What about “nations acclaiming God’s glory?” Nations are not persons...

On the Nations



by James V. Schall, S.J. (1928-2019)


In the Breviary and in Scripture, we often read passages like these: 

• “All nations will acclaim His glory”; 
• “He shall judge between the nations”; 
• “All nations will see the glory of your Holy One”; 
• “The nations shall know that I am the Lord”; 
• “All the kings of the earth will bow down in worship”; 
• “The nations shall see your justice”; 
• “What great nation is there that has gods so close to it as the Lord”; 
• “King of the nations, you called the Magi to adore you as the first representatives of the nations”; 
• “Many nations shall join themselves to the Lord on that day”; 
• “All nations will walk in our brightness”; 
• “Men and women of every nation will serve him.”

These and similar passages strike us because these things do not happen in this world. And what’s this about “nations acclaiming God’s glory?” Nations are not persons. No political entity is a substantial being, though we do have “corporations” or “legal persons” created by law for some limited purpose. So what is this telling us that “nations” will “worship” God? And even if they could, it is extremely doubtful if many nations would worship God as He has urged them to do and in the manner He has indicated. We even come across the notion of a “wicked nation,” almost as if it were a person of some kind.

Some 195 entities we call “states” exist in the world. The word “state” is a modern term with a modern meaning. It is a form rising above the actual citizens who are its subjects. The Greek word “polity” referred rather to the way citizens who have chosen differing moral ends organize themselves to promote and protect those ends. The classical terms – monarchy, aristocracy, polity, democracy, oligarchy, tyranny, and mixed regime flow from this classical approach.

The term “nation” was discussed by Maritain in his Man and the State. The word comes from “natus,” that is, from birth. So tribes and nations technically refer to those of the same blood origin. We do not “choose” our blood lines. Whether a state should force the disappearance of nation is a delicate issue. If we remove all signs of family, kinship, and nation from our states, we are left with a concept of unattached individual citizens with no roots in blood or place, with nothing except a formal and legal relation to a distant sovereign. In this sense, the term “nation-state” is much preferred to that of “the state”, lo stato, as Machiavelli called it.

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The term “secular” means the things properly of this world (saeculum). We can talk of kings, queens, presidents, emperors, or prime ministers worshiping God as persons, each with his own chosen transcendent destiny. They can also “speak” in the name of the people they represent. Can a “state” that limits itself to what it is pay proper homage to God? A state honors God precisely by being only what it is.

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Read more: Source: www.thecatholicthing.org