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Three days before departing on his Apostolic Visit to the United Kingdom, Pope Benedict signalled that the theme of his upcoming trip would focus on the role of the Church in evangelizing an increasingly secular society.
Receiving the newly accredited German ambassador to the Holy See, the Pope praised Catholic martyrs to Nazi tyranny. We were fortunate, he said, to live today in free and democratic societies. At the same time, however, this political freedom allowed for a falling away from christian commitments and concepts, so that social life had become increasingly dominated and determined by private interests and power-calculations (Machtkalkül). In such circumstances, faithful Christians had a duty to respond to such developments in a critical and positive manner and to affirm the “fundamental and permanent” importance of Christianity in providing the foundation and structure of our culture (in der Grundlegung und Gestaltung unserer Kultur).
Prelude and Subtext.
As usual, Benedict’s remarks were rich with counterpoints and themes. It was nothing new to hear a preacher declaim that society had gone astray and needed to return to the Good Shepherd. But Benedict used this otherwise “canned sermon” to make some astonishing allusions which all but accused modern secularists of harbouring the same woe-laden disorientations as inhered in Nazism.
It was hardly surprising that the Pope would use the occasion of receiving the German ambassador to make pious remembrance of German martyrs. To whom else might such remembrances be addressed? But Benedict was not about to leave it at, It’s been a long haul, Babe, but we finally made it to the land of peace and freedom. Instead, he turned on the dime and spoke in language all but directly cribbed from Pope Pius XI’s 1937 encyclical Mit Brennende Sorge, (With Burning Sorrow) which Reich Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop had called a “declaration of war”.
In 1933, the Holy See signed a Concordat with the German Government which had just been taken over by the National Socialists. The Nazi programme for German society was no secret and the purpose of the Concordat, from the Vatican’s perspective, was to carve out “spheres of immunity” for itself within the larger new social order.
There was little question of “evangelizing” Germany; for, in fact, Germany had been evangelized by the Nazi “Bewegung” (“Movement”). Faced with such a looming onset, the best the Church could do was to hold onto what she had and this meant preserving the inviolability of confession, the sanctity of the mass, the peace and security of religious orders and the uninfringed prerogatives of catholic education.
These provisions were no small things. They prevented priests from becoming de facto snoops for the Gestapo; they prevented Goebbels from turning Sunday mass into praise and thanksgiving services for Germany’s New Saviour; they provided a real and actual refuge for people who wanted to “absent” themselves from society while still providing a presence within it; and, most importantly, they allowed the Church to fight for the minds of the young. This latter was especially crucial because the Nazis understood very well -- as did the Church -- that who controls the minds of youth controls the future.
Those who are ignorant of the historical facts (and this includes much of the present-day academic and media establishments), criticise the Concordat as, at best, “legitimising” the Nazis. Worse and more viciously, it is asserted as proof that the Church was “in league” with them. This is villainy.
Fifty years before, Chancellor Bismarck had launched his Kulturkampf the purpose of which was to bring the Church to heel as a state-controlled confession. Religious orders were abolished, Jesuits were banned, schools were subject to state inspection and priests were prohibited from discussing political issues from the pulpit. A wave of anti-Catholic propaganda accompanied the Kulturkampf, fueled with outright hatred from Liberals who viewed Catholics as the enemies of a modern German nation. Over time, enforcement of the more notorious provisions were relaxed, even if they remained on the books. Now, however, in 1933, a new, modern German Reich was, as the Nazis proclaimed, being “reborn”. Once again, and even more uncompromisingly, the Church faced a State intent on remolding religion to suit its own purposes.
Faced with such an overwhelming force, there are three general alternatives: collaboration, retrenchment and, what the Protestants later called, “inner emigration” -- a term which was used to denote the cultivation of a subjective attitude of distance and mental reservation.
The difficulty with “inner immigration” is that it is next to useless. The inner immigrant falls into his own head and becomes a little white particle floating about in the maelstrom of a glass snow ball. Inner immigration is simply the inverse of collaboration which consists of falling into line as a marching unit in column. Retrenchment, as the middle way, shades into both polarities of the spectrum. It “passively” collaborates in that it acquiesces in the status quo, which is typically the price for these arrangements. On the other hand, it provides a locus for an “outer emigration” in which the reserved places and privileges of the Church become sanctuaries from the status quo and provide safe harbour without having to flee the country altogether. Outer (as opposed to outbound) emigration is neither trivial nor useless. All resistance movements have necessary recourse to safe-houses and these houses provide not only a place to hide but spaces to make contact with other resistors, to acquire “illegal” information and to make plans. Retrenchment accepts the status quo but provides objective means for both withholding and resisting.
