The Nature and Extent of Political Action in

Postsecular Societies.

by

Juan Pablo Aranda Vargas

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science University of Toronto

© Copyright by Juan Pablo Aranda Vargas 2019

The Nature and Extent of Catholic Political Action in Postsecular Societies

Juan Pablo Aranda Vargas Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science University of Toronto 2019

ABSTRACT

Confronted with the crises of liberal and institutional , this work argues that

Catholic political action, seen as a tradition of thought rather than as a dogmatic religion, understands the tensions between the individual and the community, immanence and transcendence, and faith and reason through the notion of the dignity of the person, which constitutes an alternative to the “individual” of . The introduction discusses the crises of and of the and explains the reach and limits of this work. The first chapter analyzes the notion of “political theology,” suggesting that, while the theologico-political is an inescapable dimension of human existence, a Christian political theology, understood as the attempt to make the earthly city resemble the heavenly one, thus immanentizing what is originally transcendental, must be rejected. The second chapter argues that implies not the end of religion but a transformation of religious belief wherein religion becomes one among many alternative answers to the problem of existence. The third chapter studies the political implications of the of the Catholic church and focuses on two reactions to the council that ended up immanentizing the notion of the “kingdom of God.” The fourth chapter introduces the Catholic idea of the person as an alternative to the liberal individual and situates Catholic political action at the local level.

The fifth chapter portrays Catholic political action as a tradition of thought and studies its most important contributions for contemporary political thought.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

In the long time this project unfolded, I have been blessed with the love, friendship, and advice of many people. I took my Catholic identity from my parents: my mother patiently listened and advised me, even when my train of thought was at its most confused; my father taught me that politics matter, as well as the necessity of honesty and political . Without their support throughout these years, this project would have never been possible. I am also grateful to my sister, Mónica, and my two brothers, Enrique and Jorge: thanks for all your love and support. My late father-in-law, Emilio, who treated me as his son, pushed me to pursue graduate studies: you’re always missed. From my mother-in-law, Cecilia, I have always received support and love.

I have had the luck of always finding myself among extraordinary friends. To my friends from

ITAM: Edgar Moreno, Alejandro Trelles, Francisco Gatica, Luis Islas, Luis Portugal, Leonardo Cerezo,

Fernando Estrada, Alberto Niño, and Jako Pérez, I can only say thank you for always being there for me, for being the point where the love of political science and friendship merge. To Pilar Ituarte, Claudio Flores,

Leo Gálvez, Marisol Moreno, Víctor Topete, Abel Flores, Juan Carlos Cortés, Iván Flores, Ximena de

Ovando, Abril Novoa, and Carlos Robles: Thanks to all of you for making us feel the warmth of home while we were in Canada.

This project was possible thanks to the financial support I got from many institutions. I received scholarships from the Mexican Council of Science and Technology (Conacyt), the Popular Autonomous

University of Puebla (Upaep), and the Political Science Department of UofT. The Department also provided me with funding to present my work at the McGill-CREOR Graduate Student Conference in 2017 and at the sixth congress of the Mexican Political Science Association (Amecip) in 2018. I also had the opportunity to work at the Family Care Office of UofT and at the Family & Graduate Residence of UTM. A special thanks to Delores Lanni, who became a dear friend of my family. As a teacher assistant, I was fortunate to work with Mark Lippincott. I admire the lengths Mark goes to show his students how throws light on their lives, showing a passion for teaching that I can only wish to develop myself.

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At Upaep, I met great people who welcomed me in the academic milieu. When my family and I moved from Mexico City to Puebla, Juan Pablo Salazar made us feel at home like nobody else: Thank you tocayito. Without the vision of Herberto Rodríguez I wouldn’t be writing these pages: Thanks for believing in me. Jorge Medina has been a colleague, a discussant, and a dear friend. I am also grateful to Pablo Nuño,

Fr. Pablo Lamamié, Mariano Rojas, Carlos Ortíz, Herminio Sánchez, Lourdes López, Claudia Ramón, and

Heliodoro Fraile.

At UofT I met great persons and made good friends. Ryan Balot and Joe Carens helped me during my MA studies more than I could have asked for: your advice convinced me that I had an idea worth pursuing. Peggy Kohn introduced me to the thought of Claude Lefort and patiently explained me the many intricacies of his thought. I am also grateful to my fellow theorists (and non-theorists), who took the time to talk about my dissertation and gave me their opinions on my work. Thanks especially to Daniel Luna, Maria

Inés Grández, Sara Lee, Taylor Putnam, Armend Mazreku, Catherine Power, Amanda Arulanandam, Daniel

Hutton-Ferris, Abraham Singer, Mauricio Suchowlansky, Zak Black, Joaquín Bardallo, and Adam Casey.

A big thanks to Carolynn Branton, Louis Tentsos, Terri Winchester, and Norma Dotto, who made my life easier by helping me sort out UofT’s administrative maze. My thanks also to the friends we made in

Mississauga, especially Jason Darnell, Diane Seguin, Eduardo Rodríguez and family, Soroush Dabbagh,

Sarah Hillewaert, Fr. Tim Hanley, and Fr. Charles Egbulefu.

I had the privilege of working with amazing academics who helped me bring this project home.

Ronald Beiner pushed me to keep the balance between political theory and theology. The many suggestions he made to my work changed more than once the direction this project ultimately took. His reflections and advice constantly pushed me to question my many prejudices, and the care he put in reading each of my chapters, correcting the many mistakes I made, greatly enriched this work. Michael Attridge is one of the kindest persons I met in Canada. He patiently oriented my clumsy efforts to engage with theological texts, widening my admittedly narrow theological horizon beyond Joseph Ratzinger. Aided by Mike, I was able to produce a theological critique of our contemporary societies that remained, I believe, both faithful to

Catholicism and friendly to democracy. Ruth Marshall understood this project before I could properly iv articulate it. After every conversation I left her office with ideas for improving the dissertation, questions for further research, and thoughts on how the work of the theorist throws light to understand our current reality. Her commitment to her students and the generosity with her time—even in a particularly challenging time—illustrates what “service” means for an academic. I am deeply grateful, finally, for having Joe Carens as my internal reader and Samuel Moyn as my external reader. I have refrained from acknowledging all the suggestions made by my committee members in the body of the dissertation: having done so would have doubled the footnotes. I am confident that their influence and advice can be felt in every page of this work.

Finally, I must mention those for whom I wake up—or rather wake me up—every morning. This work is for my wife and kids. Pia, Juan Pablo, and Ana Lucía: you are the reason of every effort and every plan. Your smiles and hugs have kept me going through the many challenges we have faced over these years. You give me hope in these dark times. And, finally, a huge thanks to my best friend, my biggest support, my wife. Lucy: thanks for twenty years of being together through good and bad times. Thanks for always trusting in this project; for our morning walks, where I tried to unravel my thoughts while you patiently listened; for taking care of me when my health was weak; for always forgiving my many imperfections; for being the heart of our family; for always reminding me, in short, that the road was, indeed, a good place to start our family. I love you.

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...... iii CONTENTS ...... vi INTRODUCTION...... 1 CHAPTER 1. THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL...... 19 CHAPTER 2. SECULARITY...... 71 CHAPTER 3. THE POSTCONCILIAR CHURCH...... 124 CHAPTER 4. BETWEEN AUTHENTICITY AND TELEOLOGY...... 182 CHAPTER 5. CATHOLICISM AND DEMOCRACY...... 237 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 280

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Les catholiques de ce pays sont tombés dans l’habitude de leur religion, au point qu’ils ne s’inquiètent plus de savoir si elle est vraie ou fausse, s’ils y croient ou non; et cette espèce de foi machinale les accompagne jusqu’à la mort. (Julien Green, Pamphlet contre les catholiques de France).

A wish to “incarnate” Christianity sometimes really leads to disincarnating it, emptying it of its substance. It becomes lost, buried in politics or in sociology or, at best, in . (Henri de Lubac, Paradoxes of Faith).

Perhaps never has man been so curious about things religious, and perhaps never so little religious himself. (Jean Daniélou, The Scandal of Truth).

According as we establish either democratic or democratic tyranny, the fate of the world will be different. Indeed, one may say that it depends on us whether in the end republics will be established everywhere, or everywhere abolished. (, Democracy in America).

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INTRODUCTION.

Unlike other great , Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from . Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law—and to the harmony of objective and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative reason of God.1

I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalizing the truth.2

We live in dark times. Ours is a time wherein the whispering voice of truth is crushed under the hubbub of blatant lies, simulation,3 and fake news; a time wherein the face of democracy is distorted by the return of radical politics, from far-right activists and their racist dystopia to far-left reactions to globalization and even to democracy, which have brought to life a new messiah-like kind of despot; a time wherein civic spiritedness is ignored, despised, or even opposed by anomic, nihilistic, and self-centered individuals who willingly cede their political for the mess of pottage of private comfort and material advancement, happily paying the price of being ruled by ignorant populists who dismantle democracy under a business- as-usual mask; a time wherein religions are distrusted because some of its members have failed to live up to their own standards, or have even lowered themselves to commit atrocious crimes, sometimes under the complicit mantle created by their superiors; a time wherein education is synonymous with mass-produced professionals, individuals endowed with technical tools for the endless production of commodities… A time, in short, where citizens are scarce because the fabrics of citizens are desolate.

Our age is characterized by a deep sense of distrust and skepticism: toward the government, institutions, churches, and universities; toward the media and journalism, professional politicians and specialists, academics and intellectual elites. No other time in human history seems to have been less

1 Benedict XVI, 2011. 2 Burton Benjamin Memorial Award Acceptance Speech 2016, by Christiane Amanpour. Quoted in Kakutani 2018, 76. 3 As Francine Prose rightly foresaw, reality TV has become the new “real,” transforming politics into a scenario where democracy is performed, sometimes as tragedy, others as comedy, and others even as an advertisement ruse. One of the many problems with this is, of course, that the values of reality TV are not those of a healthy, civic-spirited community: Reality TV’s “reality is a Darwinian battlefield on which only the fittest survive, and it’s not merely logical but admirable to marshal all our skills and resources to succeed in a struggle that only one person can win” (Prose 2004, 60).

1 concerned with truth.4 Even science—the motor of liberal from the sixteenth century onwards— finds itself questioned and cornered: from Creationists demanding that the Book of Genesis be offered in schools as an alternative to evolutionary theory, to anti-vaxxers and climate-change deniers, today myth and reality, reason and opinion, facts and fabrications, news and fake-news, superstition and religion, are all indiscriminately put on the same level. A different fanaticism is found, however, in the opposite camp: a blind faith in scientific and technical progress uncontested by moral constraints has brought the world to the edge of nuclear annihilation; its reckless dismissal of all boundaries, moreover, has raised questions regarding the morality of experimentation with stem cells,5 climate change, the substitution of human labor for machines, and artificial intelligence, to name but a few. Today the release of the new iPhone mobilizes thousands, or hundreds of thousands, while the extinction of species hardly raise eyebrows.

Our age has also seen a drastic mutation in the theologico-political dynamics in Western liberal . Today, hardly anyone still thinks that ineluctably leads to the end of religion.6 More interestingly and often worrisome is, to be sure, the sudden and sometimes violent return of religious motifs in political discourse. A deranged theologico-political language, subservient to political power—which in the past decades had been used by populist leaders such as Hugo Chávez in Latin America, who called Jesus

“the greatest socialist of our era”—has been appropriated in many other places of the world.7 In the United

States, for example, Republicans have used a theologico-political rhetoric to frame America’s war on terror.

Pushing Trump to send more troops to Afghanistan, Senator Lindsay Graham asserted the war unleashed by 9/11 is without end: “It’s good versus . Good versus evil never ends.”8 By simplifying the complexity of global politics as the cosmic war between , the United States presents itself as the champion

4 Joseph Ratzinger has insisted on the dangers of : “Where relativism is consistently thought and lived… either it becomes nihilism or else it expands positivism into the power that dominates everything, thus ending once again in totalitarian conditions” (Ratzinger 2010a, 109). In recent times, a growing number of thinkers have started to recognize that democracy cannot do without truth, that the banalization of truth leads to despotism. 5 See, for example, Habermas 2003. 6 In an interview published in The Hedgehog Review in 2006, sociologist Peter Berger, who had argued in favor of the secularization theory in his book The Sacred Canopy (1967), acknowledged that “[t]oday you cannot plausibly maintain that necessarily leads to secularization” (Mathewes 2006, 152). He explained: “What I did not understand when I started out… is that what has changed is not necessarily the what of belief but the how of belief… What pluralism and its social and psychological dynamics bring about is that certainty becomes more difficult to attain. That’s what I mean by the how of belief” (Ibid., 153). As we will see, this is Charles Taylor’s take on secularity. 7 In July 2018, Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the Mexican presidential election by a landslide. The acronym of his party, Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, MORENA, brings to mind the most important religious symbol in Mexico, namely, the Virgin of Guadalupe. The Virgin is affectuously called “morenita” (diminutive of “morena,” which means “brunette”). This is not the first time the Virgin is used for political mobilization. In 1810, the priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla took the image of Guadalupe as the banner of the insurgents fighting for Mexico’s independence. 8 Woodward 2018, 121. 2 of God, morality, and good government, imposing upon the international community the impossible choice between blind loyalty to the hegemon or diabolic opposition to it. This is but American exceptionalism in a new religious key. A wide, diverse world has been reduced to the ignoble confrontation between a deluded hegemon and the forces it cannot tame or control anymore.

In The Death of Truth, Michiko Kakutani affirms:

Trump’s unhinged presidency represents some sort of climax in the warping of reality, but the burgeoning disorientation people have been feeling over the disjuncture between what they know to be true and what they are told by politicians, between common sense and the workings of the world, traces back to the 1960s, when society began fragmenting and official narratives—purveyed by the government, by the establishment, by elites—started to break down and the news cycle started to speed up. In 1961, Philip Roth wrote of American reality, “It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates.”9

Trump’s era seems to be nothing but the coarser, most emblematic example of what seems to be the predominant political trend in our days, what Tocqueville called “soft despotism” and Sheldon Wolin described as “inverted totalitarianism” in a “managed democracy.”10 A new nationalist zeal is increasingly dominating global politics, pushing for the closing of borders, the protection of national markets, and the dissemination of xenophobic sentiments.11 In , for example, Angela Merkel’s coalition became extremely fragile after the Bavarian elections in October 2018, in which the Christian Social Union lost the majority while the far-right, anti-immigration Alternative for Germany party took 10.2 percent of the vote, giving it seats in parliament for the first time.12 At the end of that month, Merkel had announced she would not seek reelection as German Chancellor in 2021, as well as her stepping down as the chair of her party in

December 2018.13

The present work analyzes our present situation from the perspective of the tradition of Catholic political thought. It argues that a set of political values and understandings indebted to this tradition can be used as a promising alternative to the current crisis of liberal democracy. This work claims that the notion of the human person, as developed by Christianity, does a better job at keeping a healthy tension between

9 Kakutani 2018, 78. 10 Wolin 2008. 11 The documentary Alt-right. Age of Rage, directed by Adam Bhala Lough, portrays this phenomenon focusing on the confrontation between Alt- right and Antifa—an antifascist group—in 2017. 12 “Angela Merkel’s Bavarian allies lose majority in crushing vote.” CNN, October 15, 2018, goo.gl/gw117z. The resurgence of far-right policies in Germany has been a recurrent topic in the last years. See also “‘Htler Schntzl,’ Nazi salute dolls, SS-themed liquors: How far right skirts German hate laws.” CNN, August 18, 2018, goo.gl/BLRLbK. 13 “Germany’s Angela Merkel says she won’t run again for party leader or chancellor.” Washington Post, October 29, 2018. goo.gl/8g6Zdw. 3 rights and responsibilities than the liberal individual. It is by means of the idea of the human person, moreover, that other tensions manifest in democracy, namely, that between faith and reason, religion and the state, transcendence and immanence. This alternative conception must be understood, finally, as one among many different arguments entering the public arena of discussion where different traditions of thought—liberalism included—engage critically and respectfully to build consensus about our common life.

[1] The crisis of Catholicism. When Joseph Ratzinger became the 265th Pontiff of the Roman

Catholic church in April 2005, under the name Benedict XVI, a thick cloud was already darkening the lives of the 1.2 billion Catholics around the world.14 Three years before the start of his papacy, the Boston Globe had published an investigation uncovering several sexual abuses perpetrated by Catholic priests. These crimes were ignored or, worse, concealed by bishops and some officials in the Roman Curia.15 To this scandal was soon added the depravity of the founder of the Legion of Christ, the Mexican priest Marcial

Maciel, ranging from sexual misbehavior—he abused many seminarians, forcing them into silence, and begot many children—to many instances of corruption.

The crisis, however, had just begun. In 2010, the Institute for the Works of Religion (the Vatican

Bank), then headed by Ettore Gotti Tedeschi, was investigated for money laundering.16 In 2012, the Vatican was shaken by the leaking of documents which revealed many acts of corruption in the Roman Curia.17 In

February 2013, a tired, isolated Benedict XVI became the first to resign in nearly 600 years.18 His successor, Francis, has faced as many, or even more, new reports on child abuse and corruption than

14 According to the Annuarium Statisticum 2015 ( Press Office 2017). 15 There is no doubt that, in the scandal, Joseph Ratzinger played a significant role as the Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. In my opinion, David Gibson’s characterization of Ratzinger’s role is adequate. In the CNN documentary “What the Pope Knew,” he claims: “Joseph Ratzinger was not, and is not, the villain of the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church… and yet he is not the hero either.” And he continues: “The power, the authority, under the Church’s Canon Law, was always in his hands to do something, but he always took the slower route, he always took the stalling tactic. That’s something, I think, people still want him to answer for.” I believe we must be critical of Ratzinger and other officials’ mistakes, delays, and hesitance about taking the side of the children, without forgetting the fact that Ratzinger was, indeed, the one who pushed for reform of the Canon Law in order to protect the victims from pederast priests. Criticism, however, cannot mean disregarding his intellectual production, which I use in this work as a powerful account of Catholicism. 16 “Vatican Bank ‘investigated over money-laundering.’” BBC, September 21, 2010, goo.gl/Bn31DS. As late as March 2018, the Vatican Bank was still under deep suspicion of corruption. The Wall Street Journal informed that Vatican prosecutors were to indict a former president of the Vatican Bank, Angelo Caloia, and his lawyer, Gabriele Liuzzo, “for generating losses of more than €50 million ($61.6 million) for the bank” (“Ex-Vatican Bank President Indicted for Embezzlement, Money Laundering.” The Wall Street Journal, March 3, 2018, goo.gl/rMNKRw). 17 “Vatican official calls leaked documents an ‘immoral’ and ‘brutal’ attack.” Washington Post, May 29, 2012, goo.gl/kAi8nK. 18 In his resignation speech, he explained: “After having repeatedly examined my before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.” (Benedict XVI 2013).

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Benedict had. The report that a Grand Jury released on July 27, 2018, documenting the crimes committed by over three hundred Catholic priests in Pennsylvania, deserves special mention. The combined effect of the perversity of some priests—a priest told their victims “that it was ‘OK’ because he was ‘an instrument of God,’”19 while another one “fondled and masturbated a 13-to-14-year-old boy on multiple occasions from

1976 to 1977 under the pretext of showing the victim how to check for cancer”20—and the complicity of church officials—rotating priests instead of prosecuting them, allowing predator priests to stay in active ministry for many years, and taking every measure in order to avoid scandal, reaching such a level of absurdity as finding a job for a pederast priest who “decided to quit after years of child abuse complaints… at Walt Disney World”21—necessarily leaves in the believer a profound disgust with the actions of some bishops, priests, and other officials in the Roman Curia. Just as it was the case with his predecessor, Francis has been attacked not only from the outside, but from the inside as well. While Benedict XVI was despised by liberal, progressive Catholics, Francis has faced the rejection of conservative, traditionalist ones.22 Sadly, the oversimplification of reality that creates an “us” against “them” is not exclusive to politics.

[2] The crisis of liberalism. In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen proposes a radical thesis:

“Liberalism has failed—not because it fell short, but because it was true to itself. It has failed because it has succeeded.”23 Deneen claims, in a way that reminds us of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity, that liberalism—characterized by , voluntarism, and the separation of humanity from and

19 Grand Jury 2018, 87. 20 Ibid., 70. 21 Ibid., 10. 22 When Francis published his , Amoris Laetitia, in March 2016, four Cardinals— Italian Carlo Caffarra, American Raymond Burke, and Germans Walter Brandmüller and —submitted, in September of the same year, five questions (dubia), demanding precision and explanation from the Pope on certain issues discussed in chapter 8 of the document. In essence, the dubia confronted John Paul II’s with what they interpret is Francis’ more ambiguous moral language. In August 2018, bishop Carlo Maria Viganò opened a new front against Francis, accusing him and Vatican officials of ignoring his insistent warnings against ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s “gravely immoral behavior with seminarians and priests” and asking for the pope’s resignation. Interviewed during his trip to Dublin, Francis refused to comment on the accusations against him, claiming: “I read the statement this morning, and I must tell you sincerely... read the statement carefully and make your own judgment.” (“ silent on archbishop’s call for him to resign.” CNN, August 29, 2018, goo.gl/emmwDZ). What was presented at first as a letter from a bishop worried about apparent omissions by the Roman Curia quickly evolved into a frontal confrontation between the most conservative sectors in the church with Pope Francis. In September 29, Viganò published a second letter to Francis, now accusing him of actively covering sexual abuses: “Pope Francis has defended homosexual clergy who committed serious sexual abuses against minors or adults.” In October 7, Cardinal Ouellet scolded Viganò: “Your current position seems to me incomprehensible and extremely reprehensible, not only because of the confusion that sows in the people of God, but because your public accusations seriously damage the reputation of the Successors of the Apostles” (“Cardinal Ouellet: Vigano in ‘open and scandalous rebellion’ against Pope Francis.” CNN, October 7, goo.gl/UDSRKb), which Viganò countered by a letter of his own. 23 Deneen 2018, 3.

5 opposition to nature24—took the political language developed by Greek, Roman, and Christian thought and reconceived it in a new fashion. Contrary to the classical notion that self-rule could only be accomplished through the cultivation of virtue—requiring the kind of education achieved by liberal arts—liberalism put the world, so to speak, upside down: while classical philosophy discovered the human end (telos) in a proper understanding of nature, modern science rejected the notion that nature is a source of meaning, embracing instead Francis Bacon’s idea that nature must be subdued for human utility; while family and the community were seen as schools of virtue, individualistic liberalism proclaimed the emancipation of the individual from any structure membership of which is not voluntary, especially when they become oppressive. While liberal arts meant education in self-mastery and the exercise of the , that is, an education of citizens, today liberal arts are disappearing or, at best, are being confined to a dark corner of the departments of humanities.25 Liberalism privileges the hegemony of “practical”26—Deneen adds, servile—education,27 that is, the provision of technical tools designed to create efficient, normalized professionals ready to participate in the economic market.

Since liberalism is about individual , and liberal freedom is understood as the removal of obstacles in the pursue of individual desires—that is, ’s negative liberty28—then the liberal state is designed to provide and satisfy the multiplicity of those individual desires. Deneen, however, alerts us that the very system that was created to protect liberty has become, in practice, one in which citizens have no connection with their governments, and where economic logic is so pervasive that the homogeneity created by the market has supplanted diversity. Liberalism thus meant “the replacement of one unequal and unjust system with another system enshrining inequality that would be achieved not by oppression and violence but with the population’s full acquiescence, premised on the ongoing delivery of increasing material prosperity along with the theoretical possibility of class mobility.”29

24 Ibid., 31. 25 A persuasive argument for the restoration of liberal arts as the core of the educational project of democracies is given by (2010). 26 It is important to emphasize that liberal arts are nothing but practical. The difference is that, while the praxis born out of an education in the liberal arts is a civic, moral, and social praxis, the kind of praxis privileged today is linked to the generation of wealth and the technical normalization of global economy for the benefit of a rapacious minority. 27 Deneen 2018, 111. 28 Berlin 2002, 167-217. 29 Ibid., 138. 6

Although I am sympathetic to Deneen’s critique of liberalism, in my opinion his work has problems that become evident when we analyze his proposed solution:

Moving beyond liberalism is not to discard some of liberalism’s main commitments—especially those deepest longings of the West, political liberty and human dignity, but to reject the false turn it made in its imposition of an ideological remaking of the world in the image of a false anthropology. A rejection of the world’s first and last remaining does not entail its replacement with a new and doubtless not very different ideology… A better course will consist in smaller, local forms of resistance: practices more than theories, the building of resilient new cultures against the anticulture of liberalism.30

First of all, saying that liberalism failed “because it was true to itself” is a whole different story than saying that it took a wrong turn.31 If we’re dealing with the pathologies of liberalism, then we may want to preserve the core of what made liberalism attractive in the first place. An important problem with liberalism—which

Deneen correctly identifies—is its mistaken attempt to present itself as a neutral ground, instead of one among many other traditions of thought composing the democratic public arena. But this is not, we must insist, a sine qua non of liberalism.

A second problem refers to the implicit suggestion that we can walk away from ideology.32 Again, while I am sympathetic to Deneen’s call to reignite local politics and civic education, I think it is simply naïve to believe we can ever escape ideology. Deneen’s call for “practices more than theories” reminds us of Marx’s famous thesis on Feuerbach, or the theological confrontation between the defenders of and those advocating for orthopraxy. There’s nothing in the preference of practice over theory, or local over national, that justifies the idea that we can escape . Deneen himself alerts us against this trick: the

“wrong turn” of liberalism was precisely presenting itself as “neutral,” that is, as non-ideological. In this work I subscribe to MacIntyre’s view of a confrontation among different moral and epistemological traditions—which by nature are not neutral—as the only way to generate moral growth. In other words, a moral language develops inside a tradition of thought, and only in the context of that tradition it achieves full intelligibility; on the other hand, traditions supersede other traditions when they are able to answer questions the others cannot.

30 Ibid., 19-20. Emphasis added. 31 Later in the book Deneen claims: “Part of moving toward a postliberal age is recognizing that while liberalism’s initial appeal was premised upon laudatory aspirations, its successes have often been based on a disfigurement of those aspirations.” (ibid., 186-187, emphasis added). 32 Deneen returns to this issue on pp. 188-191. 7

A third concern arises from the promotion of local politics against the enormous weight of the dominant ideology. Although in this work I advocate for local politics as the privileged place for Catholic political action, I think there’s a danger in local politics that Deneen seems unaware of. The excessive zeal for the local can lead us to renounce the benefits achieved by liberalism in the international sphere, namely, global politics, the dissemination of human rights, and economic cooperation. While, for instance, it is indisputable that today the market works exclusively for the benefit of a tiny minority of wealthy families, closing borders and taking refuge in the local pose their own problems.33 The local must be given pre- eminence in order to inform and, eventually, change national politics. We focus on the family, the university, the market, the neighborhood not in an attempt to seclude ourselves from the world, but with the intention of changing it.

Finally, although Deneen correctly denounces many of liberalism’s shortcomings, he seems utterly blind to the fact that liberalism was a reaction against some of the oppressive structures of the tradition he is defending, a tradition he does not criticize even once. At one point he even affirms, without a hint of criticism, that classical liberal arts required the study of the great texts of Christianity as well as other practical activities, such as “compulsory attendance at chapel or Mass.”34 Clearly, we cannot imagine the peaceful coexistence of liberty of conscience and such a practice. A central claim of this work is that

Catholicism is incompatible with any form of oppression, and, especially, with the oppression that results from the theologico-political attempt to make the human society resemble the divine economy or

Providence, that is, the attempt to immanentize what is originally transcendent. Although Catholicism cannot be silent about injustice and oppression in this world, the heavenly city, as described by Augustine, is not identifiable with any institution here on earth.

[3] What does it mean for a Catholic to live and act politically in these postsecular, liberal democracies? How can the efforts to impregnate social existence with the Catholic message be reconciled with a healthy separation between church and state, that is, between the orders of the theological and the

33 It seems that humanity must be reminded, once and again, about the lessons history teaches us. The horrors of the Second World War should be enough to remind us about the necessary balance between national politics and a peaceful global order. 34 Ibid., 128. 8 political? How does democracy relate to religion and, specifically, to Roman Catholicism? What kind of relationships are pertinent between a Catholic citizen, the Magisterium (that is, the church’s authority to interpret Scriptures, vested in the Pope in communion with the bishops), his or her personal encounter with

God and with other Christians, members of other religions, agnostics and atheists? And, finally, what, if any, is the Catholic answer to our contemporary crises, what alternative version of the “good life” does

Catholicism offer, and how persuasive is it? This work tries to articulate an answer to these questions.

In this work I reject an understanding of Catholic political action as the solution to the problems of contemporary liberal democracies. This, for two interrelated reasons. First, because the necessary outcome of the exercise of in a democratic regime is, as correctly saw, diversity. The very possibility of finding a unique solution for the human problem is, thus, cancelled by the fact of pluralism.

In this work I follow liberalism in its understanding of pluralism as the natural outcome of the free unfolding of human creativity. This, however, does not mean giving up truth. Diversity does not necessarily mean relativism or, in the language of Isaiah Berlin, “ pluralism.” While a final resolution to the question

“What is the best life a human being can live?” seems out of reach, I subscribe to Charles Taylor’s claim that we can discriminate between higher and lower forms of life. Were this possibility taken from us, we would be unable to explain the steady march of human rights since its adoption in 1948, the abolition of legal slavery and segregation, as well as other ideas, still maturing, like the respect for our natural habitat or the rejection of cruelty to animals.

But, second, diversity is not exclusive to modernity. For Christianity, diversity is expressed first and foremost in the Trinitarian dogma, in God’s self-revelation as one God in three persons. By describing human beings as imago Dei, Christianity imprints the notions of “personhood” and “diversity” on human nature. The Trinitarian mystery also suggests a solution to the problem of “unity-in-diversity”: while humanity is composed of diverse, unrepeatable persons, we are social beings who cannot achieve our true self in isolation. Unity is visible in the family, in the neighborhood, in many voluntary associations, in the nation, and, finally, in the human family. For Catholicism, moreover, unity is achieved through sacramental life, such as baptism, which creates a spiritual community visible in the Catholic church understood as the body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:27; Colossians 1:18), but also, on different levels of proximity, between 9

Catholics and other baptized Christians,35 members of other religions, and with humanity at large. Diversity, on the other hand, is also a fundamental element of Catholicism. The variety of charismas, for example, reminds us that “his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God” (Ephesians 4:11-13).

What I propose in this work, therefore, is not a cure-all. In fact, I claim in this work that Catholic political action enters the public arena not as revealed religion, but as a tradition of thought proposing an alternative way of dealing with the current crisis. I defend, moreover, the secular public sphere as the best possible political arrangement—one that is compatible with Augustine’s pessimistic view of politics—for the free exercise of Catholic political action. In order for this sphere to work, however, a critique of the excesses of liberalism is necessary. Liberalism, as I will contend in chapters 1 and 4, has played two contradictory roles, both as a comprehensive doctrine with metaphysical commitments and as a metaphysic- free, unbiased, neutral ground upon which free societies debate. In order to work, liberalism, Catholicism, and any other tradition of thought must enter the public sphere under conditions of equality, respect, and non-domination.36 If we are to repel the post-truth era and save the many achievements of the West, we must be able to question and criticize any kind of “neutral” master-language functioning as the default status quo—and there is no doubt both liberalism and Catholicism have their own share of guilt on this matter— and accept the fact that only a respectful dialogue between reasonable persons holding different comprehensive doctrines can bring minds together in a peaceful manner by means of an honest search for the truth.

35 The Catholic church recognizes the validity of baptism performed by other Christian churches. The Catechism of the Catholic Church establishes that “[t]he ordinary ministers of baptism are the bishop and priest and, in the Latin Church, also the deacon. In case of necessity, anyone, even a non-baptized person, with the required intention, can baptize by using the Trinitarian baptismal formula. The intention required is to will to do what the Church does when she baptizes. The Church finds the reason for this possibility in the universal saving will of God and the necessity of baptism for salvation” (§1256, emphasis added). 36 I don’t think any of these conditions is respected today. What we see today as political debates are but comical representations, smoke screens behind of which the game of power is played. Few public servants seem interested in a serious dialogue, listening pragmatically, instead, to the cost- benefit calculus of decisions, their impact on the possibilities of being re-elected, and their private interest. On the side of the citizenry things don’t look better. The weakening of the liberal arts and the predominance of technical education, as well as the pervasive influence of the Internet and social media—designed to serve as a sounding board of the individual’s prejudices and his or her parochial mentality—has turned society into a collection of micro-associations where individuals confirm their own presuppositions by the continual reaffirmation and repetition of their prejudices by like-minded individuals, as well as the muting of any criticism which originates outside of the group. Society is becoming a battleground where increasingly radicalized individuals defend their opinions as evident truths, with no intention to subject themselves to critical analysis.

10

A fundamental question immediately arises: How can we justify the introduction of religious ideas into the public sphere? I think we can answer this question on two levels. Given that secularization does not spell the end of religion but, as Taylor suggests, only its transformation, then demanding an absolute separation between church and state, or between faith and reason, is problematic at best. This is so because the intended primacy of rational (or “scientific”) arguments over faith is chimerical. Faith and reason are different ways of confronting reality.37 The role of faith becomes manifest when we realize that science cannot provide a definite answer to Heidegger’s question: “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”38

Science cannot encompass the whole of reality because, following Kant, our reason is restricted to time and space.39 “Nothingness,” therefore, is the name we give to that which is not-space and not-time, thus, to the unknowable. Faith, on the other hand, “signifies not the observation of this or that fact, but a fundamental mode of behavior toward being, toward existence, toward one’s own sector of reality, and toward reality as a whole.”40

A second way to show this is by an exploration of the notion of political theology. This work is written under the conviction that the attempt to radically separate the theological and the political is a futile enterprise. As Claude Lefort claims, society’s self-understanding, the process by which a social body becomes aware of itself, requires an exteriority, a point outside society itself, first developed by religion:

“Every religion states in its own way that human society can only open on to itself by being held in an opening it did not create. Philosophy says the same thing, but religion said it first, albeit in terms which

37 Erik Peterson correctly asserts that “[s]aying that faith is a type of knowledge means… that believing involves knowledge only because faith exists in the domain of the revelation of the Logos of God or, to put it differently, because the condescension of God is also a revealing” (Peterson 2011, 5). 38 Heidegger, Introduction to , chapter 1. A similar problem arises when we consider the problem of human exceptionality in the cosmos. 39 Thus, to affirm, without a trace of doubt, that “nothing exists outside time and space,” necessarily implies a metaphysical claim. Against Kant’s treatment of religion, Benedict XVI claims: “When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole” (Benedict XVI, 2006). While Benedict is rightly worried about the restrictive confining of faith to practical reason, he seems to lose sight of the effect of Kant’s thought on reason, that is, the rejection of any attempt to deny religion on the basis of so-called —an attempt New Atheists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins deem not only possible, but morally necessary. In my opinion, we must acknowledge the radical gulf between faith and reason without throwing faith into the basket of the “irrational.” That faith and reason are compatible does not imply that faith is demonstrable or falsifiable. It only means that God’s communication—and Jesus is God’s Word— is reasonable, that this word is not only compatible, but welcomed and even yearned for by reason, even though we can never fully grasp God by means of reason. 40 Ratzinger 2004, 50. Elsewhere he defines faith as “a disclosure of reality that is granted only to him who trusts, loves, and acts as a human being; and as such it is not a derivative of knowledge, but is sui generis, like knowledge, although it is indeed more basic and more central to our authentically human nature than knowledge is” (Ratzinger 1971a, 20).

11 philosophy cannot accept.”41 The open question of the permanence of the theologico-political militates against Mark Lilla’s notion of “the great Separation” between the theological and the political. This separation was defended by various thinkers: Hobbes, who put Christianity back under the secular arm;

Rousseau, whose civil religion, found in Vicar Savoyard’s profession of faith, turned religion, according to

Lilla, into a religion without God42; Kant, who placed the object of religion outside of human reason; and

Hegel, who brought back religion by transforming it into a historical epic.

Lilla’s most serious mistake is his narrowing of the meaning of political theology,43 which is but the metaphysical obverse of his uncritical embrace of liberalism. For him, a fundamental decision must to be made: either we reduce religion to a private matter or we open Pandora’s box, bringing religious discourse back in the form of political messianism.44 Lilla blindly adopts an either/or logic, as if the works of Hobbes,

Rousseau, Kant, or Hegel were understandable without the mediation of theological notions. It seems to me more exact to recognize that the canon of Western political philosophy is a dialogue with Christianity that does not end with a defeated religion and a triumphant rationality, but with a cross-fertilization, to the point where Western political philosophy cannot be understood independently of , and

Christianity as a tradition of thought is radically incomplete when estranged from Western rationality.45

In this work I defend a conception of political theology that departs from Carl Schmitt—who appropriates theological ideas for the sake of secular power—as well as from Lilla, for whom secular democracy should overcome the theologico-political problem altogether. Political theology becomes necessary precisely where evidence and testimony, doubt and faith, immanence and transcendence, converge in the questions: How am I to live the good life? Which political regime best promotes human flourishing? Now, insofar as political theology discusses the matter of human flourishing on the very point

41 Ibid., 222-223. I think, however, that Lefort is too confident in the ability of philosophy. In his discussion of the legislator, Rousseau admits that “[s]ince… the legislator is incapable of using either force or reasoning, he must of necessity have recourse to an authority of a different order which can compel without violence and persuade without convincing” (On the , bk. II, ch. 7). 42 “[The Vicar’s] real interest is not in God, it is in himself—and if he professes a faith in God, it is only because he needs it for good moral and psychological reasons.” (Lilla 2008, 124). 43 “The argument over religion and politics did not end with the dawn of the modern age, or the Enlightenment, or the American and French revolutions, or the birth of modern science, or any other crypto-messianic historical moment. It did not end because it could not, because it concerns an enduring question that all societies implicitly face: whether to order their political affairs in light of a divine revelation, or to make their way alone” (Lilla 2008, 303). In my opinion, it is possible to agree with Lilla about the dangers of ordering political affairs in light of revelation while at the same time recognizing that political theology is not exhausted by this recognition. 44 Lilla has in mind two postwar works: ’s Epistle to the Romans and Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption. 45 This is not to say that Christianity is a Western phenomenon. Ignoring the rich Christian tradition in the East mutilates the idea of Christianity. That in this work I focus only on the West, both politically and theologically, says nothing about the richness of the Christian tradition in the East and the urgent ecumenical task ahead of us. 12 where immanence touches transcendence and reason gives way to faith, we must reject any attempt at breaking this tension, especially on the political side, that is, attempting to solve the theological problem— the mystery of evil, the problem of salvation, etc.—here and now. Instead, the tension between these extremes must be preserved. I argue that this is the only way to achieve for both spheres. Looking at

Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam, Christians must recognize, first, that it is God who approaches humanity (Adam lies, awaiting), thus theology is but a humble reflection upon this mystery and not a freestyle art that opens up an infinite canvas for human creativity, transforming God into the material with which a divinized human being paints his or her distorted image. And, second, believers must acknowledge that God remains, ineluctably, outside the spectrum of what we can rationally know. God is near, but his finger never touches us.46

[4] A couple of terminological clarifications are necessary before I outline the chapters of this work and close these introductory lines. The first refers to the difference between the “Christian” and the

“Catholic.” While this work focuses on Catholic political action, there’s no doubt that many of the fundamental tenets of Catholicism are shared with the larger Christian tradition. Thus, in this work I distinguish between Christianity and Catholicism in order to recognize that some of the most important ideas in this project derive from basic notions shared by Christianity at large. Thus, when I use the term

“Christian” I refer to the large tradition of thought that began with the ministry, death and resurrection of

Jesus, a tradition that has suffered two main , the one between the Eastern and Western traditions, and the Reformation, the in Western Christianity produced by the confrontation between the

Augustinian monk, Martin Luther, and the Catholic church. In using the notion of “Christianity” I am trying to suggest, in an ecumenical spirit, the many insights shared by the followers of Christ. It is my conviction

46 In Das Wort Gottes als Aufgafe der Theologie (“The Word of God as the Task of Theology”) Karl Barth claims that: “As theologians, we are supposed to talk about God. But we are also human beings, and as human beings we are not able to talk about God. We are obliged to be aware of both our ‘Ought’ and our ‘Cannot’, and in so doing, to give God the glory” (Quoted in Peterson 2011, 1). While this is an important insight, one that humbles us before the mystery (or the question) of God, Erik Peterson rejects the Barthian dialectic by affirming that, while before Christ “the attempt to do theology could only happen in a form in which thought would dissipate itself in myths of dialectical possibilities,” with the coming of God “all myths of dialectical possibilities have now been blown away like dust, and the indiscipline that was the correlative of myth has been transformed into the obedience of faith.” (Peterson 2011, 3-4). This means, for Peterson, that “in theology the possibility of a real, even though limited, knowledge is presupposed” (ibid., 4). What justifies this asseveration is nothing other than Christ’s words: “Truly I say to you,” and “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (quoted in Peterson, ibid., 3). In this work I subscribe to Peterson’s theological insights (see chapter 1). 13 that a respectful, fraternal dialogue is the precondition for any authentic ecumenical work. On the other hand, therefore, my use of the term “Catholic” refers to ideas specifically held by Catholics. This does not necessarily mean, however, that these and other ideas are not, or could not, be shared; it is only my way of recognizing that Christian diversity is not exhausted by Catholicism.

The second clarification refers to one of the central figures in this work, namely, the theologian

Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. I believe it is important to distinguish the theologian from the man John Paul II called to be the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), and the Prefect from the pope. I contend that we can differentiate between Ratzinger the theologian and

Benedict the pontiff by using the Kantian distinction between public and private reason.47 I am not suggesting any incompatibility between the thoughts of the theologian and those of the pontiff; I am only pointing out that the prefect and the pope speak with a voice that is not their own—in the sense, for example, of the freedom of scholars. Ratzinger, moreover, made the distinction himself. When in 2007—already a pope—he published the first book of his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy, he claimed:

It goes without saying that this book is in no way an exercise of the magisterium, but is solely an expression of my personal search “for the face of the Lord” (cf. Ps 27:8). Everyone is free, then, to contradict me. I would only ask my readers for that initial goodwill without which there can be no understanding.48

It would be difficult to find a clearer example of Kant’s distinction between public and private reason. The one presenting the book is not Benedict XVI, the pope, but Joseph Ratzinger, the theologian who imposed one condition when John Paul II asked him to head the CDF: “I can only accept it if I am allowed to continue publishing.”49 I make a further distinction—although a tenuous one—between the works Ratzinger published before becoming the prefect of the CDF and those written afterwards. Although Ratzinger was careful to distinguish his theological work from his work as prefect, I refer to the latter as “late” works of

Ratzinger, noting they were written when Ratzinger was an official of the Roman Curia. I make the

47 “I understand… under the public use of his own reason, that use which anyone makes of it as a scholar [Gelehrter] before the entire public of the reading world. The private use I designate as that use which one makes of his reason in a certain civil post or office which is entrusted to him… [A] clergyman is bound to lecture to his catechism students and his congregation according to the symbol of the church which he serves; for he has been accepted on this condition. But as a scholar he has the complete freedom, indeed it is his calling, to communicate to the public all his carefully tested and well-intentioned thoughts on the imperfections of that symbol and his proposals for a better arrangement of religious and ecclesiastical affairs” (Kant, An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?). 48 Ratzinger 2007a, xxiii-xxiv. Emphasis added. 49 Seewald 2017, chapter 9, “München (1977-82).”

14 distinction in order to track changes in Ratzinger’s view before and after entering the Roman Curia. In general, however, one can say Ratzinger’s most fundamental convictions have remained unchanged.50

[5] The argument of the book unfolds throughout five chapters. In them I have tried to combine philosophical and theological reflection. I argue that the best way to do political theology is to take both theology and political philosophy seriously. As I will argue in this work, many contemporary works in

Christian political theology fail to do justice to theology, twisting or even ignoring the teachings of Scripture in order to favor current trends or ideological commitments.51 In this sense, I follow Henri de Lubac’s view of theology as thinking with the Bible and the Fathers of the church.

The first chapter is a discussion on methodology. In it I offer a discussion of what political theology is, focusing on two problems. First, I consider the two monuments of Christian political theology, Augustine and , and what I deem the most powerful critique of Christianity, found in the thought of

Nietzsche. These three accounts will appear from time to time throughout the work, as signposts suggesting specific directions and tendencies. In the second part I track the twentieth-century debate between Carl

Schmitt and Erik Peterson and the commentaries of Giorgio Agamben and Joseph Ratzinger on the topic, in order to present my own perspective on political theology as an unavoidable, necessary dimension of political life, which nonetheless rejects the immanentization of the Kingdom of God, or the founding of political power on the basis of the revealed Word, as deformations incompatible with Christianity and democracy.

The second and third chapters lay out the context within which this work unfolds. They trace the boundaries, both in time and space, beyond which the work is silent. That my research focuses on Catholic political action in postsecular societies implies, politically, that we need to circumscribe our analyses to a specific kind of political society, namely, Western liberal democracies, which are the product of a

50 A change can be seen in Ratzinger’s ideas, though. The social, philosophical, and sexual revolutions in the mid-1960s, along with the many radical reactions to the Second Vatican Council (especially ), forced Ratzinger to rethink the conciliar confidence in the harmony between the church and the “world” (a term Ratzinger also finds problematic, since it suggests the church is somehow “outside” or “in front of” the “world” rather than being itself worldly). This change happened before Ratzinger became an official in the Roman Curia, and is but a deepening of his Augustinianism, which he embraced since the very beginning of his theological career. 51 “Just as theology is not mythology, so it also is not simply authorship. On the contrary: the theologian stands in total contrast to the writer” (Peterson 2011, 7). Although this is not a theological work, but one in political theory, Peterson’s insight helpfully reminds us of the limits of theological creativity. 15 combination of historical events that run from the crisis of the late Middle Ages caused by nominalism to the emergence of modern times, by the hand of thinkers like Petrarch and Martin Luther, who challenged the Catholic church’s authority and collapsed the difference between higher and lower forms of life, bringing to the fore, for the first time, the dignity of ordinary life. Chapter 2 tells this story by means of an exposition of the thought of Charles Taylor, culminating in his influential work, A Secular Age.

Within the theological camp, Catholic political action demands an understanding of the radical changes the Catholic church experienced in the mid-twentieth century. The landmark of this transformation is, without a doubt, the Second Vatican Council. In chapter 3, I try to understand the political consequences of the council, focusing on the tension between rupture and continuity, suggesting that while Vatican II implied a drastic change in the church’s mentality, this cannot mean a complete severance from tradition, a rupture inaugurating something completely new. This would imply, necessarily, the existence of two churches, one authentic and the other inauthentic, which would beg the question of which one is His Church

(Jesus’) and which one is ours. Instead of talking of rupture, I adopt Ratzinger’s notion of ablatio, as well as Benedict XVI’s distinction between the hermeneutics of discontinuity and the hermeneutics of reform, as the best analytical tools to approximate the meaning of the council. To conclude, I discuss two reactions to the council, Marcel Lefebvre’s Society of Saint Pius X and liberation theology, arguing that both end up immanentizing the Kingdom of God, that is, aiming at some form of Christendom.

The last two chapters develop the main argument of the work. Chapter 4 begins with a critique of

Charles Taylor’s liberalism, which I claim informs his Catholicism to a point where a reconciliation between individuality and unity becomes problematic. In order to solve this problem, I introduce the thought of another Catholic philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre, from whom I take two main insights: first, that liberalism and Catholicism must be seen as traditions of thought, that is, as narratives that integrate a cohesive and more or less complete comprehensive doctrine, outside of which the understanding of its contents becomes problematic; and, second, that against liberalism we must promote what he calls “utopianism of the present,” which entails working actively in order to strengthen and vitalize local communities. In this work I understand Catholic political action as a tradition of thought that offers an alternative to the problem of social coexistence and good government by focusing on participative democracy at the local level (bottom- 16 up) instead of attempting to seize power and promote institutional and constitutional changes from the top down. This, Catholic action is able to do by a critique of individualism and the retrieval of the notion of person, which is in my opinion the most important Christian contribution to political thought.

Finally, chapter 5 tries to organize the analyses and arguments I make throughout the work by recognizing that the main figures analyzed—Ratzinger, Taylor, and MacIntyre—are all indebted to Alexis de Tocqueville. The chapter begins with a brief discussion of Tocqueville’s thoughts on religion, suggesting that, rather than being a deist, or a pragmatic proponent of a civil religion, Tocqueville was a Catholic tormented by the anxieties and doubts characteristic of the modern age. I then develop Tocqueville’s main ideas on equality and freedom, as well as his anthropology—what Joshua Mitchell calls the “Augustinian self”—in order to discuss his worries about the dangers inherent in democratic regimes. I also analyze

Tocqueville’s thoughts on the salutary effects of the family, associational life, civic participation, and religion on democracy. With these insights in mind I turn, in the last section of the chapter, to scrutinize the main ideas of the work under a Tocquevillean light, trying to show that the consistency of the work is given by tracing a tradition of thought that, notwithstanding the many disagreements among its members, advances some core political and theological insights shared by all.

This work proposes, let me repeat, not a definite solution to the current problems of democracy, nor a definitive critique of liberalism. My aim is to build a consistent account of the meaning of Catholic political action as understood by thinkers who, despite their differences, share some basic notions about the meaning political action has for a Catholic in postsecular societies. I place Charles Taylor and Joseph Ratzinger at the extremes of this tradition, suggesting that the tension between the two is necessary in order to avoid what Ratzinger himself called, in a debate with Habermas in 2005, the pathologies of reason and the pathologies of religion.

The only way of being truthful to ourselves commands us, first, to understand the tradition from which we are speaking, recognizing that we cannot ever speak the atemporal language of absolute truth, but rather that our thoughts are always conditioned. But, second, this recognition does not mean the impossibility of truth. For Christianity, faith in Christ opens the window to that which is beyond this life, allowing us to be closer to, without ever touching, the Absolute. Some philosophers have said something 17 similar: either ’s forms, in classical political thought, or Taylor’s lotta continua, which is but a different name for Hans-Georg Gadamer’s fusion of horizons, they all postulate the possibility of transcending, if only by approximation, the restrictions of our context, making us step, if only for a second, into the realm of truth, the permanent, and the necessary. It is, again, the tension between the poles, contextuality and absoluteness, that best describes, in my opinion, the human tragedy, as well as our exceptionality. And it is precisely this tension which forces us not only to humbly recognize our limitations, but also, and at the same time, to never despair in the search for a better approximation to human flourishing.

18

CHAPTER 1. THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL.

Rather than attempting to redefine relations between the political and the religious in order to assess the degree to which one is subordinated to the other and to examine the question of the permanence or nonpermanence of a sensitivity to religious thought in modern society, might it not be more appropriate to posit the view that a theologico-political formation is, logically and historically, a primary datum?1

A complex relationship between religion and politics has always existed, and modernity is no exception. This relationship has taken a variety of forms, from the instrumentalization of religion by politics to the subsumption of politics under religion. A paradigmatic example of the first is Machiavelli’s praise of

Numa, the founder of Roman religion. Machiavelli bestows on him the “highest merit,” for “there never was any remarkable lawgiver amongst any people who did not resort to divine authority, as otherwise his laws would not have been accepted by the people.”2 Similar attitudes toward religion can be found in the third and fourth parts of Hobbes’s Leviathan and the fourth book of Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social. In our days, theocracy can be found in the writings of Islamist thinkers, such as Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Ruhollah Khomeini, who claim that society must be ruled according to the and commandments contained in the Qur’an and shari’a law. Khomeini claims, for example, that “the laws of the shari’a embrace a diverse body of laws and regulations, which amounts to a complete social system.”3

Western political life is no exception. Alexis de Tocqueville tells us that

[t]he Connecticut lawgivers turned their attention first to the criminal code and, in composing it, conceived the strange idea of borrowing their provisions from the text of Holy Writ: “If any man after legal conviction shall have or worship any other God but the Lord God, he shall be put to death.” There follow ten or twelve provisions of the same sort taken word by word from Deuteronomy, Exodus, or Leviticus.4

To speak of the postsecular suggests neither the end of secularity as a project nor a return to an enchanted world where objects are charged with intrinsic meaning. It means rather to assert that the theologico-political

1 Lefort 1988, 249. 2 Machiavelli, Discourses, I-11. 3 Khomeini 1981, 43. 4 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I.I.2:35. Tocqueville qualifies some of this regulations as “ridiculous and tyrannical” (36). 19 was there all the time, whether or not it was recognized as such. To better understand this idea, we can analyze the words of Michelet on the French Revolution:

One day when I was passing through Reims, I saw the magnificent cathedral, the splendid Coronation Church, in great detail. When one walks around the internal gallery eighty feet above the ground, one sees the ravishing wealth of its flowery beauty as a permanent alleluia. In this empty immensity, one always seems to be able to hear the great official clamor that was once called the voice of the people… I reached the last little tower. There, I found a spectacle that astonished me greatly. The round tower was garlanded with sacrificial victims. One has a rope around his neck; another has lost an ear. The mutilated are sadder than the dead. How right they are! What a terrifying contrast! The church of festivals, the bride, has adopted that lugubrious ornament for her wedding necklace! The pillory of the people has been placed above the altar. But might not those tears have fallen down through the vaults and on to the heads of the kings? The fearful unction of the Revolution, of the wrath of God. “I will not understand the monarchical ages,” I said to myself, “unless I first establish within me the soul and the faith of the people,” and, after Louis XI, I wrote my Revolution.5

Michelet’s beautiful passage shows how even a project which tries to abolish the old partnership between church and state has been reformulated by means of the same categories it rejects. Claude Lefort observes that “Michelet moves through the church like an actor. He makes it undergo a true metamorphosis, but he is still there.”6 Although stripped of its Christian content, the church still performs a symbolic function. The

“people” is enthroned, and this action is made possible through the enactment of both rite and symbol. This means that there is in Michelet a reconstruction of historical time as a ceremony the intelligibility of which is given by its being performed religiously. That this is the case becomes clear when Lefort points out that

Michelet “uses all the old symbols.”7 Why would anyone want to depict a secularist revolution as a religious event? The answer is given again by Lefort: so as to achieve what Christ accomplished through his resurrection, what was granted to Christianity through the Eucharistic sacrament, namely, an opening outside time, the irruption of sacred time which is, by its very nature, reversible, “in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present.”8 Michelet “becomes sensitivized to a time that, while it does not exist outside time, does not exist within time either; the time of a people, of the people who await their incarnation, who are in a sense always invisible, but who reveal themselves for one moment

5 Michelet, History of France, 1845, 53, quoted in Lefort 1988, 238-239. Eric Voegelin refers to the French Revolution as “a new State Religion” whose solidarité was interpreted by secular philosophers of the Third Republic as a secularized Christian caritas (Voegelin 1986, 36). 6 Lefort 1988, 239, emphasis added. 7 Ibid. 8 Eliade 1987, 68. Theologically, in the Catholic Mass the mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ is made present in the eucharistic sacrifice. This bringing-back means neither repetition nor memory, but rather actualization. The concept of anamnesis, which refers to this actualization, is studied in the fourth chapter of this work (4.III.3).

20 in history—and who demand faith.”9 For Lefort, the theologico-political remains because “both the political and the religious govern access to the world.”10

Against the claim that religion has been put once and for all in the private realm, where individuals can relate to spiritual forces that nonetheless are banned from entering the public arena,11 Michelet’s portrayal of “the people” as the sacrificial victim anointed on the altar reminds us of the symbolic character of the notion of “people,” a reality that is never completely immanent nor fully transcendent. This immanent/transcendent play is indispensable for the new political role of the people as the anointed one, that is, as the new sovereign. The tears that are dropped over the altar and over the heads of the kings, which speak at the same time of unspeakable sacrifices and absolute joy, remind us of the women who followed

Jesus in his walk to Gol´gotha (Luke 23:27), and who reappear in the passage of the Resurrection (Luke

24:1-3), where tears were wiped by the risen God.12 We could say that, just as Jesus promised his disciples to stay with them “to the close of the age” (Matthew 28:20), starting a new relation with humanity defined in terms of visibility/invisibility, in the same way, the “people” is always present and absent, it transcends everyday politics only to be able to found the political as a space of intelligibility (see chapter 5.II.2).

But what is, specifically, the theologico-political? Can there be, to begin with, something like a

Catholic political theology? What would that imply, moreover, for a postsecular democracy? And even if we accept the possibility of a politico-theological approach to reality, what exactly would that mean? Does it imply the historical parallel and structural analogy between theological and political concepts, such that the exception in law, for instance, relates to the miracle in theology? Or does it mean, on the contrary, that there exists a productive tension between the two spheres by means of which human beings gain access to meaning in life? If the latter is the case, we need to understand the specific form of this relationship. The theologico-political could imply that the borders between the spheres cannot be traced with precision, and therefore the overlap between the two would allow for the kind of experiments we referred to above, in the

9 Ibid., 173. 10 Ibid., 156. 11 Taylor relates this idea to Hobbes: “What Hobbes does is to make the demands of Christian faith, as confessionally defined, irrelevant to the public sphere. There the independent ethic reigns supreme. In a private realm, the believer can and must do what conscience demands, but he commits no sin in respecting publically-established forms and ceremonies” (Taylor 2004b, 35). 12 The end of is also present in apocalyptic literature. In John’s Revelation, we read: “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them, he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away” (Revelation 21:3-4). 21 first paragraph of the chapter; or it could mean that the spheres, although necessarily connected by the fact that they both govern access to the human world, have clear enough boundaries, so that the possibility of certain theologico-political experiments must be closed, either from the political or the theological side.

This chapter provides an answer to these questions. In the first part, I discuss the two most powerful

Christian political theologies, namely those of and Thomas Aquinas, as well as what is, in my opinion, the most serious and powerful philosophical challenge against Christianity, that offered by

Friedrich Nietzsche (I). These three positions inform many of the insights of this work. The central part of the chapter studies the debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson in order to answer two interrelated questions: What is political theology? Can there be a Christian political theology? (II) In the third section I deal with two commentaries on the question of political theology: Giorgio Agamben’s critique of Peterson and Joseph Ratzinger’s critique of political theology. I adopt Ratzinger’s position, highly indebted to

Peterson, as the most solid Catholic position on political theology today (III). In the final section I conclude with a concise account of how I will understand political theology throughout this work (IV).

I

Augustine of Hippo, a bishop who lived between the fourth and fifth centuries, and Thomas

Aquinas, a thirteenth-century Dominican friar, are perhaps the two most important theologians of

Christianity. The effect each of them has had on Western civilization is unfathomable: their works continue to influence not only theology, but legal studies, political theory, psychology, sociology, and many other human disciplines. On the other hand, the challenge posed to Christianity at the end of the nineteenth century shook the most powerful religion in the West, raising questions that prevail to our day, pointing out the dangers—sometimes hidden in remote, and even unconscious cracks of the human soul—inherent in religiosity. This section brings forward their political ideas, trying to capture their differences and similarities, so that these accounts will help us to organize some contemporary currents in

Christian political theology, in a similar way in which a trail in the forest suggests the hiker the main routes, helping her at the same time to distinguish the known from the unknown, the familiar from the alien.

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[1] Augustine13 was born in 354 of the Christian era in the Roman Africa. He was heavily influenced by Plato and Neoplatonism, engaged for a time with Manichean doctrines, and in 386 he converted to

Christianity. He was baptized, became a priest, and in 395 he was appointed bishop of Hippo. He died in

430, in the midst of the Vandals’ siege on his city.

Augustine’s anthropology is deeply pessimistic.14 An indisputable tenet of Christian doctrine is, however, that human beings were created good, since all of God’s creatures are good (Genesis 1:31).

Moreover, God created human beings in His own image: “For He created for him a soul by virtue of which he might surpass in reason and intelligence all the creatures of the earth” (XII:24). Whence, then, does

Augustine’s pessimism come from? The answer lies in the problem of freedom. From the moment human beings were created, they were free, that is, endowed with the ability to distinguish and choose between good and evil. However, the first human couple sinned: tempted by the devil, they succumbed to the idea of “becoming like God” (Genesis 3:5) and disobeyed the Creator’s command. But, we might further inquire, how can a naturally good creature sin? Since Augustine understands evil in purely negative terms, as an absence of good (XI:9), the cause cannot be an evil nature. An evil will, thus, “could not exist in an evil nature, but in a nature good but nonetheless mutable.”

How, therefore, can a good thing be the efficient cause of an evil will? How, I say, can good be the cause of evil? For when the will relinquishes that which is superior to itself and turns to that which is inferior, it becomes evil not because that towards which it turns is evil, but because the turning itself is evil. The inferior thing, then, did not make the will evil; rather, the will made itself evil by wickedly and inordinately desiring the inferior thing (XII:6).

After the fall, humanity as a whole was condemned: the pride of Adam and Eve brought “death, misery, suffering, crimes, the war of the flesh against the spirit, [and] conflict among men.”15 The condemnation of the whole humanity in Adam and Eve’s sin is a consequence of our social nature: “[For] human nature can call upon nothing more appropriate, either to prevent discord from coming into existence, or to heal it where it already exists, than the remembrance of that first parent of us all” (XII:28). Human nature was, thus, wounded by sin, fallen because of the pride of the creature that tries to be its own God.

13 In this section, references in the body of the document are to Augustine’s The City of God. They indicate book and chapter in the form (BB:CC). 14 For the discussion about human theology and psychology, I lean on Herbert A. Deane’s The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine, particularly on his first two chapters, pp. 17-77. 15 Deane 1963, 17. 23

Human beings lost their natural ability to choose the good, to will what is best for us. The consequence of original sin was a rebellion inside each one of us: the harmony between soul and body was broken, leaving instead an inability to govern the lower part of ourselves (our bodies) and subject it to the higher one (the soul). In Augustine’s words, “[h]uman nature was so vitiated and changed in him [Adam]… that he suffered in his members the conflict of disobedient lust, and became bound to the necessity of dying”

(XIII:3, cf. XIII:13, XVI:15). The story would have ended in a wicked, utterly dispossessed humanity, had not God decided to rescue his own creation.16 Without God’s help, each and every human being would have been subjected to a twofold death: that of the body, when we physically die, and that of the soul, which happens if the soul is condemned to hell. While there is no way to avoid the first death, a few human beings will be gratuitously spared from the second one by God’s mercy (cf. XIII:23, XVI:21, XXI:12). Redemption is a gift from God, and no human action can be said to be meritorious of it—an idea that Luther would radicalize in the sixteenth century.17 This, because our good actions are possible only because of God’s aid.

Without grace, we would be utterly incapable of good. According to Herbert Deane, “the primary motive for Augustine’s constant insistence that man is totally dependent for his salvation upon God’s free grace is… his conviction that pride is the root of sin, and that the most insidious form of pride is that of the man who attributes to himself and to his own efforts his good works or his progress in spiritual life.”18

The Fall is, notwithstanding, just half the story. Christ redeemed humanity by assuming human nature, dwelling among us, dying and resurrecting (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Augustine devotes chapter XVII of The City of God to provide scriptural evidence for this claim. This is clear, for example, in his reading of

Psalms, where Christ is identified as the priest of the order of Melchizedek (Psalm 110:4), or the anointed king descending from the house of David (Psalm 89), whose throne will last forever (Psalm 45:6). His kingdom does not belong to this world; in fact, his triumph is visible only from the perspective of the cross

16 “[T]he sway of the kingdom of death over men was so complete that all would have been driven headlong as their due punishment, into that second death to which there is no end [i.e., eternal damnation], had not some of them been redeemed by the unmerited grace of God” (XVI:1). 17 Puritanism—the relevance of which will become clear in the last chapter, when we analyze Tocqueville’s thoughts on religion and democracy— developed Luther’s radical Augustinianism. In his memoirs, Thomas Goodwin confides that “the natural man, even when seemingly a good man, is only a beautiful abomination, for the natural man has had no merit since Adam’s disobedience, and Hell is his just determination. Then, in the midst of this horror, comes the act of mercy: the voice that says to the dead soul, ‘Arise and live.’” In discussing these ideas, Alan Simpson claims that “explain the rebirth as a vivid personal experience in which the individual soul encounters the wrath and redemptive love of God. It is an experience for which the church may prepare a man, and after which it may claim to guide him, but which in its essential nature is beyond the church’s control” (Simpson 1955, 4-6) 18 Ibid., 20. 24

(Psalm 22:1, 15-18). His victory is, thus, not a political one—he has been nailed to a cross along with criminals—but one that appeals to each one of us personally, calling us to conversion (metanoia), to embrace the new plane of existence revealed by his death and resurrection.

