God's Dachshund, Part II - This Cannot Continue

Following his trip to Hispanic America, Benedict issued his second encyclical Spe Salvi -- Hope Saves -- which was to a certain extent, an answer to Liberation Theology and an implicit acknowledgment of the immense suffering that afflicts the most catholic of continents.

“To a certain extent” because each of his two encyclicals contain both personal and social components. Thus, in Deus est Caritas, after discussing the relation between eros and agape in our personal development, Benedict went on to expound on the role of philion and caritas in the Christian social mission. Similarly in Spe Salvi, although the sequence was somewhat the reverse, Benedict discussed the concept of “hope” in its social aspect before moving on to the role of hope in more existential and personal settings.

To say as much is to over-simplify a papal style that weaves material and spiritual, social and personal perspectives together rather than tracing a simple progression from one to the other. Acknowledging, Benedict's "wholistic" style, I shall focus on the encyclical’s more political dimensions.

Benedict began his second encyclical by quoting the familiar adage that in spe salvi facti sumus -- by hope (faith) we are saved. Instead of leaving it at an exhortation to “accept Jesus as your personal savior” Benedict followed up with a heavy dollop of skepticism: “What sort of hope could ever justify such a statement?” Indeed.

From that point he compounded the skepticism by launching into a discussion of slavery -- the story of an African slave girl and the story of Spartacus. By broaching a phenomenon that might well be called an objective, social disorder which, not unlike eros, covets and debases man and woman into things of convenience, Benedict was implicitly asking: What kind of redemption can exist so long as slavery and poverty exist? In fact, if evil calls into the question the existence of God, does not poverty call into question the effectiveness of hope?

As I interpret it, his paradoxical answer is that slavery and poverty and social inequities provide the "substance" and habit for hope. He began the path to that curious answer began by confronting both the Protestant and Marxist challenge.

As he had begun his discussion on eros with Nietzsche, so here Benedict took on Marx as the champion and ultimate expression of Sir Francis Bacon’s hope in a brave new world of scientific and material progress. For Benedict, this was a false faith:

“ The nineteenth century held fast to its faith in progress as the new form of human hope, and it continued to consider reason and freedom as the guiding stars to be followed along the path of hope. Nevertheless, ... [this progress produced] the so-called “industrial proletariat”, whose dreadful living conditions Friedrich Engels described alarmingly in 1845. For his readers, the conclusion is clear: this cannot continue; a change is necessary. ... A revolutionary leap was needed.

“ Karl Marx took up the rallying call, and applied his incisive language and intellect to the task of launching this major new and, as he thought, definitive step in history towards salvation —towards what Kant had described as the “Kingdom of God”. ... [Kant’s] critique of Heaven is transformed into the critique of earth, the critique of theology into the critique of politics. Progress towards the better, towards the definitively good world, no longer comes simply from science but from politics— from a scientifically conceived politics that recognizes the structure of history and society and thus points out the road towards revolution, towards all-encompassing change.

“ With great precision, albeit with a certain one-sided bias, Marx described the situation of his time, and with great analytical skill he spelled out the paths leading to revolution .. His promise, owing to the acuteness of his analysis and his clear indication of the means for radical change, was and still remains an endless source of fascination.”

For those accustomed to fulminating anathemas against "godless communism", this hardly rose to the level of a swipe. From the head of the Catholic Church, Benedict's assessment is ear-burning language, as shifting in its view of politics as Benedict’s philo-erotic view of sex was in the context of love. Benedict did not dispute the fact of appalling social disparity; nor did he dispute the “clear conclusion” that a change was necessary. He commended the “acuteness” of the marxist analysis and accepted the need for progress that involves political change over and beyond mere technical innovation.

Accepting all of that, Benedict then stepped back and raised two objections to the marxist project. The first objection was to its faith that once an evil structure was done away with, the problem of human social existence would be solved. According to an obviously skeptical Benedict, Marx never outlined what the future socialist structure would be but seemed to feel that once evil capitalism were done away with goodness would flower.

Benedict’s second objection was that even if Marx had outlined the contours of the future All Socialist State, the true solution did not exist in structures but in the human heart. In a clear rebuke to Liberation Theology, Benedict reminded his readers that Jesus was not Spartacus and that the right state of human affairs and moral well-being of the world can never be guaranteed simply through structures alone, however good they are. Such structures, he said, are not only important, but necessary; and yet they cannot and must not marginalize human freedom.