In short, faced with the Nazi take-over, the Church went into feste burge (might fortress) mode; and this mode reflected at least one of several answers as to what it means for Christians to “be in” the world. The ultimate hope of all Christians is that the world will become the “City of God” but as often as not it is the Devil’s Republic in which Christians are relegated to catacombs, monasteries in gloomy forests, or simply to floating about in their own private worlds doped up on their fantasized ideas of Grace and Salvation. The Concordat aimed to provide Catholic with actual spheres of sanctuary.
Almost immediately upon signing the Concordat, the Nazis went back on their word. By 1937, the National Socialist bewegung was in full swing. They had taken over all spheres of the life of the Volk, including arts, recreation and religion. The Nazi controlled Protestant Reichskirke pushed the idea of “Positive Germanic Christianity” which was a watered-down version of the official racial paganism. As for the Church, the Nazis violated the confessional, harassed people going to mass, arrested monks and nuns and, to be sure, launched major assaults on all fronts against Catholic education. This was not only a matter of catechism class or class rooms, it included taking over Catholic scouts and submerging them into the Hitler Youth.
Pius reacted With Burning Sorrow. Discarding the official Latin for German, he railed against the Government’s broken promises and anathematised the Nazi concept of man, god and cosmos.
"Whoever identifies, by a pantheistic confusion, God with the universe, ...or ... whoever follows that so-called pre-Christian Germanic conception of substituting a dark and impersonal destiny for the personal God, is not a believer in God at all.With this background in mind, it could not have been but like being hit with loud gong or clanging cymbal when the quiet spoken Benedict said to the ambassador
"Whoever exalts race, or the people, ... or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community... beyond its standard value to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts the order of the world planned and created by God;
"Beware... of that growing abuse of the name of God, as though it were a meaningless label, to be affixed to any creation, of human speculation. Our God is the Personal God, supernatural, omnipotent, infinitely perfect,... who will not, and cannot, tolerate a rival God by His side."
"Wenn man aber den Glauben an Gott als Person aufgibt, dann ist die Alternative ein »Gott«, der nicht erkennt, nicht hört und nicht spricht. Und er hat erst recht keinen Willen. Wenn Gott keinen Willen hat, dann ist gut und böse letztlich nicht mehr zu unterscheiden."Although Germany was today a free and open society, the Pope said, “the Christian personal God, who is revealed in the Bible, is being supplanted with the concept of a supreme being, mysterious and indeterminate who only has a vague relationship with the personal life of human beings.”
"When, however, man gives up a belief in a Personal God, then the alternative is a "god" who neither understands, hears nor speaks; who has, in truth, no Will. When God has no will, it then becomes impossible to distinguish between good and evil."
In the ensuing days, Benedict, would repeatedly iterate that the Church had, and expected to play, a contributing and balancing role in the secular and political sphere. The theme would be played politely and lightly, but the shot across the ambassador’s bow served as a bas motif for what was otherwise left unsaid.
Before Germany there was always England.
The conflictive dynamic between Church and State has been one of the principal themes in European history, beginning institutionally with the Donation of Constantine and personally before then with the persecution of the martyrs. The conflict was often a wrangle over power and wealth; but it was just as often, on both sides, a matter of good faith differences of opinion ultimately arising from the fact that the purpose of society is to provide for the material whereas the aim of the Church is to remind society that man does not live by bread alone. As Benedict said at Westminster, this “corrective” reminder is not always welcome.