The mystery of redemption is inserted by Augustine in the larger narrative of the two cities, the origin of which we must track in the angelic rebellion. Two characteristics of the cities are important to mention. First, the cities are mingled together (I:35, XVIII:49, XIX:26), to the point that it is impossible to make a clear-cut distinction between them. Even though in some places Augustine suggests that the church is the city of God (cf. XVI:2), this can only mean the triumphant church, that is, the community of saints.

The pilgrim church, however, counts among its members citizens of both cities:

[W]hile she is a pilgrim in this world, the City of God has with her, bound to her by the communion of the sacraments, some who will not be with her to share eternally in the bliss of the saints. Some of these are concealed. Some of them, however, join openly with our enemies, and do not hesitate to murmur against the God Whose sacrament they bear (I:35).19

The second feature is that they are distinguished by their kind of love: while the love of the earthly city is disordered, that of the heavenly one is ordered; the former seeks self-aggrandizement and earthly consolation, while the latter, humility and celestial . 20 Consistent with his doctrine on evil, Augustine finds the fault of the earthly citizens not in the pursuit of evil goals, but in the immoderate importance given to what is accessory:

So also, the earthly city, which does not live by faith, desires an earthly peace, and it establishes an ordered concord of civic obedience and rule in order to secure a kind of co-operation of men’s wills for the sake of attaining the things which belong to this mortal life. But the Heavenly City—or, rather, that part of it which is a pilgrim in this condition of mortality, and which lives by faith—must of necessity make use of this peace also, until this mortal state, for which such peace is necessary, shall have passed away (XIX:17).

The difference rests in the way we use things—for just as poison, if swallowed, can kill us, it also can, if used properly, be curative (XI:22). The citizens of the earthly city use peace, “albeit only for the sake of the

19 I believe we can interpret Augustine’s description of those who, while in the church, conspire in the shadows, concealed, against it, as an eschatological sign. In the second letter to the Thessalonians (2:3-4), Paul alerts his flock: “Let no one deceive you in any way; for that day will not come, unless the rebellion comes first, and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the son of perdition, who opposes and exalts himself against every so-called god or object of worship, so that he takes his seat in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God.” I believe that Augustine, in the quote above, may be referring precisely to that “man of lawlessness,” who needs to be revealed in order for Parousia to unfold. This would mean not only that the church is not the same as the City of God, but that in the church may be hidden a wickedness that conspires against God himself. 20 “For though it is not necessarily true that one who enjoys what he loves is happy—for many are miserable because they love that which ought not to be loved, and more miserable still when they enjoy it—yet no one is happy who does not enjoy what he loves” (VIII:9). “Human beings are moved by what Augustine calls their ‘loves’… Two ways of loving are especially important for Augustine: what he calls ‘use,’ and ‘enjoyment.’ To enjoy something is to love it for its own sake; he contrasts this with regarding things as useful for securing something else. Something that is worthy of being loved entirely for its own sake is the sort of thing that can confer true … Only God is worthy of being loved in this way” (Weithman in Stump and Kretzmann 2001, 235). 25 lowest kind of goods” (XV:5). The citizens of the heavenly city, in contrast, humbly subject themselves to what is superior, i.e., God’s will. It should be clear by now that a certain degree of virtue is found in the earthly city, an example of which were the Romans, who “were led to do many great deeds, first by their love of liberty, and then by their desire for praise and glory” (V:12).

Now we can understand Augustine’s ideas about the political community. He rejects Scipio’s contention that a people is “an assemblage associated by a common acknowledgement of law [i.e., an agreement about right or justice], and by a community of interests” (II:21),21 claiming that by that standard no human republic or kingdom had ever existed. He proposes, instead, a less demanding22 definition: “a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love” (XIX:24). This definition is consistent with Augustine’s emphasis on love as the engine of human action. More interesting is the amorality of his definition: the state is an association of people under a determinate goal. And while, to be sure, the higher the goal, the more perfect the association would be, the definition says nothing about what kinds of goals should be pursued.

States are the mechanisms ordained by God to curb human vice and wickedness. Since, after the

Fall, human beings lost their ability to govern themselves, an external institution endowed with the ability to coerce and punish became necessary to keep peace and security. States are willed by God, and rulers receive their power from Him.23 Augustine reads Romans 13 literally: obedience to authorities is justified on the basis that all authority comes from God. For him, there is no place for civil resistance, disobedience, or rebellion. The only justified case for disobedience is when the state demands something that contravenes

God’s commandments. However, all that a Christian citizen can do is refuse to act, suffering the punishment determined by the laws, even if that leads to death, that is, to martyrdom.

The role of the state is, then, the preservation of earthly peace (cf. XIV:1). This is made by means of fear and coercion. Since most of the citizens in a state cherish not heavenly but earthly goods, the state

21 Quoted in Deane 1963, 118. In the following paragraphs I am following his chapter on the state. 22 “Augustine believed… that he had uncovered the lowest common denominators of human existence in the saeculum: a need for social life, hence for peace and order; a divided will easily traduced by a lust to dominate and to possess; a world of insoluble estrangements, perils, and shortcomings” (Elshtain 1995, 91). 23 Deane 1963, 143.

26 punishes violations by depriving individuals of the objects of their love, namely, property, freedom, and even their life.24 True justice is not possible in this life, because “the capacity ‘to do justice and righteousness’ is of God” (XVII:4), and thus a just state would necessarily imply the direct government by

God. The state is concerned, then, with the provision of order, peace, and security here on earth. This is, however, not a minor task for Augustine, for the good protected by the state is not a mystification, but authentic and beneficial.25 The State, however, does not regulate every aspect of human conduct. In fact,

“the law that is enacted to govern states tolerates and leaves unpunished many things, which are nevertheless redressed by divine governance.”26 Finally, that the state uses coercion and punishments does not mean that

Augustine advocates for repressive, authoritarian political regimes. On the contrary, given certain conditions, he would go as far as recommending republican rule:

Suppose that a society were well ordered, responsible, and a watchful guardian of the common welfare, one in which each person regards his private interests as less valuable than the public interest. Then is it not right to enact a law whereby this society is allowed to create its own governing officials, through whom the public interest is overseen?27

Augustine’s political views are motivated, first, by his theological and psychological account of the fallen man and, secondly, by his eschatological hope. Deane explains Augustine’s limited expectations about the state as a consequence of the latter: “[t]he fact that this earth is a land of ‘dying men,’ all mortal and all subject to sin, suffering, and misfortune, is at the root of Augustine’s political and social quietism.”28

One last question remains to be discussed, namely, that of the proper relationship between the church and the state. As we have seen, to each of the two cities corresponds its peace (XIV:1), the content of which is given by their specific object of their love. Can we transpose this image of the two cities to the relationships between church and state? The answer that Deane gives us is in the negative:

Since, however, the Church in this world cannot be identified with the City of God, and since a minority of the citizens of earthly states are pilgrim members of the heavenly city, we cannot directly deduce Augustine’s ideas about Church-State relations in this world from his sharp contrast between the two cities.29

24 Ibid., 139. 25 Figgis 1963, 62. Augustine asserts: “While the two cities are intermingled, we also make use of this peace of Babylon… It is for this reason, therefore, that the apostle admonishes the Church to pray for kings and for all that are in authority” (XIX:26). 26 Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, I:5. 27 Ibid., I:6. 28 Deane 1963, 151. 29 Ibid., 174.

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In general, “[t]he State is a physical authority which operates through force and fear, while the church is a moral authority which operates through teaching and the ministration of the sacraments.”30 However,

Augustine’s confrontation with the Donatists—from 391 until about 417—provides us with a testimony of his change of heart regarding state compulsion against heresy. In a letter written in 392 to Maximinus, a

Donatist Bishop, Augustine assured his interlocutor that “[o]n our side there shall be no appeal to men’s fear of the civil power.”31 In 408, however, Augustine recognized that evidence of the effectiveness of compulsion had made him recoil from his previous position, and presented his own town as example, which

“although it was once wholly on the side of Donatus, was brought over to the Catholic unity by fear of the imperial edicts.”32 Augustine was convinced, however, that a profession of faith obtained out of compulsion was very fragile, and could potentially led to a superficial religiosity which he despised.33 We can thus read

Augustine in two ways: either we choose the first Augustine, who demarcates two independent institutions, the church and the state, which deal with different planes of human existence,34 or we adopt the point of view of the bishop who saw state coercion as a tool to protect his flock against the Donatists. In my opinion, rather than trying to reconcile both postures, we must retain the two faces of Augustine, which let us better understand a man struggling to find truth, understand human nature, defend faith, and be a bishop, all at the same time.

Although Augustine’s doctrine of the two cities creates space for a more or less autonomous political sphere, this does not mean that he believed that the separation was a good idea. On the contrary, as

Eric Gregory and Joseph Clair affirm, for Augustine politics is understood in terms of virtue,35 and the most important virtue of all is piety, which is nothing but a properly ordered love. In his letter 155, addressed to

Macedonius, the vicar of Africa (413-414) and a devout Catholic, Augustine discusses the question of the meaning of a blessed life, focusing on the proper use a ruler should make of the virtues:

30 Ibid., 173. 31 Ibid., 185. 32 Ibid., 195. 33 Not only did Augustine reject faith obtained out of compulsion; he also warned against many bishops that sought the church, after it became the official religion, for personal glory or power: “a bishop who takes delight in ruling rather than in doing good is no true bishop” (XIX:19). 34 Deane suggests that Augustine’s political ideas can be deemed as heralding the modern theory of the separation between the church and the State. Robert Markus takes the thesis of Augustine’s secularism to the extreme. He claims that “no interpretation of Augustine that does not allow an important place in his thought for a secular realm can be considered acceptable” (Markus 2006, 49). 35 Gregory and Clair in Hovey and Phillips 2015, 191.

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If any of your governing, however informed by the virtues I listed [prudence, moderation, courage, justice], is directed only to the final aim of allowing human beings to suffer no unjust hardships in the flesh; and if you think that it is of no concern to what purpose they put the peace that you struggle to provide for them…, then all that effort towards the life of true blessedness will not benefit you at all.36

True blessedness is only possible for the person who recognizes that all virtue is a gift from God, and thus orders his or her whole life according to Christ’s twofold commandment of love (Luke 10:27; Matthew

22:37-40; Mark 12:30-31). All good is God’s given, and thus political action is but another kind of worship:

If you recognize the source of the virtues you have been given and give him thanks; if you use them even in your secular position of honour to contribute to his worship; if you inspire and lead those people under your power to worship him both by living an exemplary religious life and through the devotion you show to their interests…; if the only reason that you want them, with your help, to live more securely is so that they might win God, in whose presence they will live blessedly; then all your virtues will be real ones. They will develop and be perfected in this way through the assistance of God, whose generous gift they were. Then, without any doubt, they will bring you to the truly blessed life, which can only be everlasting.37

Augustine is not a secularist, if by “secularism” we mean a clear-cut separation between spheres. He acknowledges, however, that not every ruler is Christian, and thus it is not possible to demand true virtue from all. In a letter to Apringius (134) he makes explicit how different would be addressing non-Christian rulers: “the cases of the province and of the church are distinct. The government of the former should be managed by deterrence; the gentleness of the latter should commend itself by its mercy. If I were speaking to a judge who was not a Christian, I would put it differently.”38 Clearly, thus, Augustine distinguishes between politics and religion, state and church, but he rejects the idea that politics has nothing to do with the care of the soul.

[2] Thomas Aquinas39 was born almost nine centuries after Augustine. His world was that of victorious Christendom. Born in a noble family, Aquinas joined the order of the Dominican friars. He studied and taught at the University of Paris, where the reintroduction of the texts of had caused a

36 Augustine, Letter 155: Augustine to Macedonius. 37 Ibid. 38 Augustine, Letter 134: Augustine to Apringius, emphasis is mine. 39 In this section, references to the Summa Theologiae are given in parenthesis, indicating part, question, and article.

29 major revolution in the intellectual atmosphere of the 12th and 13th centuries.40 In 1274, he was summoned to attend the Second Council of Lyon, but he died on the road to it, on March 7.

Aquinas’ anthropology starts, just as for Augustine, with the book of Genesis. Human beings were created in God’s image and were given intellect and will so that their lives were not governed by sole instinct, as animals do. Original sin interrupted a life of blessedness and order, but it didn’t completely destroy human nature. As Ralph McInerny states, “[Aquinas] held to the doctrine of Original Sin, and he had very few illusions about the behavior of most of us, Christian or not… But nature is not wholly destroyed by sin; if it were, grace would have nothing to address.”41 While for Augustine the Fall suggests a complete dependence on God’s mercy—given our impossibility to do any good by ourselves—Aquinas’ approach is slightly more optimistic. The goodness of human nature was not destroyed by original sin, and thus human actions can be good insofar as they participate on the intrinsic goodness of the performing being (I 18.1,

“every action has goodness, insofar as it has being”). This is evident in his treatment of morality, law, and the life of the community.

Aquinas follows Aristotle’s teleology in his discussion of moral action. Since animals are not endowed with intellect and will, they achieve their end by following instinct. Human beings, however, are free, since they can choose between good and evil. For Aquinas: “The root of liberty is the will as the subject thereof; but it is the reason as its cause… Hence philosophers define the free-will as being ‘a free judgment arising from reason,’ implying that reason is the root of liberty” (I-II 17.1).42 Now, every human action has some good as its end, and, furthermore, there is an end that unifies human endeavors and, so to speak, gives coherence to the multiplicity of goods. For Aristotle, this end is happiness ():

We think happiness to be such, and indeed the thing most of all worth choosing, not counted as just one thing among others. Counted as just one thing among others it would clearly be more worthy of choice with even the least good added to it. For the good added would cause an increase in goodness, and the greater good is

40 Richard R. Regan, “Introduction,” in Aquinas 2002a, xv. Although Aristotelianism is perhaps the most known influence in Aquinas’ thought, we must have in mind that Augustine himself looms large in Thomistic philosophy. Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us that “Aquinas avowedly writes out of a tradition, or rather our of at least two traditions [Augustinianism and Aristotelianism], extending each as part of his task of integrating them into a single systematic mode of thought. He encountered those traditions, each with its own authoritative texts and its own standard commentaries, not only in those texts and commentaries but also in his day-to-day teaching and disputation in the University of Paris and in those questions which focused contemporary conflict both in the church and in secular society” (MacIntyre 1988. 164-165). I am grateful to Ryan Balot to pointing out this affinity between Aquinas and Augustine to me. 41 McInerny, “,“ in Kretzmann and Stump 1993, 213. 42 Since reason is the cause of the will, the latter must always act according to the former; when what is willed is in opposition to reason, the will is evil. “Every will that wills contrary to reason, whether reason be correct or erroneous, is always evil” (I-II 19.5).

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always more worthy of choice. Happiness, then, is obviously something complete and self-sufficient, in that it is the end of what is done.43

According to Aristotle, human action is directed towards happiness. This means that the immediate ends we may pursue by some actions can only be understood in the bigger picture of human happiness. When I exercise, for example, I have health in mind as my end, but at the same time my pursuit of health is caused by the inner connection between it and happiness, which is my ultimate goal. For Aquinas, “whatever man desires, he desires it under the aspect of good. And if he desires it, not as his perfect good, which is the last end, he must, of necessity, desire it as tending to the perfect good, because the beginning of anything is always ordained to its completion” (I-II 1.6).44

Free action is governed, then, by reason as its cause, by will as its origin, and by the form of good as its end. Since the virtue of anything consists in its performing in a way consistent to its end, then human virtue must be understood as the habit of doing good:

The end of virtue, since it is an operative habit, is operation. But it must be observed that some operative habits are always referred to evil, as vicious habits: others are sometimes referred to good, sometimes to evil; for instance, opinion is referred both to the true and to the untrue: whereas virtue is a habit which is always referred to good: and so the distinction of virtue from those habits which are always referred to evil, is expressed in the words “by which we live righteously”: and its distinction from those habits which are sometimes directed unto good, sometimes unto evil, in the words, “of which no one makes bad use” (I-II 55.4).

At the risk of oversimplifying, we could say that, for Aquinas, a person living a virtuous life will be able to achieve the good. And since God is nothing but the , then the human virtuous life would lead to happiness and blessedness. This picture, however, ignores a fundamental aspect of human nature, namely, its social character. For Aquinas, our sociability goes far beyond Augustine’s need for coercion, order, and peace. It is not just that chaos will erupt in the absence of an authority. In his mind, the political society is not just punishment, but an integral part of divine providence, it is the place of the common good, for “the common good of a political community and the individual good of individual persons do not differ only by reason of the number of persons involved. Rather, the two goods differ by a formal difference, for the nature of the common good and the nature of an individual good are different” (II-II 58.7).

43 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1097b. 44 Quoted by McInerny in Kretzmann and Stump 1993, 200. I follow his exposition about human action and virtue in Aquinas. 31

Again, we find Aquinas following Aristotle’s steps, for whom the polis is a natural community and, moreover, the perfect one, insofar as it pursues the supreme good and includes all other associations (e.g., the different relationships found in the household, i.e., man-woman, father-children, master-slave). Aquinas denies the existence of natural slavery but at the same time recognizes, with Aristotle, that slavery can be justified on the basis of the benefits that a slave can derive from this relationship (II-II 57.3). As for the best political regime, the Dominican friar oscillates between monarchy and republican government.

In his treatise De Regno, written to the king of Cyprus, Aquinas leans towards monarchy. The central argument for the superiority of monarchy is a theological one. If we observe God’s creation attentively, we’ll find that “in nature government is always by one,” which is but a reflection of the notion that “in the whole universe one God is the Maker and Ruler of all.”45 Government by one resembles, according to Aquinas, divine government. This is an important argument for political theology, as we will see in the next section.

Although monarchy is the best political regime, from its corruption emerges the most wicked of regimes, namely, tyranny. Since monarchy is the strongest of governments, its corruption would retain its strength, being highly effective in the pursuit of the tyrant’s individual good, at the expense of the common good. For this reason, democracy is the best of corrupted regimes, because it is the weakest. Contrary to

Augustine, who condemns any kind of resistance to authority, Aquinas concedes that, if a tyrannical government becomes unbearable, it is possible for the people to rebel and slay the tyrant.46 However, he warns oppressed peoples that once a tyrant has been slain, a new, worse tyrant often emerges that takes oppression even further than his or her predecessor.

In the Summa Theologiae, however, Aquinas joins Aristotle in advocating for mixed government:

“There is also a form of government that is a mixture of the good forms, and this mixed form of government is the best” (I-II 95.4). Mixed government is thus the best constitution, because it is “a happy mixture of kingdom, since one person rules; and of aristocracy, since many govern by reason of their virtue; and of democracy (i.e., government by the people), since rulers can be chosen from the people, and since the choice

45 Aquinas De Regno, Bk I:3. 46 Ibid., Bk I:7. 32 of rulers belongs to the people” (I-II 105.1). Perhaps Aquinas, being aware of the many dangers posed by tyranny, found a solution in moderation, in the sense of limitation of power.

Every political community, no matter its particular form, must have laws in order to subsist. A law

“is a rule and measure of acts that induces persons to act or refrain from acting” (I-II 90.1). And, since reason is the measure and rule of human actions, then the law must be in accord with reason and, thus, with the good. For Aquinas, human law is connected to divine law by means of . In a few words, divine law corresponds to God’s government of the world, that is, to His providence (I-II 91.1), and natural law is “simply rational creatures’ sharing in the eternal law” (I-II 91.2). Human law, finally, derives from the first principles that reason has discovered.

The principles of natural law are not only rational, but axiomatic. Just as, for logic, the of non-contradiction is self-evident, “the first precept of the natural law is that we should do and seek good, and shun evil” (I-II 94.2). The universality of these principles greatly depends on its generality: “the more reason goes from the general to the particular, the more exceptions we find, although there is some necessity in the general principles… The more particular conditions are added to the particular conclusion, the more ways there may be exceptions” (I-II 94.4). Natural law, then, cannot be understood independently of this generality. General principles have universal validity, but their application to the concrete conditions of a human society implies a work of particularization that unavoidably takes away their axiomatic character.

Aquinas thus makes room for diversity and, moreover, for active discussion of moral dilemmas, which must be enlightened by the principles of natural law while at the same time considering the specificity of the context in which they are to be applied. The problems brought by particularization and contextualization make it impossible to define human law once-and-for-all: “General principles of the human law cannot be applied to all peoples in the same way because of the great variety of human affairs. And so there are different positive laws for different peoples” (I-II 95.2).

The difficulties in applying natural law to specific problems are not only a result of human diversity; we need only to consider the case of murder to understand the complexity of moral reasoning. Although killing must be understood, in general, as a bad action—it is one of the Ten Commandment’s prohibitions—

Aquinas recognizes that not all killing is a violation of the fifth commandment. War can be justified under 33 certain conditions (II-II 40.1),47 as well as killing in self-defense (II-II 64.7). Even abortion, which is condemned as homicide, has its limits:

Deliberate abortion of the fetus is for Aquinas equivalent to murder, but only after “quickening” or “ensoulment,” which Aquinas, following Aristotle, believed occurred forty days after conception in the case of males, and eighty days thereafter for females. However, contrary to what some contemporary polemicists have argued, Aquinas believed that abortion even before ensoulment was a sin, although not the sin of murder.48

We need to consider, finally, the relation between church and state in the Thomistic system. Like Augustine,

Aquinas claims that Christians must obey secular authorities: “faith in Christ confirms rather than takes away the order of justice” (II-II 104.6). Now, secular authority is not unlimited, as I said with respect to

Aquinas’ De Regno. Secular power and spiritual power are distinguished, but the former is subjected to the latter in the same way as the body is subjected to the soul:

Secular power is subject to spiritual power as the body is subject to the soul. And so the power of legal judgment is not usurped if a spiritual superior interposes himself about earthly affairs regarding matters in which secular power is subject to him, or that secular power relinquishes to him (II-II 60.6).

The subordination of political power to religious power is taken to the extreme in the figure of the pope,

“who holds the supremacy of both powers.”49 Two other instances exemplify the use of the State for religious purposes. Aquinas recommends not only , but also the death penalty, to heretics.

Heresy is thus a crime, and a most serious one, because it corrupts faith, and for that reason it must be completely obliterated (II-II 11.3). As for unbelievers, Aquinas recognizes that they should be tolerated, for the only valid way to embrace the Christian faith is voluntarily and freely (II-II 10.8). However, this says nothing about their rites. In fact, “rulers should in no way tolerate the religious rites of other unbelievers, who contribute no truth or benefit” (II-II 10.11). Only the rites of the Jews must be tolerated, for they, in

Aquinas’ opinion, “bear witness to our faith,” and thus are useful to the true religion.

47 It worth mentioning the recent change that the Catholic church made to article 2267 of its Catechism. While the church had traditionally recognized the right of the state to apply the death penalty “when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor,” Pope Francis opposed the practice, claiming that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” (Francis 2017). 48 Paul E. Sigmund in in Kretzmann and Stump 1993, 227. Sigmund’s source is Aquinas’ Commentary on the Sentences IV 31.2. 49 Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences, II.44.

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[3] Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity stands out as a crucial moment in Western political thought.

He famously proclaimed that “God is dead.”50 God’s death, for him, is but the logical consequence of

Christianity’s will to absolute truth, which in the end has rendered itself untenable, turning against itself. In addition, modernity, which for Nietzsche is Christianity’s daughter, is its most decadent offspring. Its defense of equality of rights, democracy, and a bourgeois life51 is a sign of spiritual sickness, a rejection of life.

When we ask, on the other hand, what was Nietzsche’s political project, or his moral agenda for the individual and the community, we walk on slippery terrain. The scholarly efforts to interpret Nietzsche, to understand his convictions and struggles, resemble a walk on quicksand, to the point that it is not clear whether Nietzsche was an atheist or wanted to go back to the ancient Greek pagan religions; whether he was a gnostic52 or whished to step on the shoulders of Christianity to surpass it, looking into the future for a new human spirituality.53

Julian Young rejects well-known interpretations of Nietzsche as an individualist thinker—an antipolitical writer interested only in psychic health (Walter Kauffman and Alexander Nehamas), or an aristocrat interested only in higher types (Brian Leiter, Keith Ansell-Pearson, and Bruce Detweiler)—54 proposing instead a political, communitarian Nietzsche. In a nutshell, Young’s thesis is that “Nietzsche’s vision of a healthy society… is a vision of a hierarchically organized community in which everyone knows and takes pride in their station within it, a society created, preserved and unified by an ethos-embodying communal religion.”55

According to Young, the main thrust of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy was preserved throughout his life. In this early work, Nietzsche wants to recover the Greek tragic sensibility, which involves both the

Apollonian—which “refers to this same world raised to a state of glory in Homeric art,”56 focusing on the

50 See Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “Parable of the Madman” (§125) and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §2. 51 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §44, §202, and §34, respectively. 52 See Voegelin 1968, 19-23, 35-50. 53 Jaspers 1963. 54 Kaufmann 1974, Nehamas 1985, Leiter 2014, Deitweiler 1990. 55 Young 2006, 179. 56 Ibid., 17.

35 idealization or “transfiguration” of great individuals57—and the Dionysian—implying an ascent towards unity, whereby the individual dissolves herself into totality. This is consistent, Young claims, with

Schopenhauer’s functions of religion: it provides a solution for the problems of death and pain, it sanctions the community’s morality, and it is pervaded by a sense of mystery.58 Nietzsche’s religious project solves the problem of death by naturalizing human existence, that is, by rejecting transcendence as a betrayal of life, a coward fleeing from reality. What is needed is “a new way of life, not a new faith.”59 This new life, however, cannot be described as such, it cannot be transformed into a program for human existence. Doing this would kill human nature (or our unnaturalness).60

Nietzsche’s project is, in Young’s interpretation, a “civil religion,”61 an ideological force by which a society is organized hierarchically and morally. In Young’s interpretation, Nietzsche comes close both to

Plato’s social stratification in the Republic, and to the Law Code of Manu. He adopts Plato’s tripartite social structure and praises as well Manu’s hierarchy, with the exception that he rejects the category of “Chandala,” for “a society that creates an underclass of Untermenschen, creates thereby the seeds of its own collapse.”62

Young’s Nietzsche is, in the end, concerned with the creation of a Volk, a national community united by a civil religion, that is, by an original myth and moral space where everyone finds his or her own place.

Although Young’s approach is a serious and ambitious effort to present a systematic and coherent

Nietzsche along time, I believe Young does not pay enough attention to the tensions in Nietzsche’s thought.

For once, is it by no means evident that Nietzsche cares for the mob. In the Preface to The Antichrist, (a book that “belongs to the very few”!) everyone else but a select group is ignored, for “who cares about the rest of them? The rest are just humanity. You need to be far above humanity in strength, in elevation of

57 Ibid., 75. 58 Ibid., 13. 59 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §33. 60 “Humans are in no way the crown of creation, all beings occupy the same level of perfection… And even this is saying too much: comparatively speaking, humans are the biggest failures, the sickliest animals who have strayed the most dangerously far from their instincts—but of course and in spite of everything, the most interesting animals as well!” Ibid., §14. 61 “A church is above all a structure for ruling that secures the highest rank to the more spiritual human beings.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §358. Kaufmann, however, emphasises that “Nietzsche himself did not want to be the founder of a new religion’ he wished to be read critically” (Kaufmann 1974, 115). 62 Kaufmann 1974, 170.

36 soul,—in contempt.”63 Secondly, Young seems to obviate the differences in tone and content between the

Dionysius of The Birth of Tragedy and that of later books. As Kaufmann reminds us:

It has been overlooked that the Dionysus whom Nietzsche celebrated as his own god in his later writings is no longer the deity of formless frenzy whom we meet in Nietzsche’s first book. Only the name remains, but later the Dionysian represents passion controlled as opposed to the extirpation of the passions which Nietzsche more and more associated with Christianity… The later Dionysus is the synthesis of the two forces represented by Dionysus and Apollo in The Birth of Tragedy.64

Finally, even if we disregard these problems, a more central concern remains: Can Nietzsche prescribe anything as the basis of a social arrangement? I think that an understanding of his critique of Christianity will show that the answer must be No.

Nietzsche’s virulent attacks on Christianity explicitly exclude Jesus,65 the Galilean who was nailed on a cross. He was, in a sense, the only Christian that has ever existed.66 What Nietzsche attacks as

“Christianity” is not Jesus’ doctrine but Paul’s hateful reinterpretation of the rabbi. While Jesus “spoke only about what was inside him most deeply: ‘life’ or ‘truth’ or ‘light’ are his words for the innermost,”67 Paul resented the killing of the Lord, which quickly unfolded as a thirst for revenge against his executioners:

Cracks only began to appear at this point: “Who killed him? Who was his natural enemy?”—these questions jumped out like a bolt of lightning. Answer: the Jewish rulers, their upper class. At this point, people started to feel as if they were in revolt against the order, they started to understand Jesus as having been in revolt against the order. Before this, his image had not had any belligerent, no-saying, no-doing features at all; in fact, he was the opposite of all this. The small congregation had evidently failed to understand the main point, the exemplary character of dying in this way, the freedom, the superiority over every feeling of ressentiment.68

63 Is it possible to reconcile Nietzsche’s claim that “Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong” (Beyond Good and Evil, §29), with Young’s affirmation that “educators are to educate only a small group of young and talented people who are to prepare the way for the birth of a new cultural health” (Young 2006, 46)? Isn’t this precisely Plato’s problem in book VII of the Republic, when claims it is a duty “to compel the best natures to go to the study which we were saying before is the greatest, to see the good and to go up that ascent; and, when they have gone up and seen sufficiently, not to permit them what is now permitted (519d)”? Socrates’ solution is the preeminence of the community over the individual (520a), even when he had previously recognized that the very life of the educated individual will be in danger (517a). If Young’s solution is the Platonic one, then he must defend himself against Nietzsche’s critique of Platonism and herd morality. 64 Kaufmann 1974, 129. 65 “Jesus halts even Nietzsche’s attack… Nietzsche is stirred by the inner consistency of a man whom nothing could sway, and he bows to the truthfulness of Jesus” (Jaspers 1963, viii-ix). Jesus’ importance to Christianity is, on the other hand, tangential at best: “The founder of a religion can be insignificant—a match, no more!” (Nietzsche, The Will of Power, §178; cf. Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §40). It is worth noting that in using Nietzsche’s The Will of Power I try to find a correspondence with ideas present in his published works. 66 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §39. 67 Ibid., §32. 68 Ibid., §40.

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From this moment on, the inner world of the Nazarene was abandoned, favoring instead an active struggle, a consciously dishonest69 effort to tergiversate the moral order,70 which Nietzsche traces genealogically:

Now I can really hear what they have been saying all along: “We good men—we are the just”—what they desire they call, not retaliation, but “the triumph of justice”; what they hate is not their enemy, no! they hate “injustice,” they hate “godlessness”; what they believe in and hope is not the hope of revenge, the intoxication of sweet revenge (—“sweeter than honey” Homer called it), but the victory of God, of the just God, over the godless; that there is left for them to love on earth is not their brothers in hatred but their “brothers in love,” as they put it, all the good and just on earth.71

This is the slaves’ revolt in morality,72 which is born out of resentment, a passion that arises when the thirst for revenge—a healthy response to aggression—cools down and is postponed out of weakness or fear. This incapacity, this surrender to the powerful, poisons the person’s soul, thus engendering a bitter, sick feeling, namely, resentment.73

Christianity is both weak and extremely strong. Its strength comes from the fact that any religion emerges out of a feeling of power.74 Paul is, therefore, deemed a “genius of hatred”75 as well as one whose thirst for power was unquenchable. Its weakness comes, however, from the kind of beliefs Christianity feeds, which are utterly contrary to what Jesus taught.76 The Christian ethos is characterized by denial:

What values are negated by it? What does its counterideal comprise?—Pride, pathos of distance, great responsibility, exuberance, splendid animality, the instincts that delight in war and conquest, the deification of passion, of revenge, of cunning, of anger, of voluptuousness, of adventure, of knowledge—; the noble is negated: the beauty, wisdom, power, splendor, and dangerousness of the type “man”: the man who fixes goals, the “man of the future” (—here Christianity appears as a logical consequence of —).77

But, again, what is precisely Nietzsche’s program? First of all, he is neither a deist78 nor the founder of a new religion. His critique of Christianity is not a critique of religion as such, but of a life-denying religion.

69 In Daybreak (“The Philology of Christianity”) Nietzsche criticizes Christians’ dishonesty, for “they present their conjectures as boldly as if they were dogmas and are rarely in any honest [Redlich] perplexity of the interpretation of a passage in the Bible” (§84). Jacob Taubes comments that “[s]ince there is no longer any truth after Nietzsche, from Nietzsche to Weber, a new criterion arises, that of honesty” (Taubes 2004, 44). 70 “What Nietzsche discovered in Paul, the genius of the transvaluation of values, is contained in the critique of the concept of law” that is found in his Epistle to Romans (Taubes 2004, 26). 71 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, §14. 72 See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, §10. 73 A detailed phenomenology of ressentiment is found in the first chapter of Max Scheler’s Resentment: “Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite” (Scheler 1972, 45-46). 74 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §136; cf. Ecce Homo, Preface, §4. 75 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §42. 76 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §191, 193, 195. 77 Ibid., §221. 78 While clearly Nietzsche refers to the need to create new gods, this can hardly be understood as a validation of theism. If a god is the product of human creativity, then it is not God.

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Closer to Zarathustra’s threefold metamorphosis of the camel, the lion, and the child, Nietzsche bitterly laments: “Almost two thousand years and not one new god!”79 Therefore, the ideal man is for him a creator of values, a legislator.80 Notwithstanding, it is not he who is laying down a concrete religious program, but bolstering a new kind of human being, opening a space where a breeding of a different kind is again possible.

In this sense, a critique such as that of Ronald Beiner’s misses an important point. For Beiner, Nietzsche’s appropriation of “elements of paganism, Hinduism, atheism, and even Christianity” must be seen as decadent when confronted with The Case of Wagner, where he claims that “the decadent is one whose approximates ‘the anarchy of atoms,’ where the part triumphs over the whole: ‘The whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, artifact.’”81 But, in my opinion, Nietzsche is not trying to build a consistent new doctrine of the new human being, he is not interested in founding a civil religion. He uses different religions and traditions in order to create a contrast or, in his own words, to tense the bow again.

This seems to be the reason why Nietzsche always seems to be giving us something that elsewhere he takes with the other hand, the reason why he feared being “understood.”82

If Nietzsche promotes the Übermensch as a stronger species, a “higher type that arises and preserves itself under different conditions from those of the average man,”83 and if the signs of strength and power are independence, capacity for self-legislation, and creativity, then it follows that any recipe for becoming “who we are” becomes impossible. To prescribe what should be understood by a higher species would immediately subsume the whole species into the herd mentality. Nietzsche can only point towards a direction which, nonetheless, is still to be found: he asks for a revival and revalorization of naturalness, will

(of knowledge, of power), and beauty.84 He wants a reinvigoration of tensions. Kaufmann claims that

“Nietzsche, on the other hand, values power not as a means but as the state of being that man desires for its

79 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §19. 80 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §211. 81 Beiner 2011, 362. 82 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §290. 83 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §866. 84 “‘Beauty’ is for the artist something outside all orders of rank, because in beauty opposites are tamed; the highest sign of power, namely power over opposites; moreover, without tension:—that violence is no longer needed; that everything follows, obeys, so easily and so pleasantly—that is what delights the artist’s will to power” (Ibid., §803). This is close to Nehamas’reading of Nietzsche. Since “[l]ife itself has no value, but the life of an individual or a group has as great a value as that individual or group can give it… Life’s value depends on what one makes of it, and this is a further sense in which Niezsche believes that value is created and not discovered” (Nehamas 1985, 135).

39 own sake as his own ultimate end. And truth he considers an essential aspect of this state of being. Self- perfection and ultimate happiness are not compatible with self-deception and illusions.”85

The direction proposed by Nietzsche means fundamentally the embrace of life. This implies, on the one hand, the acceptance of the whole human being as he or she is:

What is good? — Everything that enhances people’s feeling of power, will to power, power itself. What is bad? — Everything stemming from weakness. What is happiness? — The feeling that power is growing, that some resistance has been overcome. Not contentedness, but more power; not peace, but war; not virtue, but prowess (virtue in the style of the Renaissance, virtú, moraline-free virtue).86

The condition of possibility of this happiness is, for Nietzsche, the complete rejection of Christian guilt.

This idea is emphasized by Jacob Taubes:

For what [Nietzsche] finds horrifying, and this is a very humane concern, is the cruelty of the pang of conscience. The conscience that can’t be evaded. Romans 7, right? And his second accusation: that Christianity hypostasizes sacrifice rather than abolishing it, and thus perpetuates it… This is in Nietzsche a deeply humane impulse against the entanglement of guilt and atonement, on which the entire Pauline dialectic—but even already that of the Old Testament—is based. This continually self-perpetuating cycle of guilt, sacrifice, and atonement needs to be broken in order finally to yield an innocence of becoming… A becoming, even a being, that is not guilty.87

While, as I have claimed, Nietzsche didn’t provide a specific program or doctrine about what does the good life look like, he dropped an intellectual bomb on Christianity and modernity, to the point that understanding

Christianity today necessarily demands a confrontation with Nietzsche’s hammer, and a discussion of modernity must consider Nietzsche’s teaching on concepts like “truth,” “science,” “reason,” and “faith,” to name only the more interesting for my purposes.

II

[1] In the last footnote to his essay, Monotheismus als politisches Problem, Erik Peterson acknowledged Carl Schmitt as the one who introduced the notion of “political theology” into the literature.88

He was referring to Schmitt’s 1922 book, Politische Theologie, wherein he famously claimed that

85 Kaufmann 1974, 330. 86 Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §2. 87 Taubes 2004, 87-88. 88 Peterson 2011, 233-234, n. 168. Eric Jacobson denies this. He claims that “[t]he term political theology… has nothing to do with Nazi theorist Carl Schmitt’s use of it in the title of a publication in 1923… In contrast to Schmitt, who spuriously claimed to have invented the term, the view presented here is that political theology begins with the Torah and the political and religious structure of the Israelites, their classes of priests and

40

all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.89

Schmitt’s assertion that political concepts are but secularized theological concepts, both in terms of their historical development and systematic structure, is not an attempt to bring back theocracy. It is not the return of the sacred but the reminder that “the metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.”90 The emergence of the ius publicum Europaeum as the child of Roman law and the Roman church exemplifies Schmitt’s understanding of the theologico-political:

We are aware of jurisprudence as a specifically European phenomenon. It is neither just practical intelligence nor only a handcraft. It is deeply enmeshed in the adventure of western rationalism. It comes as spirit from a noble parentage. Its father is the reborn Roman law, its mother the Roman church. Separation from the mother was finally completed after many centuries of difficult dispute in the age of confessional civil war. The child held to the father, Roman law, and left the mother’s home. It sought a new house and found it in the state. The new home was princely, a palace of the Renaissance or the Baroque. Jurists felt proud and far superior to theologians. […] The jurist’s withdrawal from the church was no secession to a holy mountain, rather the reverse: an exodus from a holy mountain to the realm of the profane. On leaving, the jurists took some holy trappings [Heiligtümer] with them, whether openly or secretly. The state decorated itself with some simulacra of ecclesiastical ancestry. The power of earthly princes was augmented by attributes and arguments of spiritual descent.91

Given this parallel between metaphysical and political imagination, each historical age appears as the scenario upon which transcendence and immanence unfold, where a people’s self-understanding reveals itself as a compound of metaphysical and political elements. This idea is, moreover, consistent with Lefort’s suggestion of an “opening” that inaugurates a space of intelligibility originally placed beyond human

judges, the divine ordination of kings—in short, everything that led Josephus to coin the term theocracy to capture the meaning of their social and religious organization” (Jacobson 2003, 5-6). As we will see, Peterson is aware of Jewish political theology. It seems to me that his mention of Schmitt refers only to the coinage of the term, which is compatible with Jacobson’s claim that Jewish political theology is radically different than Schmitt’s political theology. 89 Schmitt 2005, 36. 90 Ibid., 46. Cf. Schmitt’s depiction of liberalism, in which “the economic postulates of and commerce are, for an examination within the realm of the history of ideas, only derivatives of a metaphysical core” (Ibid., 62). In their introduction to Schmitt’s Political Theology II, Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward, explain that “the metaphysical discourse… determines the possibility for the conditions of the ideological acceptance of a particular form of political organization, e.g., parliamentary democracy, absolute monarchy, commissary dictatorship and so on” (Schmitt 2008, 7; see ibid., 70). 91 Schmitt 2017, 56-57.

41 control;92 metaphysics, that is, functions as the canvas over which the political city is drawn: it establishes the limits of what is imaginable and suggests the materials which will give the work stability in time and space.

An example of this relationship between the metaphysical image of the world and its effect on a political regime is found in Ernst Kantorowicz’s classic study on medieval political theology, The King’s

Two Bodies. The doctrine that two bodies are found in the person of the king, one mortal and the other political,93 mirrors Christ’s hypostatic union,94 not only in terms of its form but in its hierarchical order: just as Christ’s divine nature governs his human nature and in the human being the soul has primacy over the body, in the sovereign it is the body politic which rules over the natural one. The doctrine of the two bodies solved the problem of the continuity of power, i.e., the transfer of sovereign power from one natural body to another, after the death of the king’s physical body. Even when the body natural is subject to sickness and death, the permanence of the head was granted by three ideas: the perpetuity of the Dynasty, the corporate character of the Crown, and the immortality of the royal Dignity.95 Dynasty was understood in terms of blood, so that the body politic was transmitted to the heir even without the necessity of the unction and the coronation rites, which in some cases became just the external manifestation of a consecration and transmission of power that occurred in the intimacy of the royal family.96 The relationship of the Crown with the king or queen was a complex one: he/she was not the Crown, which surpassed him/her, but as sovereign, the king or queen were the place where the Crown dwelt. The Crown referred to the sphere of administration and law and helped to justify, among other things, a stable tax system that gradually became

92 Of course, for Lefort, this “beyond” is understood not in transcendent terms, but as a human creation that, despite of that, is designed to function as something which is not manipulable but escapes our control. In this work, on the contrary, I understand the “opening” as divine Revelation, and as such, as something over which we humans have absolutely no control. 93 “For the King has in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility or Infancy or old Age, and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other People. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic, cannot be invalidate or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body” (Kantorowicz, 2016, 7). 94 The Catholic understanding of Christ’s hypostatic union goes back to the Council of Chalcedon, celebrated in the year 451, which refers to the letter Pope Leo wrote to the Archbishop Flavian against Eutyches. Leo stresses that “the proper character of both natures was maintained and came together in a single person. Lowliness was taken up by majesty, weakness by strength, mortality by eternity.” However, “togetherness” does not imply the reduction of two natures into one: “We must say this again and again,” Leo continues, “one and the same is truly Son of God and truly son of man. God, by the fact that all things were made through him, and nothing was made without him, man, by the fact that he was made of a woman, made under the law. The birth of flesh reveals human nature; birth from virgin is a proof of divine power” (Council of Chalcedon 451). 95 Kantorowicz 2016, 316. 96 In the words of the Archbishop Crammer, addressing King Edward VI on his coronation in 1547: “The oil, if added, is but a ceremony: if it be wanting, that king is yet a perfect monarch notwithstanding, and God’s Anointed as well as if he was inoiled” (Ibid., 318).

42 a stable institution. Finally, the notion of the immortality of the royal Dignity was symbolized by the phoenix: “the imaginary bird… disclosed a duality: it was at once Phoenix and Phoenix-kind, mortal as an individual, though immortal too; because it was the whole kind. It was at once individual and collective, because the whole species reproduced no more than a single specimen at a time.”97

On his part, Schmitt traces the evolution of the principle of sovereignty from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,98 which finds its parallel in the deistic God and his “decisionist” character—e.g.,

Hobbes’ absolute sovereign, who rules as an omnipotent demiurge—to the immanentist tendency of the nineteenth century, driven by modern science—e.g. Marxism, the spirit of which Schmitt captures in Engels’ claim that “[t]he essence of the state, as that of religion, is mankind’s fear of itself.”99 What we find here,

Schmitt claims, is not a mirroring of the theological onto the political, but a correspondence between metaphysical and political imagination. History appears, in Schmitt’s imagination, as the unfolding, in practical life, of two fundamental ideas, namely, our understanding of social life (or politics) and our reflection upon everything that stands beyond immanence (or metaphysics). Accepting this correspondence, therefore, necessarily demands we dismiss the liberal solution to the problem of political power, namely, the division of social existence into (semi-) autonomous spheres, such as the law, morality, religion, economy, and politics.100

Not only historically but also in terms of their systematic structure are the concepts of the state secularizations of theological ones. The “exception in jurisprudence,” for instance, “is analogous to the miracle in theology.”101 Understanding the exception is, for Schmitt, a political problem of the first order.

Only by grasping the exception can the normal situation be revealed. While the exception’s existence proves itself and the rule, the latter cannot even prove itself because, in order to exist, a “normality” must be predicated as the universe wherein the rule applies, but this space cannot be suggested nor even intuited by

97 Ibid., 390. 98 I explain the transit from the late middle ages to the modern age in the next chapter, where I discuss the nominalist (or Ockhamite) challenge to medieval scholasticism, and the emergence of the modern alternative through figures like Petrarch, Erasmus, and Martin Luther. 99 Quoted in Schmitt 2005, 49. 100 Secularity thus understood is but one of the many separations created by liberalism in order to prevent tyrannical behavior by the submission of the political into the theological, or vice versa. 101 Schmitt 2005, 36.

43 the rule itself, which is ineluctably the prisoner of its own universe.102 It is thus only when we learn that the rule fails to provide an answer to a situation that has proven to be extrajudicial that both rule and exception become manifest. For this reason, Schmitt claims, “[t]he exception is more interesting than the rule.”103

The relevance of the exception lies in the fact that it unveils the sovereign, that is, he or she who decides on the exception,104 “the highest, legally independent, underived power.”105 Exercising sovereignty implies deciding unilaterally and in absolute freedom on the exception, to determine what is for the public benefit and, conversely, who the enemy is, which is in turn the distinction (friend/enemy) that defines the sphere of the political.106 That the sovereign is the one who decides on the exception tells us that the question about law is not about content, but about “adscription” or “competence,” which is “a question that cannot be raised by and much less answered from the content of the legal quality of a maxim.”107

What is, then, Schmitt’s stance on political theology? Schmitt saw the emergence of liberalism as a reaction against two indispensable elements for the concept of sovereignty as developed by Bodin and

Hobbes, namely, the necessity of sociological considerations and the personalist element of decision.

Liberalism, as Schmitt understood it, espoused ’s juridical theory, characterized by an either/or simplification between sociology and jurisprudence. By eliminating all traces of sociology from the sphere of law, Kelsen obtained a “unadulterated purity” in which the system of law applies universally, regardless of circumstances.108 The scope of the state is thus reduced, becoming “nothing else than the legal order itself… [and] thus neither the creator nor the source of the legal order.”109 By rejecting the necessity of

102 “Every presupposes a normal situation, and no norm can be entirely valid in an entirely abnormal situation” (Schmitt 2007, 46). 103 Schmitt 2005, 15. 104 Ibid., 5. 105 Ibid., 17. 106 Schmitt 2007, 26. The enemy is the one arousing political behavior. The enemy is neither the ugly, the evil, nor the unprofitable, but the “other,” the “stranger.” The distinction between friend and enemy “denotes the outmost degree of intensity of a union or separation, of an association or dissociation” (33). The state unifies a “people” which necessarily presupposes its correlate, that its, the enemy, which can only be defined collectively (21). 107 Ibid., 33. 108 “Kelsen sought… a theory of law that would be universally valid for all times and all situations” (Strong in Schmitt 2005, xvii). Kelsen’s legal theory is based on Kant’s account of the aprioristic necessity of moral law: “If one adds that unless one wants to dispute whether the concept of morality has any truth and relation to any possible object, one could not deny that its law is of such an extensive significance that it would have to be valid not merely for human beings but for all rational beings in general, and not merely under contingent conditions and with exceptions, but with absolute necessity, then it is clear that no experience could give occasion for inferring even the possibility of such apodictic laws” (Kant, Groundwork, 4:408). 109 Schmitt 2005, 19.

44 decision, liberalism becomes a political regime engaged in a perpetual discussion—or, in Donoso Cortés’ words, in una clase discutidora (“a discussing class”)—a regime unable to make political decisions, that is, distinguishing with no trace of ambiguity friend from enemy. Instead of enemies, liberalism sees

“competitors,” as in an economic market. This relativistic refusal to be political is for Schmitt nothing but the obverse of the liberal critique of medieval metaphysics, or what called “disenchantment,” the gradual process whereby the “cosmos” is transformed into the “universe,” that is, the abandonment of the idea of a meaningful world.110

Against the nineteenth-century secularistic thrust, Schmitt defends a personalistic and decisionist conception of sovereignty. The main problem with liberal approaches to law is, for him, their blindness to the fact that law, in its generality, lacks the necessary determinations for its application to the particular case, which inevitably reminds us of two fundamental questions: Quis judicabit? Quis interpretabitur?

(Who decides? Who interprets?). In Schmitt’s words,

Every concrete juristic decision contains a moment of indifference from the perspective of content, because the juristic decision is not traceable in the last detail to its premises and because the circumstance that requires a decision remains an independently determining moment. […] The legal interest in the decision… is derived from the necessity of judging a concrete fact concretely even though what is given as a standard for the judgment is only a legal principle in its general universality. Thus a transformation takes place every time. That the legal idea cannot translate itself independently is evident from the fact that it says nothing about who should apply it… A distinctive determination of which individual person or which concrete body can assume such an authority cannot be derived from the mere legal quality of a maxim.111

Schmitt’s attack on liberalism can also be seen from the Catholic perspective. In Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form Schmitt contraposes the Catholic church112—which he understands as “the sole surviving contemporary example of the medieval capacity to create representative figures”—to economic

110 I explain this process in chapter 2.II.1. 111 Schmitt 2005, 30-31. 112 Schmitt defines the Catholic church as a complexio oppositorum, both politically and theologically: “[The Catholic church] has long and proudly claimed to have united within itself all forms of state and government; to be an autocratic monarchy whose head is elected by the aristocracy of cardinals but in which there is nevertheless so much democracy that, as Dupanloup put it, even the least shepherd of Abruzzi, regardless of his birth and station, has the ability to become this autocratic sovereign” (Schmitt 1966, 7). Schmitt continues: “But this complexio oppositorum also holds sway over everything theological: the Old and New Testament alike are scriptural canon; the Marcionite either-or is answered with an as-well-as. Here also, many arrangements are conceivable, because so many elements of God’s immanence in the doctrine of the Trinity are attributed to Jewish monotheism and its absolute transcendence” (Ibid.). Schmitt denies that this complexio oppositorum can ever be solved, as in a Hegelian synthesis; the essence of the church is precisely to exist on two irreducible planes (Ibid., 11).

45 rationalism, which “simply prescribe rules for the manipulation of lifeless matter.”113 Economic rationality is thus the radical opposite of Roman Catholicism. Given this comparison, he finds no fundamental difference between the worldview of the capitalists and that of communists. In fact, he affirms, “[t]he big industrialist has no other ideal than that of Lenin—an ‘electrified earth.’ They disagree essentially on the correct method of electrification.”114 Thus, while the catholic Church asserts the primacy of spirit over matter, and of politics over economy, the former debases everything to the technical-material level, which implies observing the world through the lenses of instrumentality and utility, denying the possibility of any representation.115 In the confrontation between economy and politics, Schmitt joins the side of those who understand and personal sovereignty as synonyms. Only a realistic view, that is, one that understands the inevitability of conflict in Hobbesian terms, can perceive and effectively oppose the liberal mistake, that is, the rejection of politics on the basis of a relativistic, materialist, and secularist understanding of reality.116

[2] In 1935, Erik Peterson published a study on the theologico-political imagination of early

Christianity, with the intention of dealing “a blow to Reichstheologie.”117 He attempted to show, contrary to Schmitt’s suggestion, that Christian political theology, understood as the mirroring of the heavenly city onto the earthly one, is impossible because the Trinitarian mystery cannot find correspondence in the human city.

113 Ibid., 14. I am relying here on the translation offered by Christopher Dawson. 114 Ibid., 13. Heidegger asserts the same idea in his Introduction to Metaphysics: “This Europe, in its unholy blindness always on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in the great pincers between Russia on the one side and America on the other. Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of unchained technology and of the rootless organization of the average man” (Heidegger 2014, 41). 115 “Representation invests the representative person with a special dignity, because the representative of a noble value cannot be without value. Not only do the representative and the person represented require a value, so also does the third party whom they address. One cannot represent oneself to automatons and machines, anymore than they can represent or be represented” (Schmitt 1966, 21). 116 Schmitt’s yearning for the return of a political praxis that restored the place of decision made him an advocate, and a member, of the Nazi regime. Tracy Strong claims that three ideas contributed to Schmitt’s attraction for the Nazi ideology: (1) his understanding of power on the model of God’s creation, as “something from that which is not something and thus is not subject to laid-down laws”; (2) the necessity to oppose the myth of the democratic power of the French Revolution with a “myth of a hierarchically ordered and unified people”; and (3) his political realism (Strong in Schmitt 2005, xxvii, xxviii). Carl Schmitt offered, in Ex Captivitate Salus, a self-exculpatory response: “A researcher and scholar cannot select the political regime according to his wishes either. In general he accepts it initially as a loyal citizen, like every other person. If the situation then becomes completely anomalous and nobody from the outside protects him from the terror within, he must determine the boundaries of his loyalty himself, namely when the situation becomes so abnormal that one no longer knows where even his closest friend really stands. The duty to unleash a civil war, to conduct sabotage, and to become a martyr has its limits” (Schmitt 2017, 21-22). This is a very weak defense for someone who voluntarily became member of the Nazi party and wrote, in July 1934, an article defending Hitler’s murder of Ernst Röhm and many other political enemies. In Der Führer schutzt das Recht, Schmitt contended that the Führer “acted as ‘the supreme judicial authority of the Volk,” becoming the “supreme judge” in order to distinguish between the friends and the enemies of Germany (Schmitt in Rabinbach and Gilman 2013, part 1, chapter 2, §30). 117 This is Peterson’s description of his book in a letter to Friedrich Dessauer, quoted in Mrówczyński-Van Allen 2017, 10.

46

His starting point is a quote from the Iliad found at the end of book XII of Aristotle’s Metaphysics—

“the rule of many is not good, let one be ruler”118—the development of which he tracks down in the pseudo-

Aristotelian treatise De mundo and in the Jewish philosopher Philo. Peterson notes that, while Aristotle thinks god as the transcendent end (telos), the author of De mundo understands the divinity as the

“presupposition for the existence of potestas (dynamis)”119 thus transforming a metaphysical argument into a political one. Philo, on his part, applied the term “monarchy” to Israel: since the God of the Jews is not one god among many, but the only God, creator of the universe, i.e., the cosmic monarch, then his people,

Israel, “become priests and prophets for the whole human race.”120 According to Peterson, it is possible to identify an early Christian tradition that adopted the notion of divine monarchy. He reviews the works of

Justin, Cyril of Jerusalem, Tartan, Theophilus of Antioch, and Tertullian in order to show how the notion of “monarchy” was introduced in Christian thinking. Tertullian, for example, refuted Praxeas’ identification of the Son with the Father through the term “monarchy,” defending the possibility for a non-divided divine

Monarchy: “if the son should also be appointed to participate in it… it is still a monarchy, which is held jointly by the two as unified.”121

Tertullian’s argument was used by the opponents of Christianity to justify polytheism. The model of a monarchy composed by a multiplicity of persons could be used to construct a hierarchical heaven populated by major and minor gods, where the one, great God rules over them. Celsus had attacked

Christianity precisely for its refusal to embrace the theologico-political order of polytheism, postulating instead a unique, omnipotent God. In his view, Christianity—and, for that matter, Judaism and — disrupted the harmony of the polytheist Roman Empire, wherein many cults and mythologies coexisted peacefully. For Celsus, “anyone who says of the divine that there is only One God is really an atheist, because he brings division and revolution into the royal governance of God.”122

Many Christian thinkers saw the emergence of the Roman Empire as a providential aid for the

Christianization of the world. They incorporated the Roman Empire to the notion of divine monarchy as a

118 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 12.1076a 3ff, quoted in Peterson 2011, 69. 119 Peterson, 2011, 71. 120 Ibid., 73. 121 Ibid., 82. 122 Ibid., 88. 47 providential project. These early Christians saw the Roman Empire as part of God’s plan, in the sense that the pacification it brought was a necessary condition for the quick and efficient dissemination of the gospel.

Origen read Psalm 72:7 (“In his days justice and fullness of peace have arisen”) as a prophecy referring to

Rome. Eusebius linked together the end of Jewish kingship and Augustus’s monarchy as the Providential preparation for the birth of the Messiah.123 What began with Augustus, moreover, was to be finished by

Constantine, with whom the Christian era begun. In The Proof of the Gospel, Eusebius refuted Celsus’ attack on Christianity as a rebellious and antisocial cult, and created a Christian political theology. By welding the

Roman Empire with the redemptory work of Jesus, Eusebius linked God’s monarchy with earthly political authority. The Roman Empire was God’s plan, and thus its authority was willed by the King of Kings

(basileus basileōn).124

After his analysis of early Christian theologico-political imagination, Peterson contends that “the phrase loses its political-theological character alongside the orthodox dogma.”125 He demonstrates the impossibility of any Christian political-theology by recurring to Gregory of Nazianzus, who argued that the unity of the triune God “doesn’t find correspondence in the created order,”126 and Augustine, who dismissed the identification of the Pax Romana and the peace announced in the psalms. György Géreby concludes that

“a thoroughly eschatological view of the church cannot look on any existing political order as fulfilling the promise of the heavenly Jerusalem and the coming kingdom of God.”127

There is yet another way to see the impossibility of a Christian political-theology. In his article, Die

Kirche, written amid his conversion to Catholicism, Peterson interprets the eleventh chapter of Paul’s Epistle

123 “‘When, then, the Lord and savior appeared, and at once with his arrival Augustus became the first among the Romans to rule over the nations, at that time multiple authorities vanished, and peace embraced the whole earth.’ At that time were fulfilled the prophetic predictions of peace among the nations, for example, Micah 5:4-5 and Psalm 72:7” (Ibid., 92-93). See Kantorowicz 2016, 293. 124 “For Peterson, monotheism denotes the false alliance of church and state first established in the realm of Christendom by emperor Constantine and theorized by his biographer Eusebius. In essence, however, the doctrine of cesaro-papism, as it came to be called, is to Peterson a Jewish heresy” (Zank 2012, 324). 125 Peterson 2011, 103. 126 Ibid. Cacciari reaches the same conclusion: “Whoever projects onto this scene the theology of the Deus Trinitas is forced to halt before an unbridgeable abyss: in the theological symbol it is the same Author who presents himself, who makes himself present in the distinct face of the Logos-Mediator. And the representing-mediator is en arché, in the beginning and from the beginning, one with the Author. Here, on the other hand, the representation posits a substantial difference, in fact it is only conceivable by force of the difference between representing and represented in order that the two, always and at every instance, are also able to represent themselves as separate and autonomous” (Cacciari 2018, 9). György Geréby subscribes to Peterson’s interpretation, although acknowledging the many objections it has been subjected to: “Peterson’s interpretation of this difficult text has been subject to intense scrutiny by historians, theologians, and philosophers ever since” (2008, 16). For a critique of Peterson’s reading of Géreby see Mrówczyński-Van Allen 2017. 127 Geréby 2008, 20; cf. Schmitt 2008, 9. Jean Bethke Elshtain claims that, for Augustine, “any identification of the city of God with an earthly order invites sacralization of human arrangements and a dangerous idolatry” (Elshtain in Scott and Cavanaugh 2004, 42).

48 to the Romans as a presentation of the “doctrine of the last things.” Paul’s eschatology (Romans 11:25) reveals that the kingdom of God will come only when the Gentiles, and after them, the Jews, convert. Since the Jews, the people of God (Exodus 6:7; Jeremiah 30:22), hardened their hearts and refused to believe (Acts

13:26), God had mercy of the gentiles (Hosea 1:10), without forgetting his promise to the chosen people, which will be fulfilled in the end of times (Isaiah 59:20-21). According to Peterson, the time of the church exists between Pentecost128 (Acts 2:4)—wherein the gift of tongues signalizes the abandonment of Hebrew as the holy language, and thus, the inauguration of the time of the gentiles—until Christ’s return and the coming of the kingdom of God.129 The church, thus, owes its existence to the need to fulfill an eschatological itinerary that will end with the conversion of the Jews. From all this can be deduced that, for Peterson, political-theology is an undue immanentization of the notion of “God’s kingdom,” which must be understood eschatologically. This is consistent with another article of his, Christus als Imperator, where he emphasizes that “Christ is… king, and not emperor, of the coming aeon,”130 that is, the king of the world to come, and with his claim, in Das Buch von den Engeln, that Christianity implies the abandonment of the

“earthly” Jerusalem: “The earthly Jerusalem, with the Temple cult, is clearly the point of departure for the ideas and images of early Christian literature, though this point of departure has now been left behind and

Jerusalem as a political entity, city as well as place of worship, is no longer found on earth but in ‘heaven,’ to which Christians’ eyes are turned.”131

[3] Schmitt’s reply to Peterson, Politische Theologie II, was written thirty-five years later. This reply joined many other voices that opposed what they saw as the Catholic church’s turn toward modernity, which materialized in the sixteen documents issued by the Second Vatican Council. Schmitt’s outcry can be thus read both as a nostalgia for the good-old days of Christendom and as a furious rejection of the liberal ethos. While a thorough discussion of the politics of Vatican II is reserved for the third chapter of this work,

128 See the Second Vatican Council’s (SVC) , §4. In this work, all quotes from the council are taken from Flannery 2014. 129 “The reason that political theology qua divine kingship came to an end is that the Christian Gospel had announced the advent of a new kingdom that closed the age of human kingdoms” (Vatter 2017, 257). In his article “Divine Monarchy,” Peterson quotes Gregory of Elvira: “Whoever would want to realize the divine monarchy on earth would be like the Antichrist, for it is him who alone will be the monarch of the whole earth [ipse solus toto orbe monarchiam habiturus est],” quoted in Geréby 2008, 20-1. 130 Peterson 2011, 149. 131 Ibid., 107-108. Cf. Mrówczyński-Van Allen 2017, 3-4. 49 here it is important to contextualize Schmitt’s response as one among many voices that worried about an overenthusiastic embrace of modernity by the church, especially in the pastoral constitution . Schmitt correctly saw that Pope John XXIII’s call for —which he read as a capitulation—rejected his own view of the church, as he had defined it in 1923. The church embraced,

Schmitt asserts, liberal politics, thus recanting from a political self-understanding. Gaudium et spes instructs:

Men, [women,] families and the various groups which make up the civil community are aware that they cannot achieve a truly human life by their own unaided efforts. They see the need for a wider community, within which each one makes his specific contribution every day toward an ever broader realization of the common good. For this purpose they set up a political community according to various forms. […] It follows also that political authority, both in the community as such and in the representative bodies of the state, must always be exercised within the limits of the moral order and directed toward the common good— with a dynamic concept of that good—according to the juridical order legitimately established or due to be established. When authority is so exercised, citizens are bound in conscience to obey. Accordingly, the responsibility, dignity and importance of leaders are indeed clear (Gaudium et spes, §74).

Schmitt interprets these paragraphs as the church’s reconciliation with liberalism. Clearly, the council rejects Schmitt’s idea of sovereignty, imposing instead limits to political authority, such as the notion of the common good and, more importantly for our purposes, the idea of the juridical order regulating and limiting state action. Schmitt fails to notice, however, that while the juridical limitation has indeed a liberal guise, the church’s concept of the common good—which for Catholicism is centered in the notion of the “person”

(see chapter 4.III)—departs from, and is opposed to, the liberal “individual.” In short, the “person” is for

Catholicism in a perpetual tension between the rightful claim for authenticity and freedom of the will, on the one hand, and the community as the necessary complement of an anthropologically incomplete being, on the other.132 Along with many others, then, Schmitt mistook the council for a capitulation, while in truth

Vatican II must be read along the lines of both continuity and change, what Pope Benedict XVI called the

“hermeneutics of reform” (see chapter 3.I.2).

