“Chapter X The Two Realms”

5. The balance of Power

... There are the hedonists who would withdraw wholly into the realm of existence, to ear, drink, and be merry without the pains and the qualms that go with immortal yearnings. The view of civility has been challenged by the ascetics who would withdraw from the realm of existence, waiting for the end of the world and their own release from mortality. It has been challenged by the primitive Chiliasts, who live in the expectation that the millenium, according to the revelation of Saint john, is near at hand. And it has been challenged by the modern perfectionists who believe that by their own revolutionary acts men can make themselves the Creators of heaven on this earth, In all these views the error stems from the same fundamental disorder. All refuse to recognize that, on the one hand, the two realms cannot be fused, and that. On the other hand, they cannot be separated and isolated—that they must be related by striking, maintaining, redressing a balance between them.

This is a complex arid subtle truth, rather like a surd in mathematics which cannot be expressed in the finite terms of ordinary quantities.

Because we are drawn between the two realms, there Can he no definitive line of demarcation of the orbits of the state and of the church. Though the political government is concerned primarily with the affairs of the existential world, though the churches are primarily committed to the realm of the spirit, they meet whenever and wherever there are issues of right and wrong, issues of what is the mature of man, of what is his true image, his place in the scheme of things, and his destiny. Both the state and the churches are involved in these decisions, and their relationship cannot be defined by any clear. precise demarcation of their respective spheres of influence.

In the tension between them, which is the theme of so much of the history of the Western society, neither must be allowed to conquer and absorb the other. The experience of the West has taught that lesson. But it has taught, also, that the two realms cannot be separated, that they cannot he isolated and insulated in different compartments.
p. 153-154

Walter Lippman, Essays In The Public Philosophy - 1955