In no place was corrective action least welcome than in England, whose history is paradigmatic for the conflict between crown and mitre. This conflict should not be viewed as a simple rams-head opposition but rather as a dialectical dynamic in which there is as much drawing from the other as there pushing against it. It is precisely this intercourse within opposition that enables an ultimate synthesis to emerge. What emerged in England was a constitutional-religious settlement the moderating nature of which was a collection of counter balancing corrective measures facilitated by equivocal usages. As stated by Benedict,
“[England’s] Parliamentary tradition owes much to the national instinct for moderation, to the desire to achieve a genuine balance between the legitimate claims of government and the rights of those subject to it.”What the Pope omitted to specify was that Magna Carta, that “great charter of English and American liberties” began with a defence of the then Catholic Church against the State. “Bad” King John was the son of Henry II who (equivocally) ordered the murder (1170) St. Thomas Becket in the course of jurisdictional disputes which included a demand that the clergy pay a fee to be exempt from military service and that priests accused of crimes be tried in the King’s common law courts. Like his father, John was one of a new breed of “modernising” kings intent on streamlining government and establishing a unitary nation-state. His taxations without consent antagonized the barons and his asserted right to appoint bishops provoked the Church. At Westminster Hall, Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, (in defiance of the Pope), organized the barons in revolt.
Thus, when Article One of the Charter stated “We have granted to God, and by this our present Charter have confirmed, for Us and our Heirs for ever, that the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable” the intent was to establish that the Church was independent from the State, although it would not be considered insignificant later that, in the circumstances of the day, that same establishment had also entailed a defiance of Rome.
Over the course of 500 years and through the crucible of the English Reformation, Article One evolved into the American First Amendment, that synthesis of historical experience which prohibits the state establishment of religion and by the same token guarantees freedom of individual conscience.
The transmutation of Magna Carta’s institutional balance into a question of individual rights of conscience began precisely at the point where the Crown, under Henry VIII, succeeded in gaining control over the Church, such that questions of faith became matter for treason. It was thus that St. Thomas Moore was tried and condemned (1535) for refusing to publicly endorse Henry VIII’s establishment of the Church in independence from Rome.
It is a curious fact that illustrates the nuanced nature of the dialectic that Thomas a Becket and Thomas Moore are each considered saints by both the Anglican and the Roman Church.
Although these church-state disputes often appear as mere struggles over power and revenue the surface conflicts were manifestations of a deeper divide concerning the structure of society itself. In the middle ages, it was accepted that governance of society was a co-participation between church and state. Thus, jurisdictional lines reflected an understanding (or disagreement) as to where the Church had a say ( -diction) and over what, not.
This theory of co-participation derived from Pope Gregory the Great (590-604). Believing that Caesars ruled by God’s decree, he felt that the Church should acquiesce to regal demands where possible but, at the same time, that the Crown was duty bound to protect the Church when requested. Innocent III (who backed King John against the Bishop and his barons), upped the ante, maintaining that the royal power derived its dignity from the pontifical authority in the same way as the moon derives her light from the sun. Henry VIII, reversed the ante, setting up the Crown, hence nation state, hence the sovereignty of the People, and ultimately the supremacy of the Volk, as the source of all authority from which all else emanates.
The tempering adjustments between ecclesiastical and state power has been a feature of most European countries; and, of course, the Reformation was in certain measure a struggle over the rights of conscience. But nowhere did the institutional and the individual aspects of the conflict play out more paradigmatically and with as clearly defined contradictions than in England.
Those contradictions included the disgraceful fact that for near 300 years after the Anglican break with Rome, and in the name of freedom, Catholics were persecuted and excommunicated from established society. Those persecutions included the shutting down of monasteries, inquisition into the confessional, prohibiting public or at times private services, barring Catholics from education, and even from trivial posts in government. Even today, an untoward and unworthy animus against Catholicism persists among Englishmen and among their nativist residue in Tennessee.
Given the historical saga, it was nothing short of amazing to see a Roman pontiff walk into the very hall where Thomas Moore was convicted and stand face to face with the English lords and commons assembled. To say that it was “fitting” that Benedict would discuss the relationship between church and state rather misses the point. The scene demanded the script, which is why Benedict went there in the first place.
Once again, the Moon and the Sun.
The Pope’s address at Westminster Hall was manifestly intended to be the piece de resistance of his visit. But the prelude that began in Rome was continued in the run up to the Hall so that it is best to regard the Pope’s various pronouncements as all one cloth. Culminating in his Westminster Address, the Pope made three simple points.
1. Church and State Have A Common Responsibility.
Benedict explained that religion was linked to politics at the juncture or “justice”. It was there that the two spheres met because whereas the need and demand for justice is a religio-moral issue, determining and implementing justice is a function of the state. (Sept.16, Remarks to Press on Flight.) This, the Pope said, was a “common responsibility of politics and religion for the future of the continent and the future of humanity. Our high and common responsibility is to see that the values that create justice and politics, and those that come from religion, walk together in our time.”
