Political Spirituality and Spiritual Politics

Introduction

This essay offers a theoretical explanation of and a rational framework for the connection between politics and spirituality and some of the consequent implications of that connection for political life and development. It rests on the idea that empirical investigation, logical reason, and contemplative intuition are connected. They are only different epistemological approaches to the same reality, which is multidimensional but one. The unity of reality has been recognized with different nuances by various spiritual traditions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. In the Abrahamic religions, God, the Absolute One, is the sole creator, giver of life, and sustainer of the universe—that is, the divine reality that upholds and supports all observable reality. But this essential distinction between a transcendent God and creatures does not necessarily exclude the unity of reality, since God permeates all material existence. God is “all in all,” says the Apostle Paul.1 Philosophers from Plotinus2 to Wittgenstein3 and mystics over the centuries have also accepted this unity of reality, which has never been denied by modern science.

Because of my own Christian background, I will refer above all to the Christian tradition. This Christian understanding, always inclusive, does not mean any underestimation to other traditions, nor is it an expression of ethnocentrism, but rather the opposite: a high respect for the variety of traditions and a strong desire that many scholars continue being involved in the exciting project of establishing a bridge between politics and spirituality in the age of secularization.

Spirituality, religion, and God

Spirituality is an umbrella concept with a wide range of meanings and connotations.4 It is sufficient to recall the very different approaches to the topic by two great figures such as Jacques Maritain5 and Michel Foucault.6 In this paper, influenced probably more by the former than the later, I understand spirituality as an intentional and experiential union with the universe, humanity, the divine, and, ultimately, the Supreme Being that many people call God. Spirituality is mainly a matter of purpose, communion, and love. While intimately connected to religion, spirituality is broader; it has a life of its own.7 Spirituality is an essential aspect of religion, a necessary condition for the existence of it, but spirituality cannot be identified with religion, cannot occupy the political space of religion. Thus, spirituality can be illuminating on both sides of the church–state wall of separation without political risk of church interference. Moreover, spirituality exists prior to and outside of religion (e.g., in individual openness to transcendence), and many aspects of religion lie outside the realm of spirituality (e.g., positive canon law and Jewish dietary laws). Spirituality is holistic; religion holonic (see next section). Spirituality can be considered an autonomous and fertile source of political inspiration, in which not just meaning and reason but consciousness and purpose, good will and unity play a relevant role. The potential conflict between spirituality and religion is not challenging in the way that the difference between the spiritual and the material is.

This separation between spirituality and religion at no time aims to undermine the important value of religions, nor to reduce religion to a mere organized structure or institution, nor to promote a sort of unchurched or individualistic spiritualism. Further, religions very often have shaped different spiritual traditions because spirituality in some degree requires embodiment in culture, history, faith, and communities, just as communication needs to be embedded in a language system.8 Although spirituality is universal, expressions of spirituality are cultural.

My proposed spiritual paradigm prioritizes a theistic approach over a nontheistic one. The reason is clear: the very idea of the theistic Spirit of God is both spiritual and religious at its heart. God cannot be put away either from religion or from spirituality. However, the spiritual perspective and the religious perspective differ in the ways they approach God. God is Spirit, but God is not Religion. The spiritual goes from top to bottom, the religious, from bottom to top. Spirituality is more, though not exclusively, experiential and therefore internal; religion, however, is more liturgical and thus external.

There is also a rational argument to favor a theistic approach. For we can best understand the lack of X by first understanding X itself. It is easier to understand atheism by first grasping theism than it is to do the reverse. Thus, it is reasonable that the starting point of a comprehensive spiritual paradigm should be theistically oriented instead of nontheistically oriented. Otherwise, it is easy to fall into a spiritual reductionism offering only a fragmented vision of spirituality.9

Holonic dimensionality of politics vs. holistic metadimensionality of spirituality

The most important difference between politics and spirituality is that politics is dimensional and holonic, while spirituality is metadimensional and holistic. By “holonic,” I mean that politics is shaped by multiple factors and dimensions: it takes places in some region of space during some interval of time, and under a concrete political system and an extraordinary variety of political circumstances. Politics usually has both a spatial and a temporal dimension as a sphere of validity. The political life in the United States is very different from the political life in China, Peru, or the Philippines. What is profitable for US politics is not necessarily profitable for political development in Europe or Australia. What was a good political decision in the past is not necessarily a good decision in the present, and a good decision in a concrete field cannot directly apply in a different field without risk. In some sense, we can say that politics always operates under four dimensions (temporal, spatial, material, and personal), just as in relativistic physics three dimensions of space and one of time have been the traditional accepted norm: the four-dimensional space–time continuum. However, just as the four dimensions do not completely explain physical reality, the four political dimensions do not completely explain political reality.

