploitive rule of Classical civilization, the early Christian communities emphasized a more egalitarian conception in which both husband and wife were held to a common standard. The sexual abuse of children was anathematized, and common Greek terms like paiderastes (a “lover of boys”) were redefined as paidophrothos (a “corrupter” or “destroyer of children”). Meanwhile, husbands were encouraged to love their wives with the same single-minded devotion they showed to Christ (per Ephesians 5:25–33), and taught to view the sexual union as an intimate bond between husband and wife, rather than one serving solely the gratification of male lust. As Pope Saint Gregory I emphasized in speaking of St. Paul, he who reached the spiritual heights of “the third Heaven”, descended “…with heartfelt empathy, [and surveyed] with care the average person’s marriage bed” in his apostleship to the early Church. It is this comprehensive concern for all aspects of social life that Donoso Cortés references in terming Catholic Christianity as a “complete principle of civilization” capable of guiding the moral formation of the family and, by extension, the state.
The Christian notion of marriage was historically unique in emphasizing the family not solely as the seat of arbitrary patriarchal authority, but as a union formed to protect women and children from the unconstrained passions of men, and which was to serve as a mutually reinforcing school for the inculcation of virtuous habits. Seen against this backdrop, the modernist critique of the marital bond by J.S. Mill and Friedrich Engels (the latter of whom referred to marriage as a “world historical defeat of the female sex”) as mere pretense for the enslavement and sexual control of women loses its force. Both mistook the secular civil marriage bond of the modern liberal societies they inhabited as representative of the ideal of Christendom, an error we find echoed in contemporary discourse. In defending Christian marriage as a pre-political institution, it is critical that we also emphasize its historical distinction as a post-pagan institution.
The Continuing Relevance of de Bonald and Donoso Cortés to Contempoary Politics:
Two instrumental truths may be drawn from these authors, one relevant to right-liberalism, the other, to its left-wing, ‘progressive’ variety. While the contemporary liberal right is most outspoken in defending the traditional marriage, the humanity of the unborn, and the sanctity of the familial bond, it generally follows the model of de Bonald’s sociological heirs, Durkheim and Taine, in suggesting that the familial and civil authorities may adequately serve the ends of society without the guidance of the Church. In so doing, it falls victim to the rationalist fallacy that society can adequately function independent of a transcendent, teleological morality that legitimizes parental, civil, and ultimately, moral authority. Moreover, de Bonald’s integralist vision of civil order offers a still relevant critique of the right-liberal belief that religious tradition can ably survive in an abstract, depersonalized regime of atomized individualism.
From Donoso Cortés, we may draw the lesson that the first principles of an ideology will eventually manifest themselves to their full logical extent. Although the residual social capital of the Christian west made his dire, a priori predictions seem ridiculous for more than a century, we are today able to see the social result of such a reductionist view of man. Donoso Cortés judged the nascent Socialist revolutionary movement of his time as a more coherent doctrine than liberalism, and given this assessment, would likely have been utterly unsurprised by the contemporary metastasis of left-liberalism into ‘Progressive’ dogmatism. While liberalism attempted the hopeless positivist maneuver of excising normative content from public legislation, leaving the common good to be realized through the free exercise of individual self-interest, the socialist movement instead presented a clear immanent vision: mankind’s highest good was to be sought in a radical levelling of society, pursued with the aim of the final liberation of the individual from all constraints and the relentless pursuit of material and technological advance. While the reprieve offered to post-war liberalism by the cathartic destruction of World War II made Donoso Cortés’ extrapolation from first principles seem unduly severe for many decades, today we are unable to ignore him: political ideologies, as artificial constructions of the rationalist mind, necessarily posses a theological content.
In searching for an alternative to the hypostatizations of liberalism, we would do well to heed the warnings of de Bonald and Donoso Cortés, and begin with the difficult undertaking of renewing the patria by reaffirming the primacy of virtue in ordering the life of the individual, the family, and civil society. For “[the] future of the world and of the Church passes through the family.”
Originally published at abrenuntio.com on February 25, 2019.