In this regard, Anglicans and Catholics in particular shared a common mission. (Ibid) The two confessions need no longer be in “competition” if both “Anglicans and Catholics see that [they] are not there for themselves, but are rather instruments of Christ.”
In fact, all religious groups participate in this mission because all religions ask common and fundamental existential questions so that genuine religious belief always points “beyond present utility” and “brings enlightenment... purifies our hearts and ...inspires noble and generous action, to the benefit of the entire human family.” (Sept. 17, Address to Inter-Denominational Religious Leaders.)
2. In Shouldering its own Portion, there can be no Compromise.
In this joint enterprise, Benedict noted, the initial onus was on the Church to be true to her mission on Earth. “[A] church which seeks above all to be attractive would already be on the wrong path, because the Church does not work for itself, does not work to increase its numbers so as to have more power. The Church is at the service of Another; .... [and her task is]to make herself transparent for Jesus.” (Sept. 16, Remarks on Flight.)
This fidelity to Faith, the Pope warned, may often require personal sacrifice, just as Cardinal Newman had suffered through a “long path of renewal and conversion”. (Ibid) More than sacrifice, faithfulness often required martyrdom. Standing where he had been tried and condemned, Benedict “recall[ed] the figure of Saint Thomas More, the great English scholar and statesman, who is admired by believers and non-believers alike for the integrity with which he followed his conscience, even at the cost of displeasing the sovereign whose “good servant” he was.”
In this challenging enterprise, it fell to the Church to “maintain its respect for those traditional values and cultural expressions that more aggressive forms of secularism no longer value or even tolerate." (Sept.16, Speech in Holyrood Hall, Edindurgh.)
In such remarks, one could not but hear echoes of Burning Sorrow where Pius XI had praised
“those priests and Faithful, who have persisted in their Christian duty and in the defense of God's rights in the teeth of an aggressive paganism.”and who had admonished that
“A Christianity which keeps a grip on itself, refuses every compromise with the world, ... will be, a model and a guide to a world which is sick to death and clamors for directions, lest it be condemned to a catastrophe that would baffle the imagination.”3. Christianity is under attack.
These intimations and echoes got full blast at Westminster Hall where, addressing British lords and commons assembled, the Pope said,
"I cannot but voice my concern at the increasing marginalization of religion, particularly of Christianity, that is taking place in some quarters, even in nations which place a great emphasis on tolerance. There are those who would advocate that the voice of religion be silenced, or at least relegated to the purely private sphere. There are those who argue that the public celebration of festivals such as Christmas should be discouraged, in the questionable belief that it might somehow offend those of other religions or none. And there are those who argue – paradoxically with the intention of eliminating discrimination – that Christians in public roles should be required at times to act against their conscience. These are worrying signs of a failure to appreciate not only the rights of believers to freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, but also the legitimate role of religion in the public square.Once again, Benedict echoed his predecessor.
"Religious bodies – including institutions linked to the Catholic Church – need to be free to act in accordance with their own principles and specific convictions based upon the faith and the official teaching of the Church. In this way, such basic rights as religious freedom, freedom of conscience and freedom of association are guaranteed."
“In your country,” Pius declaimed, “voices are swelling into a chorus urging people to leave the Church, and among the leaders there is more than one whose official position is intended to create the impression that this infidelity to Christ the King constitutes a signal and meritorious act of loyalty to the modern State. . . . But the believer has an absolute right to profess his Faith and live according to its dictates. Laws which impede this profession and practice of Faith are against natural law.”4. Christianity is the Sure Foundation of European Civilization.
From Parliament, the Pope proceeded to Westminster Abbey where, again hearkening to the assault on Christianity, he reminded his audience that the assault is fundamentally self-destructive since Christianity is both the fount and hope of Western civilization.
“Here we cannot help but be reminded of how greatly the Christian faith shaped the unity and culture of Europe and the heart and spirit of the English people.
“In a society which has become increasingly indifferent or even hostile to the Christian message, we are all the more compelled to give a joyful and convincing account of the hope that is within us (cf. 1 Pet 3:15), and to present the Risen Lord as the response to the deepest questions and spiritual aspirations of the men and women of our time.