Although autonomous, the political dimension is also part of other superior dimensions, and in this sense is holonic. The word holon was coined by Arthur Koestler10 and developed by Ken Wilber11 and Gonzalo Rodríguez-Fraile,12 among others. Holon refers to something that is at the same time a whole and a part. The first general sense of the concept had been understood many centuries before, expressed in the well-known phrase, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” But Koestler’s term holon adds something more: each emerging holon both integrates and simultaneously transcends what precedes it. In the same way that a cell incorporates and transcends its component molecules, the molecules themselves incorporate and transcend the atoms, which, at the same time, include and transcend their particles. There is an antireductionist hierarchy of dimensions of reality in which each dimension is true but subsumed in the higher: the physical in the chemical, the chemical in the biological, the biological in the social, and so on up to the spiritual.

Something that is holonic is simultaneously both a whole and a part of a larger reality. The political dimension is autonomous (that is, a whole) but interdependent with (that is, a part of) other dimensions. It is autonomous because politics has its own language and actors, laws and rules, principles and standards. At the same time, however, politics is very dependent on other dimensions—for instance, the legal, moral, economic, and social dimensions. To be holonic implies that internal conflicts and oppositions must be resolved in a superior dimension and ultimately in the holistic spiritual realm, which provides unity to the whole. Inside the spiritual realm, God provides unity because God, the Absolute One, is the ultimate source of communion.

Unlike the political dimension, the spiritual is metadimensional and holistic. The spiritual order overcomes and transcends the spatial and temporal sphere of validity. And this is possible, even from a scientific point of view, because space is not necessarily the fundamental level of reality, and therefore not all phenomena happen and fit within space.13 Moreover, unlike what happens with politics, spirituality cannot be restricted to a determined number of politicians and political institutions nor limited by activities and operations. With different nuances, degrees, and intensities, spirituality embraces all aspects of human life, and life in general. The ultimate reason for this is that the Spirit of God is immeasurable and therefore irreducible to any dimension. The spiritual order as a whole is metadimensional because the Spirit of God is metadimensional. God is everywhere and cannot be confined to any point in space or moment in time. God permeates and surfaces everything by divine power, presence, and essence. God exists “uncircumscribed in all things,” says Bonaventure.14 Moreover, all things are one with God without being themselves God. As Pseudo-Dionysius pointed out: “The One cause of all things is not one of the many things in the world, but actually precedes oneness and multiplicity and indeed defines oneness and multiplicity.”15

Spirituality, therefore, offers a holistic appreciation of the reality in which everyone and everything is harmoniously linked with everyone and everything else. “Each thing is in each thing,” Nicholas of Cusa famously said,16 since each thing reflects in some degree the oneness of the Spirit of God. “God is so one,” Nicholas of Cusa insists; God “is actually all that is possible.”17 Oneness is primary in God’s knowledge and by extension in spiritual knowledge, just as otherness features in the conceptual domain, and therefore in the legal domain. The spiritual, thus, cannot be holonic because the condition of being a part of a larger reality fails. Inside the spiritual world are autonomous realities (e.g., human souls, angels), but the spiritual as such is not part of another reality. It is not holonic but holistic.

If the spiritual is holistic, spirituality has something to say in politics generally and in the analysis of political activities, political development, and political behavior. If the spiritual is holistic, it is also possible to talk about a political spirituality as an aspect of spirituality connected to the realm of politics.

