I began this post two days ago, in the preceding page, and I am re-posting the Ratzinger excerpt I posted earlier, along with a translation of Vian's foreword to the 2009 edition of the book, and a book review = all published in the 1/2311 issue of OR.
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.].
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.
The only Absolute
in a provisional world
by Giovanni Maria Vian
Foreword to 2009 Italian edition
Translated from the 1/23/11 issue of
Already there is all of Ratzinger in this little book, a text that is as valuable as it is little known, and which goes back to his younger years as a university professor.
At the start of the 1960s, the theologian who had recently been appointed professor at the University of Bonn, nad anticipated its fundamental ideas in two substantial articles, which he would rework into the book published a decade later and almsot immediately translated to Spanish, Italian and Portuguese.
In the center is the problem of politics, confronted by the method that has characterized the author since his formation for the priesthood - namely, a historical and theological analysis, referred particularly to the Christian tradition, rethought with creativity and caution.
In this, he follows the attitude which characterized the Biblicist Friedrich Stummer, who specialized in the Old Testament, whom Joseph Ratzinger would describe half a century later in his autobiographical memoir as "a quiet and reserved man, whose strength was strictly historical and philological work – he would hint at theological themes only with the greatest restraint. I greatly appreciated this scholarly carefulness”.
For this book, the interest of the young scholar was addressed exclusively to the ancient world and the Fathers of the Church, represented by two important and very significant names: Origen and Augustine.
In his early 30s, Ratzinger in confronting the subject he had chosen, demonstrated an uncommon familiarity with ancient sources, and at the same time, an acute sensitivity to contemporary culture.
His study of Patristics imposed an oiginal approach to his research of a subject, political theology, which in the second half of the 1960s, became relevant, as the author notes in his foreword, and as indicated by the subtitle of of the first translation of the book (in Spanish):
Aportaciones para una teología política.(Contributions towards political theology).
A debate on the subject in the period immediately ollowing the Second Vatican Council demonstrated new developments and emphases, but whose deeper line was prepared for between the two world wars, especially by the 'ideal' debate between Schmitt and Erik Petersen (mot by chance, the latter's name is often mentioned)
[See Benedict XVI's discourse about Petersen last year].
The world and culture of antiquity as a context was always of great interest to the young Ratzinger, who as a high school student, was an enthusiast of the Latin and Greek classics. In the first few months after the war, the 18-year-old seminarian-to-be wrote Greek hexameters to while away the time as when he was a prisoner of war.
Then for years, he became a passionate reader of the Fathers of the Church in the critical editions of their works published in connection with their rediscovery by historians and theologians in Germany and France.
The results of this rigorous and demanding formation, which flowered into his doctpral thesis on St. Augustine and his travail-ridden Habilitation dissertation on Bonaventure, were already ripe in his brief study on "Humanity and political dimension in the vision of the pririmitive Church" which was the origin of this book, an attentive reading of which will show reflections and themes that are recurrent in the mature Ratzinger - and now in Benedict XVI - with a truly impressive consistency.
Addressing the political theology of the Greco-Roman world with its widespread idea of a correspondence of human kingdoms to the divine monarchy, and evoking the philosophical opposition of diverse political orders in the name of cosmopolitanism (which much later would offer links to the Christian order), Ratzinger clearly underscores how the limits of every political and even theological vision are set by the Sacred Scriptures, Hebrew and Christian (of which he proposes without hesitation a canonical reading as transmitted by Church Tradition, in which individual parts refer to each other integrally) - and Biblical faith.
This also gives rise to his opposition to every political absolutization of Christianity, which was seen in the ancient world as a 'revolutionary entity', even if such absolutization was tempered.
At the same time, there was the disquieting presence of gnosticism, which in the early centuries, was like the malignant shadow of Christianity, radically different from it by opposing the world to its creator, and therefore characterized by a fundamental anarchy.
Ratzinger, who proved to be very much abreast with the scientific debates over the origins of gnosticism, and, with refined philological attention, highlights the conviction of pagan intellectuals like Celsus and Plotinus who identified it with Christianity, gives a historical and theological reading of gnosticism that sees it consistently as being ranged 'on the side of the serpent (devil)'.
This Ratzingerian description recalls that of the great adversaries of gnosticism in antiquity, who represented it as “a tonality of the spirit whose energies had been building up over time as to make ripples” that, not by chance, emerged into the open and became widespread with the appearance of Christianity, and which - in a diabolical way, precisely - would accompany it throughout its early history.