“At the dawn of a new age in the life of society and of the Church, Bede understood both the importance of fidelity to the word of God as transmitted by the apostolic tradition,
“This nation, and the Europe which Bede and his contemporaries helped to build, once again stands at the threshold of a new age."
The Axe and the Hammer.
From the crescendo of his remarks at Westminster Hall, Benedict used the melodious finale of evensong at Westminster Abbey to close the circle by recalling his namesake and placing the historicity of the church-state dialectic within a still larger historical cycle. In the Pope’s view, the “corrective action” of the Church is not simply a counter-balance from the outside but takes place within the larger context of a Europe that is the product of Christian reclamation.
Speaking to a general audience at St. Peter’s Square in April 2008, the Pope recalled that,
“with his life and work St Benedict exercised a fundamental influence on the development of European civilization and culture” and helped Europe to emerge from the "dark night of history" that followed the fall of the Roman empire." [more]In so saying, the Pope was expressing the Church’s official view which considers St. Benedict to be the “Father of Europe.” (Paul VI, Pacis Nuntius, 10/24/64)
And not without reason; for it was from the monastic order which Benedict had established, in 540, on the outskirts of a desolate and deserted Rome, that missionaries went forth to reclaim Britain and then Germany for civilization and Christ. If this is so, then the Church’s participation in social and political life can never be regarded as a gratuity extended by the largesse of the liberal nation state but is rather more like the act of a parent solicitous for the welfare of her own offspring.
It is worth recalling the events in order to grasp what this reclamation entailed and how it worked, given that Pope Benedict has repeatedly urged the example of St. Benedict as a paradigm for Church and Christian conduct today and in the future.
In 475, the Roman Empire in the West collapsed. The event ought not be painted in overly apocalyptic hues, dramatically pleasing as it might be to do so. The collapse had been a long time in coming; the “Barbarians” were not inhuman savages and the plumbing still worked on the morning after. But the collapse of civil authority meant precisely that civilization in its fundamental political aspect had ceased. Men were left to their own devices and it was here that a dark and looming chaos hung over the continent.
Where it could, the Church took over routine and necessary bureaucratic tasks that had previously be discharged by imperial clerks or the household slaves of some local senator. In the north, however, the vestiges of city life decayed into rustic tribalism. In 597, Pope Gregory the Great sent the Benedictine St. Augustine (of Canterbury) to Britain to reclaim the island for Christianity, which he did with help from the King’s christian wife and the prospect of certain strategic advantages over rival tribes. A little over a century later (716) St. Boniface set out from a Benedictine monastery in Southhampton to convert the pagans of Germany.
It is said that the Germans were converted when Boniface, calling upon Thor to strike him down, took out his little axe and started chopping away at the sacred Donner Oak. When instead, Thor (or Whoever) sent a big gust of wind to blow the oak over, the amazed Frisians are said to have converted on the spot. One might be permitted to observe that the Frisians were already rather doubtful pagans in as much as a true devotee would hardly permit any stranger to attempt such a cutting blasphemy, as if gods could be treated like mere specimens in a scientific experiment.
Boniface himself was more down to earth, remarking that without the protection of Charles Martel (the same “hammer” who defeated the advancing Muslims at Tours) he could “neither administer his church, defend his clergy, nor prevent idolatry.”
Later medieval glossators, embellished the tree cutting miracle by adding that in the cracked crevice of the oak there appeared a sapling fir tree causing Boniface to exclaim that like this little fir, “let Christ be at the centre of your households; as its leaves remain evergreen in the darkest days, let Christ be your constant light; as its boughs reach out to embrace and its top points to heaven: let Christ be your Comfort and Guide.” From whence the Christmas Tree, alluded to by Benedict in his address to the parliamentarians.
Delightful as such miracles are, the more instructive lesson is that the “conversion” of a wild and disordered Europe was a collaborative process between axe and hammer. This is not to say, in cynical sociological fashion, that religion served as a “mere prop” to the state. It was rather the other way around. Augustine and Boniface’s missions were truly informative on their own initiative.
Les Idiots of the Enlightenment are full of scorn for fantastic “credulity” of medieval man. What kind of fool, they, ask could believe such nonsense as Benedict’s miraculous chopping down of the oak tree? But it is they who are the fools for bringing l’esprit de geometrie to bear on what is said by way of finesse.