The spiritual triad: love, communion, and gift

In the Christian tradition, to deal with spirituality means to speak of the Holy Spirit, and to speak of the Holy Spirit means to speak of love, communion, and gift.18 The Holy Spirit is the eternal mutual love between the Father and the Son. For this reason, although God is love and the source of all love,19 the Holy Spirit is especially called love in some texts of scripture.20 The singularity of the Holy Spirit is precisely that of being in communion, being unity. The Holy Spirit is unutterable communion of Father and Son,21 because the Holy Spirit is neither of the Father alone nor of the Son alone, but of both.

Gift is also a fundamental designation of the Holy Spirit.22 If the characteristic of the Son is being born, the characteristic of the Holy Spirit is being given. The Holy Spirit is a gift of both the Father and the Son. This being given, however, at no point suggests a relation of subordination among the divine persons but establishes one of harmony. As Augustine explains, the Holy Spirit “is given as a gift of God in such way that He himself also gives himself as being God.”23 The second feature of the divine gift is that it is free. The Holy Spirit is freely given, and “whoever is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him.”24 Using the words of Yves Congar, we can say that “the Spirit is the principle of our return to God,”25 and spirituality the path to do it.

If the Spirit of God is love, communion, and gift, then becoming spiritual from a Christian perspective means essentiality living in love, in communion, and as a gift, or in other words, living in communion of love with God and others by considering ourselves as a gift from God to others. As a result, love of neighbor will become no longer a commandment imposed, so to speak, from without, but a consequence deriving from spirituality that becomes active through communion, love, and gift.26

Communion represents an essential element of universal spirituality because it overcomes the apparent opposition between multiplicity and unity. To be in communion is to communicate with one another and to become part of the other. In full communion, nobody is any longer alone or separate from others. Love is the transformative power which leads human beings to communion with God and others by an act of self-giving. Love of God and love of neighbor are interwoven, even inseparable, because ultimately love is divine. It comes from God, and it unites us to God, and makes us one, overcoming all divisions. Because love is divine, it is free. There is no spurious individual interest behind pure love, and it cannot serve as a way of achieving other goals. The genuine act of love, which is always an act of self-giving, has to be a free act. The world of spirituality is the world of full inner freedom. Freedom is not only a political and secular idea; it is primarily a spiritual reality.

The political triad: common good, political community, government

While love, communion, and gift are the pillars of spirituality, common good, community, and government are the three pillars of politics. Politics exists inside any group of people (community) who share some needs and resources (common good) and organize themselves by governing institutions (government). This triad can be much debated depending on whether the ideology is more liberal, communitarian, libertarian, or conservative. But I think it rightly reflects what has been Western political theory from the Greeks to the present day, and not merely a concrete époque of the history of political thought. Each element of the triad is a key concept in political theory and political science from the beginning, and the three of them have been for centuries carefully analyzed by political thinkers.

Common good. The common good is one of the most classical (but also complex and controversial) concepts of the Western political tradition, and the cornerstone of normative political theory. Since its first formulations, especially by Aristotle,27 great thinkers along the centuries such as Saint Augustine,28 Thomas Aquinas,29, John Locke,30 Jean-Jacques Rousseau,31 Jeremy Bentham,32 James Madison,33 and Jacques Maritain,34 among many others, have considered the common good as pivotal in political thought.35

According to Aristotle,36 the purpose of political communities is not only to secure the necessities of life by providing the required conditions to live well. Political communities exist “for the sake of a good life,” for assuring the life of virtue. The common good represents the highest purpose of the political community, the fulfillment of each of its citizens through a virtuous life or excellence promoted by government. This idea was generally accepted by medieval thinkers but reinterpreted and evaluated in the light of the Bible and some relevant works such as Augustine’s City of Good.37 Thomas Aquinas provided the most authoritative medieval account of the common good, which strongly influenced the Christian tradition. Aquinas, following the steps of Aristotle, considered the human good the end of politics and the highest end on human affairs.38

Modern conceptions of the common good, especially from the seventeenth century, were in general more individualistic and pragmatic. The common good (many times called the public good) was identified with the respect for and protection of people’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, and private property,39 or with “the common preservation and the well-being,”40 or with the maximization of utility or happiness, which is no more than the sum of all individual goods.41 James Madison, Bentham’s contemporary, put the common good and private rights at the heart of the American political experiment.42

Firmly rooted in the social contract tradition, and with the intention of discovering solid grounds for reasoned agreement in pluralistic societies, John Rawls,43 advocated for the primacy of justice over the conception of the good. He argued that since pluralistic societies cannot share a single conception of the good, the idea of the common good has to be reduced to the limits of justice and equal rights. On the other hand, Robert Nozick, in his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia,44 suggested a minimal government state limited to the provision of security, the protection of property and contracts, and the administration of law.

