Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

structure and life of society. Seneca taught that „we are members of one great body“, since
nature has generated us as „relatives“ and made us „social beings.“ 14 Thomas Aquinas systematically
incorporated the organism analogy into his social teaching: society is „reputed as
one body“ and „as one man“(I-II,81,1). A contemporary of Aquinas, Vincent de Bovais,
called the state a ‘mystical body’ (corpus politicum mysticum), a designation which, in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was taken up by Johannes Gerson, Antonius de Rosselis,
Domingo de Soto, and Francisco Suarez. St. Paul also applied the organism analogy to the
Church. He speaks of the „Body of Christ“ in a double sense: in some places, ‘Body of
Christ’ means the Church as a visible, organically articulated, social phenomenon (1 Cor
12:12-30; Rom 12:4-8); in other places by ‘Body of Christ’ Paul understands the supernatural,
mysterious community of life and grace that binds the members together with their head and
with one another (e.g. 5:21). The expression ‘mystical body’ is not employed by Paul; it first
emerges in early scholasticism and, as we have seen, has been applied from the thirteenth century
on not only to the Church, but also to the state.
2. Christian social philosophy makes use of the organism analogy in order to reject the individualistic
conception of society, on the one hand, and to elucidate the common-good principle,
on the other. Here three kinds of analogies can be distinguished:
a) Organisms continue to exist, whereas the individual cells pass away and are built up anew
again and again. In an analogous way, society outlasts the coming and going of individual
people. Even the family spans two generations. Village and city, nation and state exist for
centuries. Society, Augustine writes in the twenty-second chapter of the City of God, is like
an olive tree whose leaves fall and grow forth anew, but whose trunk and crown remain. The
organism analogy thus makes clear, on the one hand, that society temporally transcends the
short span of human life, reaching in the past and the future, and is thus not a static quantity,
but is filled with an urgent and often tempestuous movement; on the other hand, it also spatially
surpasses the living space of the individual, like the branches of the olive tree.
b) The parts of an organism, such as the leaves and roots of a plant, do not form a sum of unrelated
individual things; they are rather placed in the service of the whole by the immanent
vital force of the entelechy. One can again see this mode of being realized in an analogous
way in a society whose members are not isolated individuals, but form a spiritual and moral
unit of order and serve the whole.
c) Organisms do not allow their members to wither away, but nourish and preserve them; only
in the most extreme need does an organism sacrifice a member in order to save the whole. a
similar law holds analogously in society also, which is not allowed to exploit its members, but
must care for them, whereas the members must be ready in turn to subordinate their interests
selflessly to the common weal. As the hand instinctively exposes itself to the sword thrust in
order to save the whole body, so the citizen will „expose himself to the danger of death for the
whole body politic“ (Thomas Aquinas, I, 60,5).
3. The following emerges from the organism analogy for the interpretation of the common
good: it is false to see with Viktor Cathrein in the common good „nothing other than the sum
of homogeneous individual welfares.“ 15 The common good is not a sum, but a new value specifically
different from the individual good and the sum of individual goods. Every social entity,
such as a city or a university, has its particular common good. If, however, one speaks of
the common good purely and simply, the common good of the ‘perfect society’ of the state is
14 L.A. Seneca ad Lucilium I, XV. ep. 4. (Bononiae 1927) 83.
15 V. Cathrein, Moralphilosophie. 5th ed (Freiburg i.B. 1911), I: 284
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