As we indicated earlier, Ratzinger underscores the fact that philosophical opposition, starting with the Stoics, to the dispositions of States, links up to Christian opposition, "but the philosophers' apolitical ideal and individualistic cosmopolitanism about 'citizens of the world'” was surpassed with the coming of Christ, who is the 'mystery of unity' and who animates that 'Christian brotherhood' to which the young theologian had dedicated his first published monograph (
Die christliche Bruederlichkeit) after his theses on Augustine and Bonaventure.
In the Jewish and Christian view, attention shifts to 'nations' (and their angels and demons) that were born, so to speak, after the dispersion of Babel, and it is in this factor of nation that is one the principal points of Origen's polemic against Celsus
[a 2nd-century Greek philosopher who wrote the earliest known book attacking Christianity].
Likewise, Origen's
De principis establishes 'the theological metaphysics of the nation' elaborated by that great Christian intellectual of Alexandria, who underscores the fundamental irreducibility – for eschatological reasons – of the Christian revolution in the world, and thus, of every political system.
Even more fundamental is Augustine's reflection on political theology, developed most specially in
De civitate Dei[The City of God]. This truly epochal work, occasioned by the echoes of the unprecedented sack of Rome by the Huns, obviously deals with a totally new situation, after the Constantinian turning point
[making Christianity the state religion] and its elaboration by the historian Eusebius of Caesarea (Ratzinger remarks more on its theological rather than historical dimension, which he does not ignore, but on the contrary, he makes refined observations on it).
The theologian quickly notes how his beloved Bishop of Hippo describes the Christian faith in terms of the relationship between God and the world. Thus, in the face of Stoic monism, he maintains the absolute Otherness of God the Creator, and in the face of the Platonic insistence on divine transcendence, he affirms faith in the incarnation of Christ.
For Augustine, in short, as Ratzinger summarizes it, “the God of creation is also the God of history”. And precisely because of this, every human construction is relative because it always remains human, or as Augustine puts it, “What are all men but merely men?”
But unlike Origen, Augustine insists on the permanent presence of the Church in the unity of nations pre-announced at Pentecost - “Already the Body of Christ speaks all languages, and those that it does not yet speak, it will” - whereas Origen considers the Church as primarily an eschatological sign.
As for relationship with political structures which remain worldly, the realism of Augustine's doctrine proposes neither an 'ecclesialization' (Verkirchlichung) of the state nor the 'statalization' (Verstaatlichung) of the Church.
The aspiration, shared by Ratzinger, is something else: namely, to “make present the new power of faith' in this provisional world. And Christianity relativizes all reality, including the political, because it looks at the only Absolute.
Origen of Alexandria, considered the first Christian theologian, is a fascinating lay figure to whom Benedict XVI devoted two catecheses in early 2007
www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20070425...
www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/audiences/2007/documents/hf_ben-xvi_aud_20070502...
in his cycle of the great thinkers of early Christianity. If Origen had been a bishop or saint, he would be numbered formally among the Fathers of the Church, even if his reputation in the Church has waxed and waned through the centuries. If I am not mistaken, he is the only non-saint who has been a subject of Benedict XVI's catechesis.
Here is the third article in this OR special presentation - a rather lengthy book review of this early work of Joseph Ratzinger.
Christianity: The revolution
that overturned the concept of power
A review of Joseph Ratzinger's
L'unità delle nazioni:
Una visione dei Padri della Chiesa
by Manlio Simonetti
Translated from the 1/23/11 issue of
In his introduction to this petit livre, its editor, Giovanni Maria Vian, highlights its pioneering characteristic at the time it was written in the 1960s, when the fortunes of so-called political theology were just dawning.
In fact, even if the book was first printed in 1973, it was an elaboration of two previous studies from 1961 and 1963.
Its subject, the unity of nations, even if it covers pagan and Christian reflections in general, is focused on those of two authors, Origen and Augustine. And while we can more than take for granted the presence of Augustine since his fortunes have never eclipsed between his time and ours, one must remark the centrality given by Ratzinger – newly named professor at the University of Bonn, philosopher but when necessary, also a philologist – to Origen, who, with Augustine, shares the fame of being the supreme representative of Christian thought in antiquity, but whose fortunes and memory have been 'ditched' many times in the past because of the repeated condemnations of him in the 3rd to the 6th centuries, and of certain aspects of his thought which was the polar opposite of that of Luther and Calvin, as well as of Augustine himself.