Some authors, such as Glendon,45 Etzioni,46 and Sandel,47 among others, have opposed this liberal approach, arguing that the common good limits government and that taking individual rights seriously demands respect for the common good. With some differences among them on the nature of the common good, natural law theorists of our day, such as Murphy,48 Finnis,49 Rhonheimer,50 Duke,51 based on the Aristotelian–Thomistic tradition, have continued developing the idea of the common good as a principle, drawing new normative political conclusions.

Specific formulations of the common good ultimately depend on different theological, metaphysical, anthropological, political, and legal conceptions of the good, the concrete role attributed to the political community, the different historical contexts, and the different understandings of the relationship between individuals and their concrete community. Whether or not this common good should be understood as an aggregative or integrated reality, as an intrinsic good of the whole community beyond individual goods, or just as utility maximization, material welfare, or the procedural instrument of deliberative democracy is, of course, crucial for political life, but it is secondary for the justification of the political triad. What is relevant is the existence of at least a vague consensus among most of the political theorists about the central role of the common good for the flourishing of individuals and the political communities of antiquity, the Middle Ages, modernity, and contemporary times.

Political community. The second element of the triad is political community, a commonplace in political theory and political science, now privileged by communitarian theorists. Some kinds of politics could exist without political communities, but political communities, including their origins, formation, organizations, and development, are a relevant part and the most genuine product of politics.

I understand political community in the broadest sense of a common unity (i.e., community) of people organized by governing institutions and structures inside the limits of a determinable territory. Political communities provide some sense of identity, a social context for individual and collective development and normative justification. Members of political communities share some objectives and values, symbols and institutions, history and culture. The intensity of the integration of the community depends on the depth, extension, and limits of aspirations and values shared by the collective consciousness of its people, the degree of desired political unity (e.g., federation, confederation), and the conception and limitations established to the political understanding of the common good.

A political community can be a product of necessity, weakness, culture, war, ethical homogeneity, social contract, will and reason, or a mix of all of them, but always the birth of a political community is an expression of human sociability, even when it is overshadowed by the force of violence. In his Republic, following the Aristotelian and Stoic line, and unlike the Epicureans, Cicero said that the “primary reason for its coming together is not so much weakness as a sort of innate desire on the part of human beings to form communities.”52 The idea that the origin of political societies lies in an agreement for mutual protection was defended by the Epicureans,53 but also by Polybius.54 This intuitive contractualist understanding was revived by the Protestant reformers as a covenant involving God, the rulers, and the people,55 by Thomas Hobbes,56 and later in very different ways by social contract theorists such as Locke,57 Rousseau,58 and recently in modern style by Rawls.59

Although deeply and rightly criticized from David Hume60 to our day, the social contract theory still remains pivotal and fresh in modern political thought, and it can continue providing relevant insights.61 However, social contract would not be a good second element of the political triad I am defending. First, because as Tony Honoré argued, the so-called social contract cannot be categorized as a contract.62 Second, because political communities are not simply the product of a (many times hypothetical) social contract; rather, they arise and develop because human beings need each other; they need to live together. Communities are part of the human condition and development beyond any kind of categorization.

Government. Government—that is, the institutional organization of power to enforce policies and protect rights—is the third element of the political triad. Political communities achieve the good functionally through the use of legitimate power or government by political institutions, which exercise political direction, protection, and control over the political community. The relations between the political community and the government; the sources, concentration, and limits of governments; the analysis of the different forms or systems of government (including the ideal one) and their implications; and the vertical relations between different levels of government—all of these matters have been at the center of political science since the foundational analysis by Greek thinkers.

