Like Soul to Body?: The Church's Developing Understanding of Her Relation to the State – Fr. Brad Elliott, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Thomism, Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality, Catholicism, Philosophy, Christianity

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 14 May 2026

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

Fr. Brad Elliott traces the Church's evolving use of the soul-body metaphor for her relation to the state, purifying it in modern social teaching to affirm the Church as a distinct perfect society ordered to supernatural ends while leavening the temporal order.

This lecture was given on March 24th, 2026, at Cornell University.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

Fr. Brad Elliott was raised in Dayton Ohio and studied Jazz percussion at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. After being raised as a Missouri Synod Lutheran he entered the Catholic Church in 2002.

After moving to California, Fr. Brad became an active, performing musician, with a reputation as a highly sought after drummer on the international scene. Working in Los Angeles, CA, he performed and recorded various styles of modern music from Rock to jazz and big band. During his time in Los Angeles he performed and toured extensively with artists such as Annie Stela and Brie Larson.

After ten years as a professional drum set player and feeling a call to commit himself entirely to Jesus Christ, Fr. Brad chose to leave the music industry and become a Dominican friar within Western Dominican Province. After completing theological studies, he was ordained to the priesthood of Jesus Christ on June, 22nd 2018 at St. Dominic’s Church in San Francisco, CA.

In 2014 Fr. Brad received an MA in philosophy from the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley CA. In 2021 he received a Licentiate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC. In 2025 he completed a Doctorate in Sacred Theology at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC focusing on the role of human craft and participatory governance in the social doctrine of the Church. He is currently a professor of Moral Theology at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, California. He authored the book The Shape of the Artistic Mind published by Pontifex University Press in 2023.

Keywords: Bellarmine, Catholic Social Teaching, Common Good, Giles of Rome, Leo XIII, Perfect Society, Pius XI, Societas Perfecta, Soul-Body Metaphor, Two Swords

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast.
0:05.9	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church,
0:10.6	and the wider public square.
0:12.2	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute
0:16.8	chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.6	to mystic institute.org.
0:23.6	As a theologian, I have a love-hate relationship with metaphors.
0:28.6	We need them. This is clear, especially to do theology, but metaphors take on a life of their own.
0:34.6	We forget that they're only tools. We tend to reify them beyond what their original
0:39.5	use can bear. Metaphors change, and a metaphor helpful in one age can be confusing in another.
0:50.0	And so any serious effort then to think critically about what our Lord has revealed to us requires
0:56.0	a meticulous analysis of the metaphors that we use.
1:01.0	In this lecture, I want to trace one very common metaphor that runs through the entire Christian tradition,
1:08.0	the metaphor that likens the relationship between church and state to that
1:13.6	of soul and body. As the image goes, as the soul is to the body, therefore the church is to the state.
1:24.6	And I wish to do three things, three parts to this lecture. Part one,
1:29.6	I will uncover the conditions of the ancient world that provided the fruitful soil for this
1:36.8	metaphor to take root, why it was an attractive option, and what did it mean when it first
1:42.3	entered the Christian repertoire of images,
1:45.4	describing her relationship to the world?
1:48.8	Second, I will show how and why this metaphor slowly changed through time, as all images do.
1:56.0	And third, I will demonstrate how modern Catholic social thought,
	...

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