It was only after the Second World War that the central significance of Origen's thought among the Fathers of the Church began to be revalued by French scholars and later, by Italians, whereas in Germany, despite the forward-looking monograph of Voelker published in 1931, ancient and strong reservations about Origen receded only slowly and gradually.
So, in this sense, Ratzinger's position on Origen certainly went against the current, as is the importance he gave to Gnostic thought, overvalued at the time by the dominant pan-Gnosticism of Hans Jonas, but which anticipated the results of Antonio Orbe's research on the global understanding of ancient Christian theological thought, without any barriers between orthodoxy and heresy.
Initially, Ratzinger highlights, in the context of Greek philosophical thought, the position of the Stoics who had discovered “behind the diversity of structures, the unity of the essence of 'man', man's humanity itself, which subsists through all time and space” (p. 20).
The pantheistic concept in Stoic philosophy, more specifically, the Aristotelian idea of divine monarchy, found its political realization in the Roman empire. To this pantheistic concept in Stoic thought, Ratzinger counterposes the Old Testament faith in one God “who stands free before the world” (p. 26).
According to this faith, the initial unity of man was shattered by sin, and the recovery of unity is projected into to the future, towards the moment when all peoples would converge in Jerusalem as the center of a new united humanity.
The contraposition of these two concepts was sharpened in Christianity by the advent of Christ as the new Adam, with whom, after Adamite man, “a second and definitive humanity began” - that of Christians, who having overcome the natural character of the human condition through participation in the death and resurrection of Christ, “claimed the distinction of being the second and definitive human race, which was already building itself in the midst of the old humankind” (p. 28).
The Christian Church was the new world which, though alien to every form of violence, opposed the Roman world insofar as it pre-announced itself as the definitive and true world, to which the ancient world “would one day have to yield” (p. 29).
At this point, Ratzinger juxtaposes to the Christian revolution the gnostic ascendancy which was revolutionary in a very different way: “It rejected the world in its entirety along with its God, whom it unmasks as a dark tyrant and jailer, seeing in God and religions only the seal and the definitive closure of that prison which is the world” (p. 32).
These pages of Ratzinger's book, inspired by the interpretation that Hans Jonas had given to gnosticism and which was dominant in Germany and the United States in the 1960s, must now be re-evaluated along with that interpretation, in that the rejection of the material world had remained at the stage of mere theory with the Gnostics, without being realized as a concept of true and proper political theology. The Gnostics were loyal to the Roman state, and because of this, beyond other more important doctrinal reasons, they were, to say the least, unpopular with the Catholic faithful.
In opposition to gnostic nihilism, Catholic thought, while not minimizing the damages of sin, has always affirmed the goodness of the world as the world created by the one supreme God, and despite the conviction that in a future time, the Roman empire – considered eternal by the Romans – would come to an end and be replaced by the kingdom of Christ, Christians in affirming that every power comes from God, giving rise to the separation between what belongs to God and what belongs to Caesar, did not see any reason to reject the empire as long as it did not violate the preeminent right God has over man.
To this reasoning was added the concept of the unity of all men in Christ: St. Paul already thought of the Church as the Body of Christ, understood as the only new man (p. 37). Becoming man in Christ, God drew man to him, into unity with God, such that “Jesus Christ and his message introduced a new dynamic into mankind, the dynamic of passage from the lacerated being of many individuals to the unity of Jesus Christ, of God. The Church is, so to speak, nothing other than this dynamic, this movement by part of mankind in the direction of unity with God” (p. 40).
This mystery of unity, which is ritually centered on the Eucharistic banquet and nourished by the more general belief that all men become brothers in Christ, “is realized in the individual as a passage from the sovereignty of his own ego to the unity of the members of the body of Christ” (p. 42).
Factually, this unity finds concrete realization in the network of communities, the local churches, which although they are materially autonomous of each other, are in fraternal communion among themselves and in God, realizing “the ultimate purpose of the coming of Christ” (ibidem).
Origen's reflection on the unity of Christians took on consistency in his debate with the pagan philosopher Celsus, who reproached Christians for having abandoned national laws. Celsus had a vision of the unity of various peoples as different entities - administered superhumanly, under the aegis of the supreme God, by minor divinities, which the ancient Jews called 'angels of the nations' - harmonically living together in the superior political unity represented by the Roman empire.
Origen accepted and adopted the Jewish doctrine of the 'angels of the nations' but he based it on its most characteristic and important sxiom : Only Israel, among all the peoples on earth, was not entrusted to the governance of an angel, but remained under the direct dominion and protection of God (Deut 32,8-9).