In our day, the implementation of the common good through government usually takes place in the context of a political consensus manifested primarily under a general agreement or constitution that establishes basic rights and standards of reason to guide legislation and administration. Contemporary democratic governments have commonly mixed elements of the three traditional forms of government (monarchy, oligarchy or aristocracy, and democracy), and are firmly rooted in the institutional restraint developed by modern constitutionalism (Locke and Montesquieu). Legitimacy of the government depends on respecting these restrictions and constraints, including the idea of separation of powers.

Deep connectivity between the spiritual triad and the political triad

The essential metadimensional aspect of spirituality supports the idea that although politics is indeed a matter of protecting the common good of a political community by a government, politics is also, at least aspirationally, a matter of love, communion, and gift. The common good is a manifestation of love; the political community is an expression of communion; and government is a sort of gift.

Good and love are inherently related. There is no love without goodness, nor is it possible to achieve the plenitude of goodness without love. The Holy Bible is full of texts referring to the goodness of God: “Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth;”63 “Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good! For His love endures forever;”64 “Good and upright is the Lord;”65 “Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him;”66 “No one is good but One, that is, God;”67 “Why do you call me good? Jesus answered. No one is good except God alone;”68 “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning”69.

If God is love and God is good, love is good, and the good is to be loved. More, since love is union, love demands a shared good, a real common good, between the lover and the beloved. Love seeks the integral and common good of all human beings. This explains why both Augustine70 and Aquinas71 consider the common good as an essentially spiritual reality. Ultimately, for these two Cristian thinkers, God is the common good. In this sense, the political common good would be only one aspect of the more fundamental integrated common good that is both divine and human, embracing a community of creatures living in love and communion with God.72 If God is the common good, the common good, like God, is also unlimited and one. If so, we can say with Aquinas about a more limited political common good intrinsically connected to the fullness of the common good.73 And we can say with Timothy Jackson of a “political agape.”74

The more spiritual the idea of common good is, the more unlimited; the more political, the more limited. The common good is holonic: it is a whole but is also a part (political common good, individual common good). The whole of humanity as subsisting within a hierarchical ordering of groups shares with different intensities the universal and solidary common good. But if the common good is conclusively one, any political common good requires “a correct scale of good and values which can be structured with God as the ultimate point of reference,”75 that is, as the ultimate common good.

The connectivity between communion and political community is also deep and powerful: there is indeed an analogy between the divine communion of persons that is the Triune God—in which each equal person loves the others eternally—and the political community of persons united by a common good, in which each person, united to the others and becoming a part of the community, is also considered as a whole, full of dignity. This Trinitarian perspective helps understand that there is no opposition between the human person and the political community, nor between the individual common good and the political common good, nor between equal persons. This Trinitarian approach protects political communities against the totalitarianism of considering the political community above each person, and against the extreme individualism of considering the political community as a tool to satisfy private interest (famously against Peterson.)76

The third element of the political triad, government, is also related to the third element of the spiritual triad, gift. Government is a gift in two different senses. It is a gift because government is something from outside the individual, something given by the political community, and ultimately by God,77 to the political authorities. Political authorities are vested with power by delegation, they are empowered because no human being has the innate right to govern the other. Original power always belongs to political communities, and ultimately to God, not to the political authorities to whom the political community has delegated its power and offices.78

Government can also be considered a gift in the sense that the exercise of power demands a self-giving of the political authorities for the sake of the community. Self-interest is in opposition to the exercise of power, always directed to the common good. Tyranny is precisely the exercise of power not as a gift but as ownership, as domination. On the other side, corruption is the exercise of government for the sake of self-interest and not for the common good.