Schmitt’s reply to Peterson is organized as the study of a “political myth.” This implies, for Schmitt, dealing not with a “complete” argument, but with a theological exercise the incompleteness of which was

132 This distinction will be crucial for my purposes, as it will be the basis, in the last two chapters, for the transition from Charles Taylor’s ethics of authenticity and politics of recognition to Alsadair MacIntyre’s critique of and his embrace of a utopianism of the present. 50 compensated by the superimposed narrative of its final authority. Peterson’s example, that is, the theological confrontation between Augustine and Eusebius is not, in Schmitt’s account, comprehensive enough to cancel political theology altogether, insofar as it leaves unexamined the problem of sovereignty in modern democracies. Against Peterson’s argument, Schmitt can only oppose another myth—for, by their nature, myths are indestructible, at least by rational argumentation, and so their confrontation is only possible in terms of their endurance—which he creates by reinterpreting the notion of stasis in a highly political way.

The possibility of political theology is closed, in Peterson’s argument, from the theological side.

That is to say that, for Peterson, it is enough to understand the impossibility of mirroring the Trinitarian mystery into the human world, and the impossibility of a complete eclipse of the earthly city by the heavenly one, to proclaim that there cannot be a Christian political theology.

Schmitt’s critique can be divided into three claims. The most powerful is, perhaps, his contention of the political shortcomings in Peterson’s analysis. Peterson’s exclusive focus on monarchy and, thus, on the formula “One God-One King” is attacked by Schmitt on two fronts. First, Peterson is oblivious of modernity. The dawn of modernity smashed the clean-cut distinction between sovereign power and the people. Schmitt charges Peterson for ignoring “the crisis of the modern problematic of church/state/society.

Neither of these kingdoms is any longer distinguishable, either in matter or content.”133 Under modernity,

Schmitt claims, political theology is the natural consequence of the blurring of boundaries between spheres.

Furthermore, given that a “pure” sphere of theology does not hold because of the Incarnation,134 Peterson’s purely theological refutation cannot hold, and thus survives only in the form of a myth. The second aspect refers to democracy. With the democratic revolution the overlap between the people and the sovereign becomes absolute. The emergence of demands, in Schmitt’s opinion, a new formula:

“One God-One People.”135 While Schmitt’s critique is correct, he completely ignores the fact that Peterson’s

133 Schmitt 2008, 44. 134 The Incarnation is, for Peterson, the event that makes theology possible (Peterson 2011, 10). However, that God assumed the human nature in the Person of the Son, creates an ineluctable theologico-politico problem, because from now on revelation is not offered through intermediaries (i.e., prophets), but in the form of an event that happened in time and space. The ministry, apprehension, trial, and crucifixion of Christ had political consequences of the first order—in this sense, Christianity was extremely revolutionary. But, on the other hand, Christianity is not ultimately concerned with this world (cf. Matthew 6:25-34). This tension can be explained when we add to the theology of the Incarnation a theology of the Cross (see Ratzinger 2004, 229). Schmitt’s overemphasis on the humanity of Christ (i.e., the Incarnational side) forgets that every act of Jesus on earth had echoes in transcendence, that everything he did was done under the conviction that his kingdom was not, and could not, be captured in human terms. 135 Schmitt 2008, 72. 51 treatise is concerned only with the theological side, that is, the “One God” part of the equation. We should insist, contra Schmitt, that, since this part of the formula hasn’t changed, Peterson’s formulation holds because his argument is centered on the impossibility of mirroring the triune God in the human city, whether it is organized monarchically or democratically.

A second aspect concerns theology properly. In the “Postscript” to his book, Schmitt counters

Peterson’s closure of political theology with a theological opening. Schmitt uses the same source as

Peterson—Gregory of Nazianzus’ third theological oration, “On the Son”—and extracts from it a radically different conclusion. Schmitt analyzes Gregory’s formula that “The One – to Hen – is always in uproar – stasiazon – against itself – pros heauton.”136 Based on the notion of stasis, which “means in the first place quiescence, tranquility, standpoint, status… [and] in the second place, (political) unrest, movement, uproar and civil war,” Schmitt concludes that “at the heart of the Trinity we encounter a genuine politico- theological stasiology.”137 This interpretation is, however, inexact. Schmitt forces a reading of Gregory of

Nazianzus which would be entirely alien to the church father. Gregory, for instance, insists that the Father begets the Son “without passion”138 because incorporeal generation, contrary to corporeal (e.g., human) generation, excludes passion. This distinction opens the way for us to oppose Schmitt’s appropriation of the

Trinity in order to justify his own view of political theology. For, while Gregory vehemently rejects any attempt to shrink God into our limited categories,139 Schmitt quickly finds in the Trinitarian mystery a confirmation of his political theory. Immediately after his conclusion about Trinitarian stasiology, he reminds us: “Thus the problem of enmity and of the enemy cannot be ignored.”140 We must insist, however, that from Gregory’s use of stasis in God—“an identity of motion, and a convergence of its elements to unity—a thing which is impossible to the created nature—so that though numerically distinct there is no severance of Essence”141—does not follow Schmitt’s stasiology, used as a pretext to justify a realist,

136 Quoted in Schmitt 2008, 122. 137 Ibid., 123. 138 Gregory of Nazianzus, Third Theological Oration, II. 139 Observe, for example, the many nuances in the following idea: “The Son is the Begotten, and the Holy Ghost the Emission; for I know not how this could be expressed in terms altogether excluding visible things. For we shall not venture to speak of ‘an overflow of goodness,’ as one of the Greek Philosophers dared to say, as if it were a bowl overflowing […] Let us not ever look on this Generation as involuntary, like some natural overflow, hard to be retained, and by no means befitting our conception of Deity.” (Ibid.). Gregory uses the linguistic tools at hand while recognizing their insufficiency. This illustrates, in my opinion, Peterson’s claim that “[t]heology is the concrete actualization of the fact that the Logos of God has spoken concretely of God, so that there is thus concrete revelation, concrete faith, and concrete obedience” (Peterson 2011, 11). 140 Schmitt 2008, 123. 141 Gregory of Nazianzus, Third Theological Oration, II. Emphasis added. 52 decisionist political theory. Schmitt’s attack on Peterson’s closure of political theology is but a political distortion of theology, insofar as he tries to use theological concepts for the purpose of justifying a particular political position. It should be obvious by now that Schmitt’s is the kind of political theology Peterson was trying to avoid in the first place.

Lastly, Schmitt contends that the confrontation between Augustine and Eusebius is historically inadequate: “In terms of the politico-historical and historico-dogmatic situation, you cannot compare the context of a Greek church father of the Nicaean Council with that of a Latin church father under the rule of the Vandals.”142 But this accusation forgets that Peterson is building a theological argument, not a historical one. Christianity, as a revealed religion, is always circling back around the “event” of Christ as the sole source of truth.143 True theology is, consequently, evaluated in terms of its fidelity to that event. From this perspective we may suggest that Christian political theology—understood not in terms of mirroring but as a Christian reflection upon the political problem—cannot become a creative exercise, but only one based on fidelity to the logos. Schmitt’s attack is understandable when we remember that his decisionism includes the infallibility of the pope as the answer to the questions: Quis judicabit? Quis interpretabitur?144 The church, as Schmitt understands it, is “the consummate agency of the juridical spirit and the true heir of

Roman jurisprudence.”145 Against this understanding, which historically corresponds to Christendom,

Vatican II rejected any political reduction of the relationship between episcopate and papacy. The pope is neither a monarch nor a sovereign, but the Vicar of Christ. His power of decision is not personal, but collegial; not Peter the monarch and his lords, but Peter the apostle as part and head of the twelve (see 3.II.1 below).

This accusation of anachronism becomes important when we look for the immediate purpose of

Peterson’s book. Schmitt harshly criticizes Peterson’s move:

When a bishop from the fourth century suspected of heresy is introduced into the twentieth century as the prototype of political theology, there seems to exist a conceptual link between politics and heresy: the heretic

142 Schmitt 2008, 98. 143 I am not trying to dismiss here the role of tradition in the Catholic church, but only pointing out that tradition itself must be anchored in the event of the Incarnation of the Son (cf. SVC Declaration , §9). 144 Schmitt 2008, 115. 145 Schmitt 1966, 18.

53

appears eo ipso as the one who is political, while the one who is orthodox, on the other hand, appears as the pure, apolitical theologian.146

Leaving aside Schmitt’s unfair reading of Peterson, it is important to remember here that the latter wrote his book as “a blow to Reichstheologie.” Once a friend of Schmitt, Peterson’s aim was to alert the former of the catastrophe that was heralded. The confrontation depicted by Peterson is not aimed to be read historically, but analogically. Confronting Augustine with Eusebius relates beautifully to Schmitt’s situation. He is Eusebius charmed by the Emperor, only this time the “Emperor” is not a Christian, but a barbarian filled with resentment. He has tried to justify the unjustifiable actions of the Führer,147 because only in him can Schmitt see the will to absolute sovereignty, decisionism, and political activity (i.e., distinguishing between friend and enemy, which Hitler did brilliantly). Augustine, on the other hand, is the theologian that tirelessly confronts doctrinal mistakes. Rather than a systematic author, his theological work is intimately engaged with his time. Schmitt, a jurist—that is, an emancipated theologian—approached the

Reichstheologie with a legal theory decorated, in his own language, “with some simulacra of ecclesiastical ancestry.”148 Jacob Taubes, finally, read in Peterson’s book a clever, urgent advice to Schmitt. In a letter to

Schmitt, written in 1979, Taubes confided:

You yourself have established that the term Führer is unique, as is the reference to “Christian ideology” for Eusebius’s theologumenon. Also astonishing is the reference to Civitas Dei III.30, which has nothing “historical,” but which in 1935 was shockingly contemporary: caecus atque improvidus futurorum [“blind and reckless about what was to come”]—a coded warning to you—which you never received. You have had no better friend than Peterson to put you on the path to the Christian Church.”149

III

[1] In The Kingdom and the Glory,150 Giorgio Agamben rejects Peterson’s closure of political theology. He claims that the difference between Erik Peterson and Carl Schmitt is not about the theologico- political apparatus and its rejection, but between two “Catechontic”151 perspectives, with the result that

146 Schmitt 2008, 84. 147 See n. 116 in this chapter, above. 148 Schmitt 2017, 57. 149 Taubes 2013, 28. See Hollerich in Scott and Cavanaugh 2004, 120; Géreby 2008, 23. 150 Agamben 2011. In this and the next section I reference the page of this work in the body of the text, in parentheses. 151 Ibid., 7. The “Catechontic” refers to Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians (2:3-8), where Paul develops his eschatology. According to him, the Day of Judgment is delayed by the presence of the enigmatic figure of katechon, that is, the restrainer that delays the end. The katechon has been identified with the Roman Empire or even with the pilgrim church. The political importance of the fact rests on the fact that the katechon delimits human history in general, and the time of the church, which runs from Pentecost to the Parousia.

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“[f]or Schmitt, political theology founds a politics in the proper sense as well as the secular power [Potenza] of the Christian empire that acts as katechon. On the other hand, for Peterson, politics as liturgical action rules out any identification with the earthly city” (15).152 For Agamben, this debate must be seen under the light of the more general problem of the two paradigms that emerge from Christian theology: political theology and economic theology, which produce the distinction between Kingdom and Government.

Peterson is guilty, according to Agamben, of forgetting a fundamental aspect of Gregory of

Nazianzus’ doctrine, namely, the economic aspect of the Trinity, by means of which early Christianity solved the problem between the unity of God and its multiplicity (i.e., God as Trinity). Christianity defended a monotheism that, in distinction to Judaism and Islam, predicated a divine oikonomia whereby God’s being unfolds as triune. In this way, Christianity opposed both Gnosticism—which predicates an inactive demiurge or deus otiosus, and a providential, active god or deus actuosus (77, cf. 113)—as well as pagan polytheism and the civil religion founded upon it. For Agamben, moreover, “it is a matter of thinking the

Trinitarian articulation of the hypostases without introducing a stasis in God, an internecine war” (13), that is to say, a political solution of the first order.153

Christianity thus developed an economic, not political, language (25) that it used to describe both

God’s being (a “Trinity of substance”), as well as his praxis (a “Trinity of revelation”), the latter of which manifests in what is called “providence” (62).154 It is in the correspondence between being and praxis, on the one hand, and Kingdom and Government, on the other, that political theology is retrieved. Since

Christian theology does not stop at the description of God but it is “immediately economy and providence”

(47), oikonomia articulates at the same time divine life and the government of creatures. Inquiring about

God, therefore, necessary and ineluctably leads us to ask about God’s providential work. The reason for this

152 A couple of lines after he clarifies: “Politics as liturgical action is nothing else than the cultual anticipation of escathological glory” (16). 153 This is, as we will show below, a problem of Agamben’s understanding of the Trinity. He sees oikonomia performing a political work, namely, preventing stasis, in God. This equilibrium is, for him, never stable: “The articulation between these two Trinities [“Trinity of substance,” and “Trinity of revelation”]… is the aporetic task that the Trinitarian oikonomia bequeaths to Christian theology… which therefore presents itself as a bipolar machine whose unity always runs the risk of collapsing and must be acquired again at each turn” (62). It is enough for now to point out how, from the beginning of his work, he thinks that the Trinitarian oikonomia is a solution to a rather unstable situation, one that will become almost destructive when he analyzes the politics of glory in the last chapter, where human acclamation and praise to God become nothing short to the food God needs to subsist. 154 In 1 Corinthians 12:4-6 we find an interesting example of how, in Christianity, unity and diversity are in equilibrium. Just as the Trinitarian oikonomia refers to praxis, not to being, the Christian ministry is described economically: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of working, but it is the same God who inspired them all in every one.” Here we have a powerful example of the Christian harmony created by the tension between the one and the many. Agamben, surprisingly, misses this reference. This reference to the economic nature of the ministry is fundamental for our purposes, for it upholds the claim that the papacy is neither a king nor emperor, but a pastor who administers the church (see 3.II.1). 55 is the Incarnation of the Son, which makes it impossible to ever fully separate God’s inner life and its care for the world, because one leads necessarily to the other. However, Agamben asserts that “[t]he economy through which God governs the world is, as a matter of fact, entirely different from his being, and cannot be inferred from it” (54), in the sense that we cannot derive Christian providence necessarily from God’s being, as we can do, for example, in Aristotle’s first mover, where being and praxis completely overlap and become indistinguishable. This caesura is fundamental in Agamben’s critique of Peterson.

God’s providence, that is, divine administration of the world, is not a work God does directly, but through the angelic choruses. Angels are ordered economically as well; this order is explicit in two operations described by Bonaventure: “the contemplative operation and the administrative” (149).

Angelology is politically relevant for two reasons. First, and most obviously, the angelic administrative function serves as the blueprint for governmental bureaucracy. This function is a vicarious one in that their job, administration, is done on the basis of general rules determined by the sovereign. But secondly, it is when we face angelology that we take the decisive step in understanding Agamben’s refutation of Peterson’s closure. Confronted with the question as to what angels will do after the Day of Judgment, Aquinas answers that the administrative function, that is, the government of the world, will cease. The other function, however, will be preserved: “The angelic ministries survive the universal judgment only as a hymnological hierarchy, as contemplation and praise of the glory of the divine” (162). Glory will develop, in the last chapter of Agamben’s book, as “the place at which this bilateral (or bi-univocal) character of the relation between theology and politics clearly emerges into the light” (193). This is so because glory—what

Agamben calls the doxological machine—unveils the intimate relationship between God’s inner life and its providence, on the one hand, and between Kingdom and Government, on the other.

If we take the phrase le roi règne, mais il ne gouverne pas—to which both Peterson and Schmitt refer—as our starting point, we can understand what is at stake in Agamben’s archeology of glory. God’s absolute perfection implies necessarily that he lacks nothing. Consequently, God does not need human praise and acclamation, that is, glory. Thus, “[w]e do not praise God because he has any need of it… Nor do we praise him because it is useful for us… glorification is due to glory because in some sense it derives from it” (214). The circularity between God’s glory and human glorification pushes Agamben to introduce 56 the hypothesis that human acclamation becomes, in the last analysis, a vital food for the divinity. Perhaps,

Agamben suggests, leaning on non-Christian sources, “glorification is not only that which best fits the glory of God but is itself, as effective rite, what produces glory” (226). By means of an analysis of angelic economy, thus, we are presented with the aporia between a God trapped in an eternal cycle of glory/glorification. What happens when God’s providential activity ceases is nothing but this circularity of glory. But this doxological machine, once government has ceased, shows us the emptiness of the throne

(211). It is, thus, just acclamation, the activity of inactivity or, in Pauline terminology, an eternal “sabbath rest for the people of God” (Hebrews 4:9). When we apply the doxological machine to human politics,

Agamben’s critique of Peterson takes on its full force. For, if all human government ceased, what would remain but acclamation? The answer to this question becomes more worrying when we add a second one:

What was the outcome of the last doxological experiment? Agamben answers: “Such an absolute reduction of creatures to their glorifying function is clearly reminiscent of the behavior demanded of their subjects by the profane powers in Byzantium and in the Germany of the 1930s… Here, as well, the glorification is due to the sovereign not because he needs it but, as his resplendent insignia, his throne and crown reveal, because he is glorious in himself” (215-216). This is the sense, then, in which the “doxologies and acclamations in some sense constitute a threshold of indifference between politics and theology” (229-230). Peterson’s mistake, that is, his oblivion of the economic theology that underlies Christian theology, returns as a boomerang effect, via angelology, to smash the closure of political theology, which is revived in its worst possible way, that is, in the form of totalitarian politics as doxological politics. Thus, with respect to

Peterson, “after the repression of politics in theology, it reappears—as it is the case with all forms of repression—in an improper form in doxology” (215).

According to Agamben, finally, Peterson failed to demonstrate the impossibility of political theology, but rather grasped “the analogy between the liberal political paradigm that separates kingdom from government and the theological paradigm that distinguishes between archē and dynamis in God” (73).

Modernity is presented as being indebted to the “providential machine,” insofar as the distinction between ratio gubernandi and executio, that is, between the power that creates or sustains the general order and the 57 execution of its will, is mirrored in the modern doctrine of the division of power, where the executive power is given only to the application of a legal body the origin of which escapes its faculties. Agamben concludes with a disturbing suggestion: glory, he asserts, is at the end of two types of politics, the one, totalitarian, characterized by public acclamation and the other, liberal, where the role of acclamation is transferred to public opinion:

What our investigation has shown is that the holistic state, founded on the immediate presence of the acclaiming people, and the neutralized state that resolves itself in the communicative forms without subject, are opposed only in appearance. They are nothing but two sides of the same glorious apparatus in its two forms: the immediate and subjective glory of the acclaiming people and the mediatic and objective glory of social communication. As should be evident today, people-nation and people-communication, despite the differences in behavior and figure, are the two faces of the doxa that, as such, ceaselessly interweave and separate themselves in contemporary society (258).

I think Agamben wrongly characterizes Christian doxology, which leads him to mistakenly affirm the affinity between the “holistic state,” which is nothing but a less aggressive term for totalitarianism, and liberal democracy. In the next section I offer a critique of Agamben’s analysis of glory. In my opinion, in the eight chapter of his book Agamben abandons Christian sources—due of a lack of confirmation of his thesis—and immerses himself into sources alien to Christianity in an odd attempt to square the circle. This strategy obfuscates the differences between Christian doxology and totalitarian politics. I will postpone the answer to the question about the differences between the “naturalized” and “holistic state” until the last chapter of this work, where I offer an analysis of the role of public opinion in democracy which clearly elicits the fundamental differences between the two political regimes.

[2] Is it really the case that Christianity and “the holistic state” coincide in their absolutization of glory? In my opinion, Agamben’s critique is flawed on the Christian side. While Agamben ends mixing up

Christian doctrine with foreign elements, resulting in an eclectic thesis on the relationship between the divinity and glory, the Christian understanding of God is clearly and tightly related to the notion of agape.

In the last chapter of The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben is trying to understand the consequences that follow from his analysis of angelology and, specifically, the idea that, after the Judgment, the angelic administrative function will cease and angels will be left with their acclamatory activity. He starts with a harsh critique of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s aestheticization of glory, which Agamben quickly refutes, 58 asserting that in the Bible “neither kabhod nor doxa [the Old and New Testament words for “glory”] is ever understood in an aesthetic sense: they are concerned with the terrifying appearance of YHVH, with the

Kingdom, Judgment, and the throne—all things that can be defined ‘beautiful’ only from a perspective that it is hard not to call aestheticizing” (198). Glory, Agamben maintains, is a “signature”155 founded upon the idea of “power.”

Once he runs into the wall of the circularity of glory, explained in the last section, things start moving away from Christianity and into non-Christian sources. About halfway of the chapter, Agamben introduces Marcel Mauss’ doctoral thesis on prayer, a study from which Agamben develops a crucial insight:

“Perhaps justification is not only that which best fits the glory of God but is itself, as effective rite, what produces glory” (226). After this suggestion, Agamben reminds us the link between Mauss and Émile

Durkheim (they had “intellectual and familial relations”), whose sociology of religion advances Agamben’s insight farther. Durkheim asserts: “No doubt, the men could not live without gods; but on the other hand, the gods would die if they were not worshipped” (227). Agamben explores a couple of more non-Christian sources—the Kabbalah and the doctrine of divine nourishment in the Brahmana—before returning, in the final sections, to the Pauline doctrine of the sabbatism of the people of God, that is, the perfect inactivity of those who rest in the Lord. It is this inactivity, this inoperativity, that Agamben links to totalitarianism. In this political regime, he claims, the Kingdom—which is by definition inactive—is fed, so to speak, by the doxological machine in a similar way as God feeds from praise, prayer, and acclamation. We are thus confronted with a hybrid theory of glory: the Christian God is semi-paganized, that is, put back, at least analogically, into where gods were human creations who, consequently, needed human acclamation to subsist. This reconceptualized God fits better in Agamben’s doxological machine. The cost, however, is the abandonment of theology altogether: it has ceased to be a reflection on revealed truth and has become like clay in the hands of the philosopher, something malleable and useful for his purposes and that, as such, adjusts itself to the form imposed by human creativity.

155 Agamben understands a “signature” (segnatura) as “something that in a sign or concept marks and exceeds such a sign or concept referring back to a determinate interpretation or field, without for this reason leaving the semiotic to constitute a new meaning or a new concept. Signatures move and displace concepts and signs from one field to another” (4). In this case, “glory” is a signature in the sense that the term is able to take us back and forth between the political and theological fields, without necessary constituting new meanings. In the paragraphs below, I reject Agamben’s understanding of glory as a signature, proposing instead that “glory” has different foundations when predicated about God or the human power. 59

While Agamben questions: “Why does power need inoperativity and glory? What is so essential about them that power must inscribe them at all costs in the empty center of its governmental apparatus?”

(247) we must retort with another question: “Is it really the case that in God glory functions in the same way as in the totalitarian regime?” What is perplexing in Agamben’s study is the absolute silence about love. In the first seven chapters of his book, we find the word “love” only five times, always as part of quotes. This situation changes in the eight chapter, where the word appears thirty-three times, both in quotes and in

Agamben’s own words. It is surprising, to say the least, that a serious analysis of love and the Trinity, as well as love and providence, is missing.

In his To Monimus, Fulgentius of Ruspe offers a beautiful description of the Trinity.

Rightly do we ask that this [the spiritual building of the Body of Christ] should be brought about in us by the gift of that Spirit, who is the one Spirit of the Father and of the Son: because that Holy Unity of Nature, that Equality and Love, that is the Trinity, the one true God, sanctifies in unanimity those whom it adopts. In this one substance of the Trinity there is unity in the origin, equality in the Son, but in the Spirit of Love a fusion of equality and unity: the unity knows no division, the equality no difference, the love no shadow of dislike. There is no discord there: for the equality, which is love and unity, the unity, which is equality and love, and the love, which is unity and equality, continue for ever in one unchanging nature.156

According to Fulgentius, the unity and equality of God are produced by love, and in a way are indistinguishable from it. Love is thus at the very center of the divine essence. Now, when Agamben affirms that “the center of the machine is empty” (211), he misreads a quote from Augustine introduced in support of his thesis. When referring to God’s Sabbath, Augustine affirms that “there we shall be inoperative

[vacabimus] and see, see and love, love and praise” (242, emphasis mine). There’s no doubt that Augustine is referring to a very specific kind of inoperativity, which he describes with three terms: sight, love, and praise.157 This inoperativity does not lead to emptiness, as Agamben thinks, but it is filled by love—just as in Fulgentius’ thoughts on the Trinitarian mystery—a love that is the very essence of God (cf. 1 John 4:8),

156 To Monimus, bk. 2, ch. 11. Quoted in Lubac 1988, 390. 157 Ben Witherington III’s analysis of glory is telling. On the one hand, he boldly states that “salvation is not the point and goal of human history. That is but a means to the ultimate end, which is the proper worship of God by all creatures” (Witherington 2010, 18). This affirmation seems consistent with Agamben’s study on glory and may even describe God as a “glory-grabber, deeply worried if he doesn’t get enough credit.” But, Witherington answers: “I find this whole approach to the biblical discussion of glory very wide of the mark… Christ himself, it will be remembered, said that he came, trailing clouds of glory, perhaps, but not to be served but to serve others and to give his life as a ransom for the many (Mark 10:45). This does not sound like self-glorification to me. Is sounds like self-sacrificial love. And if the Son is indeed the spitting image of the Father, and if God’s enduring and endearing character is indeed love (as 1 John says), then I doubt that narcissism is the ultimate character trait of God” (12-13). It is the idea of love that changes our understanding of God; and, tellingly, it is precisely “love” what is missing in Agamben’s analysis. 60 which is communicated by God to his creatures, whom correspond to this love by loving and praising God back.

Take, for example, Agamben’s critique of von Balthasar’s aestheticization of glory. While he correctly points out that we sometimes encounter in the Old Testament the “terrifying appearance of

YHVH,” he seems to dismiss everything that has to do with God’s tender love for humanity. In contraposition to the terrible God, in Hosiah (11:8-9) we find a loving God who cannot remain angry at their people: “How could I give you up, O Ephraim, or deliver you up. O Israel?... My heart is overwhelmed, my pity is stirred. I will not give vent to my blazing anger, I will not destroy Ephraim again; For I am God and not man, the Holy One present among you; I will not let the flames consume you.”158

The love of God for humanity is the heart of the Christian message. Benedict XVI affirms:

The divine power that Aristotle, at the height of Greek philosophy, sought to grasp through reflection, is indeed for every being an object of desire and of love—and as the object of love this divinity moves the world—but in itself it lacks nothing and does not love: it is solely the object of love. The one God in whom Israel believes, on the other hand, loves with a personal love. His love, moreover, is an elective love: among all the nations he chooses Israel and loves her—but he does so precisely with a view to healing the whole human race. God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape.159

Christianity, Benedict XVI continues, reconciles in itself two different meanings of “love”: eros, that

“divine madness” described by ancient Greeks, and agape, which is no longer “self-seeking, a sinking in the intoxication of happiness; instead it seeks the good of the beloved: it becomes renunciation and it is ready, and even willing, for sacrifice.”160 This is a love, finally, which “promises infinity, eternity—a reality far greater and totally other than our everyday existence.”161

If we now turn to Agamben, we find that for him totalitarianism is founded upon the doxological machine inherited from Christian thought:

Just as liturgical doxologies produce and strengthen God’s glory, so the profane acclamations are not an ornament of political power but found and justify it. And just as the immanent trinity and economic trinity, theologia and oikonomia constitute, within the providential paradigm, a bipolar machine from whose distinction and correlation stems the government of the world, so Kingdom and Government constitute the two elements or faces of the same machine of power (230).

158 See also Is 62:1-5 where the prophet claims: “Nations shall behold your vindication, and all the kings your glory… You shall have a glorious crown in the hand of the Lord, a royal diadem held by your God… For the Lord delights in you and makes your land his spouse. As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride so shall your God rejoice in you.” The novelty of a personal loving God is missing in Agamben’s analysis. 159 Benedict XVI 2005b, §9. 160 Ibid., §6. 161 Ibid., §5. 61

Agamben’s erudite treatise offers brilliant insights on how totalitarianism works. However, his analysis mistakenly thinks that the relationship between divine glory and human acclamation is direct, when in fact it is inverse. In other words, totalitarianism appears, when put in the light of Christian doctrine, as the hubristic inversion of Christian love. A disordered love for earthly power pushes human beings to divinize their political regime, mistakenly yearning to eternise what is otherwise contingent. Totalitarianism is thus nothing but the most radical, most perverted iteration of humanity’s attempt to become gods (Genesis 3:5).

It is a reaction against every limit—moral, temporal, spatial—and the affirmation of an utterly emancipated will. This act is, for Christians, an evil one. Proof of this can be found in Satan’s (the “prince of this world,” cf. John 12:31; 14:30) promise to Jesus of “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them”162 (Matthew

4:8, emphasis mine), if the latter falls down and worships him. It is telling that Agamben misses this reference, which clearly establishes that a disordered glory, in Augustinian terms, is as far from divine glory as the Roman virtue was from Christian virtue.

That totalitarianism bears a resemblance to Christian doxology should be obvious by now.

However, Agamben’s lens is broken. The image produced by totalitarianism is in reality an inverted one.

The divinization of the Führer, thus, approaches the image of the devil, not that of God. As a bizarre, inverted theologico-political project, the acclamation and deification of the kingdom of earth is hellish. Agamben, on the contrary, considers eternal government, not the misguided deification of the earthly kingdom, as infernal:

hell is the place in which the divine government of the world survives for all eternity, even if only in a penitentiary form. And while the angels in paradise will abandon every form of government and will no longer be ministries but only assistants, despite conserving the empty form of their hierarchies, the demons, meanwhile, will be the indefectible ministers and eternal executioners of divine justice (164).

Compare this with Joseph Ratzinger’s account of hell:

If there were such a thing as a loneliness that could no longer be penetrated and transformed by the word of another; if a state of abandonment were to arise that was so deep that no “You” could reach into it any more, then we should have real, total loneliness and dreadfulness, what theology calls “hell.”163

162 The Latin version prays: omnia regna mundi et gloriam eorum. The Greek version prays: πάσας τὰς βασιλείας τοῦ κόσμου καὶ τὴν δόξαν αὐτῶν. 163 Ratzinger 2004, 300. 62

Hell is, for Ratzinger, not a place of physical punishment, but an eternal abandonment, that is, loneliness.

Since sin is a refusal of relationality (see chapter 2.II.1), hell is but the logical consequence of sin, namely, absolute loneliness. This loneliness does not need or presuppose a government but is described as the rejection of love.

What about democracy? Although, as I said above, a full discussion must wait until the last chapter, we can provide a preliminary answer to the question. Contrary to totalitarianism, democracy is not founded upon glory. Agamben correctly sees that public opinion may act as a doxological machine but misses that this functioning is itself a pathology—a pathology contemporary democracies know only too well!

Tocqueville’s account of democracy is founded upon a fragile balance between freedom and equality, the individual and its community. It is because of mores—and religion in democracy is but a school of mores— and not public opinion, that democracy achieves this balance: these habits of the heart combat both individualism and restiveness, both of which threaten its existence. Democracy not only admits its natural contingency, it is also founded upon the notion of the person and his or her inherent dignity. Democracy escapes the totalitarian trap by recognizing its proper limits, as well as by establishing a salutary separation between the spheres of religion and politics which, as we will see, does not imply either confrontation or lack of communication between them.

[3] Contrary to Erik Peterson, who experienced the Nazi regime in his adulthood, Joseph Ratzinger was a teenager at the start of World War II. He joined the Hitler Youth when it became mandatory in 1941, reached military age in 1944, and was sent to and Traunstein, from whence he deserted in 1945. He was captured by the American army and held prisoner for some months before being released.164 Ratzinger remembers being raised in a Catholic, deeply anti-Nazi home:

My father… was one who with unfailing clairvoyance saw that a victory of Hitler’s would not be a victory for Germany but rather a victory of the Antichrist that would surely usher in apocalyptic times for all believers, and not only for them.165

164 Ratzinger 1998, 30-40. 165 Ibid., 27.

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Joseph Ratzinger has denounced time and again the horrors of totalitarianism, leaning towards democracy as the best political regime.166 However, not everyone sees Ratzinger as an ally of democracy. John Allen

Jr. claims, for instance, that Ratzinger “believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism.”167 It is easy to show Ratzinger’s opposition to totalitarianism, and not very hard to uncover his hesitation about the possibility of “an ecclesial totalitarianism.” In this final section I discuss Joseph

Ratzinger’s understanding of political theology as indebted to Peterson’s thought.

Ratzinger rejects political theology on at least four grounds. First, he explicitly subscribes to

Peterson’s work to reject the possibility of a political theology understood as the mirroring of the heavenly city onto the earthly city.168 The possibility of political theology is also rejected by the New Testament.

Here, Ratzinger leans on the historian Martin Hengel, who contrasts the Jewish Zealot movement with the preaching of Jesus of Nazareth. In Hengel’s words, “one could, like the Zealots, attempt to ‘force’… the imminent reign of God through militant action, with weapons in hand, or, conversely, to alleviate the enormous, concrete need, to bind up wounds instead of inflicting them. Jesus consistently chose the second way.”169 In the third place, he follows Eric Voegelin’s critique of gnosticism.170 In opposition to the gnostic tenet that through the use and perfection of human knowledge we can establish a new order of being,

Ratzinger claims that our “relationship to truth is first of all essentially receptive and not productive.”171

Gnosticism, on its part, represents a rejection of the cosmos and its God, “a radical form of protest against everything that up until then had seemed to be holy, good, and upright, and that was now exposed as a prison, which gnosis promised to show the way out of.”172 Ratzinger asserts that “neither reason nor faith

166 In affirming the superiority of democracy, Ratzinger embraces the spirit of the Second Vatican Council. For a study on the transition from the anti-liberal church of the nineteenth-century to John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris and Vatican II’s Gaudium et spes, both of which abandoned the old opposition to liberal democracy and committed to democracy and human rights, see Sigmund 1987. 167 Allen 2000, 3. I am aware Allen is a journalist, not a theologian. I am trying to take his words as, in my opinion, he wants them to be read, namely, as a powerful rhetorical move against Ratzinger. Thus, my purpose here is just to follow the inner logic of Allen’s rhetorical move. 168 Ratzinger paraphrases Peterson’s conclusion: “in the old Church the victory of belief in the Trinity over Monarchianism signified a victory over the political abuse of theology: the ecclesiastical belief in the Trinity shattered the politically usable molds, destroyed the potentialities of theology as political myth, and disowned the misuse of the Gospel to justify a political situation” (Ratzinger 2004, 170-171). See also Ratzinger 2015, 7, 103, 112, and 1988, 58. 169 Hengel 1971, 20. “It is not unlikely that Jesus formulated his demand to forgive one’s enemies and be ready to forgive in conscious contrast to that Zealot passion that so informed the leading intellectual and spiritual class of his nation” (Hengel 1973, 50). Cf. SVC , §11. 170 According to the website VoegelinView, published by the Eric Voegelin Society, Ratzinger wrote to Voegelin in 1981 praising his study on gnosticism. The then cardinal confides: “Since I came across your small volume on Science, Politics, and Gnosticism in 1959 I have been fascinated and inspired by your thought” (Ratzinger 1981). See Ratzinger 2015, 18, n.22. 171 Ratzinger 1988, 160. 172 Ratzinger 2015, 18-19.

64 ever promises us that there will ever be a perfect world. It does not exist,”173 and thus the gnostic project is condemned to fail. A fourth ground for rejecting political theology comes from Ratzinger’s

Augustinianism.174 He adopts Augustine’s doctrine of the two cities, the idea that, although mixed together here on Earth, two cities are distinguishable in their origins, their loves, and their telos. Happiness for the citizens of the heavenly city—which is “true” happiness—is not attainable in this world, for “no one lives as he wishes unless he is happy, and… no one is happy unless he is righteous. Even the righteous man, however, will not live as he wishes unless he arrives at the state where he is wholly free from death, error and harm.”175

Consequently, when we hubristically deceive ourselves into the belief that our sole efforts can change human nature176 and “renew the face of Earth” (Psalm 104:30), the illusion of unbridled reason becomes potentially destructive. Politics, therefore, must not aim at ultimate happiness, it must not try to bring God’s kingdom to earth, to divinize its immanent form and thus, become totalitarian. Politics, as understood by Ratzinger, is an “exceptionally sober” human activity: “it must ensure peace at home and abroad.”177

The definition of politics above is vague enough as to allow pretty much any political project: it can range from Hobbes’ solution of an absolute sovereign that holds together the keys of the two cities, the sword and the staff, to Kant’s perpetual peace among republican governments. We need, therefore, to clarify what Ratzinger actually means. To do this, we need to understand the relation between faith and reason, in order to see how politics, which is “the realm of reason”178 relates to faith and religion.

Christianity shook the Hellenistic world, presenting itself as a scandal. Paul’s speech at the

Areopagus (Acts 17:22-34) challenged not only traditional polytheism, it also claimed that God had come

173 Ratzinger 1988, 208. 174 Ratzinger 1998, 44. It is significative that Augustine is the topic of his doctoral thesis, Volk und Haus Gottes in Augustins Lehre von der Kirche. 175 Augustine, The City of God, XIV:25. 176 The creation of an ideal society is impossible because human nature remains a constant over time: “Man, precisely as man, remains the same both in primitive and in technologically developed situations. He does not stand on a higher level merely because he has learned to use more highly developed tools. Mankind begins anew in every single individual. This is why it is not possible for the definitely new, ideal society to exist… A definitively ideal society presupposes the end of freedom” (Ratzinger 2006b, 25-26). See also Ratzinger 2012, 149. 177 Ratzinger 2006b, 22. 178 Ibid., 24.

65 to earth, adopted the human substance, had been arrested, crucified,179 and had resurrected. Christianity understood itself from the beginning as a rational religion, a claim that is beautifully expressed in the introductory lines of John’s gospel: God, the logos, became sarx and dwelt among us. In Christ, God’s communication with human beings reached its fullness: Jesus made known God’s name to us (Jn 17:26).180

That faith is reasonable means it is not mythical, that is, it is not a human product, but God’s revelation to human beings. On the other hand, faith is not rational in the sense that God can be known, that is, apprehended by human reason. God is the absolutely “Other,”181 the being that is not graspable by the human mind. For that reason, Augustine’s claim remains final: “We see that the world exists, whereas we believe that God exists.”182

The tension between faith and reason is reflected in the tension between church and state. On the one hand, the state acts in accordance with divine ordinance insofar as it “guarantees peace and the ,”183 irrespective of the personal beliefs or intentions of those in office; on the other hand, this “sober” definition entails a limitation on the state: “the refusal to adore the emperor and the refusal in general to worship the state are on the most fundamental level simply a rejection of the totalitarian state.”184 Now, it is precisely because politics is the realm of reason and Christianity is the religion of logos that a communication between Christianity and politics is not only possible, but necessary. This notion brings to the fore Jesus’ word to Pilate: “Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.” The rationality of Jesus’

179 In his study on the trial of Jesus, Agamben suggests that Jesus was never condemned by Pilate, that is, that a sentence was never given. The central moment occurs when Pilate, reluctant to condemn an innocent man, is confronted by the Jews, who cried out: “If you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend; every one who makes himself a king sets himself against Caesar” (Jn 19:12). According to the narratives of both Mark and Matthew, “Jesus was made to sit on the bēma,” scornfully inviting him to exercise the function of judge that belongs to a king. Agamben observes: “that Pilate does not sit on the bench is completely coherent with the fact that he does not give a verdict but limits himself to ‘handing over’ Jesus” (Agamben 2015, 36). 180 For Ratzinger, this passage must be understood in connection with Exodus 3:13-14, where Moses asks God about his name. God’s answer is a critique of polytheism, “a challenge to the notion of myth… a mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands” (Benedict XVI 2006): “I am who I am.” It is only with Jesus that the riddle of the identity of God will become manifest. Ratzinger explains: “All chapter 17 [of John’s gospel]—the so-called ‘high priestly prayer,’ perhaps the heart of the whole Gospel—centers around the idea of ‘Jesus as the revealer of the name of God’ and thus assumes the position of New Testament counterpart to the story of the burning bush” (Ratzinger 2004, 132-133). 181 “[T]here is an infinite gulf between God and man… God is not just he who at present lies in fact outside the field of vision but could be seen if it were possible to go father; no, he is the being who stands essentially outside it, however far our field of vision may be extended” (Ratzinger 2004, 49-50). 182 Augustine, The City of God, XI:4. 183 Ratzinger 2006b, 20. This idea has Pauline and Augustinian roots as well. G. B. Caird asserts that Paul “does not say that the state embodies the whole authority of God; it had been created for a single specific purpose, to maintain order and to suppress crime. As long as the state continues to perform its God-given task, even if in other respects it shares in the general corruption of the present world order, it still possesses a divine authority which the Christian must obey, not merely from fear of the consequences but also ‘for conscience sake.’” (Caird 1956, 24). Paul Weithman writes that, for Augustine, “the moral assessment of political authorities turns crucially on how they try to bring about earthly peace” (Weithman in Stump and Kretzmann 2001, 244; see also Elshtain in Scott and Cavanaugh 2004, 40). 184 Ratzinger 2006b, 20. See Ratzinger 1971a, 46-7.

66 message penetrates politics insofar as a realm enlightened by reason, thus making possible political theology not as a theological justification of political power but, as we have seen, as the inevitable relationship between immanence and transcendence, faith and reason, theological discourse and its secular appropriations. That Ratzinger is reluctant to call this relationship “political theology” has more to do, in my view, with his fear of totalitarianism, as well as with his sources (i.e., Peterson and Voegelin), than with a refusal to see the mutual exchange between religion ad politics.

What is, finally, Ratzinger’s position about the church? Is he really advocating for ecclesiastical totalitarianism? Here we see Ratzinger leaning again on Peterson.185 His understanding of the church was shaped by the latter’s article Die Kirche, where Peterson deals with Alfred Loisy’s dictum: “Jesus proclaimed the Kingdom; what came was the Church.” According to Peterson, the church’s existence is possible only as the church of Gentiles. Jesus sent his apostles to every corner of the world, Peterson argues, because the chosen people rejected him. Paul deems Israel’s conversion an eschatological event: “a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of the Gentiles come in, and so all Israel will be saved” (Rom 11:25-26).

Ratzinger borrows an image used by the Fathers186 to conceptualize the relationship between God and the church. The church resembles the moon, whose light is not hers, but comes from the sun. The moon

“represents the earthly world, the world that is characterized by receptivity and neediness.” Therefore, the church “receives light from the true Helios, Christ.”187 Ratzinger reacts against a feverish demand for

“reform” in the church, a yearning that is often driven by a falsification of what it is. We are tempted to see it only as a structure, an institution that can be changed to our likes. In opposition to this, all-too-human understanding of the church as a flexible human institution,188 Ratzinger insists that, notwithstanding the many scandals inside the church, the multiple ways in which it has betrayed the message of Christ, falling short from its mission, the Church of Jesus “lives behind ‘our church.’”189

185 Ratzinger 1996, 21, n.6. 186 By the term “Fathers” I am referring to the early Christian tradition. The work of early theologians of the church is also called “Patristic.” 187 Ratzinger 2012, 142-143. Cf. Balthasar 1987, 43. 188 “His Church has been replaced by our Church and, thus, by many churches, since everyone has his own. The churches have become our undertakings, of which we are either proud or ashamed” (Ratzinger 2012, 144). 189 Ratzinger 2012, 146. 67

An “ecclesiastical totalitarianism” betrays the church founded by Jesus, to say nothing of betraying the Gospel, which rejects oppression and commends conviction. The church’s obligation is to be the proclaimer of revelation, of the good news of God’s love for humanity. At the same time, it must recognize the human element in itself, which demands it to be constantly purified by reason. Just as reason, when it turns pathological—e.g. the atomic bomb, totalitarianism, science understood as completely independent of moral constraints—is in need to listen the great religious traditions, the pathologies of faith—e.g., , oppression, immanentization of eschatology—need the salutary check of reason.

This does not mean, for Ratzinger, that we’re condemned to embrace relativism, but neither can we impose our own values upon others. Ratzinger emphatically claims that Catholicism cannot be forced upon people. He quotes Origen: “Christ does not win victory over anyone who does not wish it. He conquers only by convincing, for he is the Word of God.”190 This sentence, which reminds us of Revelation 3:20—“I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me”—is consistent both with the idea that the kingdom of God is otherworldly, and with the necessary separation of church and state:

The state is entitled to be autonomous with respect to the Church, and the bishop must acknowledge that the state has its own reality and law. He avoids mixing faith and politics and serves the freedom of all by refusing to allow faith to be identified with a particular form of politics. The Gospel prescribes certain truths and values to politics, but it does not respond to concrete questions concerning particular political and economic issues. This “ of earthly things,” of which the Second Vatican Council spoke, must be respected.191

Ratzinger is aware of the dangers of the marriage of faith and a particular social design (e.g., Christendom)192 and for that reason defends a healthy separation of orders. However, this separation cannot imply a complete divorce. At least two reasons can be adduced: first of all, if we assume that truth—i.e., truth about the meaning of life, which necessarily includes communal life—is not a human possession, but it is received as a gift in revelation, then it follows that the state is obliged to listen to and learn from the great religious traditions;193 secondly, even if we adopt the secular, pluralist view of human communities, we still can

190 Ibid., 52. 191 Ibid., 101. 192 “The use of the State by the Church for its own purposes, climaxing in the Middle Ages and in absolutist Spain of the early modern era, has since Constantine been one of the most serious liabilities of the Church, and any historically minded person is inescapably aware of this. In its thinking, the Church has stubbornly confused faith in the absolute truth manifest in Christ with insistence on an absolute secular status for the institutional Church. Another characteristic deeply imbedded in the Catholic mentality is the inability to see beyond the Catholic faith, the inability to see the other person’s viewpoint” (Ratzinger 1966, 144). 193 Ratzinger 2012, 214-215. 68 defend the right of the churches to actively participate in the public sphere and offer arguments to inform their moral positions. Ratzinger’s notion of the state and, particularly, of democracy, is more welcoming to modernity than for example, Voegelin’s, who radically rejects the modern as Gnostic, with no visible ground for reconciliation.

IV

Political theology is a broad concept which can refer to many different things.194 Among these meanings we have referred here to the mirroring of the heavenly city onto the earthly city, to God’s providence and the government of the world, and more generally, to the Christian reflection upon the problem of the human being in community and its relationship with transcendence.

Following Erik Peterson, I have asserted that Christian political theology, understood as the attempt to immanentize God’s Kingdom and identifying it with an immanent, political entity, is impossible. The doctrine of Trinity cancels such an attempt because it finds no parallel in the created world. Christianity, moreover, deems every single human institution as contingent and transient. The fullness195 of the Kingdom will arrive only at the end of times, when Christ “delivers the kingdom of God to the Father after destroying every authority and power,” that is, “until he has put all his enemies under his feet” (1 Corinthians 15:24-

25).

Two conclusions follow from this idea. The first one is that, although political theology is impossible when understood as “mirroring,” Christianity is not silent about the more general, more fundamental problem of the human community, that is the political problem. This is why we can refer to the political writings of both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as “political theologies” without violating

Peterson’s closure. Thus, we can speak of a Christian political theology as a reflection, inspired by God’s revelation, about the human community, its problems and ideals. This is possible, as Schmitt correctly saw,

194 In his most recent book, Adam Kotsko defines political theology “as the study of systems of legitimacy, of the ways that political, social, economic, and religious orders maintain their explanatory power and justify the loyalty of their adherents” (Kotsko 2018, 8). He advocates for an understanding of political theology as “a nonreductionist analysis of the homologies between political and theological or metaphysical systems, grounded in the recognition that both types of systems are attempts to grapple with the perennial dilemma that is represented theologically as the problem of evil and politically as the problem of legitimacy” (31). Kotsko’s account, which is not a Christian one, focuses on the synchronicity between theology and politics without stopping for a moment to consider that both languages are more than different approaches to the same thing (evil/legitimacy). In this chapter I have suggested, following Peterson, that the objects studied by theology and politics are radically different, despite the necessary connection between them. 195 See chapter 3.III.2, n.248. 69 because of the Incarnation: Christianity proclaims that God has assumed human nature and dwelt among us.

Jesus’ life, ministry, and death, as well as the life of the first Christian communities—when the followers of Jesus identified themselves as “the Way” (see, for example, Acts 9:2)—were intensely political.

However, Christianity’s political character goes far beyond its historical origins. Christianity is political, more generally, in the sense that it creates a perpetual tension between immanence and transcendence, which necessarily defines the former as contingent and limited.

From this last idea follows the second conclusion. Given that Christianity founds a tension between immanence and transcendence, and thus necessarily defines the political as the realm of the contingent and transitory, it is with Christianity, as Marcel Gauchet brilliantly explains,196 that the history of secularization starts. Secularization is a Christian product in the sense that Christianity broke the ancient nexus between politics and religion, what we call “civil religion.”197 Jesus’ inaugurates a time when what is due to Caesar does not coincide to what is due to God. No more “gods of the city,” then, but only the one God who created the world and redeemed it by the sacrifice of the Son. Seen from this perspective, secularity spells not the end of religion, but its progressive transformation under the aegis of human rationality.

But secularity is not, obviously, only a product of Christianity. Throughout the history of the West, the construction of the secular has been a constant preoccupation of politicians, philosophers, and many other intellectuals. The story of this process is, thus, multicausal and runs on many different intellectual tracks. Telling the story of this process, indispensable to understand our contemporary societies, is the task of the next chapter.

196 Gauchet 1999. 197 See chapter 5, n. 12. 70

CHAPTER 2. SECULARITY.

I have given them your word; and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. I do not pray that you should take them from the world, but that you should keep them from the evil one (John 17:14-15).

As I tried to explain in the previous chapter, the theologico-political is a permanent dimension of human social existence, in the sense that politics is never just the science of controlling and managing immediate, bodily, and transient human needs, but is always and necessarily, by its most inner motions— that is, by the activity whereby society shapes itself and becomes transparent to itself—a discipline belonging to the symbolic, existing in a permanent state of indebtedness to an “opening” that itself cannot create.1 Far from recommending or, worse, legitimizing theocracy—that is, the blurring of borders between the theological and the political, and consequently the dominion of one over the other—the theologico- political is constructed here as a permanent paradox in human existence. Human existence runs between immanence and transcendence, between biological existence and the inescapable awareness of death and finitude that forces upon us questions about meaning which, in one way or another, problematize the possibility of living our lives in a fixed horizontality that recognizes no need for transcendence, no metaphysical anguish, no sense of the contradictions of human existence. To think in terms of the theologico-political invites us to dwell in this uncomfortable paradox, with its perpetual tension between the gravity-like force that pulls us down to earth—the awareness of our materiality, pain, and this-worldly needs—and the human exceptionality made possible by language, which propels us toward meaning, an enterprise classical thought captured as the search for the good, the just, and the beautiful.

The next couple of chapters try to investigate the specific context wherein the driving question of this study, that concerning Catholic political action in postsecular societies, unfolds. Somewhat artificially,

I divide this context into its “secular” and “theological” elements, without this meaning that they are autonomous with respect to each other. My goal is rather to show how the stories of Western secularity, on

1 Lefort 1988, 222. 71 the one hand, and of Catholic political thought in and after the Second Vatican Council, are knitted together.

Obviously, this does not mean Catholicism is only European nor that Western modernity is nothing but

Catholic. Advancing this would be a sterile simplification. What I suggest is rather that the lens of the theologico-political allows us to see how the emergence of the secular world was highly influenced by the theological and, specifically, by Christianity; and, second, that any reading of the last Catholic council which fails to see that its ruptures and continuities were in large part caused by a dialogue with, and no longer against, the modern world, is doomed to render the council unintelligible.

This chapter focuses on Charles Taylor’s theory of secularity. In the first two sections I provide an exposition of his thought, focusing first on his epistemology and theory of language, and then focusing on his understanding of “secularity.”2 In the third section I briefly sketch Joseph Ratzinger’s model of two modernities, and its close affinity with Eric Voegelin’s critique of Gnosticism. In the fourth section I present three main commentaries on Taylor’s work. In the last section I offer a summary and conclusions to the chapter.

I

[1] In his Philosophical Papers, Taylor describes his work as that of a “monomaniac.”3 His thought revolves around the critique of a dominant point of view, a way of observing, studying, and understanding things that, while undoubtedly a powerful approach to the natural world, has obscured and restricted the study of human beings. His first book, The Explanation of Behaviour, is a critique of behaviorism,4 which imports the methods of the natural sciences, disregarding the peculiarity of each subject. Science, in Taylor’s opinion, is a powerful tool to improve our understanding of the world we live in, to better grasp the reality we are embedded in. But this perspective is not the ultimate stage in humanity’s journey towards knowledge.5 In fact, science is possible only as a particular way of looking at reality. Moreover, the

2 Taylor distinguishes between the church-state separation (or “secularity 1”), “secularization theory” (or “secularity 2”), and the fact that we live in a world where religion is but one option among many (or “secularity 3”). Secularization theory has three components: factual claims that religious belief and practice have declined; explanations of why this has happened; and the place of religion today (secularity 3). See Taylor 2007, 1-4, 423- 424. 3 Taylor 1985, 1. 4 For a discussion of Taylor’s critique of behaviorism see Abbey 2000, 63ff, and Blakely 2016, chapter 3, especially 45-47. 5 For a critique, from the perspective of theology, of the claim that the “scientific point of view” is the only one able of providing us with “knowledge,” see O’Collins 2013, 83-90. 72 conditions of possibility of this way of cognizing the world rest upon a pre-conceptual engagement with the world, not as a collection of readily discernible and classifiable ideas, but as the “world” in which we are thrown, a world from within which each one of us looks, perceives, and thinks.

Human thinking is made possible through language and, consequently, “language makes possible science.”6 Obviously, the diversity of linguistic communities7 leads us to think that different languages will disclose different “worlds.” Therefore, the problem of truth and realism arises: How can we say that there is one intelligible reality if, from the moment we are born, our thought is shaped by a language that mediates our access to reality? This section unpacks Taylor’s attack on the attempts to impose the methods of the natural sciences upon the human disciplines, and his alternative account, namely, a “pluralistic robust realism”8 in epistemology, and his adherence to constitutive theories of language. In my opinion, we need to focus on Taylor’s epistemology and theory of language in order to understand the foundations of his thought, which inform both his theory of secularism and even, I suspect, his religious views.

The question concerning knowledge can be found everywhere in human history.9 For Plato, the sensuous world presents us only with shadows, nothing but opaque reflections of the truly real Ideas. His famous allegory of the cave shows how by means of a long and painful educational process the individual is first released from the shackles of sensuous perception, only to be set on a rough ascension towards the contemplation of truth. Plato claims that “in the knowable realm, the last thing to be seen is the form of the good, and it is seen only with toil and trouble.”10 For Aristotle, knowledge happens when the human intellect

(nous) captures the form (eidos) which is appropriate to a particular object, that is, when both intellect and object are brought to the same eidos.11 Scholasticism, in the Middle Ages, was made possible by the

6 Taylor 2005, 438. 7 What Taylor means by “language” includes not only words, but practices, symbols, metaphors, and rituals. These uses of language are discussed as the “figuring” dimension of language, as well as its constitutive function (Taylor 2016, Chapters 5-7). Facial and bodily expressions also convey meaning, even in the absence of actual words (Taylor 1985, 219). 8 Dreyfus and Taylor 2015, 154. 9 In spite of this ubiquity of language, the modern “linguistic turn” that the works of thinkers like Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ferdinand de Saussure made possible has intensified the importance of language not only for the human sciences, but even in the natural field. For example, , a philosopher deeply influenced by Wittgenstein, defines “linguistic philosophy” as “the view that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved (or dissolved) either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use” (Rorty 1992, 3). 10 Plato, Republic, 517a. 11 Dreyfus and Taylor 2015, 17-18.

73 encounter of Christianity with Greek thought. Thomas Aquinas, to mention the most prominent Medieval theologian, built his own system upon Aristotle.

The transition from scholastic to modern epistemology found a crucial development in Descartes.

At the heart of the Cartesian epistemology we find the “ideas,” which are a “particular kind of inner, mental entity which are marked out from the external ones in that they are in certain respects immune to skeptical argument.”12 Descartes’s goal was to build knowledge upon solid foundations, free of the prejudices and taken-for-granted falsities inherited from an unquestioned tradition. In order to do so, he needed to find a cornerstone, a piece of knowledge the truthfulness of which was so evident and beyond doubt that the whole edifice of human knowledge could be built upon it. He found this incontrovertible evidence in the thinking subject, in his famous cogito ergo sum. Notwithstanding Descartes’s piety, his epistemology watered down

God’s role, bringing Him from a position as the source of truth (John 14:6) to a silent guarantor of an intelligible cosmos:

[T]hat the things we grasp very clearly and very distinctly are all true, is assured only because God is or exists, and because he is a perfect Being, and because everything that is in us comes from him; whence it follows that our ideas and notions, being real things and coming from God, in so far as they are clear and distinct, cannot to this extent be other than true.13

The real proof for the truthfulness of an idea happens inside the mind: only ideas that are clear and distinct are true. That God warrants this condition will turn out to be an unnecessary metaphysical warranty. The important stuff happens inside the mind, as Descartes makes clear in the Meditations: “if, whenever I have to make a judgment, I restrain my will so that it extends to what the intellect clearly and distinctly reveals, and no further, then it is quite impossible for me to go wrong.”14 What has changed is the direction of the proof: for Cartesian epistemology, the certainty that ideas come from God is demonstrated by a human mental operation that discloses the clearness and distinctiveness of ideas.15

12 Ibid., 7. 13 Descartes, Discourse on Method, IV. 14 Descartes, Meditations, 2:46, quoted in Patterson 2008, 216; see Taylor 1989, 157: “God’s existence is a theorem in my system of perfect science.” 15 John Paul II explains that “after Descartes, philosophy became a science of pure thought: all esse—both the created world and the Creator— remained within the ambit of the cogito as the content of human consciousness. Philosophy now concerned itself with beings qua content of consciousness and not qua existing independently of it” (2005, 8).

74

Taylor and Dreyfus refer to the group of theories that rely on the Cartesian ideas as “mediational” theories. This tradition was furthered by the works of and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac. All mediational theories share four presuppositions. First, the “only through” structure: knowledge of what is

“outside” our minds/organisms “comes about only through some features in the mind/organism.”16

Secondly, the content of our knowledge can be analyzed, because it is composed of definite, discontinuous elements, whether ideas (Descartes) or sentences held true (Rorty). We cannot, thirdly, go beyond these ideas or sentences. And, finally, mediational theories assume a mind/body, mental/physical distinction.17

Against this picture, Dreyfus and Taylor offer two main criticisms. First, they contend that the inside/outside (I/O) account of mediational theories does not hold when carefully analyzed. Descartes’s method—never accept as true what is not evidently so; proceed analytically, i.e., divide a problem into as many parts as necessary; advance in order, from the simplest to the more complex; and review the process to avoid omissions18—imagines an objective, disengaged inquirer who, in order to know, must abstract everything that makes her the subject she is. The problem with this picture is, as we said above, that the very possibility of the disengaged thinking assumed by mediational theories is given by a non-conceptual, engaged experiencing of the world. In Heideggerian terms, we can say that “grasping things as neutral objects is one of our possibilities only against the background of a way of being in the world in which things are disclosed as ready-to hand. Grasping things neutrally requires modifying our stance to them, which primitively has to be one of involvement.”19 This enables us to argue against the primacy of the scientific point of view, and to claim that this perspective is only one among many ways to engage with reality.

Heidegger claims:

Dasein is never “initially” a sort of a being which is free from being-in, but which at times is in the mood to take up a “relation” to the world. This taking up of relations to the world is possible only because, as being- in-the-world, Dasein is as it is. This constitution of being is not first derived from the fact that besides the being which has the character of Dasein there are other beings which are objectively present and meet up with it. These other beings can only “meet up” “with” Dasein because they are able to show themselves of their own accord within a world.20

16 Dreyfus and Taylor 2015, 10. 17 Ibid., 11. 18 Descartes, Discourse on Method, I. 19 Dreyfus and Taylor 2015, 35. 20 Heidegger, Being and Time, I.II, 57-58. 75

Mediational epistemologies ignore that human beings are never unconstrained, that our position in the world matters. To exist in the world is, in this sense, to have been thrown. As Katherine Withy explains: “to be thrown is to have a starting-point, somewhere we are located… The though is that a starting-point is always something that we already have, and so something that we find ourselves ‘stuck with’… A human life is never neutral or undetermined but always has some definite content already.” 21 This notion of “thrownness” informs Taylor and Dreyfus’s “contact theory” of knowledge, according to which disengaged modes of knowing are always preceded by engaged ones. By “engagement,” the authors mean that “the world of the agent is shaped by his or her form of life, or history, or bodily existence.”22

An important characteristic of contact theories is that knowledge cannot be deemed the product of the individual, as in the Cartesian model of clear and distinct ideas. This is the second critique made to mediational theories: “at the most basic, preconceptual level, the understanding I have of the world is not simply one constructed or determined by me. It is a ‘co-production’ of me and the world. That’s what it means to say that our grasp of the world at this level is not in us but in the interaction, the interspace of our dealings with things.”23 Rather than monological, knowledge is dialogical, insofar as it requires a linguistic community on the basis of which understanding becomes possible.24 This second critique makes explicit the relation between knowledge and language, which Taylor explores in his most recent book, The Language

Animal.

[2] The opposition between “enframing” and “constitutive” theories of language corresponds to the opposition between the Hobbes-Locke-Condillac (HLC) and Hamman-Herder-Humboldt (HHH) traditions of language. The HLC tradition of language is informed by a Cartesian epistemology. In Hobbes’s linguistics, “the general use of speech is to transfer our mental discourse, into verbal.”25 Words express an

21 Withy 2011, 62. 22 Dreyfus and Taylor 2015, 92, cf. Taylor 1995, 25: “our sense of ourselves as embodied agents is constitutive of our experience.” 23 Ibid., 93. 24 Alasdair MacIntyre has a similar argument: “Wants, satisfactions, and preferences never appear in human life as merely psychological, premoral items to which we can appeal as providing data that are neutral between rival moral claims. Why not? In every culture emotions and desires are norm-governed. Learning what the norms are, learning how to respond to the emotions and desires of others, and learning what to expect from others if we exhibit certain types and degrees of emotion or desire are three parts of one and the same task” (MacIntyre 1988, 76). 25 Taylor 2016, 103.

76 idea that has been already formulated in the mind. Locke reified the mind26 as a fabric of ideas which combine to build the edifice of human knowledge.27 The HLC view is a monological account of language where an individual exposed to sensory data interprets information in the intimacy of the mind. This demystified account of language resembles, Taylor claims, contractual theories of the state: just as a view of language where the individual is deemed to possess control over meaning—insofar as meaning is a product of individual creativity—in the political realm the state is no longer conceived as a reflection of the cosmos, or a micro-cosmos itself,28 but as the product of human freedom.

This account of the origin of language is, Taylor claims, unrealistic. What distinguishes human beings from other evolved animals is our ability to go beyond the pairing of word and meaning, our capacity to reach the underlying intentionality. The transmission of language from parents to their children does not happen word by word, but more precisely as a sharing of a whole “world” that is understood not as “my parent’s view of things,” but as the way the world is.29 This intimate relationship involves not only words, but also a shared emotional bonding called “communion.”30

For HHH theories, on the other hand, there is more in language than just the ability to describe things, that is, to capture objects linguistically. Language provides us with the ability to relate to others socially, to join others in the construction of “human meanings,” as opposed to “life meanings.”31 But it also opens the possibility for articulating different patterns of relationship, as well as the constitutive force of language, that is, its ability to shape and reshape our reality in conversation. This view opposes the atomist view according to which the acquisition of language happens “inside” the individual, as well as the idea that language occurs as the consequence of mental processes, that is to say, that the acquisition of a word attests to the mental process by which an “idea” is produced. In Herder’s theory of language two new elements are

26 Ibid., 107. 27 Reification is produced by two perspectives: the notion of “simple” ideas, which are produced by breaking down the input into basic data—what Taylor calls the “T perspective”—and a mechanistic picture by which the mind passively receives uninterpreted data, or the “M perspective.” (Ibid). 28 Eric Voegelin explains that, for Plato, “society must exist as an ordered cosmion, as a representative of cosmic order, before it can indulge in the luxury of also representing a truth of the soul” (Voegelin 1952, 61). On the distinction between “chaos” and “cosmos” see Eliade 1987, 29ff. 29 Taylor 2016, 65. 30 “[T]he fundamental point that emerges from the ontogenesis of language is that it can only be imparted from within relations of shared emotional bonding, what we might call ‘communion.’ Language cannot be generated from within; it can only come to the child from her milieu—although once it is mastered innovation becomes possible.” (Ibid, 55). 31 “Life meanings are modes of significance that things can have for an organism or agent who pursues certain goals or purposes which can be identified from outside even by beings who don’t share these purposes… [H]uman or metabiological meanings… concern goals, purposes, and discriminations of better or worse, which can’t be defined in terms of objectively recognizable states or patterns.” (Ibid, 91).