Having thus dealt with Marx, Benedict swung around and had a thing or two to say to the Protestants, particularly Luther. Benedict emphatically rejected the “classical Protestant error” of focusing on subjective, personal salvation,

"[H]ow did we come to conceive the Christian project as a selfish search for salvation which rejects the idea of serving others?”

In Benedict’s view Christian Faith does not consist in the tearful egocentricities of “I once was lost but now I’m found” but rather is a social consciousness lived collectively through compassion ...

“ While “[t]he joy of Jesus can be personal” ... salvation has always been considered a “social” reality. ... Consistently with this view, sin is understood by the Fathers as the destruction of the unity of the human race, as fragmentation and division. .... Hence “redemption” ....appears as the reestablishment of unity, in which we come together once more in a union that begins to take shape in the world community of believers.”

Once again, Benedict leaves one a-gape. The traditional Thomist view has been that “sin” consists in being “cut off from God.” Now comes Benedict telling us that sin consist in being cut off from fellow man. In effect, that sin is Zeus’s punishment which fragmented human unity into two incomplete halves which now must come together in a re-newed union. It is a view of “sin” and “redemption” that is very close to some neo-Marxist interpretations of Genesis as a story of trans-ethnic human unity and solidarity.

It should not come as surprise, by now, that Benedict equivocates. In part, his view is informed by an unquestionably traditionalist perspective that the City of God is not established by class war a la Spartacus but rather by transcending class divisions through participation in a holy and divine gemeinschaft.

“ Those who, as far as their civil status is concerned, stand in relation to one an other as masters and slaves, inasmuch as they are members of the one Church have become brothers and sister .... Even if external structures remained unaltered, this changed society from within.”

But he does not leave it with a Beethovenesque intonation about “man’s heart transcending what stern custom parted wide.” He reiterates in several contexts that Christian Faith is an essentially social phenomenon. It is grounded in individual compassion, by which he means an actual and present sharing in the suffering of others. It also must unfold through every generation’s work to establish effective and just social structures adapted to their time. The New Testament, he says, defines Christian hope as an “hypostasis” -- not a subjective attitude a la Luther, but the objective “substance” of a social reality requiring practical and ongoing work. Alluding to the early Benedictines, reminds his readers that Europe was not “evangelized” by hymns alone, but by the organized communal discipline and hard work of the missionary monastic orders.

-oOo-

What is one to make of all this, particularly as it relates to Liberation Theology? At first blush, Benedict’s critique of Marx verges on the ludicrous -- or at least some kind of papal cat and mouse game.

He first chastises Marx for not elaborating a post-capitalist structure. He then says, that “the answer” is not to be found in structures anyway. Having said that, he goes on to posit an affirmative christian duty for each generation of faithful to fashion and build just and compassionate structures suitable to their times; only to remind us, in the end, that christian faith and unity are independent of outward structures. All of this while making latent allusions to Aristophanes in talk about the sin of disunity -- which lands him (whether he knows it or not) right in the lap of liberationist interpretations of Genesis, which interpret the First Commandment as a prohibition against detracting from the unity of humanity.

We are not going to find a straight line to anything in this swirl; and so we have little choice but to climb out, look elsewhere and beat up on Protestants for a while.

Benedict’s critique of Luther’s individuated and subjective definition of faith is a no brainer. The Reformation notwithstanding, it is clear from New Testament texts that faith was understood by the early church as a collective experience flowing from a shared understanding. Here in fact the English helps out the pope’s point.

As Benedict points out, no one after the first century was very sure what St. Paul meant when he said “Faith is hypostasis the of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen”. Translated literally into Latin, the phrase became, “Faith is the substance of things ...unseen” which led Luther to conclude that the “substance” at issue was an internal subjective attitude ... one might say, a kind of divine hallucination. Aquinas, adverting to scholastic definitions of substantia, rendered the saying as “faith is the habit of things hoped for...” which, Benedict says, is sort of like our saying that it is the embryo of things to come.

My understanding, which at this point is as good as anyone’s, is that the phrase is best rendered, at least in English, as: faith is our under-standing of things hoped for” And, I am fairly sure that this is what hypostasis meant. To be sure, understanding is a subjective mental matter. But when a faith or an understanding is shared it becomes objectified and acquires an existence of its own that is greater than the sum of its subjective parts. When the understanding involves any kind of conduct, it becomes a contract. In legal terms, our faith is our private law - the understanding which governs the contracting parties.

This is not a play on words. The U.S. Constitution is a heap of words, but words that have common meanings which are shared and assented to thus becoming our “common understanding” of how the country will be structured and run. Although the Constitution arose from the subjective understandings of the initial Framers, it became objectified when they agreed to it and further objectified when the Colonies ratified it so that no one in their right mind would say today that the United States is merely a figment of an individual’s imagination.