Intentions and values: two channels of interaction between politics and spirituality

The two main bridges of practical interaction between spirituality and politics are intentions (individual or collective) and values (cultural intentions). The spiritual intention of any human action or attitude is its more profound and ultimate purpose. Spiritual intention arises from the deepest part of the human being—the heart—and it affects and embraces all dimensions. Intention is metarational and therefore not mental, although it is connected with the mind. Spiritual intention determines the purity or simplicity of heart, that is, the intensity of love, the level of communion with others, and the degree of self-giving in any human action. Because of its metadimensional nature, spiritual intention can be present in all human actions, not only in strictly spiritual ones. Spiritual intention can be shared with other, secondary mental intentions, aims, purposes, or interests. For instance, one can be united to God while teaching, painting, cooking, or driving a school bus. Teaching, painting, cooking, and driving are not strictly spiritual actions, but the spiritual element can inspire and be present in all these activities. The more purified the spiritual intention, the more harmonically united to God, the divine, and others. Spiritual intention is a source of freedom, joy, and peace for human beings. It grants freedom to choose always in union with God, the divine, and others, and therefore to share others’ freedom. When that happens, freedom is expanded, since it is not limited by one’s own will and circumstances. It grants the joy of experiencing communion and love. Finally, it grants peace, that is, full harmony between one’s action, another’s action, and divine plans.

Human beings can do things with more than one rational intention in mind. What is critical for this argument, however, is that the political intention of individuals and communities can be inspired, supported, or illuminated by spiritual intention. It was a deep spiritual intention that moved Gandhi to employ nonviolent resistance against British colonialism in India. It was a deep spiritual intention that moved Martin Luther King Jr., influenced by Gandhi, to defend civil rights in an American society wounded and divided by racism. Naturally, these spiritual intentions are concretized in various political intentions, but those were always supported and illuminated by the deepest spiritual intention.

Values are the second channel of interaction between politics and spirituality. Values are cultural distillations of individual and collective intentions. The whole idea of value implies selectivity and evaluation of “intersubjective-shared preferences and goods,” if I may use Habermas’s definition.79 Like intentions, values are teleological, and they are able to lead and illuminate the development of political communities in accordance with their destiny. Unlike norms and rules, values allow a code of greater or lesser intensity. They operate gradually, and not in accordance with the dynamic of dualism and binary validity.80 Values enable human beings to make judgments in different dimensions. Political values allow human beings to make political decisions, moral values moral decisions, and legal values legal decisions. However, political, moral, legal, and other values depend on one another and support each other coherently. This so-called unity of value is a well-established philosophical idea,81 and it is just a consequence of the fact that reality is one, and all dimensions are ultimately related.

The unity of value is more strongly manifested in the holistic spiritual realm than in any holonic dimension, because communion is deeper in the spiritual metadimension than in any fragmented dimension of reality. That is why there is no conflict of values in the spiritual metadimension, as there very often is in the political dimension. Love, peace, wisdom, freedom, joy, and mercy do not conflict in spirituality as, for instance, integrity, stewardship, performance, diversity, solidarity, respect, quality, commitment, humility, empathy, inclusion, trust, tolerance, responsibility, passion, accountability, freedom, equality, and participation often contrast and collide in the political dimension.

Spirituality interacts with politics through values in two different ways: directly and indirectly. It can operate directly because spiritual values (e.g., love, communion) can openly act in every dimension of reality due to the holistic character of the spiritual. It can operate indirectly by spiritualizing specific values of other dimensions. Pluralism, for instance, is not a spiritual value strictly speaking, because it demands a political community to operate. However, pluralism can be spiritualized when love and communion illuminate it, and when it is used to develop unity in society and not fragmentation. Something similar occurs with other values such as tolerance and diversity, to mention two examples. Spiritual values (e.g., love, communion) are hierarchically superior to other values because they provide unity to all the values by illuminating all of them in the various dimensions of reality. In this sense, unity prevails over the good and the right, and it acts as a link between politics and ethics.

Evolution of politics through spiritualization

In this section I provide some examples of why and how politics evolves through spiritualization. I enumerate a variety of political areas and aspects in order to promote and support subsequent analysis and research. My main purpose is only to show that the connectivity between spirituality and politics is real, not to analyze deeply this connectivity in any concrete area of politics.

