Joseph Ratzinger and political theology
Translated from the 1/23/11 issue of
In the autumn of 1962, Joseph Ratzinger gave a lecture at the Salzburger Hochschule (Salzburg University of Education) on the occasion of their annual theological week. A brief excerpt was published in the magazine
Der katholische Gedanke(Catholic thought) (19, 1963, pp 1-9) and a much larger part was printed earlier in
Studium generale (14, 1961, pp. 664-682).
The two articles were then re-elaborated as a book,
Die Einheit der Nationen (1971), which was translated to italian in 1973, and republished in 2009 with Giovanni Maria Vian as editor (Brescia, Morcelliana, 2009 120 pp).
In this issue, we publish an excerpt from the final chapter of the book, the introduction written by Vian for the 2009 edition, and a review of the book written by one of the leading scholars of Patristics and the history of Christianity.
[I will post the translations as I finish them].
DIE EINHEIT DER NATIONEN: Eine Vision der Kirchenvaeter
(The Unity of Nations: A vision of the Church Fathers)
by Joseph Ratzinger
First published 1971
Without truth, politics
is worship of the demon
by JOSEPH RATZINGER
With Augustine as with Origen, theology's hook into political reality was a rhetorical necessity. The fall of Rome in 410 to Alaric and the Huns had reawakened pagan reaction to Christianity. Where are the tombs of the Apostles, they demanded?
Obviously, the Apostles could not in any way defend Rome, the city which had been invincible for as long as it was under the protection of its guardian pagan gods. But the defeat of Rome demonstrated with tangible evidence that God the Creator, adored by Christians, was not concerned about political affairs. This God could be competent for man's beatitude in the afterlife, but events had just proved effeictively that he was not competent in the political reality of the world.
Politics obviously had its own structure of laws that did not have anything to do with the supreme God, and therefore it had to have its own political religion. It was what the masses wanted out of a general sensibility, namely, that alongside elevated religion, there should be a religion of earthly things, especially of political matters, capable of motivating people more profoundly, as the ancient philosophers maintained.
Simply recall that axiom of Platonic thought formulated by Apulieus: "Between God and man there is no possibility of contact". Platonism was convinced profoundly of the infinite distance between God and the world, between spirit and matter. That God would be directly concerned with matters of the world appeared to them totally impossible.
And any divine service that had to do with worldly affairs was done through intermediate beings, forces of a diverse nature that one had to resort to.
In this excessive emphasis on God's transcendence - which meant segregating him from the world, excluding him from the concrete processes of life on earth - Augustine rightly perceived the true and proper nucleus of resistance against the totality of the Christian claim, a resistance that could never tolerate marginalization of political reality in the name of the one God.
To the pagan reaction which tended to restore a religious dimension to the
polis, and thereby relegate the Christian religion to the purely private sphere, Augustine countered with two fundamental objections.
Political religion has no truth whatsoever. It rests on the canonization of the habit against truth. This renunciation of truth - rather, opposition to truth out of love for what was habitual and customary - was even admitted openly by representatives of that Roman political religion - Scevola, Varrone, Seneca, who defended tradition to the degreee that they opposed truth. For them, their concern for the polis and its good justified this assault on truth.
This meant that the good of the State, which they believed was linked to its persistence and survival in its ancient forms, was placed above and beyond the value of truth.
Here Augustine sees the true contrast erupt in all its acuteness: In the Roman concept, religion was an institution of the State, therefore one of its functions, and therefore, subordinate to it.
Religion was not an absolute independent of the interests of the group representing it, but was an instrumental (exploitable) value for the State which was the absolute.
On the contrary, according to the Christian concept, religion does not have to do with habit or custom, but with the truth which is absolute, and which therefore cannot be instituted by the State - by and in itself, it had instituted a new community which embraces everyone who lives in God's truth.
Starting with this concept, Augustine thought of the Christian faith as a liberation - a liberation of the truth from the constraints of custom.
The political religion of the Romans had no truth at all, but there is a truth above and beyond it. Such truth is that the subjection of man to habits that are hostile to truth makes him prey to anti-divine forces which the Christian faith calls demons.