77 present: first, the notion of “aboutness,” which implies that individual impressions, sensations, etc., have the meaning they have only insofar as they relate to somewhere, thus bringing to the fore the notion of

“background”; and secondly, the concept of “holism” which implies that the meaning of a word is conditioned by larger, more comprehensive language practices, “which are ultimately embedded in a form of life.”32 That’s what Wittgenstein has in mind when he claims that “to imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.”33 In short, the way we acquire language resembles not a child picking apples and putting them in an ever-growing basket, but the same child joining an immense puzzle game that has already started, striving to cope with a world that irremediably precedes him and imposes its rules upon him.

There are times when what we are trying to express is not readily available in words. Some novel experiences demand, so to speak, to be articulated. This process of articulation brings about something radically new, instead of just pairing objects with words. Think, for example, of the ways the horrors of

World War II were rendered into words, the painful attempts to “make sense” or even “talk about” the

Shoah. Two elements are present here: first, the experience of the radically new that needs to be put into words and, secondly, that these experiences are often of a normative kind or, to use Taylor’s terminology, that they raise “strong evaluations,” where “the valued reality comes across as such that our not appreciating it, far from undermining its value, would on the contrary reflect negatively on our ability to perceive it.”34

A terrifying example is found in Primo Levi’s If This is a Man. Levi tries to understand Pannwitz’s attitudes and looks. Pannwitz, a Nazi, recognizes that the man in front of him (Primo Levi) possesses the characteristics of the human species; but there is, however, something about the latter that perplexes him.

This perplexity arises from the intuition that the look between them “was not one between two men.”35 The radical distinction between the two men is given by the fact that, for Pannwitz, what is in front of him

“belongs to a species which it is obviously opportune to suppress.”36 The absurdity of this thought, its not making any sense, is felt everywhere in the books and movies about the concentration camps: extermination

32 Ibid., 17. 33 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §19. 34 Taylor 2016, 192-193. 35 Levi 1959, 123. 36 Ibid.

78 didn’t add up. This nonsensicality disrupts the “world,” our basic understanding of how things work, and thus demands an explanation which cannot be but normative. Another example is Augustine’s conversion.

In his intimate dialogue with God, he acknowledges: “I was in conflict with myself and was dissociated with myself.”37 Dragged by a divine inspiration, he opens the book of Romans and finally converts.

Augustine becomes a wholly new human being, one who can say “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Here we do not have an individual “choosing” or “joining” a new religion. This is not a matter of choice, but an existential imperative: not believing is lying to himself, being less of the man than he could be. This is a strong evaluation, and one that, in the case of Augustine, is accompanied by a

“hypergood,”38 namely, God as the good that orders his whole life and organizes his whole value system.

Clearly, in Taylor’s thought there are some meanings that escape the domain of individual preference or taste, pointing beyond the self towards a sense of fullness that calls, so to speak, for adherence.

The importance of these goals or goods is that they capture something inherently worthy for human beings.

Here we reach a complex problem: how is it possible to reconcile the fact of our embeddedness in a world, which ineluctably shapes our understanding of reality in ways that are at least difficult to understand to those who stand outside my linguistic/epistemological community, while at the same time defending the possibility of making value judgements, that is, to say that some goods/values/actions are “better” than others?39

[3] In an article discussing Taylor’s theory of truth, Richard Rorty criticizes the former’s theory of hypergoods as untenable when one accepts the linguistic turn and the fact that our descriptions are not irrelevant to the truth predicated of them. Rorty asks: “can we distinguish the role of our describing activity, our use of words, and the role of the rest of the universe, in accounting for the truth of our true beliefs? I do not see how we can,” and concludes by claiming that “when the thing-in-itself goes, correspondence goes

37 Augustine, Confessions, VIII-24. 38 “[G]oods which not only are incomparably more important than others but provide the standpoint from which these must be weighed, judged, decided about” Taylor 1989, 63ff. Cf. Abbey 2000, 35-36. 39 Taylor 2007, 544.

79 too.”40 Taylor’s answer is built upon the suspicion that, first, Rorty largely ignores the idea of a

“background,” of the inarticulate in our language and, as a consequence, he remains imprisoned in a representationalist or mediationalist view of knowledge that denies “some crucial common-sense distinction between reality and our picture of it: the world as it is versus the world as we see it.”41 If all we have are representations in our minds, then it follows that we can never escape this world to get in touch with the world-as-such, or as it really is. In fact, Rorty deems the former distinction nonsensical, and aims to drop the empiricist dogma of the scheme-content distinction. However, Taylor claims that “the assumption that underlies this inference is that the only way to make sense of the distinction would be to disaggregate and isolate somehow a component of pure precategorized reality, which could then somehow be compared or related to language.”42 Taylor claims we cannot escape our embeddedness in a linguistic world so as to compare what we say of things and what things actually are. But this does not mean human beings are unable to judge between better or worse descriptions—e.g. the notion that the sun is not a planet or the permanent confrontation between higher and lower forms of freedom, what Taylor calls “la lotta continua.”

In the case of science, Taylor and Hubert Dreyfus defend a view they call “robust realism,” which claims that the descriptions made by science are not just useful schemas that allow us to take advantage of nature, irrespective of how well they grasp nature’s constitution. Scientific progress improves our understanding of how the world actually works.43

However, since we are discussing human meanings, we need to recognize the plurality associated with linguistic communities. Taylor and Dreyfus embrace a “pluralistic robust realism,” using the

Gadamerian idea of the “fusion of horizons” to make pluralism and the search for truth/reality compatible.

For Hans-Georg Gadamer, that we are always immersed in a particular background (or “horizon”) does not preclude communication among horizons. To think of worldviews as unintelligible to each other is, Taylor warns, dangerous,44 for

40 Rorty 1998, 87. 41 Taylor 2003, 168. 42 Ibid., 172. 43 Cf. Taylor 1995, 42. 44 Taylor 1991, 78. Taylor recognizes, however, that “perhaps there is no way, in the end, of arbitrating between [different cultural values] when they clash. Perhaps they are quite incommensurable… so we might be forced to recognize that certain goods are only such granted the existence of humans within a certain cultural form… I think this is a real possibility, but I doubt if it is true” (Taylor 1989, 60-61).

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[t]he differences of behavior are then often simply coded as bad versus good. For the more unsophisticated conquistadors, the Aztecs had to be seen as worshipping the devil. It’s simple, compadres, you either worship God or the devil. Ripping out hearts, is that worshipping God? It follows…45

Instead of shutting oneself from others with different views, Gadamer claims human beings “allow ourselves to be interpolated by the other,”46 a move he calls “openness.” When I open myself to the other, trying to understand her not in my own categories but, to the best of my abilities, in her own words, the possibility for our horizons to fuse opens. It is this dialogical activity where human beings connect with each other that

Taylor deems a moral ideal insofar as it takes into account the unavoidable plurality that emerges from our linguistic condition but refuses to concede a relativistic solution to the human problem, striving instead to keep open the possibilities for communication, and, consequently, for impregnation among horizons.

Taylor rejects the imposition of the natural sciences’ method as the paradigm for the study of human affairs. He also rejects mediational epistemologies for falsely atomizing the creation of ideas, thus missing the dialogical dimension of knowledge, as well as the dependence of knowledge and language on

“backgrounds” or “horizons,” upon which meaning is generated. Against mediational epistemologies and

HLC theories of language, he defends a pluralistic realism that recognizes the problem of the diversity of languages while rejecting the relativist conclusion of the impossibility of truth. Science has brought about important developments to provide a better explanation of the natural world. As for the human world,

Taylor’s theory of strong evaluations and hypergoods presupposes the necessary confrontation between higher and lower views of human flourishing.

II

The question that inaugurates Taylor’s A Secular Age is: “Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say, 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy, but even inescapable?”47 This section analyzes the notions of “modernity” and “secularity” in Taylor’s most

45 Taylor 2003, 174. 46 Dreyfus and Taylor 2015, 126. 47 Taylor 2007, 25.

81 celebrated works, Sources of the Self and A Secular Age. What happened in those five hundred years was, according to Taylor, a combination of a negative moment—the fading away of the enchanted world—and a positive one—the rise of exclusive as an alternative.48

[1] Towards the end of The City of God, Augustine discusses supernatural events. Focusing on a story recorded by Pliny about an inextinguishable lamp in a temple dedicated to Venus, he suggests three possible explanations for them: either the device involved some kind of inextinguishable material, or the lamp was contrived by some magical art, or it was the work of demons:

For the demons are enticed to take up their habitations by the action of created beings, created not by them, but by God. These created beings offer to the demons what suits their various tastes. As spirits, they are enticed not by food, as animals are, but by such symbols as are appropriate to them: by stones of various kinds, and by herbs, wood, animals, songs and rites… But, above all, the demons possess the hearts of mortals and are especially proud of this possession when they transform themselves into angels of light… Many things are done by demons.49

Throughout the book we learn that the pagan gods were not just human inventions designed to serve a political goal. The Roman gods were demons who, while capable of cunning and deceiving human beings, were useless and powerless when summoned to aid and defend the city.50 In Augustine’s world demons coexisted with human beings, always waiting for the moment to ambush them, making them fall into sin and corruption. Human beings feared them, not least because they could be everywhere, disguised even as angels of light. They could do many things. In this world, a prudent person would not only lock the doors and windows of her house—as Hobbes would suggest eight hundred years later51—she would also protect herself against invisible enemies, dark magic, and unknown powers by seeking God’s protection, which became tangible in certain blessed objects, words, and prayers.

Augustine lived in an enchanted world, one where the forces of good and evil, in the form of angelical and diabolical beings, could influence the material world. Not only was the earth the point where human and supernatural beings converged, it was also a place where objects could be charged with magical

48 Ibid., 234. 49 Augustine, The City of God, XXI-6. 50 Ibid., II-13, 29 and III-17-20. 51 Hobbes, Leviathan, VI.

82 powers, or be magical themselves. The loss of that world, the difficulty we moderns experience in understanding its fears and magical dynamics, is one part of Taylor’s story about the emergence of a secular time. This is the process Taylor calls, following Weber, disenchantment.52 Certainly, disenchantment is not the same as atheism. The loss of the enchanted world didn’t do away with God, although it certainly challenged the traditional ways in which the divinity acted upon the world. The story of disenchantment is thus one about the estrangement between God and humanity caused by a double movement: the substitution of the “porous” self by the “buffered” one, and the move from a God who actively shapes society to Deism and, finally, to an impersonal natural order.

To exist in a cosmos implies that the meaning of things is given from the outside, independent of us. A cosmos is a meaningful order which we human beings must strive to replicate in our own lives, as individuals and as societies.53 There is in the world’s design, so to speak, a blueprint of the nature and order of things. Mircea Eliade claims that “the experience of sacred space makes possible the ‘founding of the world’: where the sacred manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world comes into existence.”54

Any creating act implies a superabundance of reality,55 which is nothing but “the irruption of the sacred into the world.”56 This experience of living in a cosmos supported the enchanted world of the Middle Ages. Only where meanings are independent of the individual can an enchanted world exist. And to this world corresponded a particular kind of human existence, which Taylor refers to as the “porous self,” that is, one for whom meanings are not in the mind, but outside, “in things, or in various kinds or extra-human but intra- cosmic subjects.”57 I can be affected, for example, by witchcraft, insofar as I can fell prey to a curse that forces me to perform evil actions which otherwise I would be reluctant to carry out. To protect me against

52 Taylor 2007, 446. 53 Ibid., 60. 54 Eliade 1987, 63. 55 See Ratzinger 2006c, 79ff. 56 Eliade 1987, 45. This process is evident in the narratives about the founding of Israel. From the moment that God disclosed Himself to Moses in the burning bush, an intimate relationship between him and land is made (Ex 3:5). The land where God is, is holy. After being liberated from its captivity, under the Egyptian yoke, God gave instructions for the construction of his sacred dwelling (Ex 25:10ff), which will find a definite place in the temple built by Solomon (1 Kings 6). Jacob Neusner explains the importance of the Temple in the mindset of Israel: “The priest perceived the Temple as the center of the world: beyond it he saw in widening circles the less holy, then the unholy, and further still, the unclean” (Neusner 1993, 114; cf. Eliade 1987, 42-3). Diaspora will change this relationship between land and holiness, spiritualizing the notion of the temple, so to speak, to the point that “when I keep these rules, which the Torah lays down for the holy people, I can act as though every place is holy… It is one way of acting out what it means to be a kingdom of priests and a holy people” (Neusner, 126). Christianity will adopt this spiritualization. Paul, for example, exhorts the city of Corinth by asking: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you…?” (1 Cor 6:19). 57 Taylor 2007, 33.

83 this curse, on the other hand, I can use a talisman, or carry a relic. The extreme version of this porosity can be found in the popular fear of the devil’s power. In the Middle Ages, the presence of the devil pervaded the whole life of the Christian, from birth to death, as was manifest in the rites of Christian initiation.

Consider, for example, the transition from the view that, in the early church, “the state of original sin was akin to that of one bewitched,”58 and thus required the practice of an exorcism before the child could enter the church to receive the sacrament, to Joseph Ratzinger’s understanding of sin as a rejection of relationality, as the refusal to acknowledge our essential incompleteness, our need for God: “sin begets sin… all the sins of history are interlinked. Theology refers to this state of affairs by the certainly misleading and imprecise term ‘original sin.’”59 The same can be seen in the medieval rite of marriage, where the fear of diabolical harm or even possession led to the priest’s intervention, blessing, for example, the marriage bed (benedictio thalami).60

How, then, was this porous self abandoned and substituted for a “buffered,” disengaged one? To answer this question, we must examine two moral transformations that brought about modernity, namely, inwardness and the affirmation of ordinary life. The story runs from Plato to Augustine, Descartes and,

Locke. Plato’s contribution was mainly the “centering or unification of the moral self,”61 which Taylor deems a precondition for the emergence of the internalized self. In contrast to the Homeric idea of the fragmented self—e.g. the hero’s self being divinely infused—Plato espouses the dichotomies of soul/body, eternal/changing that will become, in Augustine’s thought, the inside/outside distinction. Augustine will remain a Platonist in his dualism, as well as in his granting of pre-eminence to the mind over the body. For him

That by which humans are ranked above animals, whatever it is, be it more correctly called “mind” or “spirit” or both—we find both terms in Scripture—if it dominates and commands the rest of what a human consists in, then that human being is completely in order.62

58 Bossy 1985, 14. 59 Ratzinger 1995a, 72. In other work, Ratzinger claims that “original sin is not an assertion about a natural deficiency in or concerning man, but a statement about a relationship that can be meaningfully formulated only in the context of the God-man relationship” (Ratzinger 1983, 69). Ratzinger is drawing from Augustine’s doctrine of sin. Herbert A. Deane explains that, for Augustine, “Sin is disobedience and revolt—man’s turning away from God and from His will and His commands, and making himself and his own will and desires the center of his existence. Sin is man’s refusal to accept his status as a creature, superior to all other earthly creatures but subordinate to God. So the root cause of sin, of falling away from God and from goodness and toward evil, is man’s prideful self-centeredness” (Deane 1963, 16-17). 60 Bossy, 1985, 22. 61 Taylor 1989, 120. 62 Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, I:8.

84

Knowing God requires, for Augustine, a movement that originates at the soul’s depth, where God dwells in the form of a subtle but firm voice which allows us to “see”: “God is not just what we long to see, but what powers the eye which sees.”63 Moral perfection can only come from within, as a movement of the will that seeks to live rightly and honorably, as well as attaining the highest wisdom.64 As we saw in the previous chapter, Augustine placed full responsibility on the freedom of the will when confronted with the problem of evil.65

We have already seen how Descartes’s new epistemology boosted the anthropocentric turn. In the first place, he identified the source of morality within individuals, since a source of morality which lies outside of the self does not comply with the requirement of clarity and distinctiveness. This was a crucial step for modernity. The individual is deemed capable of discovering what is good by digging inside of herself, instead of contemplating the cosmic “order of things.” Insofar as she is able, through her own reason—and following the proper method—to unveil clear and distinct ideas, the truthfulness of which is undeniable because the way they were produced makes them self-evident, it can be said that she is capable of self-mastery, which “consists in our lives being shaped by the orders that our reasoning capacity constructs according to the appropriate standards.”66 The use of such a method presses for inwardness in a second way: it forces upon us an “inside/outside” distinction, where the observing subject is completely detached from the observed object. The distance that is created makes “control” over our observations possible, conceiving a manipulable object that is subjected to critical assessment. In this new relationship, nature is conquered and subjugated, and every independent meaning it may have for human beings is obliterated.

In Locke’s epistemology, finally, the mind is reified as a machine where the whole process of creating ideas happens. While rejecting the Cartesian theory of innate ideas in the mind, Locke pushed disengagement further. In Taylor’s words

radical reflexivity is central to this stance, because we have to focus on first-person experience in order so to transpose it. The point of the whole operation is to gain a kind of control. Instead of being swept along to

63 Taylor 1989, 129. 64 Augustine, On the Free Choice of the Will, I:12. 65 See Kotsko 2017, 110-111. 66 Taylor 1989, 147.

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error by the ordinary bent of our experience, we stand back from it, withdraw from it, reconstrue it objectively, and then learn to draw defensible conclusions from it… We fix experience in order to deprive it of its power, a source of bewitchment and error.67

In contrast with the medieval porous self, enmeshed in a complex network of forces and relationships that included magic, non-human agents, and charged objects, the buffered self “has pushed this disengagement much further, and has been induced to do so by the same mix of motivations: the search for control intertwined with a certain conception of knowledge.”68

[2] Disenchantment and the buffered self are closely tied with the Reformation. In many ways, the modern age is the daughter of this huge movement inside Christianity. Taylor claims, indeed, that

“[d]isenchantment, Reform, and personal religion went together.”69 This does not mean that the Protestant movement should be understood as the only one advocating for change in a static, medieval world. The need for reform was a constant worry in Christendom.70 However, with the Reformation this anxiety for change veered towards disenchantment, the buffered self and, in some cases, Deism.

Luther’s project started as an insider’s critique, a cry for an urgent change inside the church.71 The system of indulgences—which was from the beginning at the heart of Luther’s concerns—had arisen as a consequence of a change in the way the sacrament of reconciliation was seen. The obligation imposed on the faithful by the fourth Lateran Council, in 1215, to confess their sins at least once in a year, stated that absolution wasn’t complete until the penitent had made visible acts of reparation for his sin. However, it seems that by the fifteenth century “sacramental penance was largely symbolic.”72 Indulgences came to fill the void left by strict reparation, and quickly became an important source of resources for the church’s projects, such as the crusades or church-building. Luther saw in this system a sign of the corruption spreading throughout , and thus eventually confronted the Roman curia, giving way to the most important schism in Western Christianity.

67 Ibid., 163. 68 Taylor 1989, 161. Cf. Gordon 2008, 650. 69 Taylor 2007, 146. 70 Ibid., 243-244. 71 In “An Open Letter to Pope Leo X,” Luther emphasizes: “I have never alienated myself from Your Blessedness to such an extent that I should not with all my heart wish you and your see every blessing.” Luther’s attack is on the Roman Curia, which has become “more corrupt than any Babylon or Sodom ever was,” with the Pope sitting “as a lamb in the midst of wolves.” (Luther 1962, 43-52). 72 Bossy 1985, 47-49. 86

Disgusted not only with the practice of simony, but with what he saw as an increasing alienation of the hierarchical church from its flock, Luther virulently attacked the distinction between “higher” and

“lower” vocations, that is, the idea that priests and monks lived authentically holy lives, while the rest, too weak to follow Christ properly, settled for marriage and family life.73 Instead, Luther considered priesthood an office providing a service to the whole community, which conferred no special charisma:

Those who exercise secular authority have been baptized like the rest of us, and have the same faith and the same gospel; therefore we must admit that they are priests and bishops. They discharge their office as an office of the Christian community, and for the benefit of that community… It follows that the status of a priest among Christians is merely that of an office-bearer; while he holds the office he exercises it; if he be deposed he resumes his status in the community and becomes like the rest. Certainly a priest is no longer a priest after being unfrocked. Yet the Romanists have devised the claim to characteres indelebiles, and assert that a priest, even if deposed, is different from a mere layman. They even hold the illusion that a priest can never be anything else than a priest, and therefore never a layman again. All these are human inventions and regulations.74

It is easy to hear in the quote above strong echoes of the democratic revolution. Not only did Luther defend universal equality among Christians, he also made priesthood an office dependent upon the community.

Now, since the distinction between the priest and the layman was cancelled, a redefinition of Christian life was necessary. The Reformation meant, thus, a revalorization of family life, work, and everyday life. This is the second moral source in Taylor’s story of modernity, what he calls ordinary life. For Protestantism, labor became a path to holiness, and the real mark of holiness was displaced from the kind of activity to the spirit in which that activity was done.75 The emphasis is displaced from the distinction between higher and lower activities to a universalistic revalorization of labor where what counts is how my job is done. This renewed ethics of praxis will find in a natural ally, especially among Puritans and :

The Quaker ethic also holds that a man’s life in his calling is an exercise in ascetic virtue, a proof of his state of grace through his conscientiousness, which is expressed in the care and method with which he pursues his calling… In the Puritan concept of the calling the emphasis is always placed on this methodical character of worldly asceticism, not, as with Luther, on the acceptance of the lot which God has irretrievably assigned to man.76

73 Taylor 2007, 104-105. 74 Luther 1962, 408-9. 75 Taylor 1989, 224. 76 Weber 2003, 161-162; see Taylor 1989, 146. In the same vein, Tocqueville will claim that: “In the United States professions are more or less unpleasant, more or less lucrative, but they are never high or low. Every honest profession is honorable” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, II.II.18:523).

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Taylor mentions three main axes of the religious renewal that are related to the Reformation project.77

Devotion was internalized, in part as a consequence of the movement we described as “inwardness.” In the second place, and because of the disenchantment of the world, sacraments became increasingly symbolic, gradually losing their character as visible manifestations of Christ’s power, that is, efficacious signs of God’s grace.78 Finally, Protestantism introduced the radically new notion of salvation by faith, according to which not the sacraments, but faith in them, in what they stand for, is what actually saves the person. We can thus understand Luther’s claim that “baptism justifies nobody, and gives advantage to nobody; rather, faith in the word of the promise to which baptism was conjoined, is what justifies, and so completes, that which the baptism signified.”79

[3] To the increasingly disengaged self corresponded a more and more ornamental divinity. Human beings being deprived of, or disappointed in, the enchanted order, didn’t deny God altogether. Belief in God remained something close to a constant in the West but was gradually transformed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The first Christian communities didn’t care much about the world, because their expectation was that Christ’s return was imminent. For these early Christians, Jesus’s warning that “the kingdom of God is at hand” (Mark 1:15) was to be understood literally: the end of the world was nigh. Thus, the adoption of an eschatological urgency in life discouraged any efforts to organize the world. However, as time passed the church was confronted with the problem of its role in the world.

As we have seen, the Middle Ages were structured theologically.80 Thomas Aquinas, recall, claimed that eternal law—“the plan of governance of the world existing in God as the ruler of the universe”—is cognoscible as natural law, which is “simply rational creatures’ sharing in the eternal law.”81 Human reason,

77 Taylor 2007, 75-84. 78 Cf., Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1116. 79 Luther 1962, 300. 80 “Things are ordered insofar as they have a specific relation among themselves, but this relation is nothing other than the expression of their relation to the divine end. And, vice versa, things are ordered insofar as they have a certain relation to God, but this relation expresses itself only by means of the reciprocal relation of things… The perfect theocentric edifice of medieval ontology is based on this circle, and does not have any consistency outside of it” (Agamben 2011, 87). 81 Aquinas, Summa I-II, 91.2.

88 he claimed, is kindled by the spark of the divine in order to penetrate the structure of reality. This knowledge carried the conviction that God’s creation was ordered in a discernible way, so that the human city and its laws could mirror the divinely-sanctioned order. This model entered into crisis with the advent of nominalism. William of Ockham challenged the possibility of understanding God’s works, claiming that creation is “an act of sheer grace and is comprehensible only through revelation.”82 Nominalists rejected the existence of universals in the name of God’s spontaneous creational act. This rejection implied that there aren’t final causes in nature, that we are not being directed towards the good by nature.83 If reason is useless to grasp the order of things, and thus our understanding of creation is only possible through God’s revelation, then the idea that we can imitate God’s law carved into nature to build the human world is a project doomed to failure. Nature reveals itself as a neutral thing ready to be used, to be understood instrumentally, but providing no telos. With nominalism, “we have to abandon the attempt to read the cosmos as the locus of signs, reject this as illusion, and adopt the instrumental stance.”84 Nominalism thus created an insurmountable gulf between the realm of God and the human city and opened the way for an instrumental relation with nature, a development that would crystalize in the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Between the two, we can see the crisis and end of the late Middle Ages, and the slow emergence of the modern ethos. But, before trying to define in more detail this new social imaginary, we must complete the story of an important portion of the Wester civilization’s estrangement from God.

Deism85—an intermediate stage in the story of exclusive humanism—was characterized by a watered-down version of religious vitality, as well as of God’s grace.86 At the risk of simplifying, we can see a movement from Jesus command to deny ourselves and take up our cross (Matthew 16:24), that is, a call for total commitment in pursuit of a higher, more perfect existence in the kingdom of God, to a weaker

82 Gillespie 2008, 22. 83 Ibid., 24. 84 Taylor 2007, 98. 85 Ian Leask suggests that the Deists presented by Taylor—Tindal and Toland—are closer to Spinoza than to Locke. This problematizes Taylor’s linkage between Deism and exclusive humanism, since Spinoza’s radical naturalism and the denial of a special status to the mind don’t support the notion of the buffered self. “Indeed, Spinozistic immanence is more like an anti-humanism—probably a far more rigorous anti-humanism than any of its 20th century counterparts” (Leask 2010, 73-74. Cf. Gordon 2008, 671). 86 Jacques Maritain links Deism with a process of misunderstanding of natural law (a “fatal mistake”). “As to God himself, He had only been, from the XVIIth Century on, a superadded guarantor for that trine, self-subsistent absolute: Nature, Reason, Natural Law, which even if God did not exist would still hold sway over men.” This process was eventually to suppress God and substitute it with the “will”: “Natural Law was to be deduced from the so-called autonomy of the Will,” as we find, for example, in Rousseau and Kant (Maritain 1998, 83).

89 version of the divinity as the “essential energizer of that ordering power through which we disenchant the world.”87 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the emphasis was given to morality against zeal. The

Puritan affirmation of ordinary life bolstered the doctrine (e.g. Mandeville, ) that private interest produced harmony at the aggregated level.88 At the same time, the traditional notion of divine providence was assimilated by the assumed correspondence between God’s will and human happiness. Against the doctrine of original sin, the Enlightenment rehabilitated human nature. Even a pessimistic anthropology, such as Hobbes’s, finds the root of human conflict in rationality—i.e., competition for scarce resources, desire of glory, diffidence89—and not in a fallen nature. Rousseau will go further in his Discours sur l’origine et les Fondements de l’inégalité parmi les Hommes, claiming that it is not human nature, but a mischievous , which is to be blamed for the corruption of the human soul. This rehabilitation abandoned Augustine’s pessimistic anthropology and his doctrine that the good we do is nothing but grace— referring to God, he asks: “If someone lists his true merits to you, what is he enumerating before you but your gifts?” 90— and to adopt instead the idea that human potentialities are enough to pursue happiness.

God as a guarantor of a design was quickly reshaped as an impersonal order, that is, one where nature and God’s will merge and become indistinguishable in practice. God speaks through his work, which in modernity has increasingly been observed through instrumental eyes.

[4] Taylor rejects “subtraction stories,” i.e., accounts of modernity as processes of distillation, where

“old horizons were eroded, burned away, and what emerges is the underlying sense of ourselves as individuals.”91 There’s an ever-present temptation to consider our modern society and our own moral imaginary as the evolved ones, or the ones embodying true civilization. Modernity implies, however, not the unfolding of true humanity, nor a linear process from an enchanted, ignorant time to a disenchanted, enlightened one. Modernity is a multi-tracked process, with many dead-ends and counter-movements.

87 Taylor 2007, 233. 88 Ibid., 177. Cf. Taylor 2004a, 70. 89 Hobbes, Leviathan, XIII. 90 Augustine Confessions, IX-34. 91 Taylor 2004a, 64; Taylor 2007, 22. Talal Asad claims, in a similar vein, that “a straightforward narrative of progress from the religious to the secular is no longer acceptable” (Asad 2003, 1). 90

Just as any other human stage in history, modernity can be defined by a set of deep beliefs that inform the lives of those living together in that era, most of the time unconsciously. This is what Taylor calls the modern social imaginary, understood as “the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”92 Three main elements constitute the modern social imaginary, namely the economy, the public sphere, and the sovereign people.

The emergence of the economic sphere as “society’s dominant end”93 is a consequence of the priority of ordinary life, as well as the doctrine of the social harmony of the pursuit of individual interests.

The economy became the arena where free agents pursued individual happiness. This development was made possible by a series of social reforms that brought about “the disciplinary society.” These reforms were designed to attack extreme poverty and foster “civility”—that is, a particular understanding of what a good life is and how it can be achieved—and they promoted an active, effective role of the state in the direction of society.94 The primacy of the economy also meant the atrophy of other social perspectives: the medieval crusader’s ethics, for example, was considered to be infused with the wrong kind of religiosity— superstition, fanaticism or enthusiasm95—as well as being non-utilitarian.96

The public sphere emerged as an arena independent of the government where individuals come out of the private realm to form a metapolitical common space.97 The condition of possibility of the public sphere is, to be sure, the public/private distinction that emerged gradually with the notion of the individual.

Only when we have a notion of the “inner” individual space understood as a place of intimacy can we understand the same individual going “out” to encounter others like him to engage in a common dialogue.

Privacy as the definition of a space that is not shared with others is thus concomitant with modernity:

92 Taylor 2004a, 23. 93 Ibid., 72. 94 See Taylor 2007, Ch. 2. It is telling that Taylor does not mention the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and, specifically, the Decree on Reformation, chapter XVIII of the 23rd Session, that mandated the creation of seminaries. As John O’Malley claims, this decree was “an expression of the widespread war on ignorance that animated both Protestants and Catholics in the sixteenth century” (O’Malley 2013, 258). 95 Ibid., 239. 96 Taylor 2004a, 81. 97 Ibid., 86.

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Whereas the previous relations of promiscuous contact, say, between master and servants reflected perhaps a certain closeness… in the new, narrower circle of more intense relations, intimacy takes on the sense that it has with us, implying the openness and sharing of our deepest and strongest, most “private” feelings.98

It can be asked, however, to what extent this private/public distinction can be traced in the contemporary world. In some way, most moderns accept and defend some notion of privacy that refers to basic liberties, such as those defended by (belief, expression, association, and life plan).99 But the boundaries between public and private are much more elastic. In the United States, for example, the sexual behavior of public servants has often been the object of public scrutiny.100 The rationale of this phenomenon seems to be that there is a connection between private moral behavior and public trustworthiness or reliability. A more complex phenomenon is that of religion: To what extent can religion as praxis be contained in the private sphere? Does it make sense, furthermore, to demand an individual to keep his or her religion out of the sphere of public deliberation, where only the force of reasons that all can understand is accepted? If Taylor’s epistemology is right, the self emerges out of a linguistic community the meanings, values, and the most fundamental ideas of which are constitutive of his or herself. The distinction between private and public, thus, becomes a complex one, since what is more intimate about myself is, ineluctably, related to a larger whole which I cannot change unilaterally. This does not mean there is no longer a space of personal intimacy. All I am trying to say is that demanding the individual to strip herself from what resists being translated into terms “everyone can understand” implies, first, the false assumption that there is, indeed, a “neutral” language where communication is nonideological, and secondly, that it is possible for an individual to deal with her deepest convictions the same way as a taxidermist would distinguish between organs, tissues, and bones.

But this is not a problem exclusive to religion. It is by no means obvious that the liberal creed dwells comfortably in the realm of “reasons we all can accept.” Liberalism uses metaphysical claims when providing us with ideas about what it means to be a human being, what is happiness, what is reasonable,

98 Taylor 2007, 140. 99 Mill, On Liberty, Ch.1. 100 Congressman Vance McAllister, a married man caught kissing a staffer, asked for forgiveness in the following terms: “There’s no doubt I’ve fallen short and I’m asking for forgiveness… I’m asking for forgiveness from God, my wife, my kids, my staff and my constituents who elected me to serve.” Time Magazine, “ Congressman Admits Kissing Staffer in Video,” April 7, 2014. Interestingly, the website Wikipedia has the entry “List of federal political sex scandals in the United States,” from 1776 to 2017, covering from and to Donald J. Trump.

92 and so forth.101 This is true even for a definition that claims that there is no human nature.102 It is not evident why such an “empty” conception of human nature would be less metaphysical than, say, a religious one. As

William Galston claims,

the polity must commit itself to specific views of human personality and right conduct, as well as to a range of external effects on other institutions and practices. In all such cases, neutrality is never violated, because it is never possible. Every polity embodies a more-than-minimal conception of the good that serves to rank- order individual ways of life and competing principles of right conduct.103

The doctrine of popular sovereignty, finally, has been discussed many times in its two most paradigmatic cases, namely, the American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century,104 which are associated, respectively, with the political theory of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In chapter 19 of Locke’s

Second Treatise, the doctrine of popular sovereignty is presented as the consequence of the idea that predates the state, and it is precisely its defense that moves individuals to give up their natural right to punish and transfer it to a state authority. Locke opposes Hobbes’s doctrine of the absolute sovereign legislating ex nihilo, which forbids the subject’s resistance based upon the idea that the covenant makes them authors of all the actions and decisions of the sovereign. The fundamental difference in Locke’s doctrine is the pre-existence of a right that cannot be abrogated by the state. Insofar as it is my natural right to own things, and that I have given up my natural rights to punish enemies for the sole reason of protecting my life and property, the power of the state is limited by the rights it didn’t create, and by a specific mandate by the People. Civil resistance, thus, is the right of a people subjected to a train of abuses. Thus, for Locke

101 Talal Asad discusses Margaret Canovan’s article (1990) on the political values of liberalism. “The central principles of liberalism, she reminds us, rest on assumptions about the nature of mankind and the nature of society that are frequently questioned… no dispassionate observer of the human condition would find these descriptive propositions unproblematic” (Asad 2003, 57). 102 This is, for example, Sartre’s famous dictum in is a Humanism, that in man “existence precedes essence.” To say that the question “Who is she?” has no meaning outside of the context of a life fully lived, that is, a life that has ended and, by the very act of its dying has made possible, at last, to bring forward what that person was, in no way implies moving outside metaphysics. In both a positive anthropology and a negative one (such as Sartre’s) we are confronted with a metaphysical account of the person who is innately endowed, a priori and irrespective of her will, with a set of intuitions that constrain her. In this sense, saying that “the person is such and such” or that “the person is not such and such” does not change the fact that we are saying something about human beings that is irresistible and constraining. In this sense explaining always implies some degree of constraint. Moreover, that we remain in a metaphysical playground is illustrated by the fact that we can interpret, say, the Christian definition of the person as imago Dei as the condition of possibility to be free, and Sartre’s definition as a condemnation that forecloses all meaning (see Ratzinger 2013, 156-157). To be sure, the exact opposite interpretation could be offered. What matters, notwithstanding, is that each definition opens a window through which to scrutinize and inquiry about the human being, thus necessarily saying something about what and who we are. 103 Galston 1982, 627. Brian Leiter rejects the idea that “the right posture for the modern state is one of neutrality, not toleration, with the disapproval the latter implies,” because, in his opinion, “every state stands for and enacts what I call a ‘Vision of the Good’” (Leiter 2013, 13). 104 Two important examples are Arendt’s On Revolution, and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution.

93 legislative actions can never be exercised against the common good (Ch. 9); arbitrary power is never justified (Ch. 10); and the people retains the supreme right to remove or alter its government (Ch. 13).

Rousseau reacted against what he deemed a society corrupted by the malaise of private property.105

The more complex human relationships became, the more the simple, primitive self-love (amour de soi- même) was transformed into a form of love that depends on others (amour propre), privileging appearance and social mimicry. It is to this world he is referring when he says that

While Government and Laws provide for the safety and well-being of assembled men, the Sciences, Letters, and Arts, less despotic and perhaps more powerful, spread garlands of flowers over the iron chains with which men are burdened, stifle in them the sentiment of that original liberty for which they seemed to have been born, make them love their slavery, and turn them into what is called civilized peoples. Need raised Thrones; the Sciences and Arts have strengthened them.106

The solution lies, for Rousseau, in a new social contract:

He who dares undertake to give institutions to a nation ought to feel himself capable, as it were, of changing human nature; of transforming every individual, who in himself is a complete and independent whole, into a part of a greater whole, from which he receives in some manner his life and his being; of altering man’s constitution in order to strengthen it; of substituting a social and moral existence for the independent and physical existence which we have all received from nature. In a word, it is necessary to deprive man of his native powers in order to endow him with some which are alien to him, and of which he cannot make use without the aid of other people.107

For Rousseau there are, thus, two models of human existence: the domestic, self-sufficient individual, and the one whose nature was changed, demanding the citizen to exchange natural independence and autonomy for a new social existence.108 This sovereign, collective action is what Rousseau famously called the general will. In his opinion, every time human beings are required to deliver a collective decision, the individual vote cannot be made on the basis of private interest. My vote reflects my opinion of what is best for the common good, even if it particularly affects me. This is the difference between the “will of all” and the

“general will,” that “the latter regards only the common interest; while the former has regard to private interests, and is merely a sum of particular wills.”109

105 Rousseau, Second Discourse, Part II. 106 Rousseau, First Discourse, Part I. 107 Rousseau, The Social Contract, II-VII. 108 Cf. Shklar 1969, Ch. 1. 109 Rousseau, The Social Contract, II-III. 94

[5] We have discussed the transition from an enchanted world to a disenchanted one, the replacement of a “porous” self with a “buffered” one, and the becoming untenable of the medieval model for explaining human life and flourishing and its substitution by exclusive humanism. It would be simplistic to stop here, however, as if modernity had won and no challenges were made to its moral order. What we see are different paths to modernization from the eighteenth century onwards, all of them sharing some features of the modern moral order, and all of them reacting to some uneasiness caused by disenchantment and the buffered self. Religion didn’t disappear, but it did undergo transformations. This is Taylor’s main thesis: our secular age is one where religion is but one option among many others. This section discusses the trajectories that followed the emergence of the modern individual, what Taylor calls the “nova effect.”110

Reactions against exclusive humanism are grouped by Taylor in three groups: those who questioned whether there was something else beyond the buffered self; those who revolted against the flattening of human motivation caused by utilitarian views; and those who attacked moralism as unfreedom.111

In the eighteenth century, Romanticism rejected the primacy of reason and, more specifically, of instrumental reason. Romantics claimed that what is most important in life escapes dry rationality. It is rather passion, creativity, eroticism, spirituality, and feeling that opens the way to a higher, sublime experience of life.112 Isaiah Berlin claims that in the Romantic perspective what is at work is not the cogito, ergo sum, but the volo, ergo sum. Art became the privileged, most paradigmatic arena for Romantic productivity. In a work of art we witness not a cold, sober rationality where means are applied to ends. The artist is only partially conscious of her work, for a true work of art manifests not only a human will, but something inscrutable and even unutterable, something that touches Nature in its magnificence, that connects the unfathomable with the human spirit:

That is why the great portraits, the great statues, the great works of music are called great, because we see in them not merely the surface, not merely the technique, not merely the form which the artist, perhaps consciously, imposed, but also something of which the artist may not be wholly aware, namely the pulsations within him of some kind of infinite spirit of which he happens to be the particularly articulate and self-

110 The “nova,” for Taylor, emerges as a response to the dissatisfaction with the disenchanted world, which produces “a sense of it as flat, empty, a multiform search for something within, or beyond it, which could compensate for the meaning lost with transcendence” (2007, 302). Since a return to an enchanted world is not possible, what we find instead is a multiplication of answers to the crisis: “There is not only the traditional faith, and the modern anthropocentric shift to an immanent order; the felt dissatisfaction at this immanent order motivates not only new forms of religion, but also different readings of immanence. This expanding gamut is what I am trying to gesture at with the term ‘nova.’” (Ibid., 310). 111 Ibid., 310-312. 112 For a critique of the mystification of poetry see Daniélou 1962, 49-60.

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conscious representative. The pulsations of this spirit are also, at a lower level, pulsations of nature, so that the work of art has the same vitalising effect upon the man who looks at it or who listens to it as certain phenomena of nature.113

Romanticism accused disengaged reason of sacrificing spontaneity and suggested that conformity to reason had in the end obscured the human ability to feel and experience beauty. The goal, however, was not to get rid of reason altogether, embracing irrationalism as the only honest way of being human. What was necessary was to abandon a reductivist view of reason in order to move higher, to a level where “the drive to form and the drive to content (“Stofftrieb”) are harmoniously together.”114

Taylor refers to the time-frame between 1800 and 1950 as the Age of Mobilization, which he understands as the transition from paleo- to neo-Durkheimian forms of religion, from the “ancient regime” hierarchical type where order is grounded in divine will and thus pre-exists human beings, to a more horizontal view of religion where individuals see their polity-building efforts as reflecting God’s order. We have already discussed how the Reformation privileged the horizontal dimension, especially with Luther’s critique of the distinction between “higher” and “lower” vocations. The Puritans understood themselves as following God’s design when founding their polity. This was different from the ancient model in two main aspects: the order which was created didn’t exist “since time out of mind” but was created by free individuals; and the God-polity relationship was more ornamental than active.115 Another step toward the anthropocentric shift was the emergence of “denominations”:

Denominationalism implies that churches are all equally options, and thrives best in a regime of separation of church and state, de facto if not de jure. But on another level, the political entity can be identified with the broader, overarching “church,” and this can be a crucial element in its patriotism.116

In denominationalism, religious adherence is voluntary and loose. This latter characteristic is given by the fact that I can be a member of one denomination for some time, and then move to others, without this meaning any fundamental change about my belonging to the “overarching church.” From this point of view, the “truth” of religion is not the exclusive possession of any particular denomination, but a shared good.

113 Berlin 1999, 114. 114 Taylor 2007, 609. 115 Ibid., 446-448. 116 Taylor 2002, 74-75. 96

From the 1950s on and especially after the 60s, a cultural revolution changed the way we see ourselves. This is what Taylor calls “expressive individualism,” informed by a culture of authenticity.

According to him, authenticity involves “(i) creation and construction as well as discovery, (ii) originality, and frequently (iii) opposition to the rules of society and even potentially to what we recognize as morality,” but it also requires “(i) openness to horizons of significance… and (ii) a self-definition in dialogue.”117

Authenticity is an heir of Romanticism, of the critique of the primacy of reason, the disciplined self, and the mechanization of existence. What is important is that I understand myself as self-created, in the sense that the choices I make shape the person I am creating. This process must be free if it is to be authentic.

But, on the other hand, Taylor rejects the idea that this is the same as relativism. From his epistemology and theory of language we learned that he is a non-relativistic pluralist. He believes it is possible to defend pluralism while at the same time recognizing the possibility of having a serious discussion about better and worse ways of life. This process is driven not by authority or repression, but by conviction.

An age of freedom where everyone can make her own decisions opens a time of self-responsibility. I believe

Taylor’s notion of a self-responsibility that is nonetheless social is close to Sartre’s defense of existentialism as non-relativistic:

[E]xistentialism’s first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him. And when we say that a man is responsible for himself, we do not only mean that he is responsible for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men… To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all.118

Taylor seems to be endorsing Sartre’s idea that whenever an individual chooses for herself, she is in fact signaling the worthiness of her choice. Taylor takes a step further, however, when he claims that “the nature of a free society is that it will always be the locus of a struggle between higher and lower forms of freedom…

Through social action, political change, and winning hearts and minds, the better forms can gain ground, at least for a while.”119 He thinks it is reasonable to make room for the possibility of changing other people’s

117 Taylor 1991, 66. 118 Sartre 2001, 293. 119 Taylor 1991, 78.

97 minds: “I think we can marshal arguments to induce others to modify their judgments and… to widen their sympathies.”120 This is a difficult and open-ended task, but fundamental for any free society.

[6] Is it, thus, more difficult to have faith in God today than it was before? The answer, for Taylor, lies in how each one of us deals with what he calls the “immanent frame,” which is the outcome of modern science, a buffered identity, modern individualism, instrumental reason, and secular time.121 At first glance, it would seem obvious that this immanent frame points towards the “closure” of the transcendent, that is, the rejection of anything higher or beyond the here-and-now, and the self-sufficiency of this order. However,

Taylor dismisses this understanding, suggesting instead an unsolvable tension: for an individual to experience reality as open or closed to transcendence, “a leap of faith” is demanded.122 In other words, the modern critique of religion that made possible the emergence of an autonomous buffered self, cancelled at the same time the possibility of claiming with absolute certainty that “this is all there is.”123 To be sure, the same logic applies to those who proclaim the self-evidence of a transcendent reality: God cannot be neither proved nor disproved by reason. This does not mean embracing relativism, but only recognizing the limits of reason. On the side of the believer, for example, Taylor suggests: “I am never, or only rarely, really sure, free of all doubt, untroubled by some objection.”124 The unbeliever’s certainty is a consequence of the

(sometimes unconscious) adoption of a master narrative,125 examples of which are modern epistemology or enframing theories of knowledge, the “death of God” narrative,126 and what Camus named the “absurd,”

120 Taylor 2007, 428. 121 Ibid., 566. 122 Ibid., 550. 123 Taylor suggests turning the affirmation into a question, remembering Peggy Lee’s song: “Is that all there is?” Ibid., 311. 124 Ibid. 10; cf. 435. 125 A third possibility is, to be sure, agnosticism, that is, the suspension of judgement on the basis that there is no basis for knowledge. It is important, however, to see that agnosticism implies a fundamental decision, namely, the limitation of “reason” to what can be “proved.” In this way, agnosticism is not just a suspension, but an active decision about the question of God. 126 Two examples of this narrative are the so-called “new atheists” and radical theology. If secularity implies metaphysical commitments, then New Atheism (see Harris 2004, Dawkins 2006, Dennett 2006, Hitchens 2007, Onfray 2007) is the cult of the secular as an ersatz religion, the fanatical version of the Enlightenment. My favorite argument against them comes from an atheist. Terry Eagleton captures with delightful sarcasm the baseness and coarseness of the New Atheists’ claims: “Ditchkins [i.e., Dawkins + Hitchens] on theology is rather like someone who lays claim to the title of literary criticism by commenting that there are some nice bits in the novel and some scary bits as well, and it’s all very sad at the end” (Eagleton 2009, 53). If this characterization of New Atheism as fundamentalism is correct—and I believe it is—then a dialogue with them is impossible. Radical theology, on the other hand, tries to internalize and fully take account of Nietzsche’s affirmation of God’s demise. Thomas Altizer radicalizes ’s insistence “that theology is responsive to and shaped by its cultural conditions” (Altizer and Hamilton 1966, 11). Following the tradition of Feuerbach’s critique of religion, Altizer calls us to “realize that the death of God is an historical event, that God has died in our cosmos, in our history, in our Existenz” (Ibid., 44). Internalizing the death of God means not only recognizing that Christianity unfolded as a historical event, i.e., that its encounter with Greek thought put it on the track of Western history; more importantly, it means the acceptance of our own historicality, the fact that we too are but seeds germinating in a particular garden in a particular time. It is difficult to see what is left of theology in the ideas of radical theology; theology seems to be mythified for political purposes, thus rendering it non-Christian. Ratzinger claims that the

98 that is, the paradox of meaning in our world: “we feel an imperious demand in us to make sense of the world, to find some unified meaning in it” but “the claims to fulfilment and meaning are brutally denied by an indifferent universe.”127 In Taylor’s opinion, to conclude,

[f]aith has to remain a possibility, or else the self-valorizing of atheism founders. Imagining that faith might just disappear is imagining a fundamentally different form of non-faith, one unconnected with identity… Religion remains ineradicably on the horizon of areligion, and vice versa.128

Believer and unbeliever, so it seems, stand next to each other in a hermeneutical game where one cannot be understood without the other. The word “imagining,” however, inspires the question: Is it possible to imagine humanity outside these categories? It seems that, for Taylor, the answer is No. In fact, what he calls the “Jamesian open space”129 reminds us of this impossibility. As Paul Janz explains:

To stand in the Jamesian open space… is to stand at what might be called the quintessential point of experimental scission between two different pre-theoretical “senses” of the world—the space in which Taylor’s recurring references to cross pressures, dilemmas, unquiet frontiers, malaises, and so on are not so much rationally adduced as pre-intentionally felt.130

The intimate correlation between belief and unbelief becomes explicit also in the “ethical predicament.”

The answer to the question: How to go from what I must do, to what I should be and, moreover, to the identification of that which deserves my unconditional love?131 is a problem shared by both believers and unbelievers. It includes everyone.

In the last sections of A Secular Age, Taylor deals with several tensions that arise the moment we abandon simplistic subtraction stories and recognize the complexity and non-linearity of the path to modernity. An interesting example of this can be seen in the move from the medieval concept of the “sinner” to the modern one of the “mentally ill,” which is made possible by what he calls the “triumph of the therapeutic,” a modern tendency to dismiss sin and adopt, instead, the notion of “sickness.” By abandoning a narrative centered in sin and adopting one which uses the distinction health/sickness, the individual is

theology of the death of God is a consequence of Barthian theology, which separated faith and religion: “the paradox of the word of God that finds no human point of contact vanishes; all that is left is a man without religion, a man who cannot and may not inquire about God. Hence there is inaugurated a ‘theology after the death of God,’ which vainly tries to give the impression that it still has a job to do” (Ratzinger 1971a, 62). 127 Taylor 2007, 583 128 Ibid., 591-592. 129 According to Taylor, it is a “space where you can feel the winds pulling you, now to belief, now to unbelief.” And he continues: “Standing in the Jamesian open space requires that you… can actually feel some of the force of each opposing position. But so far apart are belief and unbelief, openness and closure here, that this feat is relatively rare” (Taylor 2007, 549). 130 Janz in Colorado and Klassen 2014, 60. 131 Taylor 2011, 15-18. For a discussion of “fullness” and the “ethical predicament” see the article of Joseph Dunne in Leask 2010, 53-68.

99 freed from his own perversity: he is not evil but tormented by disease. While sin is the outcome of a disordered will that chooses the lower instead of the higher, a disease implies the disruption of the body’s harmony caused by something (an agent, a mutation, etc.) which stands fundamentally outside of the person’s control.132 An immediate consequence of this transformation is, obviously, the rehabilitation of the natural goodness of the human essence—a state which reminds us of Rousseau’s description of pre-social human existence. However, with the therapeutic it came the radical objectification, the transformation of the human being into a patient that must be treated:

casting off religion was meant to free us, give us our full dignity of agents; throwing off the tutelage of religion, hence of the church, hence of the clergy. But now we are forced to go to new experts, therapists, doctors, who exercise the kind of control that is appropriate over blind and compulsive mechanisms; who may even be administering drugs to us. Our sick selves are even more being talked down to, just treated as things, than were the faithful of yore in churches.133

If we take a limit example, such as diabolic possession, we can see, I believe, what has changed. What we find in this case is the substitution of an “enchanted” explanation of the world—demons can possess, dwell

“inside of” and manipulate human beings—with a “disengaged” one, wherein we are faced with a psychological/psychiatric disorder. This is the central topic of Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun, where a pact made by priest Urbain Grandier with Satan leads to the collective diabolical possession of a whole convent of Ursuline nuns. The question pervading the whole story is: What if the event was nothing but a clinical case of collective hysteria? Grandier was found guilty and burned alive in 1634.

On the other hand, we find Michel Foucault’s critique of the modern disciplinary society,134 understood as a conscious effort to produce subjects through the application of knowledge and techniques upon them. The distinctions made between healthy/sick, normal/abnormal, etc., include the therapeutic, as a set of techniques designed to bring about healthy, functional citizens. To determine whether a nun is the victim of a diabolical possession rather than suffering a nervous breakdown illustrates the two poles of our

132 Of course, we could say that some diseases, including mental ones, are under the individual’s control, at least to some extent. For example, the abuse of substances, which is known to cause certain diseases, is to some degree under my control. I can choose, that is, not to take these substances that, eventually, might cause a disease. However, what I am pointing at is not that human behavior plays a role in pathogenesis. My point is rather that even though we know certain actions may cause a disease, that leaves intact the fact that the actualization of the disease utterly escapes my control. Certainly all, or at least the vast majority, of human beings would choose not to get sick; however, this is not something we have a say about. In the case of sin, the movement of the will (which can be good or evil, according to Augustine) is what actually matters. And of this movement we are in control. 133 Taylor 2007, 620. 134 Foucault 1995.

100 story: the porous self against the buffered self, an enchanted cosmos against a disenchanted world, a God present in the world against a distant divinity who laid down the rules of the game and then chose to remain silent.135 The goal here is, of course, not to defend one narrative against the other, but only to suggest that both are intelligible only as part of epistemological families or traditions,136 and that both face important challenges and problems.

The same can be said about the tension between violence and redemption.137 The history of religion and violence is an old, complex one. In fact, Christian faith would lose all meaning should we drop the meaning of the cross as the symbol of God’s victory (2 Colossians 2:13-15). For Christianity, the cross is at the same time the apparent place of the triumph of the prince of this world and the altar upon which God has achieved the ultimate victory: “In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace which he lavished upon us” (Ephesians 1:7-8; my emphasis).

It is at once the unbearable suffering of Mary holding her dead son and the dictum en touto nika (“conquer by this”), which Constantine saw in heaven, along with a cross, a few days before the battle of Milvian

Bridge.138 Clearly, then, Christianity does not understand the crucifixion as mere violence. The pain inflicted by violence has a place, to be sure, in the economy of salvation—perhaps a reminder of our fallen nature— but the effects of grace greatly surpass the bare exaltation of power and strength: confronted with God’s grace, violence is reduced to impotence and weakness.139

It is thus impossible to deny that Christianity’s history is mixed with violence.140 But this is far from saying that violence is inherent to it, or that a history of violence is exclusive to Christianity. It is enough to

135 I am not suggesting neither that these are completely different phenomena, nor that they are the same thing seen from different epistemological lenses, but rather remaining agnostic about that question. All I am saying is that each of these experiences inhabits a different language, which in turn opens radically different perspectives and possibilities for us. And each of these “openings” requires, necessarily, a set of assumptions that keep each language together, which must be embraced (a leap of faith) in order for the whole language to function properly. 136 I discuss the critique of neutrality as well as defend a pluralistic view of knowledge as different traditions of thought in chapter 4.II. 137 “The function of sacrifice is to quell violence within the community and to prevent conflicts from erupting. Yet, societies like our own, which do not, strictly speaking, practice sacrificial rites, seem to get along without them. Violence undoubtedly exists within our society.” (Girard 2005, 14). 138 “In Eusebius’s Greek the phrase is en touto nika (conquer by this), but this is rendered on the earliest Latin coinage as hoc signo victor eris (by this sign you will be victor) rather than, as later, in hoc vince or in hoc signo vinces” (Leithart 2010, 69, n.6). 139 Recall, for example, Mary’s Song of Praise: “My soul magnified the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has regarded the low estate of his handmaiden… He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those in low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away” (Luke 1:46-48, 51-53). 140 Gillespie rightly points out the ferocity of the Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the brutality of which “were not seen again until our own times” (Gillespie 2008, 129): “During the Peasant’s Rebellion in 1520s, over one hundred thousand German peasants and impoverished townspeople were slaughtered, many of them when they rushed headlong into the battle against heavily armed troops, convinced by their leader Thomas Müntzer that true believers were immune to musket balls. In 1572, seventy thousand French Huguenots were slaughtered in the

101 remember Georges Sorel’s view that violence is needed to awaken bourgeois society, thus keeping history moving,141 or the many horrors caused by two world wars, genocide, , racism, terrorism, organized crime, etc.

In the end, for Taylor the dilemma of human existence presses both believers and unbelievers. The tension remains between a désir d’éternité142 and the ever-present danger of betraying human life in the pursuit of transcendence, eternity, or a higher stage of human perfection. The task for Christians is, in

Taylor’s opinion, to aim for conversion (metanoia), which urges us to reject the reduction of religion to a moral code (“moralism”) and to seek what he calls the stance of agape/karuna.143

III

Before turning our attention to the discussion provoked by A Secular Age, I want to take a short detour to spell out Joseph Ratzinger’s conception of the “world” and modernity.

Ratzinger approaches the idea of the “world” incrementally, from the simplest of understandings to more complex ones. At the most basic level we encounter the world as the “extrahuman reality that was not made by man.”144 According to the biblical tradition man was called to “subdue the earth” (Gen 1:28), which must not be understood as a tyrannical rule, but as a wise administration.145 Human beings actively change the world, so that “it is always a world that has already been shaped and stamped by human effort.”146 The individual does not passively contemplate this world but is constituted by it, so that the world is experienced as the totality of human behavior in relation to the extrahuman reality.

St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre… And finally, lest anyone imagine that the barbarity was one-sided, Cromwell’s model army sacked the Irish town of Drogheda in 1649, killing virtually everyone. They burned alive all those who had taken refuge in the St. Mary’s Cathedral, butchered the women hiding in the vaults beneath it, used Irish children as human shields, hunted down and killed every priest, and sold the thirty surviving defenders into slavery” (Ibid., 130). William Cavanaugh challenges the dominant story of the Wars of Religion. See Cavanaugh 1995, 403. 141 Sorel 2004, 77. Asad remembers, in our days, the massacre ordered by Hafez al-Assad in Hama; Saddam Hussein’s gassing off thousands of Kurds and the butchering of the Shi’a population in Southern Iraq; and Sharon’s terrorizing of Palestinian civilians (Asad 2003, 10). 142 Taylor 2007, 720. 143 Taylor 1999, 22. I analyze Taylor’s Catholicism in 4.I.1. 144 Ratzinger, 2011, 165. 145 This is the central theme of Pope Francis’s encyclical letter, Laudato si’. See especially Chapter 4 (§§137-162). 146 Ratzinger 2011, 167. In The German Ideology, Marx takes this idea and reduces it to the material confrontation between man and nature: “The way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends first of all on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce” (Tucker 1978, 150, my emphasis). This reduction notwithstanding, the central notion remains that man’s activity transforms the world in a radical way in order to create, so to speak, a world inside the world, that is, the human world as a subset of the natural world.

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The idea that we cannot separate the human being from his or her world has important implications for Christians. The Christian, as a human being, is “world.” Therefore

the question of “the Christian and the world” accordingly implies, at bottom, the question of the inner polarization of Christian existence itself, that is, the question of how the two poles that are involved in shaping the parameters for earthly existence and in centering on the eternal should be coordinated in the life of the Christian.147

This conceptualization of the world has important consequences for the Catholic doctrine of the relationship between the church148 and the “world.” Since there is no way for the believer to exist “worldlessly,” what we find in history is but different ways of Christian involvement with the world.149 The echoes of

Augustine’s doctrine of the two cities, as well as of the Johannine verse that opens the chapter, are strong here. As we saw in the previous chapter, for Augustine the two cities cannot be fully distinguished in this world, at least because the division between the members of each one of the cities does not correspond with the division between church and state. The pilgrim church and the heavenly city aren’t synonyms: there are some in the former that conspire and actively work against the latter.150

The necessary consequence of all this is that the project of a Christian earthly city would ignore the

Augustinian distinction, thus immanentizing what is essentially other-worldly.151 Here we find Taylor and

Ratzinger in agreement: Christendom, that is, “a civilization where the structures, institutions, and culture were all supposed to reflect the Christian nature of the society,”152 is a mutilated view of Catholic spirituality,

147 Ratzinger 2011, 168, 148 It is important, at this point, to make a couple of distinctions about the term “church.” First, Catholicism recognizes three “states” of the church: “When the Lord comes in glory, and all his angels with him, death will be no more and all things will be subject to him. But at the present time some of his disciples are pilgrims on earth. Others have died and are being purified, while still others are in glory, contemplating ‘in full light, God himself triune and one, exactly as he is.’” (SVC , §49). From this we can distinguish a militant (or “pilgrim”) church, a penitent church, and a triumphant church. The second distinction is about who are part of the militant church. Here we have also three meanings: “church” can mean “the liturgical assembly, but also the local community, or the whole universal community of believers.” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §752). Throughout this work, except when explicitly said otherwise, when I use the term “church” I refer to the militant church in a universal sense. It must be stressed that by “church” I don’t mean the hierarchy (i.e., Pope, bishops, and priests), but the whole community of believers. In the third chapter (II.3) I deal with Rahner’s concept of “anonymous Christianity,” which further enlarges the idea of the “church.” 149 Another reason for this is that “every age has its own blind-spot, that none can grasp everything, so that in each particular age much has to remain unexplained, because quite simply, the intellectual apparatus is lacking” (Ratzinger 1971a, 22). See the distinction between “Christianity” and “the christian world” in Maritain 1938, 34. 150 Examples of these are those discussed in the opening paragraphs of the Introduction. 151 In the next chapter (3.III.2) I analyze the idea of the kingdom of God, suggesting that, although the kingdom is already around us—insofar as the Son of God dwelt among us—the fullness of the kingdom does not belong to this world. This is why it is prayed: “Thy Kingdom come,” suggesting, again, that the kingdom is not of this world, but of that which is to come with the Parousia. 152 Taylor 1999, 17. See Ratzinger 1966, 144; 1988, 162; Voegelin 1952, 102. This is an important way in which Ratzinger distances himself from his teacher, Roman Guardini, who in The End of the Modern World celebrates the “magnificent unity” that was achieved in the medieval world, where “society itself was governed by two great ideas: Church and Empire as incarnated in the persons of the Pope and the Emperor.” (Guardini 1998, 17).

103 a bad idea. Those who follow Jesus are called to “purify” earthly realities, to impregnate them with God’s word (Mt 5:13-16) while recognizing that his kingdom is not of this world (Jn 18:36).153

Modernity is but one among many forms the human world can take. Christianity is neither “modern” nor “anti-modern.” However, Ratzinger is conscious that the history of the “West,” or “Europe,” is closely tied with Christianity. The concept of “Europe” is properly understood only when we recognize its Christian roots.154 Ratzinger came close to the idea of Christendom in an article he wrote in 1984, where he claims that “the state must recognize that a basic framework of values with a Christian foundation is the precondition for its existence.”155 However—as I try to show in the last two chapters of this thesis—his whole project is more complex and closer to the democratic spirit than this isolated sentence suggests.

“Europe” is, for Ratzinger, a composite of four elements: the Greek heritage (especially the triad

Socrates-Plato-Aristotle), the Judaeo-Christian heritage (which is itself a synthesis of “Israel’s faith and the

Greek mind”),156 the Latin heritage (e.g. the medieval res publica christiana), and the modern heritage, which was able to bring to light Christian values that remained hidden in the Middle Ages, such as the separation of faith and law and the “productive dualism of Church and State.”157 Modernity does not mean, for Ratzinger, the becoming autonomous of reason:

The epitome of the modern era appears—wrongly, in the final analysis—to be that completely autonomous reason which no longer recognizes anything but itself and has thereby gone blind and, through the destruction of its own foundations, becomes inhumane and hostile to creation.158

Against this depiction of Europe, Ratzinger finds three “counter-images.” First, the desire to go back in time, which he identifies with the Islamic rejection of the separation of faith and law159 and the work of

153 This is also an Augustinian idea: the problem is not that earthly things are evil, but that our affection for them is disordered, thus leading us to misuse them. Daniélou explains this: “The only puzzle to be solved is to make the things which turn us away from God become means to lead us to him… It is we, by the bad use we make of things, who render them blockades between him and us” (Daniélou 1962, 153, emphasis mine). 154 I am using quotation marks in the terms “West” and “Europe” because I think here Ratzinger is resorting to figuration, to the point that “Europe” and “West” are idealized constructions that don’t correspond to the actual entities. I discuss this idea extensively in chapter 4.III. 155 Ratzinger 1988, 219. 156 Ratzinger 2012, 167. 157 Ibid., 169; cf. Ratzinger 1988, 161. 158 Ibid., 170. 159 In my opinion, Ratzinger’s assessment of Islam is incomplete. He seems to give too much credit to post-colonial Islamist thought, while being blind to some serious attempts to understand Islam’s views of the secular and the religious. He gives no credit to Sufism, nor recognizes the difficulties that exist in demonstrating the Qur’anic evidence for the caliphate (cf. Souleymane Bachir Diagne in Bilgrami 2016, 30). He ignores, furthermore, claims such as that of AnNaʽim: “[i]n order to be a Muslim by conviction and free choice, which is the only way one can be a Muslim, I need a secular state” (An-Naʽim 2010, quoted in Bilgrami 2016, 45). In a late article, however, Ratzinger acknolwledges that “the Islamic cultural sphere… is characterized by… tensions; there is a broad spectrum ranging from the fanatical absolutism of a Bin Laden to attitudes that are open to a tolerant rationality” (Ratzinger 2012, 212. See also Ratzinger 2010a, 169-174).