Spirituality influences politics by, among other things: (a) prioritizing the person over the political community; (b) supporting the dematerialization of the political system; (c) fostering respect for the law and ethics; (d) encouraging the limitation of domination; (e) inspiring the reduction of coercion; (f) stimulating reconciliation and union among peoples; (g) helping political systems to overcome necessary dualisms; (h) endorsing political participation and democracy; (i) inspiring diversity, solidarity, and inclusivity; (j) encouraging freedom and human rights; and (k) facilitating the decision-making process and political agreements.

a) Prioritizing the person over the political community. Spirituality helps to avoid any risk of abuse of power, including any sort of totalitarianism, by prioritizing the person—that is, by putting the person at the center of political life. Personal dignity has integrity in itself, and political sovereignty has integrity only as an extension of individual dignity. By recognizing that the human person can morally bind himself or herself, political systems implicitly recognize the principle of personal accountability, which is key to individual development and flourishing. They also implicitly recognize the priority of dignity over sovereignty, the primacy of the particular over the universal, the inestimable value of individual conscience, and the necessary fulfillment of the personal good to achieve the common good of the political community

b) Supporting the demateriaization of the political system. Political systems dematerialize as long as nonmaterial elements prevail over material elements. Dematerialization occurs, for instance, when intention prevails over literal interpretation of the constitution, when political systems reduce unnecessary formalism and bureaucracy, when they stimulate agency and political representation, but especially when they create political institutions. The more institutionalized the political system, the more spiritual, and the more stable. It is not a surprise that in his recent book Political Political Theory, Jeremy Waldron advocated for the need to devote more attention to institutional issues in politics because there is still life in the classic institutional approach to politics.82

c) Fostering respect for the law and ethics. Spirituality helps develop respect for legal systems as necessary tools for the development of human beings. Respect is the required starting point of true communion. Otherwise, the resulting union will be dominative but not communicative, let alone spiritual. When human beings see the legal system and the legal dimension as an instrument for a higher spiritual unity, it is easy for them to respect the legal systems more than when they consider the legal dimension a mere product of temporary human convention and agreement. The deeper the reason for respect is, the more easily people offer respect.

On the other hand, spirituality leads to ethics because of the essential unity of value or, using medieval scholastic terminology, the indivisibility of goodness. The goodness of unity and the oneness of the good are both a spiritual and an ethical matter. If spirituality focuses on oneness, and the good is one, then ethics has an irrevocable spiritual dimension. It is precisely the simplicity of spirituality that unifies the diversity of moral values and facilitates the decision-making process when companies are dealing with ethical issues. Spirituality integrates ethics into a broader framework of meaning and purpose.

d) Encouraging the limitation of domination. The greater the domination allowed or exercised by a political system, the lower the degree of political spiritualization. Domination is the opposite of free communion, and therefore of spirituality. Domination is based on inequality, force, and subordination. Communion, however, is based on unity, love, and freedom. If political systems are established primarily and above all to restrict private and public domination, then political systems evolve when they gradually move from private or public domination to communion. A paradigm of liberation of public domination and high degree of spiritualization was the US Declaration of Independence (1776), especially its famous second paragraph: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”83 The Declaration contrasts with the horrendous situation of slavery in the Thirteen Colonies. This discrepancy, however, does not diminish the spiritual value of the Declaration. It shows us, however, that the process of spiritualization of law is not homogenous.

e) Inspiring the reduction of coercion. Coercion is a limitation of freedom, and without freedom, love cannot be developed. This is why spiritualization of politics requires the reduction of coercion to the necessary minimum. The growing abolition of the death penalty in many countries is a good example of political spiritualization. Important countries like the United States, China, India, Japan, and most Islamic states retain capital punishment, even on moral grounds. Yet due to a process of cultural spiritualization, millions of people now consider the death penalty a violation of the right to life and opposed to the dignity and communion of human beings. In the European Union, for instance, Article 2 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights prohibits the use of capital punishment.84 Recently, Pope Francis rejected the death penalty under all circumstances and approved in 2018 a new draft of section 2.267 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church.85

f) Stimulating reconciliation and union among peoples. Spirituality stimulates communion between and among peoples beyond the contingent plurality of institutions, groups, conflicts, and rights. The birth of the European Union is a good example of this kind of spiritual stimulation. The first and crucial steps of the long European integration process after the Second World War were possible, at least in some notable degree, because of the spiritual stature of the so-called European founding fathers: Konrad Adenauer, Robert Schuman, Jean Monnet, Alcide De Gasperi, and Joseph Bech, among others. They were able to build a new Europe from the blood and ashes of the battlefields based on the values of reconciliation and communion and overcoming any kind of domination, revenge, and retaliation.86 On a global scale, the establishment and development of the United Nations as an intergovernmental organization to maintain international peace and security, develop friendly relations among nations, and achieve international cooperation is another example of the primacy of communing of nations, and therefore of cultural spiritualization. Although its initiatives are often frustrated, the contribution of the United Nations to human cooperation has been remarkable.