Perhaps it was because paper was in short supply; but, whatever the case, medieval man found distilled and poetic ways of explaining complex realities. What did Benedict do with his little axe? Literally, he went to work chopping wood, which is precisely what the monks did when they ventured forth and cleared forests in order to domesticate the land and build their first rude monasteries. It was that work, assisted by the wind of prayer, that worked the conversion.
What St. Benedict established was an army of reconquest: worker-monks who ventured forth into the actual and metaphorical wilderness where monastic outposts re-established civility by example and exhortation. When it is said that the “pagans” were “converted to Christianity” what is meant is not simply that they were convinced to accept items on a particular (not very comprehensible) ideological menu, but rather that -- through advantage and example -- they were brought to see the worth of a cosmological order within which their own civic existence arose and acquired value and purpose. In political terms this “conversion” was, in effect, what we would call, a “constitutional act” that was as firm as stone because it was written on people’s hearts.
We must not imagine that men were stupid because they lived a long time ago. It is foolish to think that a bunch of rude and filthy warriors were brought around by suddenly seeing the truth of a tale no less absurd than their own myths. Benedict’s motto was Ora et Laboro. What the monks brought was the example of tangible technological and economic advantages coupled with a practice of listening and acts of charity. As Pope Benedict has explained,
“Without prayer there is no experience of God. Benedict's spirituality was not an interiority removed from reality. In the anxiety and confusion of his day, he lived under God's gaze and in this very way never lost sight of the duties of daily life and of man with his practical needs.What was being transmitted was a social culture; and while it may have been backed up by a little hammering, it was a culture that convinced of its own weight and which protected the weak and magnified the least.
“In the first place prayer is an act of listening (Prol. 9-11), which must then be expressed in action. "The Lord is waiting every day for us to respond to his holy admonitions by our deeds" (Prol. 35). Thus, the monk's life becomes a fruitful symbiosis between action and contemplation...” (General Audience, April 2008 [here] )
Pathologies of Faith and Reason
The Pope’s citation of St. Benedict serves a dual purpose as both a claim of right and as a model for Church participation in the society it helped create. But the Benedictine motto, ora et laboro, also serves as an emblem for what it means to be a human being.
Throughout his remarks in England, Benedict alluded to a string of dualisms with which medieval man would have been entirely familiar: city and forest; light and dark; christianity and paganism; church and state; work and prayer, reason and faith. While it is typical to think of these qualities as antagonistic opposites, it bears repeating that dialectics is not the same as opposition. The entire Benedictine premise is that work and prayer are complimentary.
But work is quintessentially the province of reason just prayer is the work of faith. Thus, in Pope Benedict’s view, the conflicts between Church and State, so productive of martyrs and burning sorrow is what occurs when the proper balance is not maintained and this, at bottom, rests on the necessary complimentarity of reason and faith in general and within each human breast. It was at Westminster Hall, that Benedict enunciated this fundamental theme of his papacy.
“There is widespread agreement that the lack of a solid ethical foundation for economic activity has contributed to the grave difficulties now being experienced by millions
“The central question at issue, then, is this: where is the ethical foundation for political choices to be found? The Catholic tradition maintains that the objective norms governing right action are accessible to reason, prescinding from the content of revelation.
“The role of religion in political debate is not so much to supply these norms, as if they could not be known by non-believers – still less to propose concrete political solutions, which would lie altogether outside the competence of religion – but rather to help purify and shed light upon the application of reason to the discovery of objective moral principles. This “corrective” role of religion vis-à-vis reason is not always welcomed,
“[In contrast] distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism, can be seen to create serious social problems themselves. These distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion. It is a two-way process.
“The world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another and should not be afraid to enter into a profound and ongoing dialogue, for the good of our civilization.”
In so saying Benedict returned to the central thesis of his much misunderstood Regensburg Address (2006) in which he proffered the services of “Helleno-Christianity” as a bridge between the putatively “rationalist” West and the emblematically “spirit-driven” Islamic world.
In that address, Benedict criticised both the unthinking fanaticism derived from a belief in a God that was beyond understanding and an absolutist scientific rationalism that refused to harbor non-quantifiable values.