Although the Constitution is specifically an organizational chart, such charts are simply schematic renditions of the sum total of individual acts they prescribe. The Constitution is given "life" and exists in objective reality by our "observance" of it. Conversely, repeated patterns of individual acts ("habits") become and can be rendered into a de facto structure.

Thus considered, the understanding is the structure, the under-girding of a certain relationship -- not the fantasy friendship with a teddy bear but of real incarnate friendships. At the time St. Paul wrote, this shared hope was also an “under-structure” to the prevailing reality. The prevailing social understanding operative at the time was that Julius was master and Philemon the slave and those words denoted their respective places in the official structure of things. To say that Julius and Philemon were one in Christ was to posit a secret structure under the official one.

At this point one we can leave off Protestants and return to wondering how much of a critique or rejection of Marx Benedict really engaged in. Marxism has been criticised vehemently for “entailing” what later became the repressive, economically centralized structure of the Stalinist State. Benedict’s “faulting” of Marx for not outlining a socialist structure actually absolves him from the monstrosities of Stalinism. However these came about, they can’t be imputed to any non existent plan of Marx’s.

What then is left of the critique? That Marx did not proscribe a particular structure? How is this different from that “Christian Hope” which, Benedict has told us does not entail any particular structure but rather an obligation to create permutable re-structurings adapted to the circumstances and reflecting a certain understanding?

How does this “christian embryo” differ from Marx’s understanding that once the structure of capitalist economy was abolished we would not be locked into the relation of Mr.Capital and. Mr. Labor, but stand as brothers united? Isn’t Marx’s hope in things unseen to come, once we are freed from the bonds of a certain relationship, simply an economic expression of “In Christ there is no slave nor free”?

It is curious that Benedict avoided direct mention of the one criticism catholic teaching has always leveled at Marxism -- its supposed “basis” in class-war. Actually Marx did not advocate ongoing class war, but rather one last push to bring in the Millenium. Here, it would seem that Marx is the faith preacher and Benedict the doubter. Benedict clearly does not believe the Millenium is just around the corner; or if it is, that it will stay around very long. Not believing that, he is not tempted to wink at one last act of violence to bring in perpetual peace.

It seems to me that Benedict has cleverly manoeuvred Christianity and Marxism into parallel berths. The message is: be a “Marxist” as you like just don’t play Spartacus.

Personally, I am not quite convinced. I believe certain structures are not simply lacking but are positively evil and need, for God’s sake, to be destroyed. Charity within or under the system is not sufficient; and if that leads me to prosecute nominal “brothers and sisters” who are exploiting the weak and oppressing the helpless then so be it.

The poverty in Latin America is simply appalling. It is no better and often much worse than the poverty described by Engels and furiously blasted in footnotes by Marx. In Mexico City, old women and lame dogs scrounge for salvageables on mountains of toxic garbage. In Lima, legions of orphans roam the street, selling their bodies in order to buy enough glue to dull the hunger pains. Throughout the continent, the maimed, the blind, the starving beg in the streets or die quietly in forgotten despair in hovels and slums. As young Che remarked “Hay mucha injusticia, no?” In Latin America, to be human is to be Marxist. With or without violence, Socialism is not an “option” but a necessity. The current system is a sin that “cries to Heaven for vengeance.” (fn 1)

I am also not convinced that the value of human freedom necessitates what might be called an option for the rich-- which is what one comes rather to close to saying once it is conceded that we have a natural freedom-right to oppress, should we so choose.... howsoever erroneously. (fn 2)

But I am not a pope; in fact, not even a priest. It seems to me that in so far as interpreting the Christian Gospel goes, Benedict stands on pretty solid ground. Christ, whose vicar he is, came for all men, and that includes the rich and the unrepentant. Jesus warned against living by the sword and reminded us that the poor will always be with us. No one is required to be Christian, but when all is said and done Jesus was not Spartacus.

All of that said, it also seems to me that Benedict met the “liberationists” more than halfway. He propounded a definition of Christian Hope that was neither a personal bliss-out nor a collective opiate but rather a caritas that requires the ergon of uniting a divided human race.

Part-III -- Reaching out to the Infidel.

©WCG, 2008

(1) In the traditional Catholic moral schema, defrauding the poor is one of four sins that “cry to Heaven for vengeance”.

(2) In Vaticanese, the "option for the poor" refers to the non-revolutionary doctrine of giving priority to the poor. It has its origins in Jeremiah and "... feed the hungry, clothe the naked.."