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Lévi-Strauss, who “expresses for its part the longing in the European mind to put its Christian domestication behind it, precisely as domestication—as slavery, in contrast with which the monde savage can be seen as the better world.”160 A second reaction implies an escape to the future, to the positivistic utopias where reason utterly emancipates itself from its religious yoke. This view shares some aspects of Taylor’s secularity 3. Finally, we find Marxism, which proposes a completely immanentized soteriology. For

Ratzinger, Marxism takes a religious impetus that “transcends rationality” and combines it with modern instrumental rationality.

We can locate Ratzinger’s views on modernity as a middle position between Charles Taylor and

Eric Voegelin. He agrees with Taylor that there are elements in modernity that are not only compatible with, but even advance our understanding of, Christianity. On the other hand, he harshly criticizes the modern yearning for complete autonomy, for the absolute independence of reason, which puts him closer to Eric

Voegelin. The critique of a hubristic, emancipated reason that claims to be self-sufficient, becoming its own transcendence, resembles Voegelin’s attack on modernity as “Gnostic.”161 For Voegelin, gnostic movements include , positivism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, communism, fascism and national socialism.162 They are all characterized by the dissatisfaction with the present situation, which leads gnostics to the belief that what caused this situation is how poorly the world is organized; that salvation from the world’s evil is possible; that from a wretched world a good one will evolve throughout history; that change is in the realm of human action, i.e., that salvation is in our hands; and that it is the task of the gnostic to seek out the prescriptions for such a change.163 Gnosticism opposes Christianity by rejecting Christianity’s critique of the hubris of human “wisdom” (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:27) proclaiming the possibility of overcoming doubt through knowledge. Thus, it ends up immanentizing human flourishing,164 e.g., the eighteenth-century idea of “progress.” Voegelin joins many postwar thinkers in warning that modern reason is Janus-faced: it

160 Ratzinger 2012, 161. 161 Gnostics “pretended to possess clear knowledge—knowledge in the sense of power to master the world both on this side of death and beyond it” (Ratzinger, 1995b, 28). Cf. DeConick 2016, 53-54. 162 Voegelin 1968, 57. 163 Ibid., 86-87. 164 Voegelin 1952, 199ff.

105 can lead to the betterment of conditions for human beings through scientific advancement, but also to the enslavement of humanity, if not its utter destruction.165

Voegelin and Ratzinger agree that the immanentization of human flourishing or the Christian message is a dangerous path. It implies the illusory appropriation of that opening that, as we said in the previous chapter, the political cannot create itself; this appropriation deifies man, to the point that the opening, the source of meaning, functions as a mirror wherein human beings only look at their reflection.166

Ratzinger emphatically dismisses the possibility of ever achieving perfection in this world: “neither reason nor faith ever promises us that there will ever be a perfect world. It does not exist.”167 The believer’s relation to the world is thus mediated by the certainty that this world is a battlefield, but one where the delimitation of the two camps is always messy and complex. All we can do in this world is “to believe totally and out of the totality of the faith to encounter the totality of the modern world—in other words, to act within functioning technological structures out of the responsibility of love.”168 An interesting question is how well

(or badly) Ratzinger’s conception of the modern world matches Taylor’s reference to la lotta continua169 and his claim that there are in modern, secularist culture “mingled together both authentic developments of the gospel… and also a closing off to God that negates the gospel.”170 I deal with this question later; for now it is enough to say that Taylor and Ratzinger can be seen as setting boundaries, or salutary checks, to each other.

165 “[T]he self-made world that surrounds man on every side becomes a prison that elicits a cry for freedom, for something completely different.” (Ratzinger 2011a, 175). 166 This is the inverted version of Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity. In his opinion, religion is nothing but a human self-projection in order to create, by that very movement, a subject (a god) standing as an object of adoration. This artificial creation exorcizes, so to speak, the human anguish: it exteriorizes our deepest yearnings, our fear of death, the anguish meaninglessness creates, as well as our excessive self-regard. Thus, in religion men and women worship—unknowingly, for the most part—themselves. For Ratzinger and Voegelin, Feuerbach’s critique applies only to ersatz religions, to the hubristic attempt to solve the human dilemma (we are tempted to say the human tragedy) here and now, assuming our faculties are enough to get the job done. Religion, well understood, humbles the person rather than making her feel the redeemer of the world. 167 Ratzinger 1988, 208; cf. de Lubac 1987, 86. He finds himself in agreement with SVC Gaudium et spes §78: numquam pax pro semper acquisita est (“peace is never achieved once and for all”), quoted in Ratzinger 2013, 166, n. 12. Jacques Maritain claims that “this secular order, as a collective form, will always be deficient, but we ought thereby to wish and to strive all the more that it be the best that may be” (Maritain 1938, 118). 168 Ratzinger 2011a, 178. 169 “In a sense, a genuinely free society can take as its self description the slogan put forward in quite another sense by revolutionary movements like the Italian Red Brigades: “la lotta continua,” the struggle goes on, in fact, forever” (Taylor 1991, 78). 170 Taylor 1999, 16.

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IV

While reading the vast material commenting on Taylor’s A Secular Age, one is confronted with a mix of often conflicting views about Taylor’s method, conclusions, and normative commitments. Taylor is deemed either as a radical orthodox171 responding to modernity’s “excarnation” trajectories of secularity in one place, or as a magnanimous thinker whose reticence to openly commit himself to definite “positions” illustrates a behavior consistent with the “Jamesian open space.”172 To cover the full breath of these commentaries exceeds the scope of this work.173 So, instead of trying to review each and every commentary that has been made about Taylor’s work, I focus here on three broad themes that are relevant for the argument of this work.

[1] A good place to start seems to be the definition of modernity. What exactly do we mean by

“modernity”? Is it the logical consequence of Christianity’s self-deconstructive unfolding, as Marcel

Gauchet claims?174 Or is it rather a non-Christian answer given to the questions the late Middle Ages left unanswered? Hans Blumenberg’s epochal work, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, confronts the thesis, held by

Karl Löwith175 and Carl Schmitt, that the concepts of modernity are secularized versions of theological ones.

That modernity is using a shared, though secularized, vocabulary, would imply that the linguistic toolbox of modernity is not different from that inherited from Christendom. In this sense, the roots of modern thought would be the same as those of Christianity. More importantly, the thesis suggests that there are metahistorical questions and, consequently, a core set of human problems.

171 Milbank in Warner, VanAntwerpen and Calhoun 2010, 54. Cf. Justin Klassen in Colorado and Klassen 2014, 16. 172 Janz in Colorado and Klassen 2014, 43-45. 173 Zemmin, Jager and Vanheeswijck (2016, 385-416) provide an annotated bibliography of the commentaries, reviews, and critiques of Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age. 174 “The metamorphosis of Christian otherness became the process of its reduction” (Gauchet 1999, 162). For Gauchet, Christianity is the “religion for departing from religion” (4). Secularization, for Gauchet, is nothing but Christianity’s unfolding, a process that goes from primitive religions to Christianity. “The so-called ‘major religions’ or ‘universal religions,’ far from being the quintessential embodiment of religion, are in fact just so many stages of its abatement and disintegration. The greatest and most universal of them, our own, the rational religion of the one god, is precisely the one that allows a departure from religion” (9). 175 According to Löwith, “the modern mind has not made up its mind whether it should be Christian or pagan. It sees with one eye of faith and one of reason. Hence its vision is necessarily dim in comparison with either Greek or biblical thinking” (Löwith 1949, 2).

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Against these intuitions, Blumenberg calls for a new understanding of the origins of modernity as well as a rejection of untimely, canonical “great questions.”176 While it is obvious that modernity cannot be understood as a new era that arose “out of nothing,” it is equally wrong to presume that modernity was begotten by Christianity.177 For Blumenberg, modernity arose in the late Middle Ages as an original answer given to the crisis that had exhausted the latter’s conditions of possibility. This is not to say that modernity’s answers are simply secularized versions of old problems. What happened was rather that, faced with the collapse of the scholastic building, ruined by the nominalist rejection of the transparency of the world as order, modernity provided humanity with an original way to solve the problem that ended the medieval world, namely, the problem of evil and God’s action in the world. We find, thus, a “reoccupation of answer positions,” where the notion of “infinite” (e.g., infinite progress) is not a usurpation of the “transcendent infinite” of the theologians. Here, Blumenberg explains, “the infinite serves from this point onward less to answer one of the great traditional questions than to blunt it, less to give meaning to history than to dispute the claim to be able to give it meaning.”178 Not far from Gauchet, Blumenberg claims:

A religion that, beyond the expectation of salvation and confidence in justification, came historically to claim to provide the exclusive system of world explanation; that could deduce from the fundamental notion of creation and the principle that man was made in God’s image the conclusion that man’s cognitive capacity was adequate to nature; but that finally, in its medieval pursuit of the logic of its concern for the infinite power and absolute freedom of its God, itself destroyed the conditions that it had asserted to hold for man’s relation to the world—such a religion, as a consequence of this contradictory turning away from its presuppositions, inevitably ends up owing to man a restitution of what belongs to man.179

The problem that proved stronger than the philosophical and theological systems of the Middle Ages was, thus, the problem of evil. Scholasticism had defended the idea that, insofar as it had been created by God, the world manifested, or mirrored, the divine order: “nature and reason reflected one another.”180 In

Aquinas’s system, as I mentioned earlier, we find a correspondence between divine law and natural law and a necessary correlation, although imperfect, between human laws and natural law. Human beings are created

176 “We are going to have to free ourselves from the idea that there is a firm canon of the ‘great questions’ that throughout history and with an unchanging urgency have occupied human curiosity and motivated the pretension to world and self-interpretation. Such canon would explain the changing systems of mythology, theology, and philosophy by the congruence of their output of assertions with its content of questions.” In fact, Blumenberg will claim, “[q]uestions do not always precede their answers” (Blumenberg 1985, 65-66). 177 Ibid., 74. 178 Ibid., 85. 179 Ibid., 115-116. 180 Gillespie 2008, 20.

108 in the likeness of God, as imago Dei, and placed in a world which, insofar as created—that is, participating of the likeness of God in its own way (Genesis 1:26)181—reflected God’s wisdom and love. However, the world is far from perfect, and more often than not the relevant note is that of evilness. But how can the world be a divine creation, designed for good, while at the same time portraying all kinds of wickedness, cruelty, and suffering?182 Augustine, who claimed that evil has no nature of its own but is rather the absence of good, freed God from any responsibility by putting all the blame on human wickedness, in a disordered will that rejects God. Now, God’s omnipotence and the absolute goodness of his creation are not easily reconcilable with human (or angelic) freedom. This opened the way to predestination,183 a problem that has always haunted Christianity.

In the thirteenth century, William of Ockham rejected the scholastic notion of the correspondence between the cosmos and reason. God’s creation was made once-and-for-all, he said, and thus nothing could be said about creation except what was given by revelation. To presume an understanding of the order and laws of creation was to constrain God’s omnipotence. Nominalists argued that “all beings are radically individual” and, therefore that “there are no universals or species, and all supposed species are merely names or signs.”184 This rejection of universals and of the possibility to know God’s will through the created world led to an instrumentalization of nature: there’s nothing in created things that can speak to us about God, so

I cannot ask “what is this?”; however, I can still ask “what is this for / how does this work?”185

Modernity emerged, in Blumenberg’s account, as a fresh answer given to a question that medieval

Christianity couldn’t solve. This answer was given in the form of human self-assertion:

Thus a claim was made to the absolute beginning of the modern age, the thesis of its independence from the outcome of the Middle Ages, which the Enlightenment was to adopt as part of its own self-consciousness. The exigency of self-assertion became the sovereignty of self-foundation, which exposes itself to the risk of being unmasked by the discoveries of historicism, in which beginnings were to be reduced to dependences.186

181 Aquinas, in order to emphasize the human exceptionality, distinguishes between “likeness-as-thread,” of which all created things participate, and “likeness-as-image,” which is peculiar of human being. Summa Theologica, I, 93.6. 182 Leszek Kołakowski (1982, ch. 1) raises the interesting point that a particularly troubling issue related to Christian theodicy is that of violence in the animal kingdom. 183 “How can God have such overwhelming power over all things and still leave room for the kind of creaturely autonomy implied in the notion of ? The demands of logical consistency were not enough to force the issue, but at least for the Latin West Augustine’s profound religious experience was. The result was that the problem of evil increasingly hinged on the vexed relationship between divine and creaturely wills” (Kotsko 2017, 111-112). 184 Gillespie 2008, 60. 185 Cf. Taylor 2007, 97; Ratzinger 1988, 155; Ratzinger 2004, 58-59. 186 Blumenberg 1985, 184. Cf. Gillespie, 11.

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In an article on the origins of the idea of progress, Blumenberg discusses the transformation of astronomy, from Hipparchus to Copernicus, and from him to Galileo, showing how the notions of immutability and uniformity of the firmament were progressively abandoned, due to the conviction that “only very long time frames allow us to assume value changes large enough to cross the threshold of the empirical parameters.”187

This new awareness made science a collective endeavor that transcends a lifetime, and at the same time demanded more attention to the accuracy of observations. Blumenberg contends that “this idea of progress corresponds more than anything else to the only regulative principle that can make history humanly bearable.”188

Taylor describes Blumenberg’s account of modernity as a “reaction” against the “all-invasive power of God, which seems to leave us no place.”189 And, at the end of A Secular Age, he recognizes that

Blumenberg disagrees with the story that the transformation of divine Providence into Design “was originally a move within Christian doctrine.”190 In my view, between Taylor and Blumenberg we find

Michael Gillespie’s story of modernity. Gillespie agrees with Blumenberg in that modernity was born neither in opposition to nor as a continuation of Christianity. Modernity is not, in other words, the same old

Christianity by other means. However, he points out that his account fails to recognize that

the shapes that modern thought subsequently assumed were not arbitrary reoccupations of medieval positions but a realization of the metaphysical and theological possibilities left by the antecedent tradition… The origins of modernity therefore lie not in human self-assertion or in reason but in the great metaphysical and theological struggle that marked the end of the medieval world and that transformed Europe in the three hundred years that separate the medieval and the modern worlds.191

The problem that became central for the late Middle Ages was not what Blumenberg calls the “second overcoming of Gnosticism,”192 that is, the emergence of a new cosmic dualism, but the increasing banality of Satan. Since the devil is just a creature and, thus, subject to God’s will, the ontological abyss between

Creator and creature ultimately raised questions about God’s goodness.193 This problem is traced by

187 Blumenberg 1974, 8. 188 Blumenberg 1985, 35. 189 Taylor 2007, 114. 190 Ibid., 775. 191 Gillespie 2008, 12. 192 Blumenberg 1985, 137. 193 “[I]nsofar as the devil’s wickedness is inscribed into God’s mysterious plan as a necessary element, it becomes more and more difficult to avoid attributing his deeds directly to God, undermining God’s goodness” (Kotsko 2017, 45-46).

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Gillespie through the rejection of nominalism by Christian humanists, such as Petrarch, and the subsequent confrontation between Luther and Erasmus over the freedom of the will. While the figure of Petrarch is central in both Blumenberg and Gillespie’s stories, as the inflection point dividing the Middle Ages and modernity, his importance is missing in Taylor’s story. Also absent is the Erasmus-Luther confrontation.194

While Taylor’s story enhances our understanding of the origins of modernity, he often seems reluctant to engage with theological arguments and their consequences for modernity. Like Blumenberg, he dismisses the thesis of modernity as secularized theology, considering exclusive humanism as a non-

Christian alternative to disenchantment. Modernity is not a Christian product, but neither is it—as

Blumenberg suggests—an original answer that reoccupies a space that became void. In a 1996 talk, Taylor formulated a complex relationship between modernity and Christianity, claiming that in the former there are “mingled together” both authentic developments of the gospel as well as a closing-off to God.195 This is a messier view of modernity compared to his blueprint of our current situation, which he portrays in four well-defined camps: that of exclusive humanism, neo-Nietzscheans, and those who believe in some good beyond life, whom are also divided in their evaluation of modernity.196 If Gillespie is right, and modernity actualized metaphysical and theological possibilities left by the Middle Ages, then it seems fair to ask how

“exclusive” exclusive humanism really is.

I see two problems here. First, Paul Janz correctly points out that Taylor’s construction of exclusive humanism leads to a subtraction narrative. While he rejects the view of modernity as the progressive emancipation of human capabilities, our breaking free from religion, superstition, and prejudice, and into rationality and civility, he adopts the opposite one: “the subtraction is not that of a ‘sloughing off’ of what is illusory and superstitional in the premodern, but rather, inversely, the story of a fundamental loss of something vital and indispensable for human’s understanding of themselves and the world they inhabit.”197

Secondly, Taylor’s blindness to the metaphysical ingredient in the mix of exclusive humanism can lead to

194 See Erasmus and Luther, 2012. 195 Taylor 1999, 16. 196 Taylor 2007, 637; cf. Taylor 1999, 26, and Taylor 2011, 22. 197 Paul D. Janz in Colorado and Klassen 2014, 51. Miller claims, in the same vein, that “by saddling those who doubt that God exists with the label of unbelief, he insinuates that those who hold this form of belief nevertheless suffer from some sort of lack, an otherwise unspecified epistemological limitation” (Miller 2008, 7). Cf. Taylor 2007, 739 (lost “communion”), 302 (lost “meaning”), 437 (“decline” of religion). 111 a false notion of “neutrality,” especially when analyzing democratic societies. So, for example, Taylor and

Maclure claim that

an education in tolerance and pluralism will in certain circumstances justify the denial of parents’ requests for exemption and the exposure of their children to subject matter at odds with the beliefs transmitted at home. That sort of restriction on freedom of conscience and parental authority is reasonable and justified as long as a particular conception of the good is not imposed on children.198

The necessary question here is whether there is a kind of education that does not necessarily imply a conception of the good. It seems to me that Taylor’s description of language acquisition by children—thus, education—makes this claim very problematic. In fact, Taylor and Maclure recognize this problem elsewhere:

It is clear that such neutrality on the state’s part will not impose an equal burden on all citizens. In exposing students to a plurality of worldviews and modes of life, the democratic and liberal state makes the task more difficult for parents seeking to transmit a particular order of beliefs to their children…199

My claim is not that an education in tolerance is a bad thing for democratic societies. But we must acknowledge that it implies a conception of the good, to the point that it can lead to strong evaluations that affect the way human beings live. Taylor seems at one time conscious of the impossibility of neutrality, but a moment after he is reluctant to embrace the consequences of this very impossibility.

[2] A second group of commentaries are focused on the question that inspires Taylor’s A Secular

Age: Is it really the case that today people are finding it more difficult to believe? Are people reacting to the pressures the immanent frame exerts upon faith? Or does this construction rather apply to a reduced group of people, the characteristics of which aren’t representative of the whole? This is not a theoretical, but an empirical question that inquires about the correspondence between a thesis and the reality it tries to explain.

Ruth Abbey claims that “Taylor provides no evidence for his declaration that those who deny the existence of God outnumber those who believe such existence can be proven, and nothing I have ever seen

198 Maclure and Taylor 2011, 102-103. Emphasis mine. 199 Ibid., 16.

112 by way of empirical evidence bears this out.”200 If we look at the World Values Survey,201 we can obtain some data on the religious phenomenon. So far, the survey has captured six waves—the seventh is in progress—and offers a variety of questions about habits, beliefs and values of people in many countries.

One of these questions explores the individual’s self-identification as a religious/irreligious person:

“Independently of whether you attend religious services or not, would you say you are a religious, person, not a religious person, or a convinced atheist?” Although the question is by no means clear,202 for my purposes we can use it to question whether or not we live in a secular age. I chose three countries included in all waves—United States, Sweden, and Mexico.203 In the United States, 81.4 percent of the population deemed themselves religious and only one percent were convinced atheists in the first wave (1981-1984).

In the last wave (2010-2014), 67 percent deemed themselves religious and 4.4 percent convinced atheists.

The change occurred in the middle category, going from 15.4 to 27.3 percent of people who identified themselves as “non-religious.” To talk about “a secular age” in Sweden makes a little more sense: in the first wave 30.8 percent identified as religious, 56.2 as non-religious, and 6.5 percent as atheists, while in the last one 31.2 percent identified as religious, 48.5 as non-religious and 16.8 percent as atheists. Religious self-identification in Mexico went from 74.7 to 74.2 percent from 1981 to 2014, and atheism from 2.3 to

2.4 percent in the same period. Even though this is not enough data to attempt any kind of generalization, it seems safe to say that the number of people who consider themselves atheists is still very low.204 These numbers can help us make sense of Charles Taylor’s claim that

200 Abbey in Leask 2010, 17. See also Miller 2008, 7. Already in 1970 Peter Berger, although confronting the “God is dead” movement, would be caught in the same illusion: “those to whom the supernatural is still, or again, a meaningful reality find themselves in the status of a minority, more precisely, a cognitive minority” (Berger 1969, 7). 201 I consulted the data online, at http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp. Accessed June 23rd, 2017. The use of this survey is relevant, moreover, because it is the same data that Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart use in their book on secularism, that I also discuss here. Norris and Inglehart are actually part of the Executive Committee of the Survey, the former as treasurer, and the latter as founding president. 202 The main problem of the question is, in my opinion, that the categories are poorly defined. Is it possible for a person who identifies as non- religious to consider herself as “spiritual”? If so, we may consider the person as not-secular in Taylor’s definition—insofar as “spiritual” could point to some form of human flourishing transcending this life. If not, what is the difference between a “non-religious” person and a “convinced atheist”? On the other hand, is a non-believer in, say, Mexico—a country with deep Catholic roots—comparable with a non-believer in China—a country the regimen of which has pushed its population towards atheism? Is the meaning of the words “religious,” “non-religious,” and “atheist” the same for people in different countries? I sincerely doubt this to be the case. 203 I use Mexico as a limit case. It seems to me that Mexico is caught between a staunch religious past and a progressive process of secularization specially felt in the urban zones. Thus, in this example, Mexico is used as a traditional country in the route towards secularity. 204 In the last wave (2010-2014), out of 59 countries which were studied, only in ten of them atheism scored values higher than 10 percent: only in one atheism is majoritarian (Hong Kong, 55%); two countries got values closer to one-third of atheists (China, 27%; South Korea, 29.5%), and seven got values between 10 and 19 percent (Taiwan, 17.2%; Sweden, 16.8%; Australia, 16.3%; Slovenia 13.4%; Japan, 11.3%; Uruguay 11.3%; and Netherlands, 10.3%). That many of these countries were, or remain, under the influence of communism is not surprising. However, there can be no doubt that some countries in this sample were once staunchly Catholic, as the case of Netherlands exemplifies. The average percent of atheism in the 59 countries surveyed was 5.3 percent.

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The salient feature of Western societies is not so much a decline of religious faith and practice, though there has been lots of that, more in some societies than in others, but rather a mutual fragilization of different religious positions, as well as of the outlooks both of belief and unbelief.205

That there has been a fragilization of religion and a decline in practice seems irrefutable. In the United

States, for example, 43.9 percent of the population attended religious services once a week or more in 1981.

In 2011, this percentage fell to 33.3 percent. We may remember here that, for Taylor, the slide into neo-

Durkheimian religions206 has many effects, for example, a rise in the number of atheists, agnostics, or people without religion. But, more importantly, “the gamut of indeterminate positions greatly widens.”207

Moreover, a drop in the attendance of religious services does not necessarily translate as decay in religious faith. The void left by the crisis of traditional religions has not always been filled by atheism: non-traditional and non-denominational religious experiences, as well as a wide range of spiritualities—from scientology among celebrities to the esoteric cult to death among drug lords—have received those disappointed with traditional religion with open arms.

It seems, then, that Taylor overestimates the impulse of disbelief while at the same time he correctly perceives changes in the way people experience those beliefs. An explanation of this can be found in

Taylor’s milieu, namely the academy, where atheism is most powerfully felt.208 This phenomenon is often linked with the rise of a “rational worldview.” Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris try to save secularization theory from the many critiques it suffered in the nineties and the first decade of the third millennium by pointing out that, while obviously “religion has not disappeared from the world, nor does it seem likely to do so,”209 it is still possible to talk about secularization in some places of the world, specifically in rich nations. Their use of the term “rational” is telling: they exemplify what Taylor correctly denounces as

205 Taylor 2007, 595. 206 “The neo-Durkheimian mode involves an important step toward the individual and the right of choice. One joins a denomination because it seems right to one. And indeed, it now comes to seem that there is no way of being in the ‘church’ except through such a choice. Whereas under paleo- Durkheimian rules one can—and did—demand that people be forcibly integrated, be rightly connected with God against their wills, this now makes no sense. Coercion comes to seem not only wrong, but absurd and thus obscene… But the expressivist outlook takes this a stage further. The religious life or practice that I become part of not only must be my choice but must speak to me; it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this” (Taylor 2002, 94, emphasis mine). For a critique of modern religious subjectivism see Daniélou 1962, 5-6. 207 Taylor 2002, 106. 208 Taylor 2007, 13. See Larson and Witham 1998, 313. 209 Inglehart and Norris 2004, 4.

114 subtraction theories, where terms like modernity, reason, and science are grouped together, just as tradition, religion, superstition, and magic are deemed to belong together.

The explanation Norris and Inglehart give for the fact that secularized communities are still small is, first, that post-industrial societies are still few, and that in these societies the fertility rates are “far below the replacement level.”210 In short, the sociological conditions that push for secularization apply to very few.

It is interesting in this respect that the authors claim that “[c]onditions of socioeconomic inequality are critical for widespread conditions of human security.”211 One can only wonder if the authors would see a problem with their theory today, where world inequality seems to be the malaise par excellence not only in authoritarian countries, but in post-industrial ones.212 Moreover, if economic and social security, as the authors claim, is a powerful engine of secular values, it seems only honest to forecast that, in a world where wealth is the privilege of a diminishing few, secularists are not the future, but a species at the edge of extinction! Slavoj Žižek captures our contemporary situation with a dark sense of humor:

A new global class is thus emerging “with, say, an Indian passport, a castle in Scotland, a pied-à-terre in Manhattan and a private Caribbean island”—the paradox is that the members of this global class “dine privately, shop privately, view art privately, everything is private, private, private.” They are thus creating a life-world of their own to solve their anguishing hermeneutic problem; as Todd Millay puts it: “wealthy families can’t just ‘invite people over and expect them to understand what it’s like to have $300 million.’”… One cannot help but note that one feature basic to the attitude of these gated superrich is fear: fear of external social life itself. The highest priorities of the “ultrahigh-net-worth individuals” are thus how to minimize security risks—diseases, exposure to threats of violent crime, and so forth.213

Both Abbey and Norris-Inglehart point to the fact that secularization theory has problems, because what was predicted didn’t happened. But while Abbey proposes to include a question-mark in the title of Taylor’s book, Norris and Inglehart are still confident in their hypothesis, even though it applies to a decreasing proportion of the world population. The other important difference is that, while Abbey carefully analyzes what we understand by “religion,” and “transcendence,” Inglehart and Norris work with very problematic definitions of “reason” and “religion.” They subsume the incredible variety of spiritual experiences in the

210 Ibid., 6. 211 Ibid., 16. 212 See, for example, the article of Jeffrey Winters and Benjamin Page, “Oligarchy in the United States?” (2009) where the authors build an index of individual powers, and compare the values of this index among the richest people in the United States (Forbes 400 and 1% richest) with 90% of the population. The results are enough to make us question the quality of democracy in that country. In the same vein, CNN reported a study by Oxfam that found that “the top 26 billionaires own $1.4 trillion—as much as 3.8 billion other people.” CNN, January 21, 2019, goo.gl/hQ3oFa. 213 Žižek 2009, 4

115 world under the term “religion,” completely ignoring that the term is in fact a Western invention that emerged along with the modern state.214 Thus, their use of the term “secularization” is also unproblematically applied globally, disregarding the fact that “the name may be the same, but the reality will often be different.”215 Moreover, the reason/religion distinction closes the door on a serious dialogue by creating a false zero-sum game216 where a partial notion of reason is deemed the pinnacle of human realization, while a dumbed-down version of religion is considered inimical to human autonomy and reason.

More problematic is, finally, that the very idea of “reason” they defend seems to go beyond the secular world. Their endorsement of some sort of Enlightened reason involuntarily endorses a metaphysical view— as Nietzsche correctly denounced217—one which stands for the reason/faith dualism just described, as well as for the other simplifications discussed in this section.

To conclude, it seems evident to me that Taylor’s picture—even accepting the validity of Abbey’s critique—is a much more realistic view of the secular age than Inglehart and Norris. The fragilization of religion, the nova effect, the pressures of authenticity and cross-pressures all point to the complexity of the changes we’re living at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This thesis seems not only better suited to explain the phenomenon but, more importantly, it helps us see our predicament in terms of fullness, or human flourishing, that all human beings, believers or atheists, must face.

[3] A third relevant discussion for the purposes of this work concerns the extent to which we could shelve Taylor’s A Secular Age in the “Catholicism” section. Keith Tester claims, for example, that “the mode of address of A Secular Age, the location of its full purchase, is explicitly catholic, at least in the way

Taylor understands in his writings the meaning of catholic and catholicity.”218 My interest here is not to

214 See Cavanaugh 1995, 403ff. 215 Taylor in Bilgrami 2016, 1. 216 “Science and religion could confront each other directly in a zero-sum game where scientific explanations undermined the literal interpretation of Biblical teachings from Genesis 1 and 2, exemplified by the Darwinian theory of evolution that challenged ideas of special creation by God” (Ibid., 8). 217 Nietzsche’s is utterly opposed to the Enlightenment’s reification of reason, as well as its attempt to see in reason the faculty for abstract, universal knowledge: “Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject’; let us guard against the snares of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason,’ ‘absolute spirituality,’ ‘knowledge in itself’… There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing’; and the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing, our ‘objectivity,’ be. But to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this—what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?—” (On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, §12). 218 Tester 2010, 667-668. 116 understand Taylor’s Catholicity as an individual, but the extent to which his religious beliefs explicitly inform the work. My insistence on explicitness responds to the fact that, following Taylor himself, it is undeniable that the author cannot “suspend,” so to speak, his religious commitments when he writes, insofar as they are constitutive of himself, but this does not mean that an attempt to distance himself from his own views is impossible.

In the first place we could say that, for a “Catholic book,” A Secular Age lacks an engagement with

Scriptures, the Catholic church documents (e.g., encyclical letters) and, perhaps most important, with the

Second Vatican Council, undoubtedly the most influential and revolutionary event for Catholicism in the twentieth century.219 Although Taylor mentions the Council a couple of times, clearly favoring a progressive reading of it, a proper engagement with conciliar documents (especially Gaudium et Spes) and with the most important changes it proposed is lacking. There is no doubt that Taylor sees the Council as an opportunity to abandon “moralism,”220 which he deems contrary to the authentic Catholic spirit.221 Against moralism,

Taylor suggests, we must recognize, in line with the Council, that “there are more ways of being a Catholic

Christian than either have yet imagined.”222 This is the heart of his address, A Catholic Modernity?: the trinitarian model, that is, God’s intimate being, is the model that human beings mirror (as imago Dei). This move creates a tension in Taylor’s thought: if we take the notion of human essence as God’s image seriously, then we need to recognize that God’s trinitarian essence suggests not only the notion of unity-through- diversity but also implies a specific notion of freedom223 and human perfectibility.224 But if this is correct, then the correspondence between human and divine (i.e., Trinitarian) nature goes far beyond the quest for

“authenticity,” which is central to Taylor’s ethical and political projects.

219 These are all questions raised by Dermot A. Lane in Colorado and Klassen 2014. 220 In this work I understand moralism in Augustinian terms, that is, as a disordered affect for a moral code, to the point that what must be a consequence of the primary event, namely, the encounter with God, becomes the very purpose of our existence. Thus, when we erroneously give preeminence to moral behavior over the encounter with the divinity, morality becomes a potential tool of oppression. On the contrary, a well-ordered morality implies a personal answer to God’s love, and is thus not a heavy, unbearable weight, but an easy yoke and a light burden (Matthew 11:30). 221 Taylor 2007, 503. 222 Taylor 2011, 252. Cf. 1 Corinthians 12:4ff. 223 See, e.g., John 8:32. 224 See, e.g., Matthew 5:48.

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But I have deviated from the main thread of the discussion. Taylor avoids theological discussions as well as making clear what his normative commitments are.225 Carlos Colorado defends Taylor’s position, claiming that, far from a refusal to take a position, what we see is the unfolding of a moral position, one that acknowledges the danger, or even the impossibility, of reducing morality to moralism. Indeed,

moral truths exceed any single account… since moral intuition cannot be located within a single perspective or discourse—it cannot be captured by a rule or a code. Instead, a moral intuition’s hold on a moral agent is fleshed out and given increased power through the process of articulation in a best account amongst a pluriformity of others. Notably, it does not follow from this that we cannot talk about correctness; indeed, the articulation that more correctly expresses, illuminates, formulates, or makes sense of an intuited moral source should be talked about as the best (or, at least, a better) account.226

Taylor is thus embracing wholeheartedly his own ethical view, which implies openness to the many accounts of human flourishing, being ready to learn from them while rejecting a relativist stance. I believe Colorado is right in his claim that Taylor is being consistent with his own moral theory. However, this leaves unanswered the question concerning the correspondence between Taylor’s philosophy and Catholicism.

These difficulties can be illustrated by focusing on the notion of transcendence. We can identify two difficulties that arise when Taylor’s notion of transcendence is confronted with Catholic doctrine. First, as Janz mentions, transcendence is defined in Taylor’s work in negative form, as that which is not immanent.

In the introduction of A Secular Age, he distinguishes three dimensions of the religious’ “beyond”: a good that is higher than human flourishing, the transcendent God of faith, and the idea of life as going beyond the bounds of its “natural scope.”227 That God is the absolute Other is, to be sure, an important part of the

Catholic idea of God. However, as Janz points out, “the transcendence made manifest in revelation is precisely not spoken of as a transcendence of distance, gaps, and remoteness, but as a transcendence of nearness.”228 If God is experienced just as complete and utter transcendence, then we have not yet entered the world of Christianity. We see again the importance of tensions: God is at the same time the absolutely distant being—if by this we allude to our inability to “see” God, that is, cognize the divine being—and the closest one, in the sense that God is with us (John 1:14, Matthew 28:20). In my opinion, however, Janz is

225 “Taylor’s reticence to commit to clearly demarcated ‘positions’ or to ‘intervene’ non-neutrally on what A Secular Age narrates leads… to a prevailing ambivalence that characterizes much of the narrative’s development” (Janz in Colorado and Klassen 2014, 43). In a similar vein, the editors of Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age emphasize that “theology as such doesn’t figure very strongly among the many intellectual sources Taylor engages in A Secular Age” (Warner, VanAntwerpen and Calhoun 2010, 3). 226 Colorado in Colorado and Klassen 2014, 81. 227 Taylor 2007, 20. 228 Janz in Colorado and Klassen, 65; cf. Rom 10:8. 118 just as biased as Taylor, only on the opposite side: the former emphasizes the nearness of God, while the latter points to the radical otherness of God. To my mind, Joseph Ratzinger does a better job capturing the tension of our relationship with God:

[T]he article about the Lord’s descent into hell reminds us that not only God’s speech but also his silence is part of the Christian revelation. God is not only the comprehensible word that comes to us; he is also the silent, inaccessible, uncomprehended, and incomprehensible ground that eludes us. To be sure, in Christianity there is a primacy of the logos, of the word, over silence; God has spoken. God is word. But this does not entitle us to forget the truth of God’s abiding concealment.229

To remain caught in the immanent/transcendent distinction forgets the Christian scandal, that is, the mystery of God assuming human nature. The specificity and radicalness of the Christian message is precisely the reconciliation of these two dimensions by the harmony of logos and sarx (“flesh”)230 in the divine person.

This radical separation between immanence and transcendence is, thus, problematic. This becomes clear when we realize that, for Catholicism, faith and reason are not estranged from each other, as if faith would deal with the “transcendent” and reason with the “immanent.” The relation is more complex. In the words of John Paul II,

[f]aith… has no fear of reason, but seeks it out and has trust in it. Just as grace builds on nature and brings it to fulfilment, so faith builds upon and perfects reason. Illumined by faith, reason is set free from the fragility and limitations deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God… Faith is in a sense an “exercise of thought”; and human reason is neither annulled nor debased in assenting to the contents of faith, which are in any case attained by way of free and informed choice.231

Taylor rightly points out that there is in faith something like a “leap,” but at the same time he seems to dismiss the fact that for Catholicism the important move is that of God approaching man, and not the other way around. It is God’s revelation that opens communication with man.232 Moreover, the inaugural claim of John’s gospel, the presentation of God as logos and the affirmation that the logos became sarx insists that

God is communication. If, finally, we add to all this the scandal that meant the encounter between early

229 Ratzinger 2004, 296. Hans Urs von Balthasar emphasizes this tension between nearness and distance: “The ‘I’ of Jesus Christ is the measure of God’s distance from and nearness to man, that unimaginable nearness of him who is, and remains, even more unimaginably sublime above everything in the world (in similitudine major dissimilitudo)—and both things are equally true” (Balthasar 1987, 28). 230 Cf. Ratzinger 2004, 193-194. 231 John Paul II, , §43. I am following Michael Conway’s critique of A Secular Age, in Leask 2010, 96-112. 232 James McEvoy points out that, “[Mark] Wrathall identifies a pragmatic problem in understanding scriptural assertions according to the communicative model of language: it is simply beyond our capacity to prove these assertions in the manner required by this model… [Thus], rather than scriptural assertions being in the business of communicating propositions [i.e., a process of responding to the truth of assertions], Wrathall argues that they must be understood fundamentally in terms of world disclosure.” Revelation is thus not about producing rational evidence that confirm the veracity—understood in terms of the natural sciences—of a statement, but rather, in Wrathall’s words, about its disclosing property: “As we allow the scriptures to attune us to the world as God’s creation and people as God’s children, we are effectively reoriented to the world” (McEvoy 2014, 127). 119

Christianity and Greek philosophy, we see the radicalness of the claim of a religion that is in accord with reason.

Taylor rejects the self-confidence of those who proclaim that knowledge of God is ready at hand.

This confidence, to be sure, can lead human beings to impose their own views—forcing people to be free, if I can borrow the phrase from Rousseau—or even to dream of a social order informed by their theological views. His critique of Christendom rightly denounces the distortion of religion as moralism, and of the mystery of God as a once-and-for-all interpreted being which we now completely understand. But he seems to dismiss too hastily the other component of the Catholic faith, that is, reason. This move, in my opinion, favors an unqualified defense of authenticity. It also explains why, in the last chapters of A Secular Age, he focuses on individual conversions, failing to give an account of Catholicism as ecclesia. This is a problem

I will address in chapter 4, where I discuss the relation between the individual and the community.

[4] So, do we live in a secular, or post-secular age? I have deferred this question to the end in order to evaluate the different arguments discussed here. The title of Taylor’s book obviously suggests that the

“secular” has not been overcome. But then, in what sense are we entitled to speak about post-secular societies? What distinguishes, in any case, these modes of sociability?

The core of the question is, to my understanding, whether or not Taylor’s A Secular Age remains in the tradition of theories of secularization. Clearly, this is not the case. One of Taylor’s main goals is precisely to discredit many of the assumptions and conclusions of these theories. Jürgen Habermas summarizes the main reasons held by secularization theorists:

First, progress in science and technology promotes an anthropocentric understanding of the “disenchanted” world because the totality of empirical states and events can be causally explained… Second, with the functional differentiation of social subsystems, the churches and other religious organizations lose their control over law, politics, public welfare, education and science; they restrict themselves to their proper function of administering the means of salvation, turn exercising religion into a private matter and in general lose public influence and relevance. Finally, the development from agrarian through industrial to post- industrial societies leads to average-to-higher levels of welfare and greater social security; and with a reduction of risks in life, and the ensuing increase in existential security, there is a drop in the personal need for a practice that promises to cope with uncontrolled contingencies through faith in a “higher” or cosmic power.233

233 Habermas 2008, 17-18. 120

Against these hypotheses militate, Habermas continues, three phenomena: the missionary expansion, a fundamentalist radicalization, and the political instrumentalization of the potential for violence innate in many of the world religions. If we take Habermas’s outline of the secularization theory as representative, then it is hard to deny that Taylor is radically rejecting these theories. That science can explain the “totality of empirical states,” in the first place, tells us nothing of the place of religion in the world, or of fullness and the scope of human goals. The second hypothesis seems to point to Durkheim’s functionalist approach to religion. However, this does not necessarily mean that religion needs to be confined to the private sphere, as the case of denominations made clear. The third one makes even less sense, not only because post-9/11 times may instill much more anxiety and fear in believers and non-believers than in any other time before, but because “security” is an insufficient standard for human aspirations; Hobbes, that is to say, does not have the last word concerning the meaning of life.

Things don’t look better when we look at his arguments for the post-secular. If we take missionary activity apart, the other two indicators of religious reinvigoration have to do with violence, either in the form of fundamentalist rage or as civil religion, none of which are central for Taylor or Ratzinger. That

Habermas focuses on such phenomena is surprising for a philosopher who intuited that which is “missing” in our societies in his agnostic friend’s demand for a service in a religious precinct,234 and who claimed elsewhere that:

In post-secular society, the realization that “the modernization of public consciousness” takes hold of and reflexively alters religious as well as secular mentalities in staggered phases is gaining acceptance. If together they understand the secularization of society to be a complementary learning process, both sides can, for cognitive reasons, then take seriously each other’s contributions to controversial themes in the public sphere.235

Habermas seems to be suggesting that it was the becoming irrational of religion that changed the game: suddenly religion returned to its old vices, embracing fundamentalist positions, promising God to those who commit themselves in holy wars, and supporting non-democratic political regimes through the use of religious books. But this is not obvious. It may be suggested that underneath its religious garments, violence in the world is more often fueled by economic interests, and that it is one of the consequences of a world

234 Habermas 2010, 15. 235 Habermas in De Vries and Sullivan 2006, 258. 121 that is growing increasingly unequal. Donald Trump’s alliance with the Christian right can hardly be deemed a theocratic project—at least when seen from Trump’s side.

The strength of A Secular Age is that the emphasis is put not on religion alone, but on the conditions of belief which ultimately affect both believers and unbelievers. Taylor goes a step further in recognizing that secularization theories were wrong from the beginning. What brings these theories down is not a resurgence of religious zeal in the world in recent years (9/11 being the pivotal moment), but the certainty that, first, secularization cannot be explained by a subtraction story and, second, that this implies that modernity is but one tradition of thought among others, one specific understanding of what it means to be a human being here and now. This is consistent with Ratzinger’s suggestion that modernity is not a Christian product, and that we are likely to find new ways of being a Christian in the world.

But there is another reason why I am defending the transition from “secular” to “post-secular,” one that refers to the tension between faith and reason discussed above. Secularization theories very quickly dismiss religion as irrational. It has been argued that man’s cognitive capacities evolved to recognize patterns, as well as animal or human figures in random data (pareidolia), to the extent that, once developed, these very capacities often trick our minds, making us see what is not really there (e.g. saints, angels, gods).236 At other times the argument presented is just a version of Feuerbach’s critique: it wasn’t God who made men but men who created God as consolation for the anxieties, fears, and pains of this world, or as a source of meaning.237

Even if religion is not just dismissed prima facie, the argument is often made that religious arguments are not of the kind that everyone can understand, so that those willing to enter the democratic public sphere are required to translate their comprehensive doctrine into secular reason, that is, into reasons we can all understand. This effort makes possible, for instance, Rawls’s “overlapping consensus,” which

Taylor at least partly embraces.238 In these models the recognition of the primacy of secular reason prevails, and consequently religion is seen as a discourse not yet “cleansed” of what makes it inscrutable and obscure.

Thus, in the end the same primacy of reason over faith is maintained.

236 For an example of this kind of argument, see Boyer 2001. 237 Christopher Hitchens makes this argument repeatedly in his book God is not Great (Hitchens 2007, 10, 54, 115, 151). 238 Cf. Taylor 2007, 532, 693. 122

In opposition to this understanding of the relations between faith and reason, I presented Taylor’s critique of science as a master narrative, which can be extended to secularized reason. Modernity, as we saw, relies on metaphysical claims just as does any other comprehensive view of human existence.

Catholicism defends the tension between faith and reason, that is, it proclaims a faith that makes sense to reason because revelation is the divine logos, that is, God’s communication with the creatural realm. For

Catholicism, faith and reason are called to invigilate the other, preventing their respective pathologies. In a conversation with Jürgen Habermas, Joseph Ratzinger described this task:

there are pathologies in religion that are extremely dangerous and that make it necessary to regard the divine light of reason, so to speak, as a regulatory body; religion must again and again be purified and ordered anew in terms of reason—which, incidentally, was also the idea of the Church Fathers. But our reflections also showed that, although mankind in general is not as aware of it, there are also pathologies of reason, a hubris of reason that is not any less dangerous but even more menacing in terms of its potential efficiency: atom bomb, man as product. That is why, conversely, reason, too, must be reminded about its limits and must learn to be willing to listen to the great religious traditions of mankind. If it completely emancipates itself and rejects this willingness to learn and this correlative status, it becomes destructive.239

239 Ratzinger 2012, 213-214. 123

CHAPTER 3. THE POSTCONCILIAR CHURCH.

For the ties which unite the faithful together are stronger than those which separate them: let there be unity in what is necessary, freedom in what is doubtful, and charity in everything.1

The Second Vatican Council was the most important event of the Catholic church in the twentieth century. It was a time when the church declared itself open to dialogue: with the modern world, science and human rights; with other religions, seeking to make peace with Judaism by acknowledging its share of guilt for antisemitism and recognizing not only that God’s grace can be found outside of the church, but also that non-Catholics (and non-Christians) can be saved; and with itself, in order to overcome Christendom and retrieve a self-understanding more in line with the spirit and letter of the Scriptures and tradition.

If it is true that the council wasn’t called to deal with an internal crisis—such as a heresy or a schism—it is also true that everywhere around the council, outside the church, a deep crisis was felt. The horrors of World War II were still fresh in the memory of Europe. Underneath all the madness and destruction, the Western sense of superiority was buried. Europe was waking up from a nightmare, and along with it the rest of the world. The war inaugurated the end of colonialism, an ever-growing demand for independence and autonomy that came especially from the African countries. A proud Europe could no longer proclaim its “civilizing” mission, for this mission had shown itself capable of the most depraved atrocities. The church, to be sure, was not alien to these problems: as we saw in the previous chapter, its history is intimately linked to Europe’s imperial history. The church had ahead of it a difficult process of self-examination, an acknowledgement of its share of guilt, a plea for forgiveness and, finally, a true conversion, the open-ended process of adjusting itself to the message of Christ, a task Ratzinger calls ablatio.

1 SVC Gaudium et spes, §92.

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This chapter aims to show that the fresh ecclesiology that emerged from the council—with its redefinition of the relations between papacy and episcopacy,2 the new liturgy, as well as its progressive abandonment of scholasticism as the ultimate theological language and the recovery of Patristic—created the conditions of possibility for a new theologico-politico order that reconfigured the church’s relationships with Judaism, other Christian and non-Christian churches, and with the state. These changes, I will argue, open up exciting possibilities for thinking Catholic political action, as well as a new chapter in state-church relations.

To understand Vatican II’s dialogue with the world we need to go back to the origins of modernity.

We saw in the previous chapter Luther’s centrality in this story, so here I examine the church’s answer to

Luther by means of an analysis of the council of Trent (I), suggesting, first, the continuity of the church’s teaching and, second, the differences in style, context, and content between both councils. I then discuss some of the main characteristics of the Second Vatican Council and analyze three conciliar issues that had a deep political impact (II): the proper relations between episcopacy and primacy, the church’s relations with the Jews, and the church’s understanding of religious liberty, ecumenism and religious dialogue. The third section offers two reactions to the council (III), one that called for its complete rejection in favor of past times, and another which urged the church to push the “spirit” of the council forward. I argue that, while both pose important challenges to the church, both end up immanentizing Catholicism, aiming to solve human problems here and now and forgetting the eschatological dimension of the kingdom. Finally

(IV), I offer some concluding remarks on the reception of the council and the task ahead of us.

I

[1] The sixteenth century in the West was a time of deep moral sensibility, anxious desire for reform, and the emergence of a new political model that disrupted the relations between church and princes. It was

2 The new ecclesiology of Vatican II, however, is not without challenges. Massimo Faggioli asserts, for example, that in the Decree “we see one of the ‘dark sides’ of the very important—indeed, pivotal—focus of Vatican II on the episcopate and episcopal collegiality: not only the clergy but also the religious orders were overlooked in the council’s ecclesiological debate of Vatican II” (Faggioli 2017, 9). It is worth noting that Faggioli does not mention the tension between Papacy and episcopate, and refers to the latter’s power as “monarchical,” an idea that theologians such as Rahner and Ratzinger will radically oppose. See below, 3.II.1.

125 a century fueled by colonialism: from Alexander VI’s bull Inter Caetera to Charles V’s decision to suspend, in 1550, all conquests overseas until a select group of jurists and theologians could decide upon the justice of the enterprise.3 It was the century of Machiavelli’s dream of a unified Italy and Erasmus’ humanist project; as well as the genius of Michelangelo and Raphael under the patronage of pope Julius II. It was the century of Copernicus and Galileo, whose theories brought down the church’s geocentric doctrine and opened the way for modern science. In politics, it was the century of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of England;

Charles V, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire; and Francis I of France. It was also, perhaps more importantly, the century of Martin Luther.

The council of Trent was the church’s response to Luther, who opposed what he saw as a pervasively corrupted church with a return to simplicity: sola scriptura, sola fidei, sola gratia. As discussed above (2.II.2), Luther radicalized Augustine’s pessimism, claiming that salvation comes only through faith, rendering works useless. He emphasized the need to go back to Scripture,4 promoted the use of the vernacular, and stressed that our corruption is so deep that only God’s grace can produce goodness. He dismissed five of the seven sacraments of the church, keeping only baptism and the eucharist.5

In order to understand Trent, which stretched over three periods in the mid-sixteenth century (1545-

1547, 1551-1552, and 1562-1563), we must see the inner and outer political tensions that Trent had to face.

First, Trent displayed a feature that would prove a thorny one four centuries later, in Vatican II: the dispute over power and authority between the pope and the bishops. Since the fifteenth century, grew increasingly fearful of the councils, seeing them more as threats against their power than as allies. The

Council of Constance (1414-1418) had stated that “the pope could be judged by no one ‘unless he should deviate from the faith.’”6 The council of Basel went farther when it declared, in 1432 and 1434, that councils are “the supreme authority in the church.”7 Pope Pius II reacted, in 1460, to Basel, issuing the bull

3 “Probably never before or since has a mighty emperor—and in 1550 Charles V was the strongest ruler in Europe with a great overseas empire besides—in the full tide of his power ordered his conquests to cease until it could be decided whether they were just.” (Hanke 1949, 117). This gave way to the philosophico-theological confrontation between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas. 4 “[E]ven if the pope acts contrary to Scripture, we ourselves are bound to abide by Scripture.” (Luther 1962, 414). 5 O'Malley 2013, 118. 6 “Papa a nemine dijudicatur nisi deprehendatur a fide divius.” Ibid., 25. 7 Ibid., 30.

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Execrabilis “forbidding appeal to a council over the head of the pope.”8 The story went on, with attempts from each side to change the balance of power. In the nineteenth century, the council Vatican I (1869-1870) addressed the issue in its fourth session. It declared as heretics both papalism and conciliarism, and decreed the infallibility of the pope whenever he speaks ex cathedra.9 Conciliarism and papalism (or

“ultramontanism”)10 have been dimensions of the internal politics inside the Catholic church for many centuries, but also part of a hermeneutical struggle to unravel the relationship between Peter and the

Apostles, or between Peter and the other Apostles.11

The council was also a battlefield wherein the European powers struggled to secure influence and power over the church. Popes themselves were handed the secular sword: as heads of the papal states, they commanded armies, raised taxes, and were a critical element in the European power game. Machiavelli, for instance, blamed the church for the division of Italy:

It is the Church that has kept, and keeps, Italy divided… For, though the Church has its headquarters in Italy and has temporal power, neither its power nor its virtue have been sufficiently great for it to be able to subjugate Italian tyrants and to make itself their prince; nor yet, on the other hand, has it been so weak that it could not, when afraid of losing its dominion over things temporal, call upon one of the powers to defend it against an Italian state that had become too powerful.12

Besides papal secular power, Trent was the meeting point of other political interests. Charles V saw himself as the leader and defender of Christendom, often disputing the authority of Pope Paul III, who convoked the council. He harbored the hope of a peaceful, non-schismatic resolution with Lutherans, and thus wanted them to attend the council. Francis I of Valois, king of France, had obtained in 1515 the Concordat of

Bologna from Pope Leo X, “granting him and his successors nomination rights for all archbishops, bishops, and other leading prelates in France.”13 Henry VIII would wage a personal war with Rome over the annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon—the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic kings of Spain—in order to marry Anne Boleyn, a conflict that would ignite the Anglican schism. The influence and power of these kingdoms would shape the face and outcome of the council.

8 Ibid., 32. 9 Council Vatican I 1986. 10 See Ratzinger 1972, 185. 11 Ibid., 203. 12 Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, I.12. 13 O’Malley 2013, 36.

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Even the location was a cause of political dispute: “Not France nor Spain because the Germans would not go. Not Germany because the French would not go. Not the Papal States because the Protestants would not go.”14 A compromise was found with Trent. The importance of the location would prove critical when, confronted with an epidemic threat (which eventually turned out to be unfounded), the council decided in 1547 to move the council to Bologna, starting a period of stagnation and political struggle that would force the council to resume sixteen years later, in 1562, again in Trent.15

In yet another compromise of the council—this one regarding its object—the fathers agreed “almost unanimously to treat dogma and reform in tandem.”16 The most important dogmatic aspects corresponded to Luther’s assertions about justification and the sacraments, while reform focused on bishops’ residence, benefices, and education. The council condemned the idea that anyone can be justified before God by his own works and established that, although justification “is not the result of human striving, the human agent contributes something to it, always on condition that that something is preceded and accompanied by grace.”17 As for the sacraments, the council ratified all seven of them,18 and confirmed the doctrine of transubstantiation and the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, a presence whole in each of both species.19

The council’s work on the church’s reform focused on the pastoral dimension of the episcopal office. That popes, cardinals and bishops often failed to live up to the standards established by Jesus was common knowledge in the sixteenth century.20 Many bishops were absent from their dioceses, in part because some held multiple bishoprics (which were sources of funds). Celibacy was another problem: priests, bishops, and popes failed to live according to the requirements of chastity. The sexual scandals of

Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI), are well known: he begot four children with Giovanna dei Cattanei,

14 Ibid., 70. 15 John Courtney Murray suggests: “The resumption of Trent meant the definite abandonment of hopes of reunion [with Protestants]; a new Council might serve as fuel to keep those hopes faintly flickering yet a while longer.” In fact, according to Murray, history “has abundantly established the rightness of the papal attitude; viewed in retrospect, the rupture with the heretics is easily seen to have been from the outset irremediable” (Murray 1994, 288). 16 O’Malley 2013, 82. 17 Ibid., 114. 18 In the first canon of the Decree on the Sacraments (seventh session), the council condemned anyone claiming “that the sacraments of the New Law were not all instituted by Jesus Christ, our Lord; or, that they are more, or less, than seven, to wit, Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Penance, Extreme Unction, Order, and Matrimony; or even that any one of these seven is not truly and properly a sacrament” (Council of Trent 1547). 19 O’Malley 2013, 130-131, 145-148. 20 That men and women of the church have often failed to live Christ’s message seems more like a constant in church history. Today, when the church lives a deep crisis of authority because of the criminal behavior of some of its priests and bishops, it is a good idea to remember the inner tension between an all-too-human church wounded by sin, capable of all kinds of hideous crimes, and a holy one, the Church of Christ, a sacrament, that is, a visible sign of God’s grace in the world. Ignoring any side would lead, inevitably, to a caricature, a misrepresentation of its true nature. 128 and had other mistresses, like the famous Giulia Farnese, sister of Alessandro Farnese (Paul III). To counteract these situations, in their twenty-fourth session the council fathers exhorted church officials to

“study to promote good pastors,” born out of lawful wedlock, who had led a good life, and had the sufficient intellectual qualifications. It exhorted the pope himself to be careful when elevating people to the cardinalate, making sure to appoint “good and fit pastors.” The council also ordered the celebration of periodical synods—a provincial one every third year, and a diocesan one every year. It mandated the pastors to visit each of the churches of his diocese once every year, and singled out the ministry of the word, exhorting bishops to practice preaching as often as possible.21 In its twenty-fifth session, the council stressed that “Cardinals and all Prelates of the churches shall be content with modest furniture and a frugal table: they shall not enrich their relatives or domestics out of the property of the Church,” also reproaching priests who kept concubines22 and establishing a disciplinary process against them. The fruits of this reform loom large in the history of the Catholic church. In O’Malley’s words, “[a] process was set in motion that over time resulted in an essentially residential episcopacy in the Catholic church and a residential pastorate.”23

Finally, it is important to mention the exhortation that the council made to the princes:

It admonishes the emperor, kings, republics, princes, and all and each of whatsoever state and dignity they be, that, the more bountifully they are adorned with temporal goods, and with power over others, the more religiously should they respect whatsoever is of ecclesiastical right, as belonging especially to God, and as being under the cover of His protection; and that they suffer not such to be injured by any barons, nobles, governors, or other temporal lords, and above all by their own immediate officers; but punish those severely, who obstruct her liberty, immunity, and jurisdiction.24

The council delimited a spiritual sphere subject to ecclesiastical right. It warned against political authorities trespassing the limits of the political sphere which, although by no means clearly defined, was visible enough to suggest, at least, that which “belongs to God.” The echoes of Jesus’ answer to the Pharisees are heard: “Render… to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Matthew

22:21).

21 Council of Trent 1547. 22 “How shameful a thing, and how unworthy it is of the name of clerics who have devoted themselves to the service of God, to live in the filth of impurity, and unclean bondage, the thing itself doth testify, in the common scandal of all the faithful, and the extreme disgrace entailed on the clerical order” (Ibid). 23 O’Malley 2013, 259. 24 Council of Trent 1547.

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The council of Trent laid the foundations for a renovation in the Catholic church: it demanded a spiritual awakening from the bishops, urging them to go back to the spirit of the good shepherd who lives and sacrifices with and for his flock (John 10:11).25 Bishops were called to preach and teach, to visit their local communities, and to embrace more fully Jesus’ spirit of detachment from earthly goods. Finally, the council instilled a moral reinvigoration, which was the product as well of the Humanist tradition.

[2] Why did Pope John XXIII feel the need to announce a council a few months after his election?

And, more importantly, what kind of council did he have in mind? Was it to be understood in continuity with the long conciliar tradition or, instead, as a rupture in time, what Joseph Komonchak calls an “event”?26

To understand the nature of the council, it seems necessary to inquire about John XXIII’s motivations, the dispute in the church about the proper hermeneutics for interpreting the council, and the council’s main characteristics.

On January 25, 1959, Pope John XXIII announced his decision to convoke an ecumenic council.

He recognized the rapid changes that cities were enduring in the modern era, and the dangers associated with the immoderate desire for material goods: “All this—let us say, this progress—while distracting from the pursuit of superior goods, weakens the energies of the spirit, leads to the relaxation of the structure of discipline and good ancient order, with serious prejudice to what constituted the strength of resistance of the church and his sons to the errors.” He then remembered councils as “periods of renewal” which bore

“fruits of extraordinary efficacy” and announced, with profound emotion, the council.27 On December 25,

1961, the Pope published his apostolic exhortation Humanae Salutis,28 in which the council was formally convoked. In the document one can hear the same sense of alarm regarding the world. The pope referred to a “grave crisis,” emphasizing that spiritual progress had not followed material progress (§3).29 However, he

25 Pope Francis has given many speeches and homilies on this topic, showing that the exhortations for good shepherds have been a constant preoccupation in the church. In his homily of Holy Thursday, on April 2, 2015, he spoke of a “good and healthy tiredness. It is the exhaustion of the priest who wears the smell of the sheep… but also smiles the smile of a father rejoicing in his children or grandchildren” (Francis 2015b). 26 Komonchak describes the “event” as “a ‘noteworthy’ occurrence, one that has consequences” and which is represented by the categories of “novelty, discontinuity, a ‘rupture,’ a break from routine, causing surprise, disturbance, even trauma, and perhaps initiating a new routine, a new realm of the taken-for-granted” (Komonchak in O’Malley et al 2007, 27). 27 John XXIII 1959. Translation and emphasis are mine. 28 John XXIII 1961. Translation is mine. 29 Interestingly, in 2005 Joseph Ratzinger, referring to our age as a time of “great dangers and great opportunities,” reached the same conclusion as John XXIII. He claimed that “the growth of our possibilities is not matched by an equal development of our spiritual energy” (2013, 189).

130 distanced himself from those who “can only see darkness around them” (§4), seeing instead hopeful hints of a better world to come. With this in mind, the pope deemed the church ripe for a new ecumenical council, which was to “continue the series of the twenty great synods that have been so helpful, throughout the centuries, to augment in the spirits of the faithful the grace of God and the progress of Christianity” (§6, my emphasis).30 Finally, on October 11, 1962, the pope opened the twenty-first ecumenical council of the

Catholic church.31 At the very beginning of his speech, John XXIII insisted on the continuity of the church’s teaching, as well as his desire to put these teachings in a language that resonates with the modern world

(aggiornamento): “in order to present it in an exceptional way to all the men and women in our time, considering the deviations, exigencies, and circumstances of our contemporary age.”32 He rejected, once again, the perspective of those who see in the modern world only “prevarication and ruin,” while pointing out the many obstacles and dangers the modern age made disappear—among them, the “undue interference of civil powers.” Finally, the pope emphasized a change in tone, which meant leaving the language of accusation and punishment aside and adopting “the medicine of mercy.” The church, he remembered,

“wants to show herself kind to everyone, benign, patient, filled with mercy and goodness towards those sons and daughters who are separated from her.”

It must be clear by now that John XXIII’s intention for the council was never a rupture, or a radical discontinuity with the history of the church, but a combination of continuity and adaptation to modern times.

The church cannot have ruptures with its past, if that means breaking away from a revelation it didn’t create but received and was called to proclaim. The church, nonetheless, exists in the world, thus subjected to

30 This spirit of continuity becomes evident when we recall Angelo Roncalli’s (later John XXIII) pastoral activity as cardinal of Venice. Jared Wicks shows the deep imprint that Trent left in the cardinal, who in 1954 described his project as a “[p]astoral visitation in the spirit of the Council of Trent, as shepherd and father (pastor et pater).” The visitation was crowned, in his own words, by a diocesan council, “which reminds us of the era after the Council of Trent and of the fervor shown then by churchmen and laypeople animated to undertake a reestablishment [un ‘instaurazione] of Catholic life.” Referring to the synod, Roncalli wrote in 1957: “Have you not heard the word aggiornamento repeated many times? Here is our church, always young and ready to follow different changes in the circumstances of life, with the intention of adapting, correcting, improving, and arousing enthusiasm.” It is difficult to find a clearer exposition of the pope’s understanding of the continuity and harmony between both councils. (Wicks 2014, 849-850). 31 John XXIII 1962. Translation is mine. 32 In other parts of the document the same combination of continuity and aggiornamento is emphasized: “The supreme interest of the Ecumenic Council is that the sacred deposit of Christian doctrine be guarded and taught with growing efficacy”; “first of all it is necessary that the church doesn’t move away from the sacred patrimony of truth, received from the fathers; but, at the same time, it must look to the present…”; it was expected “a doctrinal penetration and a training of in a more perfect correspondence with fidelity to the authentic doctrine, studying it and presenting it through the forms of research and the literary forms of modern thought.”