That is why worship of idols is not just a foolish occupation without purpose, but by leaving men prey to the negation of truth, it becomes worship of demons: Behind unreal gods is the supremely real power of the demon, and behind slavery to custom is servility to the orders of evil spirits.
This is the profound object of Christian liberation and of the freedom that it conquers: a liberation from custom stamped by a power that man himself had created, but which in time and at length had raised itself above man and was now its lord and master. It had become an objective power itself, independent of man, the spearhead of the power of evil itself that would overwhelm man, the power of demons.
Liberation from custom in order to reach truth is emancipation from the power of the demons which are behind custom. In this sense, the sacrifice of Christ and of Christians become truly understandable as 'redemption', or liberation - eliminating the political cult that is against truth, and replacing this worship of demons with the only universal service to truth, namely, freedom.
Thus, Augustine's thought joins that of Origen.
Just as Origen understood the religious absolutism of the nation State as the work of man's demons, and the supranational unity of Christians as a liberation from the prison of ethnic factors, Augustine also consigns political reality in the ancient sense - as divinization of the Polis - to the category of the demoniacal, and sees in Christianity the overcoming of the demoniacal power of politics which had oppressed the truth.
He too considered the pagan gods not as empty illusions but as the fantastical mask which hid those 'powers and dominations' which prevent man's access to absolute truths and imprison him in relativism. And he, too, saw politics as the true and proper dominion of these dark powers.
It is true that Augustine saw his own measure of truth in the idea of Evemero
[Greek writer of the 3rd century BC] that all gods were once men, i.e., that every pagan religion was based on man's hyperbolization of himself. But he also saw that this admission did not resolve the enigma of pagan religions.
The dark powers, which apparently man himself causes to issue and project from himself, soon show themselves to be objective hypostases of power, 'demons' which exercise on him a supremely real mastery - from which he can be liberated only by him who has power over all other powers, God himself.
We must note that even Augustine did not attempt to elaborate anything that was meant to constitute a world that had become Christian. His
civitas Dei, city of God, is not just an ideal community of all men who believe in God, but neither does it have anything in common with an earthly theocracy or a world that is Christianly constituted. Rather, it is a sacramental-eschatological entity that lives in this world as a sign of the future world.
He himself demonstrated how precarious was the Christian cause in 410,
when it was not just the pagans who invoked Rome's most ancient gods. That is why for him, the State - even despite its real or apparent Christianization [under Constantine] - remained an 'earthly State', in which the Church was a community of strangers to this world, who accept and use earthly realities but are not at home in it.
Certainly, the coexistence of the two communities, pagan and Christian, was much more peaceful than it was in the time of Origen. Augustine no longer spoke of conspiring against the 'scythian' (i.e, barbarian] State, but thought it right that Christians, members of the eternal homeland, should render service in Babylon, so to speak, as functionaries, even as emperors.
Therefore, whereas in Origen, one does not clearly see how this world could continue, but only that it must tend to an escatological opening, Augustine considered the 'permanence' of the situation in his time, which he thought was right for that era, to the point that he wished for a renewal of the Roman Empire.
But he remained faithful to the eschatological thought insofar as he considered the world a provisional entity upon which he therefore did not seek to confere a Christian constitution, but would let it continue to be the world which must continually struggle to achieve its own relative order.
In this measure, even Christianity that had been consciously legalized in this world, ultimately remained 'revolutionary', since it cannot identify itself with any State:
It remains a force that relativizes all the immanent realities in the world, indicating and referring everything to the one absolute God and the one mediator between God and man - Jesus Christ.
Perhaps the choice of the OR to run these articles at this time was coincidental to the Italian media's concerted interpretation of Benedict XVI's general statements made to the Roman police on Friday as a specific reproach to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi - an interpretation that is understandable but objectively unfounded, because if Berlusconi's escapades had not been in the headlines right now, no one in the Italian media would have paid attention to what was, after all, a fairly 'routine' speech by the Pope calling for public servants to live up to Christian standards, including obviously, moral standards.
In any case, in the essay above, the then 35-year-old theologian clearly showed the distinction between the absolute and the relative, the truth of Christianity and the reality of the world as embodied in politics. It is a distinction he obviously maintains even as Pope who is not in the business of reproaching politicians for their loose morals but to open the eyes of the world to the truth of God.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/01/2011 14:40]