g) Helping political systems to overcome necessary dualisms. The private–public dualism and the church–state dualism, among other important dualisms, are principal requirements of a well-organized political community. However, dualism cannot lead to the conclusion that each element of the binary is absolute, let alone a completely independent reality. From a spiritual perspective, a healthy dualism should naturally lead to mutual cooperation. The private sphere requires the public sphere, and vice versa. Thus, private rights should be interpreted in accordance with the common good, and a way to achieve the common good is protecting individual rights. The private institution par excellence (the family) requires the protection of the state, but the state likewise requires the collaboration of families to achieve the common good. On the other hand, churches require the state, and vice versa. Churches cannot be developed outside the political community. They are part of it. Likewise, however, churches impact the common good: they play an important role in political communities, especially in the area of education, health, solidarity, family, and so on.87 Yet states also need churches in order to seriously protect religious freedom and not trample the conscience of citizens. States without churches easily become totalitarian. The experience of communist countries is a good example of this phenomenon.

h) Endorsing political participation and indirectly democracy. Spirituality does not support any concrete form of government. The form is not the goal of spirituality. But by promoting dialogue and mutual understanding as an expression of communion, and cooperation of citizens in the fulfillment of the common good, and by putting the human person at the center of political life, spirituality supports the most fundamental democratic values and, indirectly, the democratic system as such at an ontological level. For a political community spiritually matured, democracy is probably the most reasonable option of political government because it guarantees peaceful coexistence among citizens and continuity in the transmission of powers.

i) Inspiring diversity, solidarity, and inclusivism. The unity provided by spirituality is neither homogeneity nor uniformity. Spirituality, at least from the theistic perspective, is based on a radical diversity, which is not in opposition to the essential oneness of reality: the Creator is not a creature, and the creature is not the Creator (diversity). At the same time, the end of the creature is to be fully united to the Creator (unity). What is indivisibly united should be by definition shared, that is, solidary. This radical solidarity is manifested in the fact that every human being is made in the image of God.88 And there are not millions of different divine images but only one, who is shared by everybody. In this sense, spirituality strengthens in the deepest way the “spirit of brotherhood” on which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was founded.89 This radical solidarity leads to inclusiveness, since no one can be separated from this essential oneness. Spirituality helps understand humans as God’s gift to humans. Diversity of humans, like a great variety of gifts, is always a source of personal enrichment and collective development.

j) Encouraging freedom and human rights. Spirituality encourages freedom because without freedom no love is possible. Since human rights are specific expressions of individual and collective freedom in the political dimension, by encouraging freedom, spirituality is supporting human rights. Rights can conflict, but love cannot. Spirituality helps to overcome conflicts between rights in the political dimension by providing unity to political values. The idea of human rights is endemic to spirituality, since human rights are the expression of one fact: that people transcend the political communities they belong to. Human destiny is superior to political purposes; the political is merely a dimension of the human being. For that reason, every person has the right to make his or her own decision in transcendent matters with regard to his or her personal and transcendent destiny. In other words, a human is ontologically a person prior to being a citizen.

k) Facilitating the decision-making process and political agreements. Spirituality facilitates the decision-making process and political agreements because egoistic views and individual interests, always limiting and conflicting, are opposite to the oneness of spirituality. Spirituality does not see any conflict between the particular and the general, one’s rights and another’s duty, one’s interest and another’s interest, individual good and the common good, since the ultimately indivisible whole cannot be understood without the solidary part. By protecting the part, the whole is protected, and vice versa. In the making of agreements, spirituality helps understand the good reasons of the other side, because the other side matters at the same level as one’s own side. This openness to others as a part of the same whole increases exponentially citizens’ capacity of collaborating and working together in the political realm.