131 constant change.33 This difficult tension between continuity and change, receptivity to God’s gift and its interpretation in time was—and continues to be—at the heart of many disputes inside the Catholic church.

But even if it wasn’t John XXIII’s intention to provoke a rupture, what Komonchak describes as

“event” could certainly have happened quite independently of his will. We must now look to what the council has meant for the church, more than five decades after its closure. Massimo Faggioli identifies two periods in post-Vatican II studies: one that runs from 1965 to 1985 and is dominated by the recollections and analysis of church fathers, perita, and other assistants; and a second one, from 1985 to 2000, in which two main schools, Bologna and Rome, disputed the correct interpretation of the council. On the one hand,

Guiseppe Alberigo and his colleagues published a broad History of Vatican II, focusing “on the council as a moment of discontinuity in recent church history.”34 Opposing this perspective, Agostino Marchetto has claimed that

Catholic historians must approach history from the viewpoint of salvation history, thereby installing a systematic-theological principle as the basis for historiographical research. When it comes to church history, such a principle entails insisting on the continuous development of Catholic doctrine leaving sparse room for discontinuity or rupture, let alone contradiction.35

The contraposition between the supporters of continuity and those of discontinuity can be seen, following

Karim Schelkens, as a debate between theologians and historians: while the former focus on the essential stability of the fundamentals of Catholic doctrine, the latter see only change. If we consider only these two options, reconciliation may seem impossible: it is either rupture and a new age in the church or pure continuity in a church that seems untouched by time, history, and change.36 A third position can be found in

Pope Benedict XVI’s Christmas address to the Roman Curia, on December 22, 2005. The pope distinguishes between “two contrary tactics,” one of discontinuity and rupture and another of reform:

33 As claims: “In a higher world it is otherwise; but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to change often” (Newman 1909, 40, quoted in O’Malley et al 2007, 177). For Rahner, “the Church is truly an historical thing. It would be to forget that the Church preserves and remains faithful to her Christ-given, permanent nature precisely by continually expressing it in a temporally conditioned form, in her ius humanum and in its practical application according to the needs of the time” (Rahner and Ratizinger 1962, 65). 34 Schelkens 2008, 879. 35 Ibid., 880. 36 Neil Ormerod points out that “the anxiety about change finds theological expression in a type of idealistic ecclesiology that takes the church out of history and places it in some ideal realm. Whether it be the ‘perfect society’ ecclesiology of Robert Bellarmine, the ‘mystical body of Christ’ ecclesiology of Pius XII, or the communio ecclesiology of more recent times, they are characterized by their lack of interest in historical details and events” (Ormerod in O’Malley et al 2007, 156).

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The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post- conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. It claims that they are the result of compromises in which, to reach unanimity, it was found necessary to keep and reconfirm many old things that are now pointless. However, the true spirit of the Council is not to be found in these compromises but instead in the impulses toward the new that are contained in the texts.37

While the hermeneutic of rupture, focused more on the “spirit of the council” than in the actual texts— because of the problem of “compromise” 38—faces the danger of making this “spirit” a vague, manipulable notion,39 the hermeneutic of reform is faithful to John XXIII’s aim of transmitting doctrine in its purity and integrity, without distortion, though studied and expounded “through the methods of research and through the literary forms of modern thought.”40

The rejection of the hermeneutic of rupture is found in the early Joseph Ratzinger as well. Thomas

Rausch explains that “[Ratzinger] rejects the popular view that the Council marked a ‘switch’ from to progressivism in the Church.”41 Two examples may be enough. In his discussion of the council’s relation with modernism, Ratzinger suggests that, by choosing “a new and positive encounter with its own origins, with its brothers and with the world of today” the council implied a “new beginning.”42

However, this is not understood as rupture, for: “Vatican Council II turned itself to a new task, building on the work of the two previous Councils.”43 A second instance of this position is found in his assessment of

Pope Paul VI’s position vis-à-vis the council: “Everything he did afterward bore this same imprint: a willingness to welcome change and innovation, but always in keeping with the continuity of history.”44

Ratzinger’s worry about the council’s hermeneutics can be traced in many of his works. His starting point is that councils don’t represent the normality of the church. While the councils are assigned “tasks of

37 Benedict XVI 2005a. See also O’Collins 2012, 768-769. Two collections of articles exemplify these hermeneutics: After Vatican II: Trajectories and Hermeneutics (Heft 2012) leans towards a hermeneutic of discontinuity, while Vatican II: Renewal within Tradition (Lamb and Levering 2008), towards the hermeneutic of reform. 38 Edward Schillebeeckx describes compromise at Vatican II as “sensitive concessions [made] to a minority which was powerful in church politics but theologically one-sided (fixated on Trent and Vatican I)” (1990, xiv). That conciliar documents are the outcome of compromise is not necessarily a bad thing. Shaun Blanchard explains that in Trent and Vatican I some minorities achieved concessions that were influential in Vatican II: at Trent, the idea that revelation is contained not “partly in the written scriptures, partly in the unwritten traditions” but “in the written books and the unwritten traditions” (2017, 150; cf. Vatican II’s Dei verbum, §9-10). At Vatican I, the notion that papal infallibility is not “separate, personal, and absolute… [but] that infallibility is first and foremost a gift to the Church” (2017, 154; cf. Lumen gentium, §25). Failing to see these nuances and compromises leads to a misunderstanding of the texts, a false triumphalism of the majority which disregards diversity in the church. 39 Cf. Komonchak in Lacey and Oakley 2011, 97. 40 John XXIII, 1962. 41 Rausch, “Introduction” in Ratzinger 1966, 4. In an article reflecting upon the speeches of Cardinal Frings—who invited him as a at Vatican II—Ratzinger claims that “[a] progressivism which maintains that nothing preconciliar is any longer of interest today is exactly what Frings wanted to preclude by his criticisms” (Ratzinger 2010b, 90). 42 Ibid., 44. 43 Ibid., emphasis is mine. 44 Ibid., 60.

133 order and configuration,” the church is, “by its own essence, the congregation around the Word and the Lord that has become spiritual food.”45 The church is an assembly that worships God and proclaims the gospel, not a legislative body ever-anxious for reform. This anxiety is oblivious to the fact that “[a] church based on human resolutions becomes a merely human church. It is reduced to the level of the makeable, of the obvious, of opinion.”46 With this in mind, Ratzinger proposes a “negative theology,”47 which he characterizes as ablatio (removal) of everything that is superfluous, human, and added to God’s message48— an action similar to that of the sculptor removing from the rock that which prevents the sculpture from being seen—and congregatio (gathering) of the faithful in the liturgical act, which is the center of the church.49 In another work, Ratzinger approaches reform by contrasting “our church” with “His Church.” He criticizes the excessive reformist zeal, which may lead us to see the church now “exclusively under the aspect of feasibility,” that is, as something we can change, forgetting that reform is “quite closely related to conversion.”50 In the same sense, against those who overemphasize the official element in the church, i.e., institutional reform, he stresses that the crucial crisis today is “the crisis of faith, which is the actual nucleus of the process.”51 Our confidence comes, then, not from the fact that we can change the church, but because

“now as ever and irrevocably through us, ‘His Church’ lives behind ‘our church.’”52 This phrase is

Ratzinger’s ecclesiology in a nutshell. The central idea here is an Augustinian one: the church is victorious and holy as the body of Christ, but while pilgrim in this world, it is administered by human beings, some of whom belong to the celestial city, while others settle for their love of earthly goods and pleasures.

Against a hermeneutic of rupture, which would put a question mark on the idea of “His Church,” since a radical break would make impossible to preserve the tradition the church finds in the succession of

45 Ratzinger 1972, 178. Translations of this work are mine. 46 Ratzinger 1996, 139; Ratzinger suggests elsewhere that “the fanatical reform of structures is a new clericalism and a clerical egotism that overlooks people and cares primarily for one’s own interests” (2011a, 382). 47 Ibid., 142. Gerald O’Collins explains this notion of “negative theology”: “As developed in , apophatic (‘negative’) theology reminds us of the inadequacy of all attempts to approach the divine mystery. Any affirmation about God has to be qualified with a corresponding negation and with the recognition that God infinitely surpasses our human categories. The Western tradition of ‘negative’ theology insists that we can say more what God is not than what God really is” (O’Collins 2013, 13). 48 An immediate question comes to mind: What are the fundamentals of Catholicism? How do we know what is essential to God’s message and what is a human addition? I don’t pretend to have a definite answer to this question, which greatly exceeds the purpose of this work and my own training as a political theorist. However, I would suggest that the Creed, which is but the gathering of revealed truths, must be our starting point, and from there we can explore other truths that drive from them, always supported by a close reading of the Scriptures. 49 Ratzinger 1966, 31. 50 Ratzinger 2012, 136. 51 Ibid., 137. 52 Ibid., 146.

134 the apostles,53 and also against the suggestion that nothing really happened at the council, that everything is

“business as usual,” Benedict XVI suggests a middle way, what he calls a hermeneutic of reform.

Discontinuity certainly exists, but, as Komonchak explains, the pope’s suggestion that discontinuity is only apparent “seems to be that this real discontinuity did not threaten the true nature and identity of the church but permitted the church to recover elements that had been compromised.”54 Discontinuity can thus be seen as ablatio in a more general project that seeks to restore what is fundamental to Catholic faith.

What were the major characteristics of the Second Vatican Council? Ratzinger, himself a peritus of the council by invitation of Cardinal Josef Frings, claims that while other councils understood themselves as animated by the “impulse of spiritualization,” Vatican II, on the contrary, can be described by the motto of “opening to the world.”55 It was, he continued, characterized by a triple opening: “opening to the sources, opening to other Christians, [and] opening to humanity’s great questions.”56

From its very beginning, the council rejected an excessively scholastic57 language and opted, following Pope John’s exhortation for a “pastoral” approach which, in Ratzinger’s opinion, meant “speaking in the language of scripture, of the early Church Fathers, and of contemporary man.”58 This impetus was concerned with “catholicity,” with a council focused not only in the “magisterial sources from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,” but—following cardinal Frings—“directed toward Scripture itself and the whole

53 See SVC Dei verbum §8. In a discussion on conscience, Ratzinger links the notion of continuity, Papal authority, and conscience, by stating that the “true sense of the teaching authority of the pope consists in his being the advocate of the Chrsitian memory. The pope does not impose from without. Rather, he elucidates the Christian memory and defends it” (Ratzinger 2007b, 36). Ratzinger identifies conscience as a composition of anamnesis (memory, the innate disposition towards the good), and conscientia (the act of judging, of applying anamnesis to a specific situation), and thus claims that the authority of the Pope is nothing but being anamnesis, or memory. This necessarily implies the impossibility of radical discontinuities in the church. 54 Komonchak in Lacey and Oakley 2011, 102. Pope Benedict’s XVI’s understanding of change and continuity can be traced back to Romano Guardini, who defined the church not as “some institution that has been planned and constructed… but a living being… It goes on living through time, developing as every living creature develops, changing itself… and yet in essence always the same, and its core is Christ” (Die Kirche des Herrn, 41, quoted in Ratzinger 1988, 4). Ratzinger continues: “A body remains identical precisely by being continually renewed in the process of living… Genuine identity with the origin is only to be found where there is also the living continuity that develps in and thus preserves it” (Ratzinger 1988, 6-7). In an interview with Vittorio Messori, Ratzinger identified Charles Borromeo, the great post-tridentine reformer as “the classic expression of a real reform, that is to say, of a renewal that leads forward precisely because it teaches how to live th permanent values in a new way, bearing in mind the totality of the Christian fact and the totality of man” (Messori 1985, 38). 55 Ratzinger 1972, 313-314. 56 Ibid., 321. 57 Tracey Rowland identifies three main intellectual groups at the council: “(i) the Neo-Thomists, that is, those who belonged to the second and third generations of Thomists scholars following the revival of Thomism by Jesuits such as Joseph Kleutgen, who influenced Leo XIII, culminating in 1879 with his publication of the encyclical Aeterni Patris; (ii) the French Ressourcement scholars, antagonistically labelled as marketeers of a nouvelle théologie by some Neo-Thomists, and represented at the Council by Henri de Lubac SJ (1896-1991) and Jean Daniélou SJ (1905-1974); and (iii) the German and Belgian Transcendental Thomists, so named because of the centrality of ’s transcendental idealism in their work, represented above all by Karl Rahner SJ (1904-1984)” (Rowland 2008:18). 58 Ratzinger 1966, 45.

135 of tradition.”59 This approach was connected with the notion of ressourcement, a word O’Malley defines as

“a return to the sources with a view to making changes that retrieve a more normative past,”60 and that found a champion in Henri de Lubac.61

The opening to the world—which must be measured, for Ratzinger, by its service to the mission and charity if we are to distinguish between “a true opening of the Church, that is, Christologically adequate, and a false opening, that is, one that mundanizes” 62—meant a new sensibility for the problems and big questions of the world, as shown in the Constitution Gaudium et spes.63 In the modern age, the church approached these questions not from the position of the judge, but with a fraternal approach; not using words to condemn and anathematize, but preferring “the medicine of mercy” and dialogue. This last component, dialogue, was difficult for a church whose basic means of communication was the kerygma, “the calling which authoritatively manifests God’s will to human beings, asking not a dialogue, but assent and conversion.”64 This is so because, contrary to Platonic dialogue, for example, which tries to bring truth to light, the Christian gospel announces the unthinkable, “that which cannot be deduced spiritually, because it preaches the unreachable.”65 For this reason, Ratzinger places dialogue at the level of ecumenism, in the form of a participation in the human drama and of science. Also, since the Christian message is ineluctably proposed in human language, science can be helpful to understand and demarcate what is purely human

(another instance of ablatio).66

59 Ratzinger 2010b, 89; see also Ratzinger 1972, 318-319. 60 O’Malley in O’Malley et al 2007, 64. 61 It is enough to read his introduction to The Splendor of the Church to understand his spirit: “There are, I know, plenty of texts cited at the foot of each text… but that is only with the idea of giving the reader a direct line on the essential texts on Tradition; for my ambition is simply to be its echo” (Lubac 2006, 9, emphasis is mine). Cf. O’Malley in O’Malley et al 2007, 65. 62 Ratzinger 1972, 316. 63 “In every age, the church carries the responsibility of reading the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel, if it is to carry out its task. In a language intelligible to every generation, it should be able to answer the ever recurring questions which people ask about the meaning of this present life and of the life to come” (SVC Gaudium et spes §4). 64 Ratzinger 1972, 324. Following MacIntyrean terminology, James McEvoy sees Vatican II as a “radically new and conceptually enriched scheme,” consequence of an epistemological crisis in the church caused by the exhaustion of the model based on Christendom and its substitution by a new church-state relation built upon two key theological insights: “First, the council recognizes that history has intrinsic significance for the way in which God acts in the world, and therefore the church is charged with the task of remaining open to the presence and purpose of God in history. And second, the council recognizes that the Spirit of God is at work in the modern world, both in individuals and in social movements” (McEvoy 2014, 81). While MacEvoy’s analysis of the evolution of Gaudium et Spes successfully shows a change of style, it is relevant to note that a discussion on continuity is missing in that chapter. The danger, in my opinion, of his approach, is that an overemphasis on the newness of the council may blind us to the fact that Vatican II is first of all a dialogue with the church’s history, thus leaving us with a false notion of a church that has severed the ties with its past. 65 Ibid., 325. 66 Ibid., 327.

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O’Malley considers that the council saw dialogue as a task directed to the betterment of the world, not simply of the church.67 He leans on Martin Buber to define “dialogue” as a “conversation… from one open-hearted person to another open-hearted person.”68 Elsewhere, he claims that “‘dialogue’ manifests a radical shift from the prophetic I-say-unto-you style that earlier prevailed and indicates something other than unilateral decision-making.”69 O’Malley correctly affirms that dialogue implied a radical change in the style of communication, a change from the legislative-judicial (e.g., Trent) to the poetic-rhetorical (Vatican

II).70 Viewed in historical terms, the change is illustrated by the transition from the anti-liberal church of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—e.g., Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos (1832), Pius IX’s Syllabus of

Errors (1864), and Pius X’s Lamentabili and Pascendi (1907)—to the spirit of Vatican II, of which Gaudium et spes is the paradigmatic document. Ratzinger reaches a similar conclusion: “if we want to make a global diagnostic of this text [Gaudium et spes], it could be said that it means (along with the documents on religious freedom and world religions) a revision of Pius IX’s Syllabus, a sort of Antisyllabus.”71

Finally, both Ratzinger and O’Malley point out a tension that was particularly significant for the council, namely that between center and periphery. At the beginning of the council, the decision of the council fathers to postpone the election of commission members indicated, first, that the council was going to work independently and autonomously and, second, it restored “a fruitful interplay between periphery and center, between the living multiplicity of Catholic life (represented by the episcopacy) and the unity which the primacy must protect.”72 The discussion between center and periphery, primacy and episcopacy, was one of the most intense and difficult of the council, as we will see in the next section. According to

67 O’Malley in O’Malley et al 2007, 63. 68 O'Malley 2008, 80. 69 O’Malley in O’Malley et al 2007, 79. 70 O’Malley, in Bulman and Parella 2006, 302. 71 Ratzinger 1985, 457 (translations of this work are mine); cf. O’Malley in Bulman and Parella 2006, 308. In his 1964 encyclical letter, Ecclesiam Suam, Pope Paul VI discussed the notion of dialogue in the Catholic church. The encyclical states, first, that the church “is not separated from the world, but lives in it. Hence, the members of the Church are subject to its influence; they breathe its culture, accept its laws and absorb its customs” (§42). The dialogue between the church and the world has a transcendent origin (§70): it is God who seeks us in order to communicate. The characteristics of this dialogue are (§§72-77): first, it is opened spontaneously on God’s initiative; second, it is born out of charity; third, it was not proportioned to the merits of those toward whom it was directed; fourth, it forced no one, but left everyone at liberty to either accept or reject its requirement of love; fifth, it was made possible for each and everyone; and, finally, it has experienced a gradual development, successive advances, humble beginnings before complete success. This dialogue “excludes the a priori condemnation, the offensive and time-worn polemic and emptiness of useless conversation” (§79), it is clear, meek, trustful, and prudent (§81). 72 Ratzinger 1966, 25.

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O’Malley, this new relation was able to modify “the traditional and exclusive focus on a top-down hierarchical model with a more horizontal one.”73

II

As we suggested in the previous chapters, a complete separation between sacred and profane, faith and reason, or the theological and the political, fails to recognize the church’s embeddedness in this world as well as the fact that that, following Claude Lefort, “both the political and the religious govern access to the world.”74 From this it follows that the pilgrim church cannot escape the political problem. The history of the Catholic church clearly shows how intricate—and, not a few times, regrettable—this relation has been. Ratzinger laments:

The use of the State by the Church for its own purposes, climaxing in the Middle Ages and in absolutist Spain of the early modern era, has since Constantine been one of the most serious liabilities of the Church, and any historically minded person is inescapably aware of this. In its thinking, the Church has stubbornly confused faith in the absolute truth manifest in Christ with insistence on an absolute secular status for the institutional Church. Another characteristic deeply imbedded in the Catholic mentality is the inability to see beyond the Catholic faith, the inability to see the other person’s viewpoint.75

Here I discuss three main political aspects of Vatican II, one whereby the church looked at itself—the problem of primacy and episcopacy—and the other two on the church’s relation with Judaism and other religions.

[1] The confrontation between bishops and popes have a long history. In the early sixteenth century, for example, Tommaso de Vio (Cajetan) and Jacques Alamin debated the question as to whom authority in the church belongs.76 The took a step towards papalism: many understood the doctrine of papal infallibility as the final word in the confrontation. However, as Shaun Blanchard affirms, the

73 O’Malley 2008, 11. 74 Lefort 1988, 222. 75 Ratzinger 1966, 144. 76 See Burns and Izbicki 1997.

138 minority at Vatican I achieved a considerable victory by preventing this power from being understood as personal and absolute, framing it instead as a gift to the whole church.77

The Second Vatican Council’s doctrine on episcopacy and primacy is contained in the third chapter of the dogmatic constitution Lumen gentium (LG). It is telling that the discussion is framed not in terms of political authority, but as the correct interpretation of Jesus’ instructions to the apostles. Jesus appointed the twelve,78 “at the head of which he placed Peter” (LG §18). Peter is part of the twelve, not distinct from the apostolic college. The council affirms that a bishop’s authority comes from “divine authority” (LG §20) and that he is endowed with a “special outpouring of the holy Spirit” (LG §21). However, the exercise of episcopal authority demands communion, that is, the bishop’s authority is only effective as a member of the college. As for the specific relationship between the pope and the bishops, the council states that

The college or body of bishops has no authority, however, other than the authority which it is acknowledged to have in union with the Roman Pontiff… [who] has full, supreme and universal power over the whole church, a power which he can always exercise freely. The order of bishops is the successor to the college of the apostles… Together with its head, the Supreme Pontiff, and never apart from him, it is the subject of supreme and full authority over the universal church; but this power cannot be exercised without the of the Roman Pontiff (LG §22).

In trying to unpack this relationship, we turn to Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger. Rahner claims that the church is not a democracy established by men, “but one whose fundamental rights, duties and powers were established by God.”79 On the other hand, neither is it a monarchy; the pope is not a king, inasmuch as his will “is limited by a reality which… belongs to the constitution of the Church, the episcopate.”80 Now, how to understand the tension between papal primacy and the episcopal college as a divine, indissoluble institution? The answer, for Rahner, is found in the local church. It is there that the church becomes an

“event”81 and acquires tangibility not as an institution, but as communion, “as a plurality of men bound

77 Ratzinger supports this idea: “For some time [the text on papal primacy] was considered as a unilateral victory of the papal and curialist tendencies… But for some time, the view that, in the Council, the text didn’t represent a victory for ‘ultramontanism,’ but of the ‘third group,’ has grown stronger.” This “third position,” for Ratzinger, opposes both conciliarism and papalism, and establishes the “irreducibility of both” (Ratzinger 1972, 157). 78 The number twelve implies both catholicity (universality) and the new Israel (Ratzinger 1988, 13, 18-19). 79 Rahner and Ratzinger 1962, 12. Cf. Ratzinger and Maier 2005, 22-30. 80 Ibid., 16. 81 Olsen explains the use of the term “event” in Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar: “An event indicates a moment (in time) when the conscious subject has been taken hold of by something independent (or other) than itself, even if this ‘other’ is occasioned by one’s own actions… of the subject in relation to the very deeds which he or she has authored.” In his view, “the shift in Catholic theology towards language of act and event signalled a relationship to ‘existentialism,’ which, taken broadly, entailed an emphasis upon subjectivity and freedom uncharacteristic of the focus upon objectivity common to neo-Scholastic thought” (Olsen 2008, 9-10).

139 together by a visible occurrence and united by grace.”82 It is only in the local church as “event” that the universal church is manifested. The tension, thus, confronts primacy, which exists insofar as the church is a church, that is, for the purpose of unity, with the rights of the episcopate, which are granted because it is in the local church that the universal church acquires visibility. In addition, there is “a ‘charismatic’ structure in the Church besides the hierarchical,”83 an idea that reaffirms that the church is neither a monarchy nor a parliament.84 The church recognizes the freedom with which God acts upon the community of faithful, which implies the necessity of pluralism on two levels: first, in the episcopacy as a collective body, and then in the church as the people of God, among the faithful (through different “charismas”; cf. John 3:8)85.

As for the understanding of authority in the church, Rahner affirms that the authority of the pope over individual bishops is not the same as the power he has over the collegiate episcopacy. This is because

“[t]he pope’s primacy is primacy in the college.”86 For Rahner, this clarifies the claim that “supreme authority of the Church rests in the council,”87 insofar as the council cannot exist without the pope, who is its head.

Relying on an image by Heribert Schauf, Ratzinger describes the church “not like a circle, with a single centre, but like an ellipse with two foci, primacy and episcopacy.”88 This image gives more dynamism to the relationship than the one we would get from a hastily adopted unity. This dialectic is already visible in the name “Roman Catholic.” At first sight, a contradiction emerges between universality and particularity.

A church whose self-understanding demands it to go to every corner of the world and speak to each in its own language (Acts 2:6) seems to be contradicted by the emphasis on the Roman element.89 This tension produces, in the same way that in Rahner, a positive understanding of the church: “‘Roman Catholic’

82 Rahner and Ratzinger 1962, 25. 83 Ibid., 31. 84 “The council is not a parliament and the bishops are not congressmen whose task is given only and exclusively by those who have chosen them. The bishops don’t represent the people, but Christ, from whom they receive their mission and consecration” (Ratzinger 1972, 188). 85 “The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit.” 86 Rahner, et al. 1963, 41. 87 Ibid. 88 Rahner and Ratzinger 1962, 43. 89 Ratzinger explains that, of the three primacies of the early church—Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch—Rome was progressively singled out, towards the fourth century, for three reasons: (a) Rome kept itself free of heresy, and was thus seen as the place where tradition was preserved intact; (b) it was the see of Peter and Paul; and (c) eventually it came to be related with the fact of the succession of Jerusalem by Rome which was seen as the definitive step from the church of the Jews to the church of the gentiles (Ratzinger 1972, 144).

140 expresses the pregnant dialectic between primacy and episcopate, neither of which exists without the other.”90

With its insights on primacy and episcopacy, the Second Vatican Council put an end to any attempt to see the popes as monarchs with absolute power. It also rejected the idea of bishops as papal delegates subject to the pontiff’s will, or as a parliament designed to check the former’s power. By better understanding the original mandate of Jesus to the apostles and its dynamic relation between head and body, the council did away with the long tradition that confused papal authority with political power. In the first place, the power of popes and bishops does not imply coercion or violence, which are reserved to the state.

On the other hand, this renewed emphasis on the local community helped restore diversity and plurality in the church not as a concession to the modern world, but as a necessity embedded in the very heart of the

Christian project.

[2] Paul’s letters produced a characterization of the Jews that became hugely influential for

Christianity. This characterization has been misused by Christians and non-Christians alike to promote anti-

Semitic sentiments and policies. Vatican II reacted against this tradition, breaking with a long history of hostility against the Jewish people and proposing a new understanding between the two communities. The central question for us is: How did the early church conceive its relationship with Judaism, the tradition it was born in but from which it broke away?91 Jesus assumed his Jewish roots—he was born “under the law”

(Galatians 4:4); his parents took him to the Temple “according to the law of Moses” (Luke 2:22); and the main events of his life coincide with major Jewish feasts92—but the of his message and his

Crucifixion made it imperative to rethink this relationship.93 I focus here on two aspects of the answer:

Paul’s antinomy Jew/Gentile and the accusation of deicide against the Jews.

90 Ibid., 62. 91 Gerald O’Collins rightly remembers us: “If we fail to appreciate the ways in which the New Testament massively appropriated and reread this salvific language [of the Old Testament] in the light of the whole Christ-event we can hardly expect to describe and explain competently how the first Christians articulated the deliverance Jesus brought them and us” (O’Collins 2013, 43). 92 Ratzinger 2007a, 237. 93 Niremberg (2014) affirms that by the notion that “‘Salvation comes from the Jews’ John meant Jewish prophecy, and his audience would have seen no contradiction in the stark separation John drew between Jewish prophets and their words on the one hand, and the Jews that rejected Jesus and later his believers on the other” (section 103/817).

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David Niremberg analyzes the evolution of the Jewish question from Paul’s letters to the four gospels. He claims that the latter radicalized Paul’s doctrine, “from a conditional and godly Jewish enmity to an essential and demonic one.”94 The Evangelists took Paul’s antinomies—Jew/Greek, slave/free, male/female, circumcised/uncircumcised—and extrapolated them into a new ontology whereby Jews appeared as a diabolic group. This becomes clearer, Niremberg continues, in John’s gospel, where Jesus’ words for the Jews are harsher than anywhere else. Jesus scolds, e.g., some Jews by asking: “Why come do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. You are of your father the devil” (John 8:43-44).95

The contraposition between Jews and gentiles, and the demonization of the former is, however, an oversimplification of Paul’s thought.96 Nonetheless, it is undeniable that Paul’s categories and his critique of the tendency to “Judaize”—the idea that gentiles must follow Jewish rites, such as circumcision (cf.

Philippians 3:3)—have inspired a vast literature on Judaism, and not a few times, on antisemitism. Shmuel

Trigano claims that it is Paul’s universalism, the katholikos as the framework of the new faith, which has dangerously rehabilitated two millennia of antisemitism:

Catholic universalism will be attained by deposing the Jewish people and reducing them to singularity and particularism. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that this is a universalism minus one (the Jewish people), a universalism constructed to exclude Israel “according to the flesh,” a critical foil for the new identity born of the splitting of Israel… The fall of Jewish Israel will enable the rise of the “New Israel.”97

94 Ibid., 108/817. 95 A more philosophical explanation can be found in Alain Badiou, who contrasts Paul’s rejection of the Jew principle (of “exclusion”) and the Greek principle (of “totality”) with John’s embracement of the latter: “It is John who, by turning the logos into a principle, will synthetically inscribe Christianity within the space of the Greek logos, thereby subordinating it to anti-Judaism. This is certainly not the way Paul proceeds. For him, Christian discourse can maintain fidelity to the son only by delineating a third figure, equidistant from Jewish prophecy and the Greek logos” (Badiou 2003, 43). In my opinion, both Niremberg and Badiou are missing an important reference. John’s verse may be read along with Matthew 16:23, where Jesus scolds Peter’s opposition to the divine plan (“Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me, for you are not of the side of God, but of men”). Being of the devil means the inability to hear God’s will. Moreover, John also emphasizes that “salvation is from the Jews” (4:22). 96 A similar case of oversimplification is Niremberg’s claim that “the historical Paul valued the spiritual world more highly than the phenomenal and material one through which it was perceived, but he did not represent the world and its necessities as evil” (78/817). Although Niremberg’s observation is right, what it tells us about Paul is very little. In fact, this affirmation says nothing more than that Paul was Jesus’ follower. The interesting issue is, it seems to me, how does this world touches upon and is inextricably linked to the kingdom of God? How can we live in this world while being aware that real life is coded in messianic terms? In short, the artificial dichotomy spiritual/material fails to understand the complexity of Paul’s solution to the eschatological problem, that is, how to live now for the world to come. 97 Trigano in Blanton and de Vries 2013, 440. A renowned Jewish philosopher, Jabob Neusner, confronts Jesus’ universalism by defending the particularism inherent to Judaism: “He calls to me, but I am part of us. He tells me to give up hope and family, but God at Sinai has told us there is no kingdom of God without home and family, village and community, land and people” (Neusner 1993, 140). This is, however, not necessarily a problem for Neusner. He can still see Jesus—the same Jesus who goes beyond the particular community upon which Judaism is founded—in friendly terms: “Friend, you go your way, I’ll go mine. I wish you well—without me. Yours is not the Torah of Moses, and all I have from God, and all I ever need from God, is that one Torah of Moses” (3). From this perspective, it is not obvious that is necessarily a threat against Judaism, nor a source of antisemitism. Ratzinger claims: “The faith of Israel was directed to universality. Since it is devoted to the one God of all men, it also bore within itself the promise to become the faith of all nations. But the Law, in which it was expressed, was particular, quite concretely directed to Israel and its history; it could not be universalized in this form” (1999, 38, my emphasis).

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When Trigano speaks of the “rehabilitation” of Paul’s universalism in contemporary times, he has in mind

Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: The foundation of universalism and Giorgio Agamben’s The Time that

Remains.98 A closer look to these works, however, will show that the image of Paul that emerges from them is more complex than the one presented by Trigano.

Badiou resorts to Paul in his search for “a new militant figure… called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the century.”99 He claims that

Paul’s general procedure is the following: if there has been an event, and if truth consists in declaring it and then in being faithful to this declaration, two consequences ensue. First, since truth is evental… it is singular. It is neither structural, nor axiomatic, nor legal… Consequently, there cannot be a law of truth. Second, truth being inscribed on the basis of a declaration that is in essence subjective, no preconstituted subset can support it; nothing communitarian or historically established can lend its substance to the process of truth.100

Now, contrary to the simple antinomy Jew-Gentile, in Badiou’s Paul we find the creation of a third

“discourse.” Paul opposes law—identified with Judaism101—because it “blocks the subjectivation of grace’s universal address as pure conviction, or faith,” and precludes the gratuitousness of the event of Christ’s resurrection. But he also opposes philosophy (understood as “wisdom”): referencing Isaiah 29:14, he asks:

“Where is the wise man? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” (1 Corinthians 1:20). We are thus confronted with three “regimes of discourse”:

Regime Figure Discourse Jewish Prophet Sign/Exception Greek Philosopher Logos/Totality Christian Apostle Event

98 Kenneth Reinhard (in Blanton and de Vries 2013, 449) claims that Agamben’s book “is largely dependent on two precursors, Jacob Taubes… and Martin Heidegger.” 99 Badiou 2003, 2. 100 Ibid., 15. 101 This identification is problematic insofar as it creates a “figural” Jew, that is, it develops an idea of what a Jew is that makes violence to actual Jews, and thus creates a prejudice the permanence and ubiquity of which closes the spaces of freedom necessary for an authentic construction of the self. Just as Badiou, Erich Auerbach (1984) finds this “figural interpretation” in the Pauline Epistles, where “Paul explains to the freshly baptized Galatians, who, still under the influence of Judaism, wished to be circumcised, the difference between law and grace, the old and the new covenant, servitude and freedom, by the example of Hagar-Ishmael and Sarah-Isaac, linking the narrative in Genesis with Is 54:1 and interpreting it in terms of figural prophecy” (49). Paul’s figural interpretation “was subordinated to the basic Pauline theme of grace versus law, faith versus works: the old law is annulled; it is shadow and typos; observance of it has become useless and even harmful since Christ made his sacrifice” (50-51). What is problematic is not that this “figures” are indispensable for the Christian self-interpretation—Judaism depends itself on many figures, as for example the “figural Egypt”—but that precisely because the widespread triumph of Christianity over the West, the “figural Jew” has been accepted as simply the “Jew.” While I cannot develop this complex topic here, I can perhaps suggest that the best way to deal with figurations is to understand the tension they create between that which is used to create the figure, the “raw material,” and the ulterior meaning that the figure is trying to convey. It seems difficult to give up figurations (I am following here Taylor’s theory of language), but at the same time one must always have in mind the possible harm our figurations can do to others. It is this difficult balance that must be studied, I think, for any other solution seems to rely in sheer power. I am greatly indebted to Catherine Power about this topic, I benefited so much from her perspective.

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Paul rejects the Jew-discourse, focused on the particularity of the chosen people and its exceptionality,102 as well as the Greek one, with its emphasis in capturing the cosmos in immutable, eternal laws. In conclusion:

Paul’s project is to show that a universal logic of salvation cannot be reconciled with any law, be it one that ties thought to the cosmos, or one that fixes the effects of an exceptional election. It is impossible that the starting point be the Whole, but just as impossible that it be an exception to the Whole. Neither totality nor the sign will do. One must proceed from the event as such, which is a-cosmic and illegal, refusing integration into any totality and signaling nothing. But proceeding from the event delivers no law, no form of mastery, be it that of the wise man or the prophet.103

Agamben’s work, on the other hand, is a reading of Paul’s letter to the Romans as a messianic project. He identifies in Paul an eschatological urgency. Even though this time (our time) is coming to an end, this does not mean for Paul that we must flee from the world. The change operated in Paul’s message is subtler:

Christians don’t leave their place in the world but, at the same time, this place is reconfigured by a new attitude towards the world that Paul calls Hōs mē (“as not”). A life pierced by the messianic dimension distinguishes between usus and dominium:

thus, to remain in the calling in the form of the as not means to not ever make the calling an object of ownership, only of use… To be messianic, to live in the Messiah, signifies the expropriation of each and every juridical-factical property (circumcised/uncircumcised; free/slave; man/woman) under the form of the as not.104

What about the division between Jews and non-Jews (Ioudaioi and ethne)? While recognizing this division,

Agamben sees Paul introducing a new division, that of “flesh/breath.” What is important is that “this partition does not coincide with that of the Jew/non-Jew, but it is not external to it either; instead, it divides the division itself.”105 The result of this transversal division is that “there will be some Jews who are not

Jews, and some non-Jews who are not non-Jews.”106 In his letter to the Romans, Paul explains:

Circumcision indeed is of value if you obey the law; but if you break the law, your circumcision becomes uncircumcision. So, if a man who is uncircumcised keeps the precepts of the law, will not his uncircumcision be regarded as circumcision? Then those who are physically uncircumcised but keep the law will condemn you who have the written code and circumcision but break the law. For he is not a real Jew who is one

102 See, for example, Exodus 6:7; Leviticus 26:12; and Jeremiah 31:1. 103 Badiou 2003, 42. Badiou’s “event” picks up, in my opinion, something of Hegel’s moment of pure negativity of the will. For Hegel: “The will contains () the element of pure indeterminacy or of the ‘I’’s pure reflection into itself, in which every limitation, every content… is dissolved; this is the limitless infinity of absolute abstraction or universality, the pure thinking of oneself” (Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §5). But just as in Hegel the moment of absolute abstraction is incomplete and calls for a reconciliation with its opposite (the moment of choice and particularity), the event in Badiou calls for its own reconciliation. For, it must be reminded, Jesus didn’t just abolish the law, but completed it (Matthew 5:17), synthesizing it into his two commandments (Mark 12:28-31). Badiou’s radicalization of the exceptionality of the event responds, I think, more to his own political agenda than to a careful study of the meaning of the Incarnation-Crucifixion-Resurrection of Christ. 104 Agamben 2005a, 26. 105 Ibid., 49. 106 Ibid., 50. 144

outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. He is a Jew who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart, spiritual and not literal (Romans 2:25-29).

These comments should be enough to show, first, that there is to be found in the Pauline letters a conceptualization of the “Jew” which will be influential in the development of antisemitism; but, second, that it is by no means evident that what Paul had in mind was actual hostility against the Jews, or that the

“new Israel” implies the exclusion of the Israel of the flesh. As is clear both in Badiou and Agamben, Paul’s new doctrine of truth, which alters his relationship with the law, emerges out of the radical uniqueness of the Resurrection, considered as “event,” an event that disrupted the extant categories (Jew/Gentile among them) to a point where old meanings were overcome and replaced by new, spiritualized ones.107

I move now to the problem of antisemitism. It is not easy to distinguish between an antisemitism of

Christian origins from one which emerged from other sources. We can, however, identify a role imposed on the Jews by Western Christianity, which Trigano describes with the Greek word pharmakos: “The pharmakos was supported and revered for a year by the city; at the end of this period, he was beaten, expelled, or killed, in a rite of purification.”108 The fascination/repulsion towards the Jew in Europe shows, as Trigano suggests, a cyclical behavior, finding its most perverse, evil manifestation in the Shoah. The awareness of this “long-repressed guilt,” Ratzinger claims, forces us to rethink the relationship between the church and Israel.109

The story of Christianity contains undeniable episodes of antisemitism. David Niremberg’s book

Anti-Judaism tells this story thoroughly. Arguably, the most nefarious attack against the Jews by Christianity has been the imputation of the “crime of deicide.” To this problem I turn now.

107 I don’t understand “spiritualized” as distinguished with “corporeal,” but as a kind of reconceptualization operated by the insertion of a familiar concept in the messianic mindset. This “spiritualization,” I would argue, is not exclusive of Christianity’s relations with Judaism. Think, for example, of Jesus’ answer when he was told that his mother and brethren were asking for him: “Who are my mother and my brother?... Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mark 3:31-35). Obviously, Jesus is not neglecting his mother; he is rather “spiritualizing” the notion of family relations. Blood ties have lost their centrality for salvation, for now hearing the word of Jesus, converting and following him are the true ties, that real familiarity that binds and saves. 108 Trigano in Blanton and de Vries 2013, 446. 109 Ratzinger 1999 17.

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In Jesus and Israel, Jules Isaac110 patiently analyzes a series of propositions about the relationships between the man who proclaimed himself the son of God and his people. It is telling that about two-thirds of the work are devoted to the problem of deicide. Isaac acknowledges that antisemitism was not a Christian invention: in the centuries before Jesus we find pogroms and violence towards the Jews, most probably caused by “Israel’s exclusivism” vis-à-vis the pagan world.111

Isaac explores the evolution of the Jewish question from the New Testament to Christendom.

Referring to the former, he asserts that “none of these texts formulates the capital accusation of deicide against the Jewish people. What is spoken of is homicide… out of ignorance, and in words which are terms of remission.”112 This attitude, however, was forgotten and substituted by a growing antipathy and even hatred. Subtle distinctions that are found in the Scriptures—which sometimes speak of the Pharisees, the

Sanhedrin, or just the rich113—were ignored and coarsely replaced by “the people of Israel,” or “the Jews.”

So, we find in the history of Christianity attacks on the Jews, such as Saint Ephraim’s reference to

Jews as “circumcised dogs,” or Saint Jerome’s “Judaic serpents.” Isaac emphasizes the vehemence of Saint

John Chrysostom and Saint Gregory of Nyssa, the latter referring to the Jews as “adversaries of grace,”

“enemies of God,” “devil’s advocates,” “brood of vipers,” “sanhedrin of demons,” “murderers of the Lord,” and “slayers of the prophets.” Instances of antisemitism are also found in legislation. The Fourth Lateran

Council (1215) demanded that Jews (and Muslims) wear distinctive clothing, forbade them to hold public office, and forced converts to abandon all their Jewish practices.114 In a Bull published in 1555, Pope Paul

IV established anti-Jewish legislation in the Papal States: “confinement in the ghetto, obligatory wearing of

110 Isaac met in 1959 and 1960 with Pope John XXIII, “who proved to be unusually open-minded” about the Jewish question. Uri Bialer tells us that after the meeting, “the Holy See asked the Jewish scholar to meet with Cardinal Bea to inform him that he had decided to include the Jewish question on the agenda of the imminent Council meeting” (Bialer 2005, 73). 111 Isaac 1971, 235. 112 Ibid., 237. See, e.g., Peter’s words to the Jews: “And now my friends, I know that you acted in ignorance as did also your rulers” (Acts 3:17-18). Moreover, as Ratzinger suggests, Christ’s “death on the Cross is theologically explained by its innermost solidarity with the Law and with Israel; the Catechism in this regard presents a link to the Day of Atonement and understands Christ’s death itself as the great event of atonement, as the perfect realization of what the signs of the Day of Atonement signify” (Ratzinger 1999, 32). For a brief explanation of the Jewish Day of Atonement see Leaman 2011, 131-132. 113 Isaac is referring to James’s letter (5:1-6). It is not clear to me that James is talking about a historical event (i.e., the death of Jesus), but rather using a literary figure to emphasize his warning against rich people. Scott Han and Curtis Mitch describe this passage as a “graphic but figurative language for the oppression of the poor and defenseless” and refer it back to the book of Wisdom (Hahn and Mitch 2010, 445). 114 Tavard in Attridge 2007, 15-6. On the other hand, Tavard acknowledges that in 1928 the Holy Office in Rome condemned “any kind of hatred against the Jewish people,” and in his enclyclical letter, Mit brennender sorge (March 14, 1937), “Pius XI condemned the anti-Semitism of the National Socialists in Germany” (20).

146 a distinctive mark (the yellow hat), prohibition from practicing most professions.”115 That these measures sound all-too-familiar is chilling.

Isaac opposes two historical criticisms to the story of the deicidal people. First, the words of Jesus.

In Mark, Jesus teaches the Twelve that he had to be rejected “by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes” (8:31); and that he would be handed over to the pagans, “who will mock him and spit upon him, and scourge him, and put him to death” (10:32-34; cf. Matthew 20:17-19; Luke 18:31-33).116 There is no suggestion in these words that the people of Israel crucified him. Two groups emerge instead: the chiefs of

Israel and the gentiles. Isaac stresses that “it is not at all certain that the Pharisee party took a united position against Jesus and conspired to bring about his downfall.”117 Many of them maintained a wait-and-see attitude towards Jesus. Neither can Caiaphas, the high priest, be taken as representative of the people of Israel. High priests “formed a restricted and closed oligarchy… both rich and rapacious…; harsh but compliant, despotic but servile, servile toward the all-powerful Roman but despotic toward the Jewish people.”118

Isaac then turns to Jesus’ trial. He rejects the image of Pilate as “indulgent, understanding, accommodating, edifying even, quasi-Christian in advance,”119 presenting him instead as a blood-thirsty

Roman who despised the Jews (Jesus included). What matters to us, notwithstanding, is that the Synoptics describe the people of Israel crying out to Pilate: “Crucify them!” and Matthew even adds them shouting:

“His blood be on us and on our children.”120 Isaac points out the discrepancies about the authorship of these utterances: Was it only the high priest and the elders demanding Jesus’ blood, or them and a small crowd, or rather the whole “people”? Isaac concludes his study stressing that, even if we grant the story told in the

115 Isaac 1971, 247. Norman Roth questions the claim that the church persecuted the Jews in the Middle Ages, and deems it “an unfortunate common myth, shared widely by Jews and Christians” (Roth 1994, 1). Roth’s main argument is that rather than papal documents, the activities of bishops give us a better understanding of the Jewish-Christian relations. In my opinion, downplaying the importance of papal documents and councils is irresponsible. The fact that some bishops were respectfull towards the Jews says nothing of the official position of the church in that time. It also fails to account for the multiple occassiones wherein the Catholic church has publicly asked for forgiveness for its mistreatment of Jews. See for example, the document “We Remember: a reflection on the Shoah” issued by the Comission for Religious Relations with the Jews in 1998, where the church openly recognized its share of guilt for antisemitism and the Shoah. 116 Ibid., 264-265. 117 Ibid., 271. 118 Ibid., 275. 119 Ibid., 318. It was Tertullian who presented Pilate as “jam pro conscientia sua christianus,” as “already Christian in his conscience.” 120 Mark speaks of “the crowd” (15:8, 15); Matthew describes that “the chief priests and the elders persuaded the people to ask for Barab’bas and destroy Jesus” (27:20), and is the only one registering the phrase “His blood be on us and on our children” (27:25); Luke speaks of “the chief priests and the rulers and the people” (23:13); there is no crowd in John.

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Gospels (which he does not), that “does not give anyone the right to conclude that Israel is guilty of the crime, that the Jewish people are fully responsible for it.”121

Isaac rightly points out the impossibility of finding the origin of the idea of Israel as a deicidal people in the Scriptures. What we see is, rather, a mixture of historical facts (some Jews may have pushed for Jesus’ crucifixion) with a psychological—very Nietzschean, indeed—reading of this attitude, which demands understanding and remission. Antisemitism is thus a misguided, un-Christian development that has nothing to do with Jesus’ original words. That Christianity has many times been found guilty of this kind of hatred demands repentance and conversion, and the acknowledgment that both Jews and Christians glorify the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Nostra aetate, the declaration on the relation of the church to non-Christian religions, was approved by the conciliar fathers on October 28, 1965. It was one of the most debated issues, and it has become one of the most important documents of Vatican II. While presenting an early version of the document on

September 25, 1964, Cardinal emphasized that the crime of a few leaders couldn’t be attributed to the whole people of Israel. Moreover, he stressed the declaration had “nothing to do with any political questions,”122 referring especially to Zionism and the state of Israel. Notwithstanding Bea’s efforts, the document had to navigate amid political waters: the Arab states saw the document as a sign of the

Vatican’s political support for the state of Israel, and therefore as a statement against Muslims.123 The document states that:

Even though the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ (see Jn 19:6), neither all Jews indiscriminately at the time, nor Jews today, can be charged with the crimes committed during his passion… the Jews should not be spoken of as rejected or accursed as if this followed from holy scripture.124

121 Isaac 1971, 352. 122 O’Malley 2008, 222. 123 Ibid., 220; see also Arthur Kennedy in Lamb and Levering 2008, 398. 124 SVC §4. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§597) interprets Jesus’ death theologically, and affirms that “[a]ll sinners were the authors of Christ’s Passion,” and continues: “The Church does not hesitate to impute to Christians the gravest responsibility for the torments inflicted upon Jesus, a responsibility with which they have all too often burdened the Jews alone” (§598, emphasis mine).

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This paragraph marked a break with the long story of Catholic-fueled antisemitism. The church also recognized and embraced all that is true and holy in non-Christian religions, everything that raises one towards the divine125 and recognized the “common spiritual heritage” shared by Christians and Jews:

The church cannot forget that it received the revelation of the Old Testament… Nor can it forget that it draws nourishment from the good olive tree onto which the wild olive tree branches of the Gentiles have been grafted (see Rom 11:17-24). The church believes that Christ who is our peace has through his cross reconciled Jews and Gentiles and made them one in himself.126

Another important consequence of Nostra aetate was that the church abandoned its missions to convert the

Jews and replaced them with an eschatological view: “the church awaits the day, known to God alone, when all peoples will call on God with one voice and ‘serve him shoulder to shoulder.’”127 This solved an old problem, namely, the feeling many Jews had about missions. In the words of Max Eisen, “all segments of organized Jewry have always opposed missionary activity among Jews. They consider it to be a deterrent and destroyer of good and friendly relations between Jews and Christians; it is a perpetual irritant and at best a form of ‘higher anti-Semitism.’”128

Ratzinger concludes his work on the relations between Catholics and Jews with a note of hope:

“Jews and Christians should accept each other in profound inner reconciliation, neither in disregard of their faith nor in denying it, but out of the depth of faith itself. In their mutual reconciliation they should become a force for peace in and for the world.”129

[3] In 1442, the council of Florence-Ferrara stated that “no one—not just the heathen but also the

Jews, heretics and schismatics—outside the Catholic church can have a part in eternal life, but that they will go to the hell fire ‘that is prepared for the devil and his angels’”130 Five-hundred years later, Lumen gentium affirmed that “those who, through no fault of their own, do not know the Gospel of Christ or his church, but

125 “Every religion contains rays of light that we must neither despise nor extinguish, even though it is not sufficient to give man the truth he needs, or to realize the miracle of the Christian light in which truth and life coalesce. But every religion raises us towards the Transcendent Being, the sole ground of all existence and all thought, of all responsible action and all authentic hope.” (Paul VI 1964b, quoted by Kennedy in Lamb and Levering 2008, 399). 126 SVC Nostra aetate §4. 127 Ibid., 573. George Tavard explains that “the Church’s hope for the reconciliation of Judaism is still present, but it is conceived as an eventual, presumably remote acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah by Jews, not as a reconciliation of the Church with the Synagogue” (in Attridge 2007, 37). 128 Eisen 1948, 64, quoted by Connelly in Heft 2012, 125. 129 Ratzinger 1999, 45-46. 130 Quoted in Schillebeeckx 1990, xvii.

149 who nevertheless seek God with a sincere heart… these too may attain eternal salvation” (§16).131 Here we seem to be confronted with a break with a long tradition in the church. However, in my opinion, the break was made not with the Scriptures, but with Christendom. In any case, we must ask: How was this new attitude toward the other defined in the conciliar documents?132 Did the Catholic church see itself as one among many religious options—Christian or non-Christian—none of which can claim to have the ultimate truth about the divinity? Or did it remain faithful to Jesus’ words that only he is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6)? If the latter is true, how are we to consider the other religions? In this section I focus on the council’s answer to these questions, first, by reviewing the church’s recognition of religious liberty, and then confronting three approaches to the problem of the “other”133: Rahner’s “anonymous Christianity,”

Yves Congar’s thoughts on ecumenism, and Ratzinger’s discussion on interculturality.

At Vatican II, Latin American bishop Pablo Muñoz Vega claimed that religious freedom is presupposed by a religion that demands the absolute right to announce the gospel: religious freedom is the condition of possibility of all missionary activity.134 The declaration Dignitatis humanae stated:

People nowadays are becoming increasingly conscious of the dignity of the human person; a growing number demand that people should exercise fully their own judgment and a responsible freedom in their actions and should not be subject to external pressure or coercion but inspired by a sense of duty. At the same time, to prevent excessive restriction of the rightful freedom of individuals and associations, they demand constitutional limitation of the powers of government.135

It is possible to hear the voices of Immanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill echoing backstage. The council seems to be drawing on the Kantian notion of “duty” as the motor of free action136 and Mill’s discussion of liberty in a representative government.137

131 Ambrose Mong comments, regarding the contraposition of the two statements, that “these two official church teachings appear to be diametrically opposed, but Vatican II does not make clear what ‘seeking God’ really means, so it could be interpreted as explicitly searching for God or as doing charitable work” (Mong 2015, 28). 132 Rahner singles out Gaudium et spes (§19-21, and the fifth paragraph of §22), Lumen gentium §16, and Ad Gentes Divinitus §7, as the pertinent doctrinal ideas on the topic (Rahner 1985, 221). 133 I am aware that in this section I am mixing two different topics, namely the church’s relation with Christian churches and non-Christian religions. Although clearly there are important nuances in the way the church approaches each group, my argument is that, politically, the council approached the “other” in a new way, which can be seen by looking either to the problem of ecumenism or to the church’s relations with non-Christian religions. 134 Ratzinger 1966, 210-211. 135 SVC Dignitatis humanae, §1. 136 Kant Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:402. Catholicism, however, rejects Kant formalism. According to the Catechism, the morality of human acts depends on the object chosen, the end in view or the intention, and the circumstances of the action (§1750). 137 “Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who from them” (Mill, On Liberty, 76).

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John Courtney Murray, an influential voice in the conformation of the declaration on religious freedom, considers that while the document is lacking in terms of theological precision,138 this may have been a prudential move on the part of the conciliar fathers. In fact, the declaration “is the only conciliar document that is formally addressed to the world at large,” so “it would have been inept for the Declaration to begin with doctrines that can be known only by revelation and accepted only by faith.”139 The document was thus obviously redacted in political terms. Murray frames the declaration in the history of secularity.

The two great revolutions of the eighteenth century—the American and French—are paralleled by Leo XII’s overcoming of Christendom.140 It is not the task of the state to defend or promote religion, but only to protect the individual right of free exercise of it.141 Dignitatis humanae extended this protection to the atheist’s disbelief, a move that went “beyond Leo XIII, for whom ‘religion’ uniformly meant only the Catholic religion.”142

However, religious freedom does not mean for Murray a full separation between church and state.143

For him, “[the] government, in virtue of its duty toward the common temporal good, has a duty toward religion in society.”144 This, in turn, was expressed by the council in three norms for cooperation between the government and religions in society: first, the government must not exceed its competence, which is confined to the temporal; second, respect to the principle of religious freedom; and third, the idea that equality among citizens should not be infringed for religious reasons.145

The declaration Dignitatis humanae took religious liberty farther than any other document in the history of Catholicism: it extended the right to non-Christians and atheists, proclaimed a separation between

138 Another weakness of the declaration is its failure to situate religious freedom within the structure of human and civil rights (cf. Murray 1994, 264). 139 Murray 1994, 189. 140 “In a series of eight splendid texts, stretching from Arcanum (1880) to Pervenuti (1920), Leo XIII finally made it clear that there are two distinct societies, two distinct orders of law, as well as two distinct powers” (Murray 1994, 192). This also meant overcoming the old formula of the Peace of Augsburg that “the ruler determined the religion of the territory he controlled and was its protector—cuis regio, eius reigio (whose kingdom, his the religion)” (O'Malley 2008, 212). 141 “The Church renounces, in principle, its long-cherished historical right to auxilium brachii saecularis… The secular arm is simply secular, inept for the furtherance of the proper purposes of the People of God. More exactly, the Church has no secular arm” (Murray 1994, 194). 142 Ibid., 257. 143 O’Malley claims rather vaguely that Murray “advocated a form of separation of church and state, much like the situation in the United States” (O'Malley 2008, 213). In my opinion, O’Malley misses the complexity of Murray’s thought, reducing him to a standard liberal. In fact, while Murray weights the similarities between the First Amendment of the American Constitution and Dignitatis humanae, he also insists that “[i]n its original conception and intention the First Amendment declared a certain neutrality of government in matters of religion. It was not, however, a neutrality of indifference towards religion” (Ibid., 261). He insists, furthermore, that Christians “must regard militant laicism or secularism as inimical to the orderly progress of society toward justice and freedom. In particular, its dogma of absolute separation of church and state is unacceptable, even on ground of the common good of society. The principle of religious freedom does indeed demand a certain separation of church and state” (Ibid., 263). 144 Ibid. 145 Ibid., 257-258. 151 church and state, and demanded equality among citizens irrespective of their belief, thus renouncing any claim for special civil status for Catholics. On the other hand, it didn’t embrace secularism altogether, but insisted that state and religion converge in the notion of common good, and thus it was necessary to imagine a new relationship between the two spheres.

What is, then, the proper relationship between Catholicism and the other religions? Three theologians can be pinpointed in the canvas of alternatives. In the first place, we can consider Karl Rahner’s notion of the “anonymous Christian.” For Rahner, every human being “experiences the offer of grace—not necessarily as grace, as distinctly supernatural calling, but experiences the reality of its content.”146 This means that, insofar as God’s communication is effective—because in God thought and action are the same—

Christ’s salvation for the whole of humanity must imply this transmission of grace, irrespective of how each one of us experiences it and reacts to it.147 Thus:

Prior to the explicitness of official ecclesiastical faith this acceptance can be present in an implicit form whereby a person undertakes and lives the duty of each day in the quiet sincerity of patience, in devotion to his material duties and the demands made upon him by the persons under this care.148

Thus, while clearly not everyone is an “anonymous Christian,” the person who does not deny God, “but testifies to him by the radical acceptance of his being, is a believer.”149 According to Rahner, then, before

Christianity enters the historical situation of an individual, a non-Christian religion contains “supernatural elements arising out of… grace.”150 So, other religions are not just erroneous and false, but they participate in the grace that God poured into humanity as a whole through Christ’s sacrifice.151

What about atheism? Are all nonbelievers condemned to hell? Rahner claims that this is an old question in an extraordinary situation. In the past, the Catholic church taught in a predominantly theistic

146 Rahner 1985, 213. 147 This is Rahner’s idea of the “supernatural existential,” upon which his whole theological system is built. According to Rahner, “God makes a creature whom he can love: he creates man. He created him in such a way that he can receive this Love which is God himself, and that he can and must at the same time accept it for what it is: the ever astounding wonder, the unexpected, unexacted gift” (Ibid., 186-187). Ratzinger criticizes Rahner’s search for a system: “[he] sought for a philosophical and theological world formula on the basis of which the whole of reality can be deduced cohesively from necessary causes” (quoted in Twomey 2007, 42; cf. Peterson 2011, 4-5). 148 Rahner 1985, 213. 149 Ibid., 214. 150 Ibid., 215. 151 James McEvoy adds to this participation in Christ’s sacrifice the permanent activity of the Spirit in human history. He claims that “in [John Paull II] says that the Spirit is offered to all—‘not only individuals but also society and history, peoples, cultures and religions.’” (2014, 137). Thus, “[a]ttentiveness to the presence of the Spirit in all cultures and world religions must be integral to the church’s life” (138).

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West. This situation has changed. For Rahner, Vatican II stated that not every instance of atheism is to be immediately regarded as a personal sin. An atheist “can be justified and receive salvation if he acts in accordance with his conscience.”152 So he distinguishes innocent atheism, wherein “the transcendental experience of God is present of necessity and is also freely accepted in a positive decision to be faithful to conscience, but it is incorrectly objectified and interpreted,” from “godlessness”—where God is known but the person in her moral freedom rejects this knowledge—and “culpable transcendental atheism,” which he understands as the denial of any dependence on God “in a free action by gravely sinful unfaithfulness to conscience or by an otherwise sinful, false interpretation of existence.”153 In short, for Rahner atheists can be saved, provided there is an attitude of honest receptivity and a positive decision to be faithful to conscience.

A second perspective on the “other” is found in Yves Congar, who felt ecumenism, the relations between Catholic and other Christian churches, as a personal mission. The words of the Dominican friar manage to achieve a difficult balance between the church as institution and as a Mystical Body, between dialogue and truth, and between human capabilities and God’s activity in the world. His words sometimes convey a poetic tone, a feature favorable to his endeavor.

Given that the Church of Christ subsists in the Catholic church, Congar suggested in an early work

(1937), Divided Christendom: A Catholic Study of the Problem of Reunion, that the separated brethren must

“in some way [be] members of the Catholic Church.”154 This paradox of membership and non-membership is solved by claiming that the Mystical Body is not coterminous with the Catholic church,155 but at the same time, it is only in the latter that one can fully experience salvation. For this reason, the goal of dialogue implies a “return.”156 This return, he adds, cannot just mean the incorporation of the separated Christian into

152 Ibid., 221. 153 Ibid., 223-224. 154 Congar 2010, 41. 155 This idea reminds us of Lumen gentium §8, where the conciliar fathers established that the church “subsists in the Catholic Church… Nevertheless, many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside its visible confines.” Stevenson (2017, 6) explains that: “The elements of the Catholic Church which exist outside her visible boundaries cannot, qua elementa, constitute an ever-expanding number independent ‘churches,’ but only communicate an imperfect participation in that organic whole of which they are properly elements.” 156 Congar 2010, 44.

153 an unvarying Catholic church; the process implies dynamism and change, dialogue and a serious effort to listen, understand, and learn from the other.

How is it possible, we could ask, to hold that the Catholic church is the true Church of Jesus while affirming that other Christians belong, though imperfectly, to it? The answer is expressed as a new tension:

“behind the dogma as it is held institutionally by the mind the same dogma is linked with the living source, which is the grace of faith and the inner life of the Holy Spirit living in the Church.”157 These words resemble those we heard in Ratzinger: His Church lies behind our church. There is in Congar, as in Ratzinger, a sense of the impossibility of ever grasping the church in its fullness. This insight, I believe, is hugely important for Catholic politics, because it reminds us that we approach truth only by degrees, but never in totality.158

Congar thus stresses confidently that “[t]he contention that one particular party has invariably been right and that all the wrongs of history come from one side only might satisfy an apologetic whose purely verbal triumphs are illusory.”159 But, on the other side of the tension, to conclude, Congar will reject as well as the renunciation of missionary activity: “Some people have gone so far as to say that we do not have to convert others; we simply have to help a Moslem to become a better Moslem, a Hindu to become a better Hindu, and so on. This is rather a defeatist reply…”160

Joseph Ratzinger, finally, states that the notion of “openness to the world” derives from God’s

“opening” to the world in Jesus, his “becoming world” in the Incarnation. It is the fidelity to this idea that helps us distinguish between a genuine opening from one which mundanizes the church. With this guiding principle in mind, Ratzinger discusses whether salvation is possible outside the church. In line with a hermeneutic of reform, he explains the motifs behind some of the most controversial statements of the church about salvation of non-Catholics.161 He refers to Pius IX’s condemnation of “Indifferentism,” the

157 Ibid., 46. Ratzinger follows Congar in his discussion of salvation outside of the church. It is Congar who remembers that Augustine developed the notion of Ecclesia ab Abel, that is, of “the church that exists already when the first man appeared; with which he helped formulate the idea of belonging to the Church outside the space of juridical visibility” (Ratzinger 1972, 383). 158 Thus, for Ratzinger, “it is not given to man to see and express the whole in itself; at best he can have but an intimation of it in the fragmentary, the positive, the particular” (quoted in Twomey 2007, 42). This is the reason Ratzinger criticizes Rahner’s theological “system.” 159 Congar 2010, 51. 160 Ibid., 54. 161 Thus, the decree of the council of Florence-Ferrara quoted above must be understood, Ratzinger insists, on the background of an “ancient world image” (Ratzinger 1972, 383) one which assumed the predominance of Christianity. Moreover, the proposition was meant as a condemnation of Jansen’s rigorism. In fact, the church would condemn the idea that “outside of the church there is no grace” in the Dogmatic Constitution Unigenitus, in 1713 (Ibid., 384-5).

154 idea that “we must have at least good hope concerning the eternal salvation of all those who in no wise are in the true Church of Christ,”162 suggesting that what has been rejected is religious pluralism, that is, the claim that ultimately every religion is incommensurable and irreducible.163 For him, the correct interpretation of the relations between the teaching of the Catholic church and other religions is a tension between two equally wrong propositions: that salvation can come from anywhere other than God through

Christ, and that outside of the church there is no grace. The Catholic church defends an absolute164 position

(e.g., Acts 4:12), but at the same time this absoluteness cannot mean that only Catholics are saved, nor justify an imperialistic Catholicism.

In order to unpack this idea, Ratzinger compares three positions on interreligious dialogue.