In the conflict between these two extremes, he said, there stood on the one side the image of a capricious God, who is not bound by any concept of reasoned goodness and whose transcendent otherness is so exalted that human reason becomes a diminished irrelevance. On the other side, if science makes no room for anything other than “mathematical and empirical elements” then,
“ it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by ‘science’ ... and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective ‘conscience’ becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, ... ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it.”Christianity itself, in Benedict’s view, represented a synthesis between “Hellenic reason” and “Jewish historical experience” -- between the logical mind and seemingly haphazard, mysterious events.
Benedict went on to criticise the Reformation’s attempt to “de-hellenize” Christianity, by purging it of its philosophical moorings. This, he said, ultimately led to Kant’s cleavage between reason and faith which, as much as irredentist scientific empiricism, consigned faith to the realm of purely idiosyncratic fantasies based on arbitrarily accepted beliefs.
Benedict returned to this theme again in his encyclical Spe Salvi (2007) which critiqued the “disturbing step” taken when Francis Bacon (Novus Organum) substituted “faith and practice” (Ora et Laboro) with “science and praxis.” (Spe Salvi § 16) “Faith in progress,” Benedict wrote, was misplaced because “man can never be redeemed simply from outside.... This kind of hope is deceptive. Science can contribute greatly to making the world and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it...” (Spe Salvi § 25)
In denouncing the modern world’s idolatrization of Cartesian rationalism Benedict was following his mentor and collaborator, the Catholic theologian, Hans Urs von Balthasar, who wrote that
"...whenever the relationship between nature and grace is severed (as happens... where 'faith' and 'knowledge' are constructed as opposites), then the whole of worldly being falls under the dominion of 'knowledge', and the springs and forces of love immanent in the world are overpowered and finally suffocated by science, technology and cybernetics. The result is a world without women, without children, without reverence for love in poverty and humiliation — a world in which power and the profit-margin are the sole criteria, where the disinterested, the useless, the purposeless is despised, persecuted and in the end exterminated — a world in which art itself is forced to wear the mask and features of technique.”Thus, in the Benedictine view, faith versus reason; church versus state; production versus prayer are each breakdowns in the proper relationship, springing from either a pathology of empiricism or a pathology of “transcendent” fundamentalism or both.
The Challenge of Kulturfriedens.
It would be a certain mistake to think that Benedict had travelled all the way to Parliament simply to throw down the gauntlet of a counter kulturkampf. On the contrary he used his trip to call for a culture of co-participation founded in respectful dialogue. His cryptic allusions to the Nazi era are not to be understood as gratuitous insults to present or past British governments.
In the Church’s view (or at least that of Pius and Benedict), the Nazi sin was not to found in its ultimate wages but in the apple from which ate -- or perhaps better said, in the number apples on which it gorged itself.
To minds brought up on the myths of rationalism it appears an oxymoron to speak of “superstitious reason”. But, in Latin, the word super-stitio means “to carry too far” or, as Pope Pius XI had put it, to take otherwise good and necessary things and exalt them “beyond their standard value.” What is that value? It is hard to specify other than to say, in a rather Hellenic way, that it is a question of moderation. But either faith or reason “carried too far” become the pathological opposites of what they truly should be.
Among western propaganda-historians Nazism is excoriated as “medievalism”, “romanticism” and an “outburst of fanatical racism.” But, in its origins, Nazism was rather an outbreak of extreme and utopian rationalism. It was the very attempt to streamline, modernize, rationalise and unify society that provided the very thing that enthused young Germans and caused admiration abroad.
Hitler was a social darwinist who took a cold hard look at the circumstances. Was life nasty brutish and short? Empirical observation would conclude so. Was Germany surrounded by enemies? Undeniably. Was all natural life a struggle between species and individuals? Does nature show otherwise? Is the race to the swiftest the strongest? Yes. Does the pack leader therefore have to provide for his pack? Yes. Combining these hard realities with a utopian vision for the future he went on to ask: Do people need sunlight, fresh air, vacations, space for production work and leisure? Yes. Should a people feel ashamed for their country? No. Should they take pride in themselves, their traditions and their scientific and cultural accomplishments? Yes. Should art and music serve to inspire and ennoble? Yes. Should diet, exercise and education aim to produce men and women who are peace loving but unafraid, hard and yet altruistic, healthy and happy? Yes! yes!! and again, yes !!!