In this sense, the dominion of angels over single peoples was predominantly but not completely considered negative by Origen. He deduced that “the salvific work of Christ... consists precisely in the fact that he triumphed over the archons [the angels of the nations] and led mankind out of the prison of the national factor into unity with God, the unity of one humanity” (p. 54).
We have said that Origen's thinking about the angels of the nations was predominantly but not completely negative. Indeed, in what has come down to us of Origen's writings, there is no lack of points in which these angels are considered as those who transmitted to men their science, their knowledge of the world, poetry, grammar, rhetoric, music, etc – but nonetheless, a science of the world, not the wisdom of God that was made made manifest in Christ (p. 60).
In effect, “Origen, confronting Celsus, does not deny that the Christian faith implies a practical breach of the ancient principle of a national political link to the religious fact. Christians had truly abandoned the ancient links... Their leader is Christ, whom they follow as the new mankind in whom swords have been transformed to plows and lances to scythes... In Christ, Christians had become children of peace... In place of the absolute dominion of national laws, the Christian had substituted the law of Christ, who had proclaimed the ancient laws null and void... In place of the limited order of nations, has entered the only law of God, which by virtue of Jesus Christ, is in force for all of the ecumene” (pp 63.-64).
Given these conclusions, Origen rejects Celsus's invitation for Christians to commit themselves concretely and actively in behalf of the empire: Christians cannot bear arms, they cannot take public office, and they believe it is right to transgress the laws of the state for love of the law of Christ.
Or, better said: Christians could commit themselves in behalf of the empire, but only from the superior viewpoint of service to God which extends to the good of one's neighbor, which is to say, the whole world (p. 70).
The new order contemplated by Origen was destined to be realized only in eschatological perspective, at the end of time, since the persistence of the pagan empire impeded any prospect in the present or in the near future.
But the radical change that took place between the Church and Constantine's empire imposed a radical re-examination of the future of the empire itself in the present world.
This rethinking was done by Eusebius of Casearea, who theorized that the empire turning Christian was an installation of the messianic kingdom by Constantine, the new Moses.
One cannot fail to note Eusebius's almost complete absence in Ratzinger's work, which goes from Origen to Augustine. The fall of Rome to the Goths in 410 had shattered the symbiosis between the Western empire and the Church that was so desired by the great historian.
Against the pagan aristocracy who interpreted the decadence of Rome as a punishment for the emperor who had dismissed the traditionalists, Augustine in the City of God decisively contests the truth and significance of the political religion of the traditionalists, which made men prey to demons.
In this context, “the sacrifice of Christ and Christians now becomes truly undrstandable as 'redemption', namely, liberation: it eliminates political worship that is against truth, worship of demons, and in its place, it places the only universal service to truth, which is freedom” (p. 84).
In the philosophical sense, contesting both the divinization of the world affirmed by Stoic pantheism and the excessive divinism preached by Platonism (which Ratzinger emphasizes), Augustine proposes the Christian belief in the world as God's creation, and in the function of the incarnation of Christ as the presence of God in human history.
From this follows his bivalent and basically negative view of Roman power, which he considered the result of prisca virtus Romana old Roman virtue) as well as of boundless ambition: “The Romans sought and received a kingdom on earth in place of the eternal kingdom, earthly fame in place of enduring glory. The Roman empire, sign of grandeur, was at the same time the portent of their perpetual blame.....“ (p. 95).
Augustine acknowledged the positive value of empire, his fatherland, capable of good administration, aiming for the earthly wellbeing of its subjects, but with relative values against the absolute value of the eternal fatherland of all men, the heavenly city - conceived not only as an eschatological reality, but even now as 'the people of God in pilgrimage through the desert of the earthly kingdom, the Church”, which in this world lives like a stranger in exile because its true place is elsewhere (p.104).
Living in this world, the Church must necessarily live with the State: Augustine clearly took account of the need to endure within earthly kingdoms with all their imperfections. While Origen, who was active at a time when Christianity was religio illecita, looked towards the end of the world for a realization of the heavenly city, Augustine, less revolutionary, saw the Church at work as the official religion of the empire, which embraced all people in its extent and united in love all the languages that sin had diversified.
The Church, moreover, against every easy temptation of earthly power, should not have 'the least in common with an earthly theocracy, with a world that is Christianly constituted – rather it is an entity that is eschatological and sacramental that lives in this world as a sign of the future world” (p. 113)
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/01/2012 15:45]