Exclusivism states that Christian faith, and not religions, saves exclusively. Karl Barth represents this position. However, what Barth has in mind is a contraposition between “faith,” which seeks God, and

“religion,” which is man-made.165 Inclusivism states that Christianity is present in all religions, which secretly walks toward it. Karl Rahner represents this perspective. Finally, pluralism states that all religions lead to salvation in their own way, and none of them can have a privileged status. John Hick is representative of this position.

Ratzinger rejects what he sees as an excessive focus on religions and prefers to look to the totality of human experience. He sees religions embedded in cultures, to the point that the only possibility for dialogue is found in a common opening: interculturality “presupposes that in all [cultures] is present the same human essence, and that in it inhabits the common truth about being a human being, a truth that leads toward unity.”166 Cultures are neither static nor pristine: they enter into contact with each other, dialogue, and undergo change. Christianity itself is the product of interculturality: it emerged not only geographically,

162 Denzinger, §1717. 163 Cf. Ratzinger 1972, 386-387. 164 This absolutism, it is important to mention, is not exclusive of Catholicism. Ratzinger explains that the three ways to evade myth—monotheism, mysticism, and Enlightenment—all hold an absolute position. Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, says Ratzinger, “teaches the absoluteness of an imageless spiritual experience, as well as the relativity of everything else” (Ratzinger 2005, 28, all translations of this work are mine). The Enlightenment, on its part, proclaims the absoluteness of rational (“scientific”) knowledge. Ratzinger’s solution is a dialogue between mysticism and monotheism, “avoiding the absorption of monotheism by a barren mystic syncretism, and, on the other hand, without subsuming the mystic religions to a false and petty absolutism of Western historical forms” (Ibid., 34). 165 Following Barth, proposes a non-religious Christianity: “What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God—without religion, i.e., without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on?” (Bonhoeffer 1972, 281). Ratzinger rejects this idea (2005c, 44-45). 166 Ratzinger 2005, 55. 155 but culturally, from the encounter of many cultures, and therefore it is neither Jewish, nor Hellenic, nor

European, but a fusion of all of them. For Ratzinger, in short, interreligious dialogue must tend towards faith and love:

Conscience itself, the only real conscience that can demand obedience, doesn’t say each one something different: that one must be Hindu, the other Muslim, and a third one a cannibal, but rather that amid the many systems and not rarely against them it says everyone that only one thing is commanded: to be human with our neighbor and love him or her… Living according to conscience doesn’t mean locking ourselves in our convictions, but to follow the cry that is addressed to every human being; the cry calling to faith and charity. Only these two spiritual dispositions, which constitute the fundamental law of Christianity, can create something like an “anonymous Christianity”—if I can quote here, with every reserve, this problematic concept.167

Ratzinger correctly suggests that our studies on ecumenism should consider the totality of human experience, not just in a comparison of religious perspectives. Also correct seems his (rather realistic) expectations about dialogue: “Anyone who expects the dialogue between religions to result in their unification is bound for disappointment.”168 But he seems to take a step in the wrong direction when he demands that the other religions “recognize their own adventual character that points forward, to Christ.”169

It seems impossible to imagine someone believing in a religion that acknowledges itself to be an “advent” for another one. Just as Christianity cannot help affirming that the whole world belongs to Christ, the other religions can rightly consider themselves as valid, fruitful and even the way towards the divine. This is, I would suggest, a necessary feature of any healthy religiosity. This is also the first step toward a respectful dialogue. This, however, does not deny the necessary opening that Ratzinger demands: everyone, and every religion, must always be open to truth. From this perspective Rahner’s notion of “anonymous Christianity” opens interesting possibilities for interreligious dialogue: it recognizes that God’s grace extends beyond

Christianity, thus making possible salvation for non-Christians, and it grants aspects of truth in all great religions; but, at the same time, it refuses to renounce the centrality of Christ, Christianity, and missionary activity.

167 Ratzinger 1972, 395. Compare this idea with Richard Rorty’s claim that “[n]o sooner does one draw up a categorical imperative for Christians than somebody draws up one which works for cannibals.” In his opinion, “[a]ll the Platonic or Kantian philosopher does is to take the finished first- level product, jack it up a few levels of abstraction, invent a metaphysical or epistemological or semantical vocabulary into which to translate it, and announce that he has grounded it” (Rorty 1982,168). 168 Ratzinger 1999, 109. 169 Ratzinger 2005, 70. 156

III

In any human endeavor, design and implementation, intention and outcome, don’t always coincide.

Vatican II didn’t escape this logic. For example, two theological camps were quickly formed after the council closed. On the one hand, Karl Rahner, Hans Küng, Edward Schillebeeckx, John Baptist Metz, and

Yves Congar founded in 1965 the journal Concilium. The journal was characterized by a progressivist tone.

In reaction to them, Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar and Joseph Ratzinger founded Communio in

1972, in an effort to think the council in continuity with the whole tradition of the church. Reactions were felt, however, beyond this academic dispute on the correct interpretation of the council.

This section analyzes two such reactions. My aim is to show that both began denouncing problems associated with the understanding or application of the council in the modern world, but in time degenerated into projects that failed to comply with Catholic doctrine. I argue that both share a common mistake: an anxiety to achieve the kingdom of God here on earth, either by retrieving Christendom or by blending

Catholic social doctrine and Marxist utopianism.

[1] From the very start of the council, one bishop felt that the road the church was taking was the wrong one. Born in 1905, Marcel Lefebvre saw the council as a liberal-modernist conspiracy to take down the true Church of Christ. Disappointed with its results, he quickly rejected Vatican II on the basis that it contravened the solid Catholic doctrine of the past two centuries. This false Catholicism overenthusiastically embraced modernity and the spirit of the French Revolution.170 In 1988, John Paul II excommunicated

Lefebvre for ordaining a bishop without papal consent.171 In 2009, Benedict XVI lifted the excommunication, after a process of dialogue with Lefebvre’s Society of Saint Pius X.172

Lefebvre, to be sure, never wanted to leave the Catholic church—although his excessive zeal and ultraconservatism led him, in the end, to reject the very church he was trying to defend. He worried about,

170 Ratzinger claims that Gaudium et spes, viewed as an Antisyllabus, “expresses the attempt of an official reconciliation of the Church with the new age established in 1789.” The pastoral constitution understands “world” as “essentially the spirit of the contemporary age” (Ratzinger 1985, 458). 171 See Canon §1382 of the Code of Canon Law: “A bishop who consecrates some one a bishop without a pontifical mandate and the person who receives the consecration from him incur a latae sententiae excommunication reserved to the Apostolic See.” 172 See the “Decree remitting the excommunication ‘latae sententiae’ of the bishops of the Society of St. Pius X” (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 2009).

157 and correctly denounced, the excesses committed during the implementation of Vatican II. He denounced, for example, “an American bishop who recommends little cakes containing milk, baking-powder, honey and margarine”173 to replace the communion wafer. The—perhaps excessive—desire to bring the faithful closer to God was misunderstood in some places, replacing this closeness with casualness, “as if we were dealing with Him as equals.”174 Lefebvre lamented how the excessive encounter of the liturgy with the modern world—e.g., in the incorporation of secular music and the relaxation of devotion—did away with the sense of the sacred.175

Lefebvre saw the post-conciliar crisis as an unequivocal sign that the council itself had been a mistake.176 For him, the solution was a radical one: the baby had to be thrown out along with the bath water.

The bishop, therefore, went beyond a critique of the excesses made by a misunderstanding of the spirit of the council, deeming these outlandish behaviors as the necessary consequence of a council that had betrayed the church. In the preface to his book, J’accuse le Concile, Lefebvre affirms that “Liberal and Modernist tendencies came to light during the Council and had an overwhelming influence on those present, because of a veritable conspiracy of the Cardinals from the banks of the Rhine, unfortunately supported by Pope

Paul VI.”177 And in his “Profession of Faith,” he proclaimed:

we refuse and have always refused to follow the Rome of neo-modernist and neo-Protestant tendencies which clearly manifested themselves in the Second Vatican Council and after the Council in all the reforms which issued from it. All these reforms, indeed, have contributed and are still contributing to the demolition of the Church, to the ruin of the priesthood, to the annihilation of the sacrifice and sacraments, to the disappearance of religious life, to a naturalistic and Teilhardian type of teaching in Universities, seminaries and catechesis, a teaching which is the fruit of liberalism and Protestantism and many times condemned by the solemn Magisterium of the Church.178

Vatican II, in Lefebvre’s opinion, embraced the ideals of the French Revolution. He sees the triad of values,

“liberté, égalité, fraternité,” reflected in Vatican II’s triad “religious liberty, collegiality, ecumenism.” He

173 Lefebvre 1986, 26. 174 Ibid., 17. 175 “The loss of what is sacred leads also to sacrilege… A Mass took place during which the band-girls danced and some of them then distributed the communion.” (Ibid., 25). 176 Ralph McInerny correctly points out that “Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s schismatic movement involved an internal incoherence. He sought to appeal to earlier councils in order to discredit Vatican II. But that which guarantees the truth of the teaching of one council guarantees the truth of them all” (McInerny 1998, 33). 177 Lefebvre 1982, vii. For a discussion of the bishops “from the banks of the Rhine” see Wiltgen 1967. 178 Reproduced in Congar 1976, 77, as Appendix I. John Eppstein saw a similar situation in 1971: “What has probably reduced respect for the Church more than anything is the impression that many of its leaders are leaning over backwards to persuade Protestants, not to speak of Humanists and Communists, that the Catholic Church is not the Church that is has always claimed to be” (Eppstein 1971, 5).

158 took issue with the conciliar recognition that it is “only in freedom that people can turn themselves towards what is good” (Gaudium et spes, §17), and that religious liberty179 derives from human dignity (Dignitatis humanae §1, 2), Against the first one, i.e., religious liberty, Lefebvre affirmed that “the foundation of liberty is truth, not dignity.”180 Adopting a correspondence theory of truth,181 his claim was that it is only when our will is in line with Christ, who is the truth, that we experience our dignity. From this perspective, it becomes clear that “religious liberty cannot be applied to false religions.”182 Why would we grant rights to error?

Wouldn’t that imply, necessarily, the tacit renunciation of truth altogether? Reluctant to dress mistake—and all non-Catholic religions, including post-Vatican II heresy, were for him mistaken—with the garments of freedom, Lefebvre praised Cardinal Ottaviani’s original schema on “Religious Toleration,” a text that

“covered seven pages of text and sixteen pages of references, from Pius VI (1790) to John XXIII (1959).”183

This is a central point: toleration creates an unbridgeable gulf between the only true religion and the rest of them, denying the possibility for grace to be found outside the church: “No grace in the world, no grace in the history of humanity is distributed except through her.”184 But here Lefebvre attacked that solid and stable doctrine of the church he defends. In denying grace outside the church, he uttered a doctrine condemned by

Clement XI’s Dogmatic Constitution Unigenitus, given in 1713.185

Also worrisome is Lefebvre’s understanding of the role of the state in precluding the spread of false religions. Here we see his argumentation becoming weaker as it goes. He anchors his political ideas in Leo

XIII’s great encyclical Rerum Novarum, which states that the goal of the state is not material, but

“principally a moral good.” From this he concludes that, since “the propagation of false ideas naturally exerts more influence upon the weakest, the least educated,” then it is the role of the state to curb false ideas spread by other religions in order to defend those whose ignorance makes them weak. For, the bishop asks:

179 In his exposition of his sixth intervention at the council, Lefebvre explains that “No subject came under such intense discussion as that of ‘religious liberty,’ probably because none interested the traditional enemies of the Church so much. It is the major aim of Liberalism. Liberals, Masons and Protestants are fully aware that by this means they can strike at the very heart of the Catholic Church; in making her accept the common law of secular societies, they would thus reduce her to a mere sect like the others and even cause her to disappear” (Lefebvre 1982, 26). 180 Lefebvre 1986, 83. 181 I mean by this Thomas Aquinas’ claim that “veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus” (truth is the equation of thing and intellect). Since God is the ultimate and absolute reality, the highest truth is that which approaches the one, true God (Stanford University 2015). 182 Lefebvre 1986, 84. 183 Ibid. 184 Ibid., 80. 185 See note 161 in this chapter, above.

159

“Who will challenge the duty of the State to protect the weak?”186 Lefebvre gives no argument to link the notion that the state’s goal is a moral one—an insight not originally Christian, as Plato and Aristotle’s works attest—with the rather odd affirmation that in fighting against non-Catholic religions the state is but complying with its duty of protecting the weak.

Before pursuing Lefebvre’s political ideas all the way down, let us briefly analyze the other two charges: those against collegiality and ecumenism. Collegiality, for Lefebvre, is a direct attack on the monarchical character of the church, transforming the pope into “no more than a primus inter pares.”187 I have already discussed Rahner and Ratzinger’s rebuttal of the understanding of the papacy as a monarchy.

This emphasis on the collegial nature of the magisterium is, according to Lefebvre, part of a more ambitious project, namely, the democratization of the church (a change also dismissed, as we saw, by both Ratzinger and Rahner):

Democratisation of the magisterium is naturally followed by democratisation of Church government. Modern ideas being what they are, it has been still easier here to obtain the desired result, carrying these ideas over into the Church by means of the slogan of “collegiality.” The Church’s government had to be “collegialised”: the Pope’s power must be shared with an episcopal college, the government of each bishop with a priest’s college, and the parish should share the running of his parish with councils and assemblies.188

An important weakness of Lefebvre’s arguments is that his sources cover only the two (anti-liberal) centuries prior to the council, pretty much disregarding the rest of the church’s long history. One can easily put Gregory XVI’s words in Lefebvre’s lips:

Depravity exults; science is impudent; liberty, dissolute. The holiness of the sacred is despised; the majesty of divine worship is not only disapproved by evil men, but defiled and held up to ridicule. Hence sound doctrine is perverted and errors of all kinds spread boldly. The laws of the sacred, the rights, institutions, and discipline—none are safe from the audacity of those speaking evil.189

However, when one looks at the whole tradition of the Catholic church one discovers that the church was never imagined as a monarchy, and that, as Ratzinger demonstrates, the dynamics between personal responsibility and collegiality presents itself at all levels of the church.

186 Lefebvre 1986, 85. 187 Ibid., 64; 1982, 47. 188 “The Snares of ‘Collegialism,’” reproduced in Eppstein 1971, 39. 189 Gregory XVI 1832, §5.

160

Third, ecumenism was attacked as the fertile soil for indifferentism: “Doubts on the necessity of the

Catholic church as the only true religion, the sole source of salvation, emanating from the declarations on ecumenism and religious liberty, are destroying the authority of the church’s Magisterium. In fact, Rome is no longer the unique and necessary Magistra Veritatis.”190 But, as we have discussed, nowhere did Vatican

II renounce Catholic exclusivism—as, e.g., in Lumen gentium §13, 14 and 39. We are confronted again with the problem of truth: Lefebvre is right when he reminds us of the intimate connection between Christ, freedom, and truth—for “the truth will make you free” (Jn 8:32). Where was, if anywhere, his mistake?

Yves Congar provides us with an answer: “As far as [Lefevbre] is concerned, he is the one to judge what is admissible and what is heretical or false and therefore to be rejected by fidelity to ‘the Church as she has always been.’”191 His insistence on finding Vatican II at fault and heretical led him to overlook the tensions inherent in its documents, as well as its continuity not only with the two centuries immediately prior to it, but with the whole Christian tradition.

This bias towards the anti-modern Catholic church is an effect, I believe, of a deep-seated conviction, namely, that Christendom was not only a positive time for the church, but its most faithful materialization. Lefebvre does not hide his annoyance about the separation between church and state.

Congar correctly identifies this problem in Lefebvre’s reading of collegiality: the latter forgets that “[t]his is no longer a question of ‘power,’ but it remains, and always will remain, a question of responsibility…

This has absolutely nothing to do with politics, but with Christian existence in the Church.”192 However, for

Lefebvre power is inseparable from the one true Catholic church. In fact, history has taught us, he continues, a model of harmony between political power and the church:

Pope John Paul II… deplored the Inquisition during his visit to Spain. But it is only the excesses of the Inquisition that are remembered. What is forgotten is that the Church, in creating the Holy Office (Sanctum Officium Inquisitionis), was fulfilling its duty in protecting souls and proceeded against those who were trying to falsify the Faith and thus endangering the eternal salvation of everyone. The Inquisition came to the help of the heretics themselves, just as one goes to the help of persons who jump into the water to end their lives.193

190 Lefebvre 1982, 97. 191 Congar 1976, 15. 192 Ibid., 39. 193 Lefebvre 1986, 86. The bishop’s view on the Spanish Inquisition echoes that of Joseph de Maistre. In his Letters on the Spanish Inquisition (de Maistre 1838) he rejects three “capital errors” about this institution: “that the Inquisition is a purely ecclesiastical tribunal… that the ecclesiastics, who sit in this tribunal, condemn certain accused criminals to death… [and] that the tribunal condemns men for entertaining mere simple opinions” (5). De Maistre contends that the Inquisition is a purely Royal institution, although its members belong to the clergy. For this reason, even though the Inquisition can find someone guilty, it is the secular arm who punishes it, “and it alone is accountable for it” (11). As for the terrors and violence

161

What Lefebvre had in mind was not only a preconciliar church. He yearned for the old authoritarian times.

In a sermon given on August 29th, 1976, Lefebvre praised General Videla’s dictatorship in Argentina:

Take the example of the Argentine Republic. What kind of a state was it in only two or three months ago? Complete anarchy… brigands killing to left and right, industries utterly ruined, factory-owners locked up or taken as hostages […] But now there is an orderly government which has principles, which has authority, which is starting to tidy things up, which is stopping brigands from killing other people; and the economy is actually starting to revive, and the workers have actually got work to do, and they can actually go home knowing that they are not going to be brained on the way by someone who wants to make them go on strike when they don’t want to go on strike.194

Brian Sudlow exculpates Lefebvre’s praise of a murderous regime stressing that his praise “reveals more a clumsy and unworldly naivety, blind to certain political realities, rather than politically extremist engagement.”195 The issue, however, is not whether Lefebvre supported political extremism, but what kind of social arrangement (what Lefort calls mise en scène) he favored. To his question, the answer must be: one that resembles Christendom, that is, one where the form of society reflects divine order, where the state’s coercive arm is used in order to protect the interests of the one, true church, which at the same time invests political power with a divine sanction.

But what does Lefebvre mean when he denounces Vatican II as “modernist”? We can explore this final question by contrasting the thought of George Tyrrell (1861-1909), a Jesuit theologian excommunicated in 1907 for his modernist ideas, with that of Charles Taylor. My argument is that while

Taylor’s Catholicism is more orthodox than Tyrrell in crucial aspects—particularly about dogma196—they

caused by the Inquisition, de Maistre replies that “nothing in the universe can really be more clam, and gentle;—more impartial, and humane, than the tribunal of the Inquisition” (31-32). His defense of the institution is, in his fourth letter, a utilitarian one: “Don’t tell me, that the Inquisition has produced such and such abuses, at such and such a time. This is not the question. The question is, to know, whether, during the last three centuries, there has been, by virtue of the Inquisition, a greater enjoyment of peace, and happiness, in Spain, than in the other nations of Europe?” (57). De Maistre’s answer is in the positive: the Inquisition has kept alive the public spirit, religious patriotism, and saved Europe from tyranny and oppression. Thus, “it is consequently but just, and reasonable, to attribute the preservation, and peace, of Spain to the power, and influence—and the power, and influence, alone—of the Inquisition,—above all, since no other cause can be assigned” (60). 194 Congar 1976, 46-47. 195 Sudlow 2017, 84. 196 Oliver P. Rafferty reports that Tyrrell “wrote in The Month in February 1898 that the church’s dogmas ‘are never final in the sense of stating exhaustively truths that being supernatural, are inexhaustible.’” Rafferty adds: “But perhaps the boldest statement in the course of his article was the declaration that a certain ‘temperate agnosticism’ about the prescriptions of Catholicism in matters such as hell was an essential prerequisite for intelligent faith” (Rafferty 2010, 24, 25; cf. Kirwan in Rafferty 2010, 135).

162 both share a desire to erect a bridge between Catholicism and modern culture,197 a feature both share with the general aim of Vatican II’s Gaudium et spes.

Tyrrell lived amid the anti-modernist church, precisely the one that Lefebvre sees as the bulwark against the doctrinal mistakes of Vatican II. He criticized the decree Lamentabilis and the encyclical

Pascendi,198 published in 1907 in order to condemn Modernism, and accused the latter of presenting scholastic theology as synonymous with Catholic doctrine, thus as naïve concerning doctrinal development.199 This was to become a shared worry in Vatican II, as we have seen. Not only did John XXIII call for aggiornamento, but major theologians—Ratzinger among them—sought a rediscovery

(ressourcement) of the sources beyond scholasticism. Tyrrell also saw the centralization of the church and ultramontanism with preoccupation, especially after the declaration of papal infallibility at Vatican I.

However, he rejected the many charges against himself for adopting a Protestant stance—including, as we just saw, Lefebvre’s identification of Modernism and Protestantism—denouncing ultramontanism as the subordination of collective judgement to individual judgement, which “was a negation of Catholicism in favour of Protestantism.”200

Finally, in another unexpected move, the excommunicated Jesuit rejected ecumenism as indifferentism: “The tendency towards reunion among the Christian sects of to-day is the result of weariness and decay; of scepticism as to the value of their several systems.”201 Tyrrell understood that the separated branches, or schisms, developed as different organisms, to a point where unification became impossible.

More importantly, perhaps, was his insistence on the absolute character of Catholicism: “What is needed before all things is a clear manifestation of the Catholic religion in its ethical and intellectual beauty, not as a religion, but as eminently the religion of mankind… For this we need interpreters and go-betweens; men, that is, who know and sympathize with both sides.”202

197 “Tyrrell’s overriding intention was to make Catholic Christianity, as he understood it, accessible to a world and culture which were indifferent and uncomprehending, if not openly hostile, towards the Christian message” (Kirwan in Rafferty 2010, 132). 198 Pius X 1907. 199 “For Tyrrell, the church had taken the synthesis effected by medieval Catholicism and medieval culture and elevated this to a universal norm for all time” (Rafferty 2010, 29). 200 Ibid., 30. 201 Ibid., 36. 202 Tyrrell, The Faith of the millions, quoted by Kirwan in Rafferty 2010, 133.

163

Charles Taylor’s project of a “Catholic modernity” echoes some of Tyrrell’s insights. In common with the nineteenth-century Jesuit, Taylor finds the Christian spirit in many modern developments. For

Taylor, in fact, “in modern, secularist culture there are mingled together both authentic developments of the gospel, of an incarnational mode of life, and also a closing off to God that negates the gospel.”203 As was discussed in the first chapter, modernity arose from the ashes of the late Middle Ages, as a project that inherited theological questions and tensions (Gillespie) and provided new answers (Blumenberg). Taylor thus calls for a critical relationship with modernity, which we could describe as discernment. On the one hand, the possibility of our modern “extraordinary moral culture”204 based on universal human rights and the struggle to abate suffering would be unthinkable had Christendom not been dismantled. This is, for

Taylor, a liberating experience that allows us not only to recognize those aspects of modernity that further

God’s divine plan, but also gives us “the freedom to come to God on one’s own or, otherwise put, moved only by the Holy Spirit.”205 On the other hand, modernity’s other face is one which radically rejects transcendence as childish superstition, and promotes instead exclusive humanism (see chapter 2.II).

In Taylor’s typology of religious positions (exclusive humanists, counter-modernity thinkers, and those who acknowledge transcendence), Lefebvre is located in the third group, in the subgroup of those who think modernity was a mistake, while Tyrrell belongs to those who think there are important developments of the gospel in it. Be that as it may, two errors must be avoided:

either we pick certain fruits of modernity, like human rights, and take them on board but then condemn the whole movement of thought and practice that underlies them, in particular the breakout from Christendom… or, in reaction to this first position, we feel we have to go all the way with the boosters of modernity and become fellow travelers of exclusive humanism.206

Taylor approaches here the spirit of Vatican II: the church is called to universality, to catholicity, which cannot be achieved irrespective of modern culture. But, at the same time, modernity cannot be considered the summit of human civilization, the stage of utter perfection beyond which everything decays. As

203 Taylor 1999, 16. 204 Ibid., 25. This culture has Christian roots: “So we see a phenomenon, of which the Christian conscience cannot but say ‘flesh of my flesh, and bone of my bone’ and which is paradoxically often seen by some of its most dedicated carriers as conditional on a denial of the transcendent” (Ibid., 26). 205 Ibid., 19. This is a very problematic affirmation to which I return in the next chapter. It may be enough for now to ask: How is this new freedom that Taylor emphasizes brought back to the community, to the “we” that constitutes the “people of God” that the church is? I don’t believe Taylor has an answer—at least a convincing one. 206 Ibid., 36. 164

Ratzinger proposes, modernity is a culture among others—one particularly important for Christianity, because of the ties between the two—and so Catholicism must engage in a dialogue with it on the basis of a mutual search for the truth.

Lefebvre’s attack on the postconciliar church was motivated by an honest dissatisfaction with the post-conciliar culture. This worry was shared, to be sure, by many other theologians—Joseph Ratzinger and

Henri de Lubac included—who didn’t conclude from this situation that the Second Vatican Council had betrayed the Church of Christ. I argued that an important element in Lefebvre’s radicalism was a theologico- political one, namely, the effort to bring back Christendom, to align secular and spiritual power again, and to bring the marriage between church and state back once again. We are confronted here with two opposed political theologies, a positive one and a negative one. While the former wants to bring back a world whose political order resembles God’s economy and providence, the latter rejects such an effort, acknowledging the relative autonomy of the secular order vis-à-vis the church’s work in the economy of salvation. I qualify the autonomy of the state as “relative” for one important reason: although for postconciliar Catholicism the political sphere must be independent from the church, this cannot mean that the state has no role in God’s salvific plan. If this were the case, i.e., if the political bore absolutely no relation with people’s salvation, this would imply for Catholicism the need to be indifferent about, for example, totalitarianism and democracy. But this would also mean a rejection of the scandal of Christianity, that is, the Incarnation of

God and the subsequent redemption of the world as a whole; a redemption which, as we saw, drove Paul to see human relationships, power relations, and gender roles, in a new light.

[2] On March 24, 1980, Oscar Arnulfo Romero, a Salvadoran bishop, was shot in the head. Romero had denounced the government’s many violations of Salvadorans’ human rights. Thirty-five years later, on

May 23, 2015, he was raised to the altars in a ceremony of beatification. Pope Francis has many times expressed his sympathies for Romero and has tended a friendlier hand to liberation theology than his predecessors. Bergoglio experienced himself the violence of dictatorial regimes in Latin America and the fight carried on by liberation theologians. As the provincial superior of the Society of Jesus in Argentina 165 and rector of the Colegio San José, he lost many friends—some of them close to liberation theology—to the violence of extreme-right dictatorship. Romero’s beatification forces us to put liberation theology in a more nuanced perspective than that offered by John Paul II and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

(then headed by Joseph Ratzinger). This is, first, because the official recognition of Romero’s life demands a serious consideration of the ways in which liberation theology can lead to holiness. Second, because once we take liberation theology’s notion of the “church of the poor” seriously, we cannot evade the claim that the papacies of both John Paul II and Benedict XVI didn’t do enough to face this challenge.207

I analyze liberation theology in the following manner: first I offer a brief discussion of the historical context within which liberation theology emerged; then I describe the most characteristic features of this movement, focusing on Gustavo Gutiérrez’s ground-breaking work, A Theology of Liberation, and then suggest some challenges to this “classic” version; finally, I discuss what Ivan Petrella describes as the “new generation” of Latin American liberation theologies, suggesting that this group clearly departs from Catholic thinking in a way that Gutiérrez does not.

The reactions to Vatican II came from conservatives who sought to preserve a church untouched by the modern age and progressives who believed that the council had only been the start of change. On the conservative camp, as we just saw, Marcel Lefebvre accused the council of heresy and the betrayal of the tradition of the church. In the progressivist side, the Dutch Catechism, published in 1968 under the leadership of Edward Schillebeeckx and Piet Schoonenberg, constitutes a landmark. The Catechism abandoned the old scholastic language and tried to speak in words accessible for the modern person. It embraced an anthropological and overtly phenomenological stance, in harmony with the new methods in historical exegesis. The document was, in the words of Ratzinger, “long overdue” in a Holland marked by a “ghetto mentality,” where “in the year 1954 the Dutch episcopate forbade Catholics from becoming

207 I am not suggesting that John Paul II and Benedict XVI had no interest in a reformation of the church and, particularly, of the Curia. On the contrary, in my opinion both made efforts to consolidate the spirit of Vatican II. I would suggest instead that one of the more urgent problems of the Catholic church is the corruption of the Roman Curia. Not the popes, but some of those surrounding them, seem to have rejected the Christian message and embraced the world and its comforts, not a few times even breaking secular laws. This topic, however, is too complex to be discussed in this work. Be as it may, liberation theology raises a good critique against this situation, one that every Catholic must consider.

166 members of socialist parties, and anyone who read socialist newspapers or magazines regularly or attended meetings of such parties was denied the sacraments and had to face the threat of being refused Catholic burial.208 However, this first stage of optimism in the church’s ability to insert itself in modernity and work with the secular world to solve the many problems of humanity209 was followed by deep disillusionment.

This time, the criticism came from Latin America. The problem was not the encounter between the modern

(European) world and the church, but the new awareness that a huge portion of the world had been hitherto forgotten. Latin American bishops and theologians made a loud claim: the reconciliation of the church with the world was not, and could not be, authentic until those without voice—the weak, the poor, the oppressed, and the marginalized—, those who Gustavo Gutiérrez calls the “nonpersons,” were heard, defended, and done justice.210 Liberation theology was born as a reminder that a church that forgets the poor is a church that fails to live the message of Christ. This message sounds today as urgent—or perhaps even more so— than in 1971, when Gutiérrez’s book, A Theology of Liberation was first published.211

Contrary to Lefebvre’s Society of St. Pius X, liberation theology didn’t split from the church or deny the authority of the magisterium. The movement has never been condemned, although a couple of documents—Libertatis nuntius (1984) and Libertatis conscientia (1986)—suggested possible deviations or dangers in its postulates. Moreover, liberation theologians tried to make explicit the filial connection between their doctrines and the teachings of the church. The seminal works of liberation saw themselves as answering the call made in Vatican II to think these documents and transform their words into life in the different localities. The conferences of Latin American Bishops held in Medellín (1968) and Puebla

208 Ratzinger’s reading of the Catechism is balanced. He asserts: “it would be just as foolish to laud it to the skies as it would be a mistake to reject it completely” (Ratzinger 1971b, 754). He praises this work for its “refreshing humanity,” which “does not teach an abstract system but takes up human problems and shows the place that faith has in relation to these problems” (744). He criticizes it, however, for its lack of a “clear definition of first principles,” and an excessive “katabatic” (descending)—in contrast to the “anabatic” (ascending)—emphasis, for “Jesus is not only God descending, he is also man ascending. He is not to be seen solely as the epiphany of divine love coming down from above, he is also the representative of mankind in whose person human nature gives to God the purest and most precious possession it can give, namely, itself” (749). 209 Ratzinger remembers us that “the council was penetrated by some of Kennedy’s era, of that naïve optimism which held the idea of the great society: all we can get if we work for it and put the necessary means for it” (Ratzinger 1985, 445). 210 See chapter 5, n. 131. 211 To provide a recent example, a study by Oxfam International found that “eighty two percent of the wealth generated [in 2017] went to the richest one percent of the global population, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth” Available in goo.gl/BzDjWM. We should say of liberation theology what Maritain says of socialism: “However grave its errors and illusions have been, Socialism in the nineteenth century was a protest uttered by the human conscience, and of its most generous instincts, against which cry to heaven. It was a noble work to bring capitalist civilization to trial and to waken against powers which know no pardon, the sense of justice and of the dignity of labor: and in this work it took the initiative… We can only criticise it effectively while remaining at many points in its debt” (Maritain 1938, 81, my emphasis).

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(1979),212 both emphasized the notion of the church’s “preferential option for the poor,” in an attempt to recall Jesus’ own words regarding the care for the weak and poor: “For I was hungry and you gave me food,

I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me… Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:35-36, 40).213 John XXIII had affirmed that “the church is, and wants to be, the church of all and especially the church of the poor.”214

The starting point of liberation theology is a criticism of the primacy of orthodoxy over orthopraxis, that is, the idea that knowing what I should think (or believe) takes precedence over the practical knowledge about what to do and how to behave. For Gutiérrez, “the goal is to balance and even to reject the primacy and almost exclusiveness which doctrine has enjoyed in Christian life and above all to modify the emphasis, often obsessive, upon the attainment of an orthodoxy which is often nothing more than fidelity to an obsolete tradition or a debatable interpretation.”215 When Gutiérrez connects this idea with Hegel’s claim that philosophy rises only at sundown, it is difficult not to perceive as well the influence of Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Just as philosophy is always behind praxis, theology is “reflection on practice in the light of faith.”216 In the words of Leonardo and Clodovis Boff:

Before we can do theology we have to “do” liberation. The first step for liberation theology is pre-theological. It is a matter of trying to live the commitment of faith: in our case, to participate in some way in the process of liberation, to be committed to the oppressed… The essential point is this: links with specific practice are at the root of liberation theology. It operates within the great dialectic of theory (faith) and practice (love).217

Thus, liberation theology implies a new way of doing theology. This also means a new approach to the

Bible. Liberation theologians pay attention to the many stories of oppression found in the Bible. The Exodus,

212 Although Gutiérrez (1988, xxii, xxxviii) takes Medellín and Puebla together in the preface to the expanded view, both being faithful to the position of liberation theologians, Juan Luis Segundo disagrees: “‘Medellín and Puebla’ today constitutes a formula as overused as it is mistaken, in the sense that we cannot cite the two documents as belonging to the same line of theology” (Segundo 1987, 2). 213 Gutiérrez 1988, 113. 214 See ibid., xxvi. 215 Ibid., 8. This, however, does not mean necessarily that liberation theology advocates for the primacy of praxis. In the preface to the 1988 edition of his book, Gutiérrez advocated for a “circular relationship between the two” (Ibid., xxxiv). On this idea, Libertatis Nuntius establishes that a “healthy theological method no doubt will always take the ‘praxis’ of the Church into account and will find there one of its foundations, but that is because that praxis comes from the faith and is a lived expression of it” (X.4; see also XI.13 and Ratzinger 2013, 55). 216 Gutiérrez in Rowland 2007, 27. Confront this idea with Zöe Bennett’s: “The basic model of liberation theology arises from a Marxist dialectical context and involves the movement from praxis to changed praxis” (Bennett in Rowland 2007, 41). 217 Boff and Boff 1986, 22.

168 for example, is relevant for its narrations of God’s liberation of his people from the Egyptian yoke.218

Liberation here means not only—or primarily—a liberation that will happen at the end of times, when those faithful to God will enjoy eternal blessedness. Israel was freed from oppression, hunger, depravity, and violence exerted by a powerful and cruel master.219 In the same way, Jesus’ salvific work cannot mean eternal salvation only. Although the kingdom of God will not be fulfilled until the afterlife, the seeds of it germinate and give fruit in our own time.220 Put in negative form, this means that “the existence of poverty represents a sundering both of solidarity among persons and also of communion with God. Poverty is an expression of a sin, that is, of a negation of love,” which runs against the idea of the Kingdom.221 Working for the cause of justice, that is, siding with the poor, weak, and forgotten against oppression, is the fundamental task of the church, because it is through the attainment of a more just society that the kingdom becomes visible. Gutiérrez endorses Schillebeeckx’s understanding of the kingdom, which runs close to pure immanentism:

[T]he true interpretation of the meaning revealed by theology is achieved only in historical praxis. “The hermeneutics of the Kingdom of God,” observes Schillebeeckx, “consists especially in making the world a better place. Only in this way will I be able to discover what the Kingdom of God means.” We have here a political hermeneutics of the Gospel.222

Siding with the poor necessarily means fighting against their oppressors. For liberation theology this means rejecting the system that has been designed to silence and marginalize the poor. Gutiérrez uses the term

“class struggle” but rejects Marx’s antagonism, which would betray the universality of the Christian message:

The universality of Christian love is, I repeat, incompatible with the exclusion of any persons, but it is not incompatible with a preferential option for the poorest and most oppressed. When I speak of taking into account social conflict, including the existence of the class struggle, I am not denying that God’s love embraces all without exception. Nor is anyone excluded from our love, for the gospel requires that we love

218 Ratzinger suggests the danger of a politicized reading of Exodus. While “Christians had interpreted the Exodus of Israel from Egypt as a symbol (typos) of baptism and seen in baptism a radicalized and universalized Exodus… to the theologians of today the road from the Exodus to baptism seems to be a loss of reality, a retreat from the political-real into the mystical-unreal and the merely individual… Baptism is an introduction to the Exodus, i.e., a symbol of an act of political liberation to which the chosen ‘people,’ i.e., the oppressed of all lands, are called” (Ratzinger 2013, 61; see also Ratzinger 2010a, 77). For a political reading of Exodus see Walzer 1985. 219 “The initial chapters of Exodus describe the oppression in which the Jewish people lived in Egypt, in that ‘land of slavery’ (13:3; 20:2; Deut. 5:6), repression (Exod. 1:10-11), alienated work (5:6-14), humiliations (1:13-14), enforced birth control policy (1:15-22)” (Gutiérrez 1988, 88). 220 “[L]iberating praxis endeavors to transform history in the light of the reign of God. It accepts the reign now, even though knowing that it will arrive in its fullness only at the end of time” (Ibid., xxx). 221 Ibid., 168. Cf. Boff and Boff 1986, 52. 222 Gutiérrez 1988, 10-11.

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even our enemies; a situation that causes us to regard others as our adversaries does not excuse us from loving them.223

Liberation theology thus appears as an original way of doing theology, which focuses on the need to take the church’s “preferential option for the poor” seriously. An interesting characteristic of this way of theologizing is the careful balance between progressiveness and continuity. Every time liberation theology seems to be taking a step beyond the church’s magisterial teachings, a quick counterbalance is suggested that restores its unity with the church. This is, in my opinion, its geniality, which is not free of dangers.

Consider, for example, Gutiérrez’s claim that “[o]nly a radical break from the status quo, that is, a profound transformation of the private property system, access to power of the exploited class, and a social revolution that would break this dependence would allow for the change to a new society, a socialist society.”224 The

Marxian echoes are unmistakable here. However, throughout the whole work, Gutiérrez patiently qualifies this and other affirmations. As we saw, he distinguishes his political theology from Marxism, at least because for Catholicism the possibility of salvation is extended to all people, and love for the enemy is demanded. The word “revolution” appears several times in the work,225 suggesting more or less reliance on violence, but always as the last resource—which happens to be a condition of a “just war.”226

Liberation theology, however, raises several questions. Here I discuss two main challenges. The most obvious, first, has to do with its relationship with Marxism. Although, as Peter Hebblethwaite suggests,

“[m]any liberation theologians have suggested that the Marxist analysis was separable certainly from the world-view, and perhaps also from the strategy,”227 some critical voices have raised serious questions about

223 Gutiérrez 1988, 160. Boff and Boff transform Marx’s famous claim that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” (Tucker 1978, 473) as “the history of the struggles of the oppressed for their liberation is the history of the call of the Holy Spirit to the heart of a divided world” (Boff and Boff 1986, 56). It is difficult to understand why they composed the phrase in this way. If they used the same structure as Marx’s dictum to preserve some of the latter’s strength, we must say this is a (very) weak appropriation of Marxism. They disregard Marx’s metaphysical principles (atheism, materialism), and impose some kind of providential/dialectical wild card (the Holy Spirit) that will redeem humankind. If, on the other hand, they are trying to Christianize Marx, they fail again. This effort would be as awkward as some postconciliar attempts to introduce modern music in the Catholic liturgy, e.g., changing the lyrics of popular songs. Just as hearing the melody of Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence with the lyrics of the Our Father can create a bizarre sensation, making it difficult to pray without experiencing the original song, or experiencing it without feeling that you’re profaning the Christian prayer par excellence, in the same way it seems impossible to enjoy Marx’s theory in the Boff brothers’ adaptation without feeling that Marx has been “desecrated,” or doing theology without having Marx’s desecralization as background. 224 Gutiérrez 1988, 17. 225 Gutiérrez even speaks of a “permanent cultural revolution” (ibid., 21), which may be a clever mixture of Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” and Mao’s “cultural revolution.” 226 Cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2309. For physical force as the last resource, see Boff and Boff 1986, 40. Gutiérrez distinguisges two types of violence: “let us by all means avoid equating the unjust violence of the oppressors (who maintain this despicable system) with the just violence of the oppressed (who feel obliged to use it to achieve their liberation)” (1988, 64). 227 Hebblethwaite in Rowland 2007, 219.

170 this possibility. We may ask, in what ways does liberation theology incorporate Marxism? Alistair Kee sums up this relation when he claims that, in Gutiérrez’s work, “[n]othing is taken directly from Marx, but the perception of the whole complex now owes a great deal to his philosophy.”228

The central criticism Kee offers to Gutiérrez’s work is the latter’s failure to deal with Marx’s attack on religion as a reversal of reality. The influence of Feuerbach on Marx here is fundamental. According to the former, religion is the outcome of a movement whereby a man (or woman) “projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object of this projected image of himself, thus converted into a subject.”229 Religion, for Feuerbach, serves a function: it helps human beings to explain that which is mysterious in themselves. For Marx, however, religion is not the source of mystery, but of error:

Man, who looked for a superhuman being in the fantastic reality of heaven and found nothing there but the reflection of himself, will no longer be disposed to find but the semblance to himself, only an inhuman being, where he seeks and must seek his true reality.230

Religion creates a world, to be sure, but an inverted world, a false one. Under Marx’s lens Feuerbach appears, then, still too theological. This explains why the is at the basis of all criticisms: because through a critique of religion it is possible to discover a methodology to criticize other forms of false consciousness. According to Kee:

So far as Marx’s reversal theory is concerned, the criticism of religion is integral to the development of his whole philosophy: it cannot simply be extracted and dealt with as a discrete social institution. As the premise of all criticism it is essential for understanding all subsequent disclosures of reversal.231

So, what is the problem between liberation theology and Marxism? Denys Turner rejects the analysis made by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Liberatis Nuntius, as “thoroughly inaccurate and grossly unfair.”232 Nonetheless, he recognizes that liberation theology fails to understand the radicalness of Marx’s critique of religion. The dilemma, he asserts, is that “insofar as Christianity is true to itself as religious, it must be alienating politically, and insofar as it engages genuinely with the revolutionary critical programme

228 He provides several examples of this debt: (1) it is because of Marx that Gutiérrez senses the inadequacy of development and consequently prefers the term liberation; (2) the concept of praxis is indebted to Marx’s view of the relationship between theory and action; (3) the relationship between salvation and liberation is formulated in the parallel of sin/salvation, alienation/liberation; (4) the idea that following the example of the civilized countries would liberate poor countries from poverty and suffering is just an ideological maneuver for oppression, etc. (Kee 1990, 164- 167). Kee recognizes that other liberation theologians explicitly appropriated Marx, such as Juan Luis Segundo (see chapter 8 of his book). 229 Feuerbach 1957, 29-30, quoted in Kee 1990, 42. 230 Quoted in Kee 1990, 45. 231 Kee 1990, 61, emphasis mine. 232 Turner in Rowland 2007, 233.

171 of socialism, it must cease to be genuinely religious.”233 The point, for Turner, is that liberation theologians failed to understand that Marx’s critique is not based on an opposition between “sacred” and “secular,” but involves the complete rejection of this opposition, to the point that for the socialist man “the question of

God cannot arise.”234 The problem is that it does not seem possible to instrumentalize Marxism to the point where one could retain the carcass of the theory, i.e., its socio-historical methodology, and transpose it to a

Christian-liberationist project the metaphysics of which are located at the antipodes of Marx’s project. The fallacy, finally, consists in thinking that we can import a methodology without taking care of its metaphysical basis.235 It does not matter, then, how much we deny—as Gutiérrez is at pains to do—that our project is an immanentization of Christianity when the tools we have chosen to work with create a paradox between what we want and what we can do. We can ask, for example, whether we can use Marxist analysis without incorporating its view on history, the danger of which Ratzinger describes:

The whole of history appears as a process of progressive liberations whose mechanism we are gradually able to explain and which we are thus able to steer ourselves. A fascinating promise opens up here: man himself can become the engineer of history.236

A second challenge emerges when we compare Gutiérrez’s claim that liberation theology seeks to create consciousness in people and liberate them, with the historical fact that the major figures of this movement have been bishops and priests. In the first place, this may be seen, again, in the light of Marxism: bishops and priests are to the Latin American poor what Marx was to the proletarian class. Just as for Marx “in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour… a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class,”237 liberation theologians can be seen as the minority that, conscious of the history of alliances of the church with those responsible for “institutionalized violence,” joins the poor, for only them, as Marx’s proletarians, hold the future. But even if this is the case, an important challenge emerges: How can liberation theology avoid the danger of building a new Christendom? Gutiérrez

233 Ibid., 235-236. 234 Ibid., 238. 235 Cf. Libertatis Nuntius, VII.6, 9. An analogous problem, in my opinion, inspired Ratzinger’s trilogy on the life of Jesus. This work is a reaction against the uncritical use of the critical-historical methodology to the Scriptures. This methodology, when it is universalized and turned it into the way to approach historical truth, ends up distinguishing between “the historical Jesus” and the “Jesus of the faith.” Ratzinger’s work aims at a restauration of the unity of Jesus, both as a historical character and as the Son of God that redeemed humankind. 236 Ratzinger 2013, 53. 237 Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party, I, in Tucker 1978, 481.

172 acknowledges the danger of a “Constantinianism of the Left.” His answer, however, is far from convincing:

“[W]e believe that the best way to achieve this development of power is precisely by resolutely casting our lot with the oppressed and the exploited in the struggle for a more just society.”238 Here, Gutiérrez is at best avoiding the question, namely: Should the “permanent cultural revolution” be—as it seems to be the case— the primary work of priests and bishops? Are they to seek an active engagement in politics? And if that is the case, how to avoid a religious government once they are successful? It seems to me that, whenever the clergy transforms itself into a political vanguard, Ivan Karamazov’s story of the Grand Inquisitor becomes a real possibility, and the work of liberation is turned on its head, becoming a new servility.239 Dostoyevsky’s

Inquisitor opposes Christ’s return to earth:

For fifteen centuries we have struggled with that freedom, but now it is all over, and over for good. You don’t believe that it is over for good? You look at me meekly and do not even consider me worthy of indignation? Well, I think you ought to be aware that now, and particularly in the days we are currently living through, those people are even more certain than ever that they are completely free, and indeed they themselves have brought us their freedom and have laid it humbly at our feet… At last they themselves will understand that freedom and earthly bread in sufficiency for all are unthinkable together, for never, never will they be able to share between themselves! They will also be persuaded that they will never be able to be free, because they are feeble, depraved, insignificant and mutinous.240

I argue that liberation theology fails to shield itself against a relapse into Christendom. To continue with our analogies, just as Marx didn’t discuss what the future would look like after the triumph of the revolution, liberation theology has no words about the role of a highly politicized clergy in a post-revolutionary Latin

America.241 The best protection against Christendom is found in the distinction between the secular and the religious, which implies that the church’s hierarchy—while certainly not apolitical—should be focused on

238 Gutiérrez 1988, 151. 239 A different possibility—that of the clumsiness and lack of political skill shown by the clergy when involved in politics, often with disastrous consequences—is exemplified by the case of the Mexican “Cristiada” (1926-1929). When then-president Plutarco Elías Calles implemented a set of anti-clerical laws—e.g., seizing church’s property, banning the public use of religious garments—the Catholic laity fought back, first, with an economic boycott. When the government hardened its position and started killing priests raping nuns, the Cristeros went to war using a guerrilla- war strategy. Towards the end of the conflict, when the Catholics saw a real chance to beat the Mexican government, they were stopped by their bishops, whom had been fighting along with them. The bishops reached an agreement with the government, offering a ceasefire in exchange for a restitution of the original concessions to the Catholic church. Immediately after the Cristeros laid their weapons down, the government chased and discreetly killed all the leaders of the movement. Anti-clericalism remained a common policy in Mexico until 1992, when president Carlos Salinas de Gortari pushed the approbation of legislation to regulate religious associations. For a history of the Mexican Cristiada, see the authoritative work of Jean Meyer 1975. 240 Dostoyevsky 2003, 328, 330. 241 The church’s answer to this question is straightforward: “[T]he Church’s Magisterium does not wish to exercise political power or eliminate the freedom of opinion of Catholics regarding contingent questions. Instead, it intends—as is its proper function—to instruct and illuminate the consciences of the faithful, particularly those involved in political life, so that their actions may always serve the integral promotion of the human person and the common good. The social doctrine of the Church is not an intrusion into the government of individual countries. It is a question of the lay Catholic’s duty to be morally coherent, found within one's conscience, which is one and indivisible” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, §571).

173 eternal life.242 This does not preclude the necessary and just demand of liberation theology to the church to become a church of the poor. In fact, it seems to me that the excessive politicization of the church, a yearning for power, has led to the many scandals and corruptions the church faces today.

This unnecessary politicization of the clergy—which encroaches upon a sphere that belongs to the laity—derives from two conceptual problems in liberation theology. Liberation theology was born in a time of crisis: priest, nuns and others were killed, thrown out of planes into the sea, persecuted, and threatened.

In those situations, filled with chaos and disregard for basic human rights, the action of many committed to liberation was not only right, but even heroic. A just war had to be waged, and for this reason many liberationists were martyred. However, these moments of crisis are neither permanent nor all-embracing.

Failing to distinguish a moment of crisis, which may justify active political action, even to the point of using physical force, from a post-crisis scenario, can eliminate the hopes for a normalization of social life. It does not seem that this distinction is made, for example, by Gutiérrez. In the second place, Gutiérrez’s understanding of the notion of the “poor” seems only partially in accord with Catholic doctrine. On the one hand, Gutiérrez rightly criticizes those who use the gospel to create a coarse, romanticized notion of poverty.243 Clearly, poor people are not loved by God because there’s something intrinsically lovable in their poverty. But, on the other hand, Christ does much more than just announcing material liberation.

Underlying Jesus’ teaching is a hard realism: “you always have the poor with you” (Matthew 26:11), a realism that is in line with the tradition of Western political thought, from Plato to Nietzsche: the confrontation between rich and poor is a constant in history.244 This is not, of course, a reason for defeatism, but an observation founded upon human nature. As Reinhold Niebuhr claims: “The hope that there will ever be an ideal society, in which everyone can take without restraint from the common social process ‘according to his need,’ completely disregards the limitations of human nature.”245 It seems to me that Gutiérrez fails to grasp the complexity of the Catholic doctrine on poverty.

242 De Lubac is radical in this matter: “The more a priest is conscious of his high spiritual mission and is really faithful to it, the more he has the right—because he has the corresponding duty—of detaching himself from purely political problems and human concerns,” although some lines below he affirms this means “neither denial nor desertion to the human cause” (Lubac 1987, 95). 243 Gutiérrez 1988, 164. 244 For Ratzinger, “the realism of Christian social teaching shows itself most conspicuously in the fact that it promises no earthly paradise, no irreversible and definitely positive society within this history” (Ratzinger 2013, 66). 245 Niebuhr 2015, 291. 174

Agamben explains, furthermore, that the liberation brought by Jesus goes beyond material wellbeing (cf. Matthew 6:25-34) and reaches the heart of human sociability. That a slave can live “as if” he or she is not a slave leaves intact the wickedness of his or her condition. But, at the same time, it liberates the person for the kingdom of God, which at the same time is here and is radically elsewhere.246 Social justice, thus, is not a sign of the kingdom, but a moral demand of Christian love.247

Liberation theology, thus, correctly criticizes laypeople and clergy for failing to live up to the expectations of Christian love—which, admittedly, is what characterizes the followers of Christ—but it takes this exigency to an extreme that reduces the Christian message to materiality, focusing only in the immanent dimension of the kingdom and thus forgetting that, in the end, the kingdom cannot be experienced in its fullness in this life.248 This is why eschatology is central in Catholic political thought, because it is through the recognition that the fullness of the kingdom transcends this life that we can reject pure immanentism, that is, the attempt to solve, here and now, once and for all, the problem of human salvation.

While Gutiérrez and other first-generation liberation theologians tried to align their teaching with that of the church, a new generation of liberationists has emerged, the doctrinal position of whom is at variance with the church’s central dogmas. A couple of examples may suffice to prove this point. In an article discussing liberation theology as a political theology, Miguel A. De La Torre claims that “[t]he miracle of the incarnation is not that God became human, but rather that God became poor,”249 an idea that contradicts the centrality of the Incarnation in Christian doctrine. To be sure, Jesus’ poverty is integral to the salvation message. However, the real miracle, the authentic scandal, is that God assumed the human

246 In this sense, the instruction Libertatis Nuntius claims that “the New Testament does not require some change in the political or social condition as a prerequisite for entrance into this freedom,” i.e., the freedom of Christ (IV.13). 247 See the conclusion of Libertatis Nuntius, which reproduces Paul VI’s “Profession of Faith of the People of God,” 30 June 1968. 248 Gerald O’Collins explains that in Jesus’ ministry, the divine kingdom is described “whether as already present (e.g., Matt. 12:28 = Luke 11:20; Luke 17:20-1) or as to come in the future (Mark 1:15 = Matt. 4:17; Matt. 6:10 = Luke 11:2; Mark 9:1)… The tension that was apparently there in Jesus’ own preaching between the kingdom as already present and as still to come finds no clear parallel in Judaism” (O’Collins 2013, 55). Ratzinger’s position is similar. He reads Paul’s words, “Our commonwealth is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20), as meaning that “[t]he new homeland toward which we are journeying is the interior criterion that governs our life and the hope that sustains us in the present day. The New Testament writers know that this city already exists and that we already belong to it, even if we are still en route” (Ratzinger 2006b, 70 emphasis mine; cf., Maritain 1938, 52; Lubac 1987, 85). 249 De La Torre in Hovey and Phillips 2015, 32.

175 condition.250 A little further, De La Torre affirms that “Jesus taught that God’s reign is for the here and now, not only some future hereafter,”251 an idea that disregards Jesus’ answer to Pilate: “My kingship is not of this world” (John 18:36). What would be, otherwise, the meaning of Jesus’ soothing words to the criminal hanged besides him: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise”? If the kingdom is fully here and now, and not otherworldly as well, then Jesus’ words to the penitent thief are not soothing, but cruel, no more than a reminder of the fact that, nailed to a cross and about to die, he just missed true life and authentic liberation. Consequently, for De La Torre Jesus’ “death was a political act.”252 But, as I explained in the previous chapter, this interpretation is foreign to the gospels. Elsewhere De La Torre takes praxis to the extreme, identifying as the enemy of religion: “For the real struggle is not between

Christianity and Islam, or Hinduism and Buddhism. Rather, the struggle occurs between the world’s disenfranchised and the materialistic religiosity of the world’s elite.”253 The affirmation is oblivious to the fact that, for liberation theology, poverty and oppression are manifestations of a more general problem, namely, sin, which cannot be identified with it.254

A second example can be found in Marcella Althaus-Reid, a feminist theologian who promotes a move from liberation theology to what she calls “indecent theology.” According to her—and contrary to the

Second Vatican Council—“the path of theology is not continuity but nonconformity.”255 She calls for “many

‘other Medellíns’ and countless ‘other Vatican IIs,’”256 that is, for as many places of nonconformity, for the

250 This is what Ratzinger calls the “scandal” of Christianity: “By thus seeming to bridge the gulf between eternal and temporal, between visible and invisible, by making us meet God as a man, the eternal as the temporal, as one of us, it understands itself as revelation” (Ratzinger 2004, 54). This idea is consistent with the Creed’s article about the Son—Jesus is the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father… begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father,” as well as with the openning words of the Johannine gospel. 251 De La Torre in Hovey and Phillips 2015, 32. Contrast this idea with Gutiérrez’s: “Although the Kingdom must not be confused with the establishment of a just society, this does not mean that it is indifferent to this society… The Kingdom is realized in a society of fellowship and justice; and, in turn, this realization opens up the promise and hope of complete communion of all persons with God. The political is grafted into the eternal” (1988, 135). Consider also the warning of Libertatis Nuntius: “History thus becomes a central notion. It will be affirmed that God Himself makes history. It will be added that there is only one history, one in which the distinction between the history of salvation and profane history is no longer necessary. To maintain the distinction would be to fall into ‘dualism.’ Affirmations such as this reflect historicist immanentism” (IX.3). 252 Ibid. Cf. Libertatis Nuntius: “An exclusively political interpretation is thus given to the death of Christ. In this way, its value for salvation and the whole economy of redemption is denied” (X.12). 253 De La Torre 2008, 6. Libertatis Nuntius rightly points out that “[t]o some it even seems that the necessary struggle for human justice and freedom in the economic and political sense constitutes the whole essence of salvation. For them, the Gospel is reduced to a purely earthly gospel” (VI.4) See also Libertatis Conscientia, §21. 254 The instruction Libertatis Nuntius establishes that “the full ambit of sin, whose first effect is to introduce disorder into the relationship between God and man, cannot be restricted to ‘social sin’” (IV.14). Thus, it is not possible “to localize evil principally or uniquely in bad social, or economic ‘structures’ as though all other evils came from them so that the creation of the ‘new man’ would depend on the establishment of different economic and socio-political structures” (IV.15). 255Althaus-Reid in Petrella 2005, 22. 256 Ibid., 23.

176 irruption of the “indecent,” as can be. “Indecent,” for Althaus-Reid, means a will for perpetual disruption.

She criticizes (classic) liberation theology as “decent theology, which is concerned with authorship and the authorisation/disauthorisation of the Grand(iose) religio-political discourses of authority in Latin

America.”257 As an example, Althaus-Reid describes an inspiration she had to impersonate the Virgin of

Guadalupe in a carnival in Buenos Aires. She reports having been inspired by Yolanda López’s Portrait of the Artist as the Virgin of Guadalupe, in which the painter’s self-portrait appears “as if coming from the opened cloak of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which, if looked at carefully, has the appearance of an open, gigantic red vulva.”258 Even if we disregard the fact that in no way can the image of Guadalupe be seriously interpreted in this way,259 we should ask what is interesting (for lack of a better word) in the asseverations that follow this artistic license:

We can consider, for instance, whether God is a female divinity represented by a vulva, but even beyond that, whether God relates to an autonomous sexuality or a reflected one (such as in the case of women’s sexuality in traditional homosexuality). Or is God a pleasurable site, a G spot somewhere hidden but built around mythical (sometimes exaggerated) proportions?260

It seems difficult to consider the previous paragraph as theology. It looks rather a play of words with no relation to any serious investigation of the transcendent. While feminism correctly points to a world structured by oppressive linguistic practices, and while there may be practices in the Catholic church and other religions that must be denounced as oppressive against women, what Althaus-Reid is doing is but a

(coarse) return to paganism. Characterizing the Christian God as male or female makes absolutely no sense.

This is clear when we consider the apophatic element of all theology. Ratzinger correctly points out that

“there is an infinite gulf between God and man; because man is fashioned in such a way that his eyes are only capable of seeing what is not God, and thus for man God is and always will be the essentially invisible, something lying outside his field of vision. God is essentially invisible.”261 Many of the gods of antiquity, on the contrary, were gendered and some of them delighted themselves in sexual adventures with other gods

257 Althaus-Reid 2000, 20. 258 Ibid., 47. 259 Althaus-Reid gives some kind of explanation of this rather bizarre interpretation: “To put your head through the hole, to see yourself as the Virgin emerging from a divine vulva, requires a sexual option. For instance, you need to consider where God is in this, because God’s position is a sexual option in itself” (Ibid.). 260 Ibid., 48. 261 Ratzinger 2004, 50.

177 and human beings. In this sense, Althaus-Reid approaches not Christendom, but the pagan world of civil religion that Augustine mocked. The question seems to be what do we learn, if anything, from an investigation of God that reduces its focus to genitalia? But, more importantly, we may ask whether indecent theology is not just the distorted reflection of a bad theology that has lost its ability to speak about God.262

To conclude, liberation theology raises an important challenge to the Catholic church, namely, that the failure to be a church for the poor implies necessarily the failure to be the Church of Christ. These theologies, however, have often failed to deal with the challenges imposed by the decision to use a Marxist methodology, coming close at times to supporting an immanentization of the kingdom that forgets that the fullness of the kingdom will only come in the afterlife. An overly materialistic conception of the poor is problematic in relation to Christian poverty, which completely transforms social relationships vis-à-vis the eschatological moment.

IV

The Second Vatican Council opened a new theologico-political window through which it is possible to observe and understand the church in a new light. The council allowed Catholicism to make peace with secularity, a conflict that found a radical expression in the French Revolution. Correcting the church of the

Syllabus, Vatican II opposed Gaudium et spes as a new attitude, a call for dialogue, understanding and collaboration with the modern world. At the same time, this new window reshaped state-church relations; the Catholic church gave up Christendom and acknowledged the autonomy of the political sphere, without this implying a full disconnection between the temporal and the transcendental, between politics and faith.

As discussed in the first chapter, the theologico-political is an inevitable dimension of human societies. The council meant not the church’s leaving politics for good, but rather learning a new way of doing Catholic politics.

262 A related issue has to do with heteronormativity (see, e.g., Althaus-Reid 2000, 112-113). What makes the rejection of heteronormativity, understood as the idea that there is something normative about sex (e.g., that human reproduction has normative consequences), and the defense of an idea of gender as dislocated from sex and its transformation into a more “fluid” or “plastic” notion subject to individual creativity, less ideological that its counterpart? Isn’t, for example, the notion that a person may be born in the “wrong” body—a common argument of transgender individuals— just as metaphysical as the Christian idea of incarnated souls? In my opinion, the real discussion must be centered around how to keep the balance between the individual’s right to live her sexuality freely, on the one hand, with society’s need of cohesion and compromise between different interest groups. 178

More than fifty years after Vatican II, the Catholic church faces a serious crisis. The crisis seems to be about the church’s authority. Behind the many scandals the church has recently faced—Marcial Maciel, pederasty, and corruption inside the Vatican Bank, to name only some of them—lurks what it seems to be a disconnection between the popes and the Roman Curia. This is, of course, not something new. It is enough to remember Luther’s warning to Pope Leo X—“Meanwhile you, Leo, sit as a lamb in the midst of wolves”263—or Pope Benedict XVI resignation announced on February 11, 2013, that Giorgio Agamben understands as a courageous adoption of the eschatological perspective which confronts the human and sinful element in the church with the transcendental, mystical one.264

Did something go wrong in Vatican II? Or was the error to be found, on the contrary, in the reception, interpretation, and implementation of the council? Did the council go too far in its attempt to reconcile the church with modernity, as Marcel Lefebvre claimed? Or maybe it didn’t go far enough in transforming its teachings into practice? Or was it, finally, as Ralph McInerny suggests, a crisis of authority in the Catholic church which has given life to “so many of the other controversies swirling around the council and the Church today”?265

While I don’t have an answer to these questions, I would like to close this chapter with a suggestion of the road Catholics may have to walk if we want to understand and, eventually, deal with this crisis. In my opinion, the crisis can neither be solved by a return to preconciliar times, nor by a rejection of the council’s texts in the name of a “spirit” that goes far beyond the compromises made there. In this sense, I subscribe to Ratzinger’s assessment of the council: “The heritage of Vatican II has not yet been awakened.

But it is awaiting its hour. And it will come; of that I am certain.”266 But, on the other hand, the crisis cannot be explained just as a crisis of authority. It is true that, more than ever, important sectors of the laity are disregarding some of the teachings of the church—an obvious example is the position of a substantial, not to say majoritarian, group of laypeople regarding birth control, refusing to adjust their behavior to what Paul

263 Luther 1962, 46. 264 “If one pretends to be ignorant, as the Church has often done, of the bipartite body, the fusca Church ends up prevailing over the decora and the eschatological drama loses all sense” (Agamben 2017, I.9). 265 McInerny 1998, 16; see also 38. For a discussion on the crisis of authority in the Catholic church see Lacey and Oakley 2011. 266 Ratzinger 2011a, 384.

179

VI’s encyclical letter Humanae Vitae, taught in 1968.267 But this is not simply the result of a rebellious attack on the church’s authority. The situation is, I believe, more complex, and much more interesting.

Vatican II opened the doors to the non-Catholic world, science, and the laity, to an extent never seen before.