Over and over, the Nazis asked hard factual questions and came up with empirically correct and logical answers. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Nazi euthanasia program.
Were morons, physical defectives and the incurably sick useful for any purpose? No. Did they themselves suffer? Yes. Were they a burden on society? Yes. As stated in a poster, "Folk Comrades, it costs 60,000 marks to keep these defectives alive. It's your money." And in this way Nazi Germany became a place “where the disinterested, the useless, the purposeless is despised, persecuted and in the end exterminated.”
Pope Benedict has good cause to know of this because his cousin was exterminated by the euthanasia programme. It was no a pathology of faith that caused it, but a pathology of reason, ruthlessly seeking to determine all things.
It was precisely here that the Gospels offered a corrective veto on reason gone astray; for St. Luke tells us that God exalted the humble and lowly as his handmaiden. And it was Jesus who, applying the exhortations of the prophets, befriended the outcast, the infirm, the sinful and reminded us that as is done to the least of us so is done unto the Son of God himself.
There is no reason to believe or assent to any of this. From a logical point of view such exhortations are “arbitrary value judgements” which have no practical benefit and little logical underpinning. Valuing the lame, the defective, the lacking, the poor was certainly not a pagan virtue and one would have a hard time locating such Jeremiahds in the most exalted writings of Aristotle of Plato. It was precisely here that faith and history entered the picture.
Benedict made no attempt to convince anyone of the “truth” of christian values or to argue people into faith. Such arguments have a long track record of proving pointless. It was for this reason, that Benedict had recourse instead to an historical argument based on the factual premise that, in its genesis, Europe was Christian. It was a fact no one could reasonably deny and which gave rise to a further premise; namely, the acceptance, in general, of those beliefs, practices and values identified as “Christian.”
But in arguing for the complimentary role of faith in the reasoned councils of politics, Benedict also had resort to an historical correlative and it was here that his allusions to Nazi Germany came into play. For it was the Nazis’ uncompromising rationalism idolatrised into a cult of necessity and into a racial egoism that lead to the “catastrophe that baffle[d] the imagination.”
What the experience of history shows is that a society that reduces religion to a barely tolerated matter of private (and hence politically impotent) idiosyncracies, that equates freedom with a skeptical relativity of values, and that views the economy as a self-justifying, self-sustaining mechanism was engaged in the same kind of rationalist-superstition that drove National Socialist project for a New Germania.
In contrast, as the Pope had stated in recalling the work of his namesake, “in order to create new and lasting unity, political, economic and juridical instruments are important, but it is also necessary to awaken an ethical and spiritual renewal which draws on the Christian roots of the Continent, otherwise a new Europe cannot be built. Without this vital sap, man is exposed to the danger of succumbing to the ancient temptation of seeking to redeem himself by himself - a utopia which in different ways, in 20th-century Europe, ... has caused "a regression without precedent in the tormented history of humanity". (General Audience, April 2008)
Summary.
The often conflictive dialectic between Church and State, between the imperatives of power and the imperatives of charity, between faith and reason have defined and informed European civilization. Along with his predecessors dating to Gregory the Great, Benedict insists that the Church has both an animating and corrective role to play in social and political life. In this respect, Benedict’s addresses and admonitions were nothing new, although the setting was striking in its conciliatory symbolism.
However in addition to continuity, history provided a further argument that weighed in the Church’s favour. The conflicts over simony, benefices, marriage and education, and law were essentially wrangles over who was responsible for the social order. But the cosmology of the order itself was not in question. All that changed in the 17th and 18th centuries. The French Revolution gave political force to philosophical doubts and launched the first of several all-out attacks on the concept of religion itself. The natural, often haphazard, evolution of society was replaced by planned utopias ab tabula rasa, man determining for himself the measure of all things unconstrained by precedent or condition, and hence the living experience of “saints departed”.
The “pathological” episodes of the 20th century and their attendant horrors are undeniable. Were these just a matter of defective man having more perfect tools at his disposal, or was something else at work? In the Church’s view, an evil of degree morphosed into a particular evil in kind typified by boastful and superstitious rationalism.
In view of this historical progression, standing at the threshold of a new age raises the uncertain question as to what kind of new age that will be.
© Woodchip Gazette, 2010
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