What we see now is the new relationship that was born out of the double movement of secularity, on the one hand, and the church’s aggiornamento, on the other. The question we need to ask is, thus, not: How to reinstate good-old authority? but rather: What kind of authority the church of our times needs? How should it relate to the laity? What is its place in postsecular societies? And, finally: What does Catholic political action look like in this new paradigm? To insist on Taylor’s approach: the goal is not a church camouflaged in modern clothes, but a church which is still “His Church” and has found, at the same time, its voice in our times. Ablatio is still necessary, and there’s no reason to believe that the problem of authority is not in need of rethinking.

The yearning for a return to Christendom must be opposed on the basis of Vatican II’s implicit recognition of the perils of a religion turned into civil religion: the denial of religious liberty and the denial of the possibility of salvation for non-Catholics, the state’s undue encroachment on the church’s affairs and vice versa. At the same time, many attempts to “modernize” the church have not ended well, either with a diluted version of Catholicism that fails to convince, or with the random identification of Catholicism with epistemological positions (e.g., relativism) that utterly contradict its very foundations. It seems that the best way to conceptualize the church is as Augustine did many centuries ago: it lives in the world waiting for

Christ’s return, constantly denouncing injustice and oppression; but, at the same time, it must not forget its otherworldliness. In the final analysis, the fullness of the kingdom cannot be achieved in this life.

267 Other pontiffs have made commentaries that suggest some fragility in the church’s position on the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” birth control methods. In an interview with Peter Seewald (2010), Pope Benedict XVI suggested that the use of condoms by, say, a gay prostitute could be “a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility” (The New York Times, December 21, 2010, goo.gl/acXmJk). Although the Curia intervened to deny some misunderstandings and distortions of the pope’s words, the fact is that Benedict XVI’s example—even if it wasn’t meant as a step towards the acceptance of condoms—forces us to change the moral focus from the means (condom) to the ends (). His example recovers a morality centered on the person’s intentions and its ability to love. I believe this can be the starting point of a revaluation of Catholic morality. Pope Francis, on his part, stressed that Catholics don’t have to breed like rabbits. While he insisted that “openness to life is a condition of the sacrament of matrimony,” he cited “the case of a woman he met who was pregnant with her eighth child after seven caesarean sections. ‘That is an irresponsibility!’ he said.” (The Guardian, January 20, 2015, goo.gl/yeK3hh). Again, the pope was not advocating for the use of condoms and other prohibited methods for birth control. But he was insisting that moral responsibility lies in the conscience of the married couple. Moreover, his words suggest the need for discernment, the careful application of the moral principle to the particular context. These two examples show us not a change in doctrine, but perhaps a new moral awareness, one that privileges conscience over authority, and recognizes a sphere of moral discernment of the laity which can be governed only by general principles of natural law, not by an all- encompassing moral code. 180

The task in front of us is, thus, to rethink Catholicism in postsecular societies. This implies, first, understanding the role of the laity in these societies, its political activity, and its relation to the magisterium, and second, evaluating the model of separation of church and state, trying to avoid at the same time

Christendom and the model of privatization of belief. To these two tasks I turn now.

181

CHAPTER 4. BETWEEN AUTHENTICITY AND TELEOLOGY.

The synthesis of the world has not been made. As each truth becomes better known, it opens up a fresh area for paradox. Thought which failed to leave it its place then, which in other words did not recognize this universal place that it has, would be paradoxical in the bad sense. Paradox, in the best sense, is objectivity.1

Our investigations have led us to the recognition of the paradoxical relationship between religion and politics.2 It is only by acknowledging the theologico-political as a persistent, unavoidable paradox in human life that we are allowed into the heart of the human problem in society. The tension between the transcendent and the immanent, between spiritual energy and political action, is clear when we see, for example, that Jesus—and his inverted mirror, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra3—was “led up to the desert by the

Spirit,” wherein he fasted, prayed, and was tempted (Matthew 4:1-11) before starting his public ministry.

Martin Luther King Jr., for his part, proposed a stage of “purification,” that is, a spiritual conditioning disposing those taking part in active resistance to endure suffering without resorting to violence.4 The temptation, however, to overcome the paradox, either by the immanentization of what is originally transcendent, or by fleeing reality, abandoning ourselves to dreams and utopias, is always strong.

In the Catholic view, existence itself is paradoxical. Human beings are a soul-body composite, neither purely matter nor exclusively spirit, but persons who dwell in this world, dealing with earthly preoccupations while at the same time yearning for meaning and transcendence. The problem of existence is also reflected in the complex relationship between faith and reason. Christianity challenged ancient

1 Lubac 1987, 10. 2 Elsewhere, Henry de Lubac characterizes paradox as the way dogma necessarily presents itself. In his discussion about the paradox between the importance of unity for Catholicism and the notion that salvation is a personal matter for every individual, he states: “This is not the only case in which revelation presents us with two assertions which seem at first unconnected or even contradictory: God creates the world for his own glory, propter seipsum, and yet out of pure goodness; man is capable of action and free, and yet he can do nothing without grace, and grace works in him ‘both to will and to perform’; the vision of God is a free gift, and yet the desire of it is at the very root of every soul; the redemption is a work of pure mercy, and yet the rights of justice are no less respected. And so on. The whole of dogma is thus but a series of paradoxes” (Lubac 1988, 327). 3 Zarathustra’s Prologue has echoes of Plato and Jesus: “When Zarathustra was thirty years old he left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. Here he enjoyed his spirit and his solitude, and for ten years did not tire of it. But at last a change came over his heart, and one morning he rose with the dawn, stepped before the sun, and spoke to it thus… ‘Behold, I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to receive it. I would give away and distribute, until the wise among men find joy once again in their folly, and the poor in their riches” (§1). Despite the obvious similarities, Zarathustra is presented as the anti-Socratic, and anti-Christian teacher. While Zarathustra, for example, decides to go back to the world out of the overabundance of his wisdom, the Platonic educated person only reluctantly returns to the cave (519d-e). Jesus’s whole ministry, on the other hand, is an act of obedience, a radical emptying of the self in order to identify with his mission. This is why Ratzinger claims that “with Jesus it is not possible to distinguish office and person” (Ratzinger 2004, 203). 4 King 1963.

182 religions by two radical moves: first, it rejected the notion of civil religion, announcing a universal religion that cannot be contained by any social arrangement; and second, it rejected mythology by attempting a synthesis with Greek thought, to the point where “the God of religion” and “the God of the philosophers” coincided, thus making it possible for Christianity to present itself as the religion of the logos, as the religion compatible with reason.5

Another paradox, one that is fundamental for my purposes, is the one that holds individual freedom as the basis of democratic political action, on one extreme, and the fact that we belong to a community which inevitably imposes constraints upon individual freedom for the sake of the whole, on the other. Take, for example, liberal political theory. The kind of individual freedom liberalism has in mind runs along

Hobbesian/Berlinean lines,6 defining the freedom of the agent as a sphere of action protected from external obstacles or interference. But if acting free means just my being able to follow the good I have determined for myself without any external interference, then my belonging to a community is secondary at best. But this is not the case: we have seen that even the efforts of the agent to be true to herself, to be authentic, unfold in a set of communal and linguistic practices of which the agent is but a participant. Liberalism has tried to solve this problem by supporting, for instance, the doctrine of human rights as the necessary restrictions on each agent’s freedom in order for a society of free agents to flourish. However, as we will see below, it is difficult to harmonize liberal freedom, which tends towards atomization, with the metaphysical claim that supports the doctrine of human rights, namely, the idea of personal dignity.

The tension is clear: my being free cannot obliterate my belonging to the community, if only because the raw material necessary to build myself escapes my control, and because I am constituted, for the most part unconsciously, by my being a member of that community. Individual freedom is thus never isolated freedom, but freedom with others and freedom in a specific network of human relationships wherein certain roles are defined. Clearly, that my freedom is determined, to certain extent, by the matrix of social relationships in which I happen to exist, implies that my freedom is restricted in certain aspects. On the

5 See Ratzinger 2004, 137-150, 2006c. 6 In his Leviathan, Hobbes defines freedom as “the absence of Opposition,” where the latter term implies “externall Impediments of motion” (chapter 21). Berlin, on his part, associates his concept of “negative freedom” with the Hobbesian definition of freedom. According to Berlin, “I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity” (Berlin 2002, 169). 183 other hand, the suggestion that the community frames the content and extent of my freedom poses an important question as to what kind of restrictions to individual freedom are legitimate.

The problem of the individual and the community is particularly important for Catholic political action. The adjective “catholic” (katholou) itself reminds us of the communitarian yearning: one is not

Catholic alone and estranged, but rather belonging to a community where communion becomes possible. As

Ratzinger claims:

Christian faith is not based on the atomized individual but comes from the knowledge that there is no such thing as the mere individual, that, on the contrary, man is himself only when he is fitted into the whole: into mankind, into history, into the cosmos, as is right and proper for a being who is “spirit in body.”7

However, the fact that a Catholic existence dislocated from the community of believers is an oxymoron does not tell us enough about the specific way in which individuals experience spiritual life. On this matter, Pope

Benedict XVI explained at the beginning of his first encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est, that “[b]eing

Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (§1). This encounter cannot but remind us of the intimate character of conversion, to the point where everything is suspended, the community included, by this moment of intimacy wherein the individual must be radically free to embrace or reject the one challenging her. Catholicism is thus to be found always in the tension between the free individual as the only one capable of answering a call, of participating in an encounter, and the community, the natural habitat where the believer abides.

The question in front of us, then, can be stated in the following terms: Can we come up with a version of Catholic political action—understood in terms of the tension between the individual and the community—that, while rejecting an atomistic (or Hobbesian/Berlinean) understanding of liberty, also keeps the community in check, preventing the absorption of the part into the whole?

The present chapter deals with that question, claiming that it is possible to find such an understanding of freedom by taking Taylor’s defense of authenticity/recognition as the necessary condition for a free encounter with the event of Christ. The shortcomings in Taylor’s theory, however, make it

7 Ratzinger 2004, 245. The justification for Ratzinger’s refusal to anchor the believer into a specific community is provided, as well, by catholicity, that is, by the universal call to follow Jesus; this is an important difference from, for example, Judaism, in which belonging to a specific community, i.e., to Israel, is fundamental (cf. Neusner 1993, 140). 184 necessary to borrow some theoretical elements that will allow the return of the individual to the community.

To this end, I analyze Alasdair MacIntyre’s political theory, suggesting that while a complete return to seems unlikely, we can nevertheless rephrase his doctrine as the ideal toward which Catholic political action is oriented, and which articulates the individual in the community. By doing this, I will suggest, we do justice to the notion of unity-across-difference in a way that Taylor cannot. In the second part of the chapter I offer the theological counterpart for what has been said in terms of political theory, presenting

Catholic political action in theologico-political terms, as a kind of activity in perpetual tension, between immanence and transcendence, between the individual and the community, between faith and reason.

I

[1] In the second chapter I presented Charles Taylor’s ideas on language and secularity, suggesting that a close link exists between the two: it is through a critique of the idea that the point of view of natural sciences is the ultimate route to the acquisition of knowledge, which includes necessarily an analysis of the nature and uses of language, that Taylor arrives at three concepts that are fundamental to this work, namely, secularity, authenticity, and recognition.

We also said that Taylor is reluctant to understand secularity either as the emptying of religion from autonomous social spheres or as the falling off of religious belief and practice, proposing instead to deem it as a social mutation that has caused belief in God to become not the default, or even the only, option, but one among others. Secularity is, thus, not the end of religion, but a transformation of society under a logic of fragmentation of the horizons of significance. This section explores Taylor’s understanding of

Catholicism in these societies, and the role of authenticity and recognition for Catholic political action.

In A Catholic Modernity? Taylor offers a personal answer. In this address—that Abbey deems

Taylor’s “religious turn”8—he plays with the terms “a modern Catholicism?” and “a Catholic modernity?” suggesting that while the former may be (mistakenly) used to recommend modern Catholicism as the pinnacle of Catholicism, the latter conveys two main ideas: first, that modernity is one among many other

8 Abbey 2006, 163.

185 great traditions of thought which, as such, displays some authentic developments of the gospel; and, second, that our task is to find our own voice in the “eventual Catholic chorus.”9 The inherent contingency of this second conceptualization of Catholicism, first as a spirituality that is displayed in a variety of cultural milieus, and, second, as only one among many manifestations of that very spirituality, is a defensive move against Christendom and in favor of the liberal democratic state.

However, liberal democracy is not free of problems. Exclusive humanism, which emerged in parallel with secular, liberal societies, threatens to flatten life. Three types of malaise haunt these societies.10

First we find the dark side of individualism, a consequence of disenchantment that can lead to the narrowing of the scope of life, to the loss of a sense of purpose in life and the atomization of the ends of life. Second, instrumental rationality threatens to force every aspect of life to conform with a means-ends, cost-benefit analysis, an operation which inescapably leaves many goods out of sight. Third, we find what Tocqueville described as “soft despotism,” that is, the progressive sclerotization of public life and civic virtue, to a point where new structures of dominion are imposed under a society anesthetized by the culture of narcissism and comfort.

Against these three forms of malaise, Taylor proposes to reignite the question about meaning in modern culture. To do this, resort to both authenticity and recognition is needed. The culture of authenticity is a modern product, born out of disenchantment, the reaffirmation of ordinary life, and Romanticism.

Authenticity requires a weakening of the world as a cosmos, as well as the acknowledgment that there’s something valuable in daily, non-heroic life. The ideal, in a few words, demands “being true to myself and my own particular way of being.”11 This, of course, does not preclude my goals being external to me, and even more or less impervious to change—as, for example, in institutionalized religions—but it demands that in adopting this or that religion, that which is embraced fits, or speaks to, the person I am. Moreover, the very way I relate to my religion must also be authentic, that is, it must “feel right” to me.

To the ethics of authenticity corresponds a politics of recognition. Given that we embrace the moral worth of authenticity as an integral part of human dignity, recognizing the other as he or she is, that is, in

9 Taylor 1999, 15. Emphasis is mine. 10 Taylor 1991, chapter 1. 11 Taylor 1994, 28. 186 his or her specificity and difference, recognition must then be framed as a political necessity of the first order. The politics of recognition emerges, according to Taylor, as a corrective of the model of universal,

“blind” rights,12 which are granted in disregard of individual particularities: “The claim is that the supposedly neutral set of difference-blind principles of the politics of equal dignity has in fact a reflection of one hegemonic culture.”13 In this sense, recognition is but the political consequence of acknowledging authenticity as a valid moral goal, and is designed to protect individuals from the tyranny of the majority.

Taylor recommends a pluralistic liberal democracy as a political regime that promotes both authenticity and recognition. This affirmation requires three observations on our part. First, he is far from concluding that recognition implies relativism (cf. chapter 2.I.3). According to Taylor, not all worldviews are the same. What the politics of recognition demands is to approach all perspectives with an open mind, trying to understand what is valuable in them. But this cannot mean the imposition of a new universalism, namely, the a priori determination of equal value among all options:

It makes sense to demand as a matter of right that we approach the study of certain cultures with a presumption of their value… But it can’t make sense to demand as a matter of right that we come up with a final concluding judgment that their value is great, or equal to others… On examination, either we will find something of great value in [a determinate culture], or we will not.14

Second, Taylor’s defense of liberalism does not imply that this political regime is a better option insofar as it is neutral among different views of the human good. Liberalism is a comprehensive doctrine which includes a hierarchy of goals made possible by the recognition of certain hypergoods (e.g., the individual as a bearer of rights). In his words: “Liberalism is not a possible meeting ground for all cultures, but is the political expression of one range of cultures, and quite incompatible with other ranges. Liberalism can’t and shouldn’t claim complete cultural neutrality. Liberalism is also a fighting creed”15 (cf. chapter 2.II.4).

Third, and as a corollary, Taylor is not claiming that liberal democracy must be imposed as the best political regime for any population, disregarding its own culture, traditions, and history. If recognition is to be taken seriously, then liberal democracy cannot be imposed as the universal medicine for every kind of

12 Ibid., 38. 13 Ibid., 43. 14 Ibid., 68. Against the fallacy of neutrality in the social sciences, Lefort insists: “If we refuse to risk making judgements, we lose all sense of the difference between forms of society. We then fall back on value judgments, either hypocritically, beneath the cloak of a hierarchy in the determinants of what we take to be the real, or arbitrarily, in the crude statement of preferences” (Lefort 1988, 12). Lefort captures the inescapability of judgment, which is imposed by our own situatedness, by our being thrown in the world. 15 Ibid., 62. 187 political malaise in the world. Taylor emphasizes that although the term (“secular”) may be the same, it will adopt different meanings in different contexts, so that we must talk of different secularizations. It follows that the political solution to a specific context will also be characterized by diversity (cf. chapter 2.IV.2).

In my opinion, Taylor’s liberalism, understood as a “fighting creed,” deeply influences his religious position, more than the other way around. Playing with words again, we can say that Taylor is less a “liberal

Catholic” than a “Catholic liberal.” It is important to note, however, that while Taylor emphasizes the adjective over the noun—embracing a Catholic-modernity instead than a modern-Catholicism—my emphasis is the other way around, choosing to define Taylor as a Catholic-liberal rather than a liberal-

Catholic. When we focus not on Taylor’s use of adjectives, but on the nouns, we understand why modernity is given primacy over Catholicism in his address.

To give an example: His notion of unity-across-difference, which Taylor claims to derive from the

Trinitarian mystery, seems to be rather informed by his liberalism. This becomes clear when we focus on the emphasis he makes on the “difference” over the “unity.” In fact, Taylor has very few words for the problem of unity, which is portrayed in Jesus’ priestly prayer: “I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:20-21).

Taylor’s Catholicism rather mirrors his politics of recognition, suggesting a sort of charismatic community vaguely united by what he calls the stance of “agape/karuna.”16 For, in his lecture, the obviously missing element is the church’s authority. Taylor completely ignores the notions of primacy and episcopate, which give unity to the church. Moreover, his suggestion that the point is “to find our authentic voice in the eventual Catholic chorus,”17 and that the freedom that modernity gained for Catholics is “the freedom to come to God on one’s own or, otherwise put, moved only by the Holy Spirit,”18 unveils Taylor’s liberalism when we notice, first, that a discussion about what the “eventual Catholic chorus” means is missing, and second, that the idea of being moved “only” by the Holy Spirit is closer to Pentecostal and other charismatic

16 Taylor 1999, 22. 17 Ibid., 15. Emphasis is mine. 18 Ibid., 19. Emphasis is mine.

188 communities19 than to Catholicism, which understands that there is a tension between the individual—who can be freely moved by the Holy Spirit (cf. John 3:8)—and the authority of the apostles, to whom power was given to bind and to loose (Matthew 18:18; cf. chapter 3.II.1). This becomes evident, finally, when we read the end of the last sentence. The voice of the Holy Spirit, Taylor adds, “will often be heard better when the loudspeakers of armed authority are silent.”20 This is the only place in the whole lecture that the word

“authority” appears. And if it is true that Taylor is not talking about the church’s authority—which has not, in our days, the power of arms—it is important to note the negative tone authority is associated with, which is closer to Luther than to the Catholic church.

It is telling that, in trying to come up with a term to explain the exceptionality of Catholicism, Taylor leans on Buddhist vocabulary, as if agape by itself were insufficient to express the demand for human love that—in Catholic terminology—redeems the individual and brings her back to fullness.21 Ian Fraser correctly finds this incorporation of Buddhist elements problematic. For, first, the kind of “decentered self” that Taylor finds in the Christian attempt to aim “beyond life” is different from the Buddhist movement from “self” to “no self” (anatta). Fraser points out that “for the Buddha the ‘no self’ is ‘without object,’” while “Taylor’s ‘decentered self is decentered in relation to the ‘object’ of God.”22 He concludes by claiming that “Taylor’s assumption about the importance of something ‘beyond life’ for Buddhism ignores the fact that the Buddha’s path to nirvana where suffering ceases also results in the ending of the cycle of death and rebirth.”23

A second critique of Fraser’s refers to the notion of “transcendence.” He points out that Taylor fails to properly articulate this idea, proposing the idea of “bewilderment,” which only vaguely approximates the process he is trying to describe. This, Fraser continues, is problematic for a philosopher who emphasizes

19 In her discussion about the Born-Again community within the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria, Ruth Marshall explains: “[Enoch A.] Abedoye refers to the eternal problem of instituting spiritual authority within the Born-Again community. Within churches and the community at large, the Holy Spirit speaks to each and every one, such that ‘Everybody [is] doing what he thinks is right in his own sight.’” Marshall argues that “[t]he Born-Again conception of sovereignty fails to institute the distinction between power and right, or to put it in religious terms, between grace and works or the law” (Marshall 2009, 211). This is not, in my opinion, a problem for Catholicism, wherein hierarchy and the flow of authority are clearly demarcated. 20 Taylor 1999, 19. 21 In my view, the best contemporary discussion of the contraposition of eros/agape is to be found in Pope Benedict XVI’s Deus Caritas Est. The confrontation of the pope with Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is a milestone in modern , for nowhere is a philosophical discussion with a major figure in the Western canon explicitly found in the pontificates of his predecessors. 22 Fraser 2005, 233. 23 Ibid., 235. 189 the importance of articulation as the process that brings about some new experience through language.

However, we should not lose sight of the fact that metaphysical terms can never be completely articulated.

This is something Taylor himself makes clear in his discussion of figuration in The Language Animal.

Against Fraser, and with Taylor, we must deny the possibility of properly articulating what “beyond life” means.

Two final criticisms of Fraser’s are, in my opinion, off the mark. In discussing unconditional love,

Fraser makes two mistakes. First, he criticizes Taylor for presenting “saints,” such as Mother Theresa, as exceptional people capable of unconditional love. That saints “are human beings who can have weaknesses just like everyone else,” Fraser suggests, militates against Taylor’s idea, because his “extreme position cannot allow for this, because saints are assumed to be engaged only in acts of ‘unconditional love.’”24 This is hardly a criticism. Nowhere does Taylor suggest that saints are perfect. Exceptionality does not mean moral infallibility. Taylor’s work is rather filled with caution about human possibilities, and saints are not excluded from the human condition. Second, Fraser claims that the notion of “unconditional love” is inaccurate, because “conditionality is also present because it is not caring for people for their own sake, but only as vehicles for showing your love of God.”25 I believe Fraser misunderstands here the meaning of

“unconditional.”26 For Taylor, the unconditionality of love has to do with the “decentered self,” that is, with the renunciation that lets me be open to everyone else. That my love is ultimately a love of God means not the becoming conditional of love, but its very condition of possibility. Only when I deplete myself can God act in me and His love becomes efficient in others (cf. Galatians 2:20).

Fraser, finally, claims that Taylor’s “principle of propagation”—which is nothing else but the task of evangelization—is illogical and contradicts the principle of diversity/recognition. Imagine, Fraser asks us, that Taylor engages in a conversation with a Protestant, and the latter becomes “so impressed” by

Taylor’s account that he decides to convert to Catholicism. From this Fraser concludes that

Taylor would certainly have widened the Catholic faith, but it would not have resulted in diversity because Protestantism would have lost one of its recruits. By definition then, Taylor would not want the Protestant to become a Catholic, which clearly shows the illogical nature of his edict.27

24 Ibid., 241, my emphasis. 25 Ibid., 243. 26 Cf. Abbey 2006, 170. 27 Fraser 2005, 244. 190

Fraser fails to read Taylor’s lecture properly. First, from the title of the lecture we are informed that Taylor is discussing Catholicism, not Christianity in general. Thus, when he speaks of unity-across-difference he has in mind, primarily, difference among Catholics, that is, the various ways of living the Catholic faith.

But second, and more important, Taylor rejects relativism and invites us to discern between higher and lower comprehensive views of human existence. Ruth Abbey correctly reminds us that Taylor “is not saying that all manifestations of difference are necessarily good; instead, he issues his audience an invitation to figure out how developments within the modern era, such as its rights culture and the affirmation of ordinary life, have developed religious faith and how they might have stunted it.”28

From the preceding discussion it can be seen that Taylor’s Catholicism is at least problematic. On the one hand, it seems to me that his defense of authenticity and recognition are in line with Catholic anti- collectivism, that is, with the notion that faith is first and foremost a personal, intimate issue, and only then a communitarian one. Also in line with mainstream Catholicism seems to be his rejection of relativism and his emphasis on the possibility of strong evaluation (cf. chapter 2.I.2). The main problem, in my opinion, arises when we ask how an authentic individual is reinserted into the whole.29 If we accept that “there is no such thing as inward generation, monologically understood,”30 because the construction of the self is dialogical, then we must ask for the mechanisms that restore unity. I don’t believe Taylor can answer this question, because his own (liberal) understanding of unity-across-difference precludes him from aspiring to a real unity. A further problem arises when we consider the possibility of fusing horizons as a way toward unity. It makes sense that the Gadamerian idea of fusing horizons may lead us toward unity. The problem,

I think, is that there’s nothing in Taylor’s thought capable of functioning as a (thick-enough) Catholic horizon. This is why, I think, most of the examples of conversion he provides in A Secular Age (chapter 20) are exceptional individual stories. Taylor, I suggest, is reluctant to fully embrace the tension between the

28 Abbey 2006, 167. 29 I am aware of the artificiality of the construction. The individual, to be sure, cannot be separated from the community. As discussed in the second chapter, our dialogical nature (given our linguistic faculties) makes human beings a gregarious species. My goal in presenting this artificial picture is rather to emphasize two polarities that inform human existence, namely, the fact that, as human individuals, we are not fully determined (either by instinct or nurture) because we have freedom and will, as well as the fact that, unavoidably, we are constrained by the context (historical, linguistical, cultural, religious, etc.) we were born into. My suggestion is, then, that Taylor overemphasizes the side of the free, authentic individual, which poses serious problems when we try to restore the balance between individual free will, on the one hand, and communitarian life, on the other. 30 Taylor 1994, 32. 191 individual and the community, between difference and unity, that is to say, the paradoxical character of

Catholicism. This failure is caused by his embrace of liberalism, which informs his Catholicism rather than the other way around.

In my view, it is possible to preserve Taylor’s defense of the individual while rejecting his liberalism. To do so, I propose to introduce the political thought of Alasdair MacIntyre as a correction to

Taylor’s. In the next two sections I discuss the consequences an understanding of rationalities as traditions have for the Gadamerian view of the fusing of horizons. The first section analyzes two examples of anomic individualism—Gilles Lipovetsky’s second individualistic revolution and Right-wing Christianity in the

United States—in order to introduce MacIntyre’s main argument, namely, that a decision must be made between liberalism as a comprehensive doctrine that privileges the monadic individual, on the one hand, and a virtue ethics that draws from the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition. Both postmodern individualism and right-wing Christians side, I will argue, with the monadic individual; Catholicism, on the other hand, is only possible when virtue ethics is available.

[2] The perversion of liberalism consists, I believe, in its mutation into what I will call here

“.” Neoliberalism31 cancels the very possibility of a human community by a twofold movement: first, it uproots human goals from their traditions, creating a sort of marketplace of meaning wherein authenticity is reduced to a creative enterprise by an anomic individual unbounded by her own story or context; and, second, neoliberalism introduces profit or economic gain as the universal measure of value, to the point where non-convertible goals or values are abandoned and replaced by those which can, in fact, be subsumed into the economic logic.

We can think of two examples that, by their seeming utterly opposed at first sight, are most helpful to illustrate the pervasive influence of the neoliberal ethos. The first one is found in Gilles Lipovetsky’s

L’êre du Vide, a collection of essays describing what he calls the “second individualistic revolution.”32 The

31 Adam Kotsko correctly identifies neoliberalism as a social, political, and moral order: “Neoliberalism is a social order, which means that it is an order of family and sexuality and an order of racial hierarchy and subordination. It is a political order, which means that it is an order of law and punishment and an order of war and international relations. And it is above all a remarkably cohesive moral order, deploying the same logic of constrained agency (demonization) consumption (in which there must be both winners and losers), and conformity (‘best practices’) at every level: from the individual to the household to the racial grouping to the region to the country to the world” (Kotsko 2018, 94-95). 32 Lipovetsky 1994, 5. All the translations of this work are mine. 192 first individualistic revolution brought about the disciplinary society, the world brilliantly described and criticized by Michel Foucault. The disciplinary society is the panoptical world where everything is observed, codified, and stocked; where behaviors are normalized by means of a pervading but silent power that shapes the individual according to a model that discriminates between the “normal” and the “abnormal,” the

“healthy” and the “sick,” and so on. Postmodern society emerged out of the fracture of the disciplinary society. It deepened the individualist logic by burying the social dimension of the modern ethos and its emphasis on “duty.”33 Kant’s morality was replaced by a new flexible society where “the stimulation of needs, sex, and the emergence of the ‘human factors,’ the cult of the natural, cordiality and sense of humor”34 supplanted the “tyranny of details.” In a word, “everywhere we attend the search of our own identity, and not of that universality that motivates social and individual actions.”35

According to Lipovetsky, the disciplinary society was dismantled, giving the individual free rein and intensifying its primacy.36 This is what Lipovetsky describes as the emergence of Narcissus,37 the postmodern individual. The era of narcissism is characterized by the triumph of the therapeutic,38 hedonism, and the radical privatization of life. However, Lipovetsky claims narcissism does not spell the end of the collective, but its mutation into a “collective narcissism: we gather because we are alike, because we are directly sensitized by the same existential goals. Narcissism is not only characterized by a self-absorbed hedonism, but by the need to gather with those who are ‘identical’ to me.”39 By this process of social atomization, the “big questions” of the past are forgotten and put to rest without this causing, in Lipovetsky’s opinion, any metaphysical anguish:

33 Lipovetsky deals with the problem of duty in Le crépuscule du devoir, where he traces back the idea in modernity—in the works of Comte and Rousseau, for example—and its weakening in the “postmoral society,” which “designates the epoch wherein duty is sweetened and anemic; wherein the idea of sacrifice has been socially delegitimated; wherein morality doesn’t demand us to consecrate to an end beyond ourselves; wherein subjective rights dominate imperative commandments; wherein moral lessons are coated by the spots promoting living well… In the post-duty society evil becomes a spectacle and ideals are lessened; while a condemnation of vice persists, the heroism of the Good is unstressed” (Lipovetsky 1986, 47-48). 34 Lipovetsky 1994, 6. 35 Ibid., 8. 36 According to Foucault, of course, the disciplinary society was only intensified in the postmodern era, wherein the mechanisms of control and normalization were perfected, and the same kind of power is applied on the citizens. 37 Cf. Lasch 1979. 38 Philip Rieff, for instance, explains that “[t]he leisured, or non-working, classes are the main source from which the therapeutic, as a character type, is drawn. Emancipated from an ethic of hard work, Americans have also grown morally less self-demanding. They have been released from the old system of self-demands by a convergence of doctrines that do not resort to new restrictions but rather propose jointly the superiority of all that money can buy, technology can make, and science can conceive” (Rieff 1966, 253). 39 Lipovetsky 2000, 14. Social media is organized under this assumption. Facebook joins together like-minded people, discarding “disliked” information and offering instead the illusion of harmony and common sense. Twitter tends to create antagonisms between groups the perspectives of which become more and more radicalized due to the imbalance between support (likes and retweets) and argument.

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God is dead, the great goals give up, but nobody gives a damn, this is the happy novelty, this is the limit of Nietzsche’s diagnostic of the European dusk. The emptiness of meaning, the sinking of ideals didn’t lead, as it was to be expected, to more anguish, more absurdity, more pessimism. This vision, still religious and tragic, is contradicted by the apathy of the masses, which cannot be analyzed with the categories of splendor and decadence, affirmation and negation, health and sickness.40

We are thus in the middle of a cultural mutation. The primacy of the individual is deepened to the point where the community as such disappears and is replaced by micro-associations of identical monads. While the value of the individual appreciates, social goals evaporate and float free and unarticulated, ready-made for individual consumption. “Our society,” Lipovetsky asserts, “knows no hierarchy, definite codification, or center, but only subsequent stimulations and equivalent options.”41 The kingdom of Narcissus also depletes society:

The res publica lacks vitality; the big ‘philosophical,’ economic, political, or military questions increasingly raise the same carefree curiosity whereby any “high point” sinks, dragged by the overwhelming force of social neutralizing and banalizing. Only the private sphere seems to emerge victorious against this seaquake of apathy; caring for our health, keeping our material wellbeing, breaking off from ‘complexes,’ waiting for vacations: to live free from ideals, without transcendent objectives, is now possible.42

While I disagree with Lipovetsky’s optimistic assessment of the postmodern condition—I don’t think the

“happy novelty” of indifference is to be celebrated, nor that it is healthy to live a life enclosed in the private sphere, and least of all with the claim that nobody gives a damn about God’s death—I believe his description of the second individualistic revolution is helpful to understand the crisis of community in postsecular societies. He is right in pointing out the atomization of social loyalties, which allows for the maximum of diversity but at the same time prevents, by its own logic, any serious contact or relationship between

“different” groups, as well as in connecting this new individualism with the crisis of public virtue, that is, with the social dimension and responsibility of each and every person. The major failure of the work is that

Lipovestky’s book is, in my opinion, but a symptom of the very story he is trying to tell.

The second example I have in mind refers to the awakening of the Christian Right in the United

States in the last four decades. The collaborators of the book The Sleeping Giant has Awoken share a

40 Ibid., 36. 41 Ibid., 39. 42 Ibid., 51. 194 common feature: the worry about the alliance between the Republican Party and the Christian Right, which upheld George W. Bush and Donald Trump’s presidential candidacies and today is one of the most important political and economic forces in that country. Slavoj Žižek synthesizes the importance of the volume by asking: “are conservative populists not the symptom of tolerant enlightened liberals?” He suggests an answer:

What moral conservatives fail to perceive is thus how, to put it in Hegelese, in fighting the dissolute liberal permissive culture, they are fighting the necessary ideological consequence of the unbridled capitalist economy that they themselves fully and passionately support. Their struggle against the external enemy is the struggle against the obverse of their own position.43

In order to unpack what Žižek has in mind, we must discuss the tight relationship between Christianity and

U.S. history, which in the twentieth century created the conditions for an alliance between the Christian

Right and the Republican party, an alliance fed by a shared promotion of consumerism and individualism.

That Christianity is present at the very beginning of U.S. history is not news. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville affirmed: “From the beginning, politics and religion were in accord, and they have not ceased to be so since.”44 The first Great Awakening, for example, (1730s-1750s), which was dominated by the figure of the Calvinist George Whitefield, was a shared cultural experience that “helped form a collective identity.”45 A second Great Awakening (1800s-1830s) swept the American territory, both North and South, with the spirit of revivalism, some decades before the Civil War (1861-

1865). The aftermath of the Civil War left a deep feeling of resentment in the South, and religion, which had hitherto been a source of unity, split along the lines of the victorious North and the defeated South.46 As a result of its defeat, the South secluded itself, keeping its religion inwardly. However, the second half of the twentieth century put great pressure on segregationists: “Southerners experienced the civil rights movement, starting with the Supreme Court decision of Brown versus Board of Education in 1954 and culminating with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as a repetition of the Civil War.”47 In addition to the pressures on segregation, the issue of abortion ignited by the decision of Roe versus Wade in 1973 pushed Evangelicals

43 Žižek in Robbins and Magee 2008, 229 44 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, I.II.9: 275. 45 Robbins in Robbins and Magee 2008, 14. 46 Crockett in Robbins and Magee 2008, 87. 47 Ibid.

195 to break the silence and mobilize politically.48 Thus, as Clayton Crockett claims, “[f]rom the ashes of this defeat [i.e., the civil rights movement] emerged the movement that became known as the religious Right, which managed to co-opt most strands of and fundamentalism in postwar United States.”49

Now, how is it that the Christian Right is seen sharing the bed with neoliberals? For once, many of the fights waged by the former—prominently, the fight against abortion—are diametrically opposed to the neoliberal ethos, which harshly attacks traditional-family values in order to maximize the space of unintruded individual freedom. To explain this rather odd symbiotic relationship we may examine

Christopher Haley and Creston Davis’ essay, “The Cultural Logic of Evangelical Christianity.” The core argument of the article is that the either/or structure suggested by the contraposition of fundamentalist

Christianity and multiculturalism creates a false, unproblematic stability. However, when we apply the

Hegelian logic to this structure, in the sense that “[t]he opposite of one’s ground of truth always contains within it an essential truth of its own essence,”50 we observe how this contraposition in fact disguises an oppressive enterprise, namely, the maintaining of a capitalist and consumerist status quo.

As we saw in the discussion about the intimate relationship between secularity and the Protestant spirit, Luther’s reaction against hierarchy and the distinction between higher and lower lives bolstered the primacy of ordinary life over so-called “higher” activities—e.g., priesthood and monastic life. This impetus brought Protestant-inspired Christianity and capitalistic ethics closer, to the point where the Calvinist variant even found a sign of God’s predestination in economic success, an idea radically opposed to the mindset of the first Christian communities.51 Haley and Davis claim, therefore, that “Christian evangelical52 faith lost its communal (and hence material) coordinates: in its place appeared the radically discreet and moral

48 Heltzel in Robbins and Magee 2008, 26. The documentary Reversing Roe (2018), written and directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg, tells the story of how Roe v. Wade ignited the response of the conservative right. 49 Crockett in Robbins and Magee 2008, 87. 50 Haley and Davis in Robbins and Magee 2008, 66. Interestingly, Haley and Davis suggest Hegel’s debt to Christianity. This analysis, they claim, “comes to us from countless stories in the Bible. Think of Jesus’ (and later Paul’s) entire mission, which can be distilled as follows: turn the knowledge (mind) of this world on its head, show how the weak are, in reality, strong; show how the poor are the ones who can lay claim to the earth; show how the prostitutes (and the socially marginalized) are, in themselves, the truth of the social condition” (Ibid.). 51 “And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people” (Acts 2:44-47). 52 The term “evangelical” is understood as a cross-denominational movement in Protestantism. David Bebbington identifies four distinctive features of evangelical faith and practice: “(1) a conversion to Jesus Christ, (2) a view in which the Bible is the ultimate religious authority, (3) an activism expressed through evangelism and social witness, and (4) an emphasis on Jesus’ death on the cross and bodily resurrection from the dead.” Quoted by Heltzel in Robbins and Magee 2008, 27.

196 configuration of the individual.”53 This closeness to the capitalist ethic is the bridge between the Christian

Right and neoliberalism, both of which are reactionary movements:

Both these movements (the evangelical Right and neoliberalism) arose from a notion of crisis—moral and economic—within American society and economy. America was in decline—its values trampled upon by a rampant hedonistic secularism—and must be reversed by cultural renewal through the guiding principles of traditional authority: God, family, and personal responsibility. America’s economy, oil-shocked into debilitating stagflation and encumbered by self-defeating governmental interventions (to increase employment and spending) must again be turned over to the dynamic initiative of individuals operating in a . Around these two crises, these seemingly antipodal ideologies coalesce around a shared vision of a new economy free from the government’s intervention and find a shared tent within the Republican party.54

Adam S. Miller adds the intimate correlation between consumerism and the rejection of truth. Consumerism removes the primacy of truth, and substitutes it for “truthiness,” which is “a way of describing the pervasive disconnect between political interests and the real conditions that shape our lives. It involves a kind of willful disregard for the truth in favor of the truthiness we would prefer to believe.”55 Truthiness, in turn, opens the way for the primacy of a self-interest that reduces everything to a commodity. In a word, truthiness is the condition of possibility for a consumerist society.

Individualism is thus the hinge which united the two ideological movements: the correspondence between the individual pursuit of salvation and the individual pursuit of profit was veiled and kept hidden as a confrontation between traditional and liberal values. For that reason, Haley and Davis find in multiculturalism the synthesis of the conservative expectations of both ideologies. For, “acultural subjectivity is in effect the structural position of capitalist logic, freed from the boundaries of ethnic and national communities, their mutual antagonisms, and their constraining cultural values.”56 Multiculturalism can be thus seen in a double movement: first, as a recognition of difference and variety in the world understood as a good in itself, something to be welcomed and embraced; second, to this movement of making difference explicit, of putting it out in plain sight, corresponds a movement which conceals the negation of the very thing it claims to support, namely, diversity, to the point where “multiculturalism masks a power game that maintains a bourgeois, capitalist status quo.”57

53 Haley and Davis in Robbins and Magee 2008, 68. 54 Ibid., 71. Cf. Crockett in Robbins and Magee 2008, 89. 55 Miller in Robbins and Magee 2008, 56. 56 Haley and Davis in Robbins and Magee 2008, 78. 57 Ibid., 79. 197

Confronted with this alliance, we can perhaps ask: What can we do about it? Is religion condemned to completely dominate political power or be dominated by it? The collaborators of the volume under discussion beg to differ. Religion can be allied with political power, but it can also be a salutary check against the abuse of power. Jeffrey Robbins, for example, confronts “Constantinian Christianity” with

“Prophetic Christianity,” the former being “the merger of church and state, whether in the soft cultural form of civil religion or in the theocratic ambitions of an imperial ,”58 and the latter aligning itself with “Jesus’ concern for the poor and the outcasts, and in his primary interest in the kingdom of God as a radically egalitarian and nonhierarchical society.”59 In the same vein, Anna Mercedes promotes a “politics of vulnerability” against a “politics of triumph,” concentrating in the concept of “kenosis,” which stands for the humility and self-emptying of Jesus’ vis-à-vis the Father. Mercedes follows Gianni Vattimo’s understanding of the kenotic nature of the incarnation as a process of progressive ontological weakening, to the point that today “Christian hermeneutics cannot maintain a stable, fixed Truth,”60 but must settle for a politics of friendship or caritas, understood as a new fidelity which will replace the fidelity to absolute truth.

Finally, Peter Goodwin Heltzel distinguishes between the Religious Right and “Prophetic Evangelicals,” locating the inflection point in whether white Christians sided, or abandoned, the cause of the civil rights movement. Heltzel presents Carl Henry as an example of a white prophetic evangelical who, as the editor of the magazine Christianity Today, “personally spoke and wrote about the importance of racial justice,”61 only to be asked to resign. Heltzel admits, however, that “only a small group of [white moderates] actually did or said anything”62 to aid the civil rights movement.

In my opinion, both prophetic Christianity and the politics of vulnerability fall short in their attempt to rescue and implement the authentic Christian ethos. Robbins’ “prophetic Christianity” resembles liberation theology in its radical one-sidedness, that is, in espousing an immanent Christianity that transforms the kingdom in a “radically egalitarian and nonhierarchical society,” ignoring that the kingdom

58 Robbins in Robbins and Magee 2008, 21. Robbins recalls Robert Bellah, who claims that “the United States developed its own distinctive civil religion, one that blurs the boundary between church and state; especially in times of national crisis, it easily becomes a tool of the ruling interests, no matter whether their policies and aims are consistent with the civil religion’s transcendent principles or not” (20). 59 Ibid., 22. 60 Mercedes in Robbins and Magee 2008, 44. 61 Heltzel in Robbins and Magee 2008, 35. 62 Ibid., 36. 198 can never be fully displayed in this world and, thus, flirting with Christendom (cf. chapter 3.III.2). On the other hand, Vattimo’s understanding of kenosis lacks any congruence with the Christian message. Nowhere does the New Testament lend support to the notion of a progressive weakening of truth. In fact, nothing is more evident than the complete identification of Jesus as the truth (John 14:6). Vattimo seems to be placing himself in Pilate’s epistemological position, which can only mean disregarding Jesus’ mission as a “witness of the truth” (cf. John 18:37-38). Furthermore, friendship is not seen as a substitute for truth in the New

Testament, but its correlate. Paul, for example, instructs the community of Ephesus: “speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together for every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love” (Ephesians 4:15-16). The last alternative, “prophetic

Evangelicals,” is not sufficiently developed so as to be an object of analysis. Thus, while it rightly recognizes universal love (exemplified in the support for the civil rights movement), it is still too vague and too historically-conditioned to be deemed the alternative to the Christian Right.

We can, I believe, derive two important conclusions from this discussion. First, contrary to Taylor’s story of secularity, it seems that the self is not as “buffered” as he thinks. In fact, in the United States the social space seems to be enchanted enough, and the selves porous enough. Taylor is right, though, in claiming that even these new radical Christians have been secularized to a certain extent, something that is evident in the identification of predestination/salvation with wealth and professional success. However, we must not disregard the fact that even this rather strange alliance between the theological and the immanent brings to the fore the theologico-political problem.

But it is precisely the solution of this problem that, in my opinion, escapes us if we limit ourselves to Taylor’s thought. The reason, I think, is that Taylor misses the point Haley and Davis make, namely, that the politics of recognition, which is at the base of multiculturalism, can be nothing else than the façade of a very conservative political program that, far from promoting diversity, is behind a program of uniformity, the kind of uniformity fueled by a consumerist society. Here we see the unhappiness of Lipovestky’s

Narcissus: the attempt to live authenticity to the maximum leads, in the consumerist society, to the most normalized, uniform mass society. It is important to note here that recognition needs to be free from 199 consumerist logic. Taylor rightly points out that authenticity does not imply relativism. However, in order for authenticity and recognition to be governed by the logic of strong evaluation, the social arrangement that supports them must make available this kind of epistemological move. What Haley and Davis contend, correctly in my opinion, is that neoliberal society is not that kind of society.

It seems, therefore, that what we need is a social criticism strong enough to propose an alternative to neoliberal societies. To do so, I turn to an investigation of Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of modernity.

II

[1] In many ways, the intellectual paths of both Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre are entwined. As Jason Blakely recounts, they both attempted, as young scholars, to reject naturalism, and they both saw the New Left as the place whence this critique was possible.63 They were also influenced by the linguistic turn in philosophy—Taylor’s The Language Animal and MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational

Animals are both concerned with human animality, as well as with that which makes us different from other intelligent animals, namely, the kind of reflective, moral, and we might also say metaphysical language that only human beings possess. Both thinkers, moreover, are Catholics—MacIntyre converted in the 1980s, heavily influenced by Thomas Aquinas, whom he deems “a better Aristotelian than Aristotle.”64 Finally, both Taylor and MacIntyre present important criticisms of modernity. However, a fundamental difference prevails here. Taylor attacked subtraction stories in order to present secularity as the process by which religion in Western societies became one among many options whereby people solve the problem of meaning in life. However, as we saw above, Taylor is convinced of the worth of modernity: first, there are in modernity authentic developments of Christianity; and, second, modern democracy revitalized the notion of authenticity, which informs the moral imaginary of Western liberal democracies. The case of MacIntyre is different: his critique of modernity seeks more than to separate the wheat from the tares. Ronald Beiner rightly affirms that

63 The “first British New Left,” Blakely explains, was “led by such figures as E.P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall,” a group of thinkers who “sought to articulate a more humanistic form of Marxism. The originality of this movement lay in its critique of both Western liberal democracies and Soviet communist regimes as being implicated in mechanistic and naturalistic worldviews” (Blakely 2016, 24). 64 MacIntyre 2007, x.

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MacIntyre never straightforwardly asserts that the Reformation and the Enlightenment were colossal mistakes, but such a claim does seem implied by the general thrust of his meta-narrative. MacIntyre’s ubiquitous theme that the Enlightenment fails to redeem its promise of a universal and rational morality seems an indirect way of impugning the Enlightenment without actually repudiating it explicitly.65

Stephen K. White describes the difference between Taylor and MacIntyre as one between “strong” and

“weak” ontologies. In his opinion, there is behind MacIntyre’s reflections “a core of absolute certainty when he contrasts his own Catholic tradition with others. He implies that the latter are responsible for, or in complicity with, the ‘new dark ages.’”66 A complementary way to contrast Taylor and MacIntyre would be to observe their ideological commitments: Taylor is a liberal-Catholic, to the point that his religious views are informed by his liberalism, and not—or not as strongly as—the other way around; MacIntyre, on the other hand, is a (disillusioned) Marxist converted to Catholicism. So, first, his Catholicism overrides

Marxism, and, second, his thought is made up by a combined tradition that opposes liberalism along with bureaucracy and the modern state,67 and confronts them with an Aristotelian project of virtues and local communities.

MacIntyre shares with Taylor a preoccupation to understand and explain secularization. He joins

Taylor in rejecting the triumphalism of the supporters of secularization as a subtraction story. He claims, first, that religion didn’t disappear: the last king was not in fact strangled with the entrails of the last priest; and, second, that Christianity has not been replaced with anything.68 The promises of secularization to purify reason and bring about a human existence without superstition and prejudice were all disappointing.

Contrary to what someone like Blumenberg would suggest, MacIntyre asserts that the fall of Christianity left a void that modernity kept empty, not knowing how or with what to fill it. In The Religious Significance of Atheism he claims that after two main crises69— from the seventeenth century onward—theism was

65 Beiner 2014, 169, n.2. 66 White 2000, 7. According to White, (a) strong ontologies “claim to show us ‘the way the world is’” (6). More importantly, “strong ones carry an underlying assumption of certainty that guides the whole problem of moving from the ontological level to the moral-political” (7). (b) They proceed by “categorial postings,” such as human nature or a telos; weak ontologies, on the contrary, offer “figurations of human being in terms of certain existential realities, most notably language, mortality and finitude, natality, and the articulation of ‘sources of the self’” (9). (c) Weak ontologies “have an aesthetic-affective quality” (10), that is, they promote a kind of sensibility toward reality. And, finally, (d) the justifications offered by weak ontologies are always part of “a horizontal circuit of reflection, affect, and argumentation” (11). 67 This is the line of argument presented by Peter McMylor (1994) in his book, Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity. According to McMylor, “[i]t is, ultimately, the clear-sighted appropriation by Marx of the inherently critical moralism of the Christian tradition, that gives Marxism its strongest appeal for MacIntyre” (15). Confronted with the question: “is there a non-liberal alternative?” McMylor will answer in the positive: “After Virtue is his answer” (22). 68 MacIntyre 1968, 1-2. 69 The first crisis refers to the challenge modern science put to theism: there is no way to justify religion factually, because God’s existence resists any factual analysis. Deism claimed that we can know God through his creation, thus giving a factual basis to belief. The cost, as discussed in

201 forced to choose between trying to justify its beliefs factually (Deism), or refusing to do this and assuming a critical stance towards secular culture as false culture.70 What happened, in the end, was a mutual weakening, a banalization of theism to the point that it ended up offering atheists “less and less in which to disbelieve,”71 on the one hand, and the emergence of an anomic atheism tired of asking fundamental questions—the kind of atheism Lipovetsky describes—on the other. The fundamental problem identified by

MacIntyre in secular societies is thus a moral one. The fall of theism, MacIntyre asserts, was not the cause of the moral bankruptcy of the modern world—a hypothesis he calls the “Dostoyevskian contention”—but the other way around: a fundamental change in the moral perspectives of human beings brought about the fall of theism. Secularization, in turn, was unable to reinvigorate a moral program because of two tendencies: what he calls the “organizational category,” which is synonymous with the birth of modern bureaucracy, and the aestheticization of morality, which leads to the silencing of questions about ultimate justifications.72

Confronted with the crisis of theism and the inability of the modern world to provide new moral sources, MacIntyre postulated two answers, each corresponding to a different stage in his philosophical life.73 An early, atheist MacIntyre found in the political thought of the young Marx a solid, moral critique of modernity. Marxism, in MacIntyre’s account, aims to provide a function originally performed by religion, namely, the ability to separate human beings from their contexts and their fixed roles in life: “It is in the contrast between what society tells a man he is and what religion tells him he is that he is able to find grounds both for criticizing the status quo and for believing that it is possible for him to act with others in changing it.”74 Given that “it is of the nature of capitalist society to deprive more and more men of an essentially human life,”75 Marxism is called to function as a religion of humankind, replacing a world where human

chapter 2 above, was the rejection of God’s Providence and its substitution with natural laws. The second crisis subjected belief to the methods of modern science. An example of this subjection are the many efforts in Biblical exegesis of bringing to the fore the “historical Jesus,” in contrast with the “Jesus of the gospels” (MacIntyre and Ricœur 1969, 9-13). 70 Ibid., 16. 71 Ibid., 24. 72 Ibid., 51-52. 73 Tony Burns divides MacIntyre’s work in three stages: an early MacIntyre, which he defines as “Marx without Aristotle,” in the 1950s and 1960s; a middle period, labelled as “Aristotle without Marx,” which runs from the mid-1960s to the mid-1990s, and a late MacIntyre in which MacIntyre returns to Marxist themes (thus called “Aristotle and Marx”), from the mid-1990s on (Burns in Blackledge and Knight 2011, 36-43). 74 MacIntyre 1968, 4. 75 Ibid., 52.

202 existence is alienated with a new humanity where labor puts people back into contact with the world they make.76

In Marx’s socialist society, moreover, religion would not be fought but will necessarily disappear, because its function will expire. There won’t be any need to buttress “the established order by sanctifying it and by suggesting that the political order is somehow ordained by divine authority”77 nor, on the other hand, to serve as a reactionary agent, showing people a vision of a future, blissful life. Redemption will be at hand.

The problem with this picture, MacIntyre suggests, is to be found in the predictions about the world to come. Contrary to Engels’ predictions, secularization didn’t result in a change of motivations and beliefs of the proletarian class about human nature and labor. Instead, a growing sense of temperance and restraint grew among this class, in the direction of a common enemy both of Christianity and Marxism, namely, liberalism, which abandons all future hopes denouncing that these utopias threaten to lay today’s lives on the sacrificial pyre of tomorrow. For liberals, thus, “the future has become the present enlarged.”78 It is worthy at this point to quote MacIntyre in extenso:

Not only are the moral attitudes of Marx, or the analysis of past history, or the predictions about the future abandoned; so is the possibility of any doctrine which connects moral attitudes, beliefs about the past, and beliefs in future possibility. The lynch pin of this rejection is the liberal belief that facts are one thing, values another—and that the two realms are logically independent of each other. This belief underpins the liberal rejection of Christianity as well as the liberal rejection of Marxism. For the liberal, the individual being the source of all value necessarily legislates for himself in matters of value; his autonomy is only preserved if he is regarded as choosing his own ultimate principles, unconstrained by any external consideration. But for both Marxism and Christianity only the answer to questions about the character of nature and society can provide the basis for an answer to the question: “But how ought I to live?” For the nature of the world is such that in discovering the order of things I also discover my own nature and those ends which beings such as myself must pursue if we are not to be frustrated in certain predictable ways.79

76 “A society in which none can achieve true humanity must be replaced by a society in which all can achieve it. This is a socialist society. It is to be a society of true communists in which the needs that are satisfied will not be the demands of an economic system, but the needs of man. The values of this society will be human values. Men will deal with other men, neither as with capitalists nor as with proletarians, but as with men. The religion of crude communism is atheism, the negation of the religion of estranged humanity. But such atheism is merely negative. Its positive side is philanthropy, the love of men… In socialist society human values are themselves fulfilled and the divine is not denied—it has disappeared. Nature is fully realized in man, man in nature” (Ibid., 54-55). 77 Ibid., 103. 78 Ibid., 115. 79 Ibid., 124.

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Eventually, MacIntyre grew disappointed with the moral possibilities of Marxism.80 His concern, however, about the dangers of liberalism, remained. A new door for criticism was opened by a turn to Aristotle.81

[2] For MacIntyre, liberalism meant a moral catastrophe. After Virtue opens with the story of an imaginary society’s relation with science in three stages: society discovered and developed science; at some point science was lost (or banned, or destroyed) almost completely; lastly, many years later that same society faced the painful task of putting the pieces back together. Given the obvious difficulties in bringing scientific concepts back after years of atrophy, “many of the beliefs presupposed by the use of these expressions would have been lost and there would appear to be an element of arbitrariness and even of choice in their application which would appear very surprising to us.”82 Liberalism resembles this post-catastrophe society: it inherited a moral tradition from its Christian past, only to progressively forget the background and the context that gave its moral concepts meaning. As has become a commonplace in this work, the Reformation played an important part in this story. Luther’s radical Augustinism postulated a new kind of reason, which asserted that we cannot know the final human ends.83 The Enlightenment picked up this concept of reason and cleansed it of any vestige of Christianity. MacIntyre asserts that “the joint effect of the secular rejection of both Protestant and Catholic theology and the scientific and philosophical rejection of Aristotelianism was to eliminate any notion of man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-telos.”84

Liberalism separates questions about “value” from questions about “fact,”85 since questions about value cannot be anchored in facts, because, it is argued, no set of facts can ever definitely settle a controversy about values. It follows, then, that the ultimate responsibility for value decisions rests on the autonomous

80 In the preface to the third edition of After Virtue, for example, MacIntyre states that: “I came to understand that Marxism itself has suffered from grave and harm-engendering moral impoverishment as much because of what it has inherited from liberal individualism as because of its departures from liberalism.” A couple of lines further he concluded that “Marxism’s moral defects and failures arise from the extent to which it, like liberal individualism, embodies the ethos of the distinctively modern and modernizing world, and that nothing less than a rejection of a large part of that ethos will provide us with a rationally and morally defensible standpoint from which to judge and to act—and in terms of which to evaluate various rival and heterogeneous moral schemes which compete for our allegiance” (MacIntyre 2007, 18). 81 MacIntyre’s admiration for Aristotle as the most important moral philosopher is clear. In After Virtue, he praises the Nicomachean Ethics as “the most brilliant set of lecture notes ever written” (Ibid., 147). In Dependent Rational Animals, he asserts that “no philosopher has taken human animality more seriously” than Aristotle (MacIntyre 1999, 5). 82 MacIntyre 2007, 1. 83 Ibid., 53. 84 Ibid., 54. 85 See Blakely 2016, 8.

204 individual. This is what MacIntyre calls the emotivist culture, that is, “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.”86

Consequently, a paradox arose between the Enlightenment’s aspiration for a universalizable practical reason, on the one hand, and the radical subjectivity that resulted from the becoming autonomous of the individual, on the other. MacIntyre sees Kant’s categorical imperative and John Stuart Mill’s correction of Benthamite ethics via the doctrine of higher goods as unsuccessful attempts to solve this paradox.87 This, because the possibility of a reconciliation is, for MacIntyre, denied by the essence of

Enlightenment itself: “What the Enlightenment made us for the most part blind to and what we now need to recover is… a conception of rational enquiry as embodied in a tradition.”88 What the universalistic aim of the Enlightenment conceals is the fact that reason is always historical, that morality is always anchored in networks of practices and traditions.

What resulted from the Enlightenment was modern secular society and the state. MacIntyre suggests three main characters that emerge in this society: the aesthete, the manager, and the therapist.89 The last two receive more emphasis than the first, because in them the drive towards control by means of technique alone is more dramatic. The kind of impersonal, detached control of the therapist, for whom ultimate questions of value are irrelevant, because therapy is concerned not with ends but with the means and the mechanics of the patient’s psyche, is matched, at the level of the public arena, by managerial/bureaucratic control, which imposes a notion of effectiveness and universal, depersonalizing rationality:

Managers… conceived of themselves as morally neutral characters whose skills enable them to devise the most efficient means of achieving whatever end is proposed. Whether a given manager is effective or not is on the dominant view a quite different question from that of the morality of the ends which his effectiveness serves or fails to serve. Nonetheless there are strong grounds for rejecting the claim that effectiveness is a morally neutral value. For the whole concept of effectiveness is… inseparable from a mode of existence in which the contrivance of means is in central part the manipulation of human beings into compliant patterns

86 MacIntyre 2007, 11-12. 87 Ibid., 62-64. 88 MacIntyre 1988, 7. 89 MacIntyre 2007, 73ff.

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of behavior; and it is by appeal to his own effectiveness in this respect that the manager claims authority within the manipulative mode.90

At the same time, this purported neutrality—and its impossibility—becomes manifest in three social phenomena: human rights, unending protest, and the unmasking of unacknowledged motives.91 The problem with human rights is, for MacIntyre, that their presumption to offer an impersonal and objective criterion for their exercise always fails. It is a fiction that never achieves the provision of good reasons for us to believe that they are, in fact, rights. Protest becomes unending because of the very impossibility of final arguments; it becomes a cathartic, cyclical exercise, a simulacrum of a true dialectic.92 Finally, the unmasking of motives reminds us the centrality of the therapist, and, specifically, of Freud’s “achievement to discover that unmasking arbitrariness in others may always be a defence against uncovering it in ourselves.”93

At this point we must ask: What is wrong with this social arrangement? And, more importantly:

What is, if any, the alternative? MacIntyre’s answer rests on the thesis that “moral utterance and practice can only be understood as a series of fragmented survivals from an older past.”94 To understand the present crisis we need to go back in history to analyze the moral traditions of humanity. It is to this task that the second half of After Virtue is devoted. MacIntyre reviews the history of the concept of justice in the

Homeric, heroic society, the Platonic-Aristotelian critique of this society, the Augustinian-Thomistic synthesis of Greek thought and Christianity, and the irruption of modernity, the moral inadequacies of which will inevitably lead to Nietzsche’s reduction of morality to the “will to power.”95 This story is supplemented, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? by an account of four traditions of practical rationality: the Homeric, the Aristotelian-Thomistic, the Augustinian, and the Scottish Enlightenment. A central argument of this latter work is that “it is an illusion to suppose that there is some neutral standing ground, some locus for

90 MacIntyre, 2007, 74. This manipulation, when added to the impossibility of neutrality, creates a sort of artificiality that puts the manager/bureaucrat permanently on scene: “It is histrionic success which gives power and authority in our culture. The most effective bureaucrat is the best actor” (107). 91 Ibid., 68ff. 92 This is linked with MacIntyre’s understanding of the “arenas of public choice, not as places of debate, either in terms of one dominant conception of the human good or between rival and conflicting conceptions of that good, but as places where bargaining between individuals, each with their own preferences, is conducted.” (MacIntyre 1988, 338). 93 MacIntyre 2007, 72. 94 Ibid., 110-111. 95 “If there is nothing to morality but expressions of will, my morality can only be what my will creates” (Ibid., 113-114).

206 rationality as such, which can afford rational resources sufficient for enquiry independent of all traditions.”96

The liberal insistence on the principle of neutrality in the public sphere is itself normative,97 thus not neutral.

MacIntyre insists, moreover, that liberalism has been unable to provide us with sound moral justifications for their basic tenets,98 as we saw above with the case of human rights. The liberal catastrophe forces us to make a choice:

What then the conjunction of philosophical and historical argument reveals is that either one must follow through the aspirations and the collapse of the different versions of the Enlightenment project until there remains only the Nietzschean diagnosis and the Nietzschean problematic or one must hold that the Enlightenment project was not only mistaken, but should never have been commenced in the first place. There is no third alternative.99

To summarize: liberalism, in MacIntyre’s view, confronted Aristotelianism on the basis of a different idea of practical rationality. While the Aristotelian tradition understands practical reason in terms of the education of a plurality of virtues100 which point towards and are organized by an idea of the human good, liberalism rejected the very possibility of publicly discussing human ends based on a distinction between facts and values. To the adoption of emotivism it corresponds the emptying of the public sphere—which in the liberal society acts as a perpetual simulacrum, the only goal of which is to never end—and the imposition of managerial/bureaucratic control upon individuals who, moreover, are prevented from critically discerning between higher and lower desires by the capitalist logic that overstimulates consumption.

So, what is MacIntyre’s social and political project? Beiner points out that for MacIntyre human beings are “first and foremost storytelling animals.”101 This is a good starting-point to break down the many elements of MacIntyre’s thought. First, morality cannot be understood individually; my morality is but the

96 MacIntyre 1988, 367. 97 MacIntyre goes even further, suggesting that liberalism prevents rational debate. This is explained when we observe the two roles liberalism has played in the modern world. It is, on the one hand, a contending party, a particular comprehensive doctrine debating in the modern public sphere. On the other hand, “it has also by and large controlled the terms of both public and academic debate” (MacIntyre 1990, 355). John Rawls’ and Jürgen Habermas’ demand for the translatability of all arguments that are submitted to public scrutiny to a language we can all understand, namely, to secularized language, is a clear example of this second function. About translatability, MacIntyre contends that: “the standpoint of traditions is necessarily at odds with one of the central characteristics of cosmopolitan modernity: the confident belief that all cultural phenomena must be potentially translucent to understanding, that all texts must be capable of being translated into the language which the adherents of modernity speak to each other” (MacIntyre 1988, 327). 98 Beiner paraphrases this criticism by saying that “one way of formulating MacIntyre’s critique of liberal modernity is to say that modern liberal culture falls short as a begetter of normatively meaningful stories” (Beiner 2014, 172). 99 MacIntyre 2007, 118. Jacques Maritain reaches a similar conclusion: “At the end of this historic and secular evolution, we thus find ourselves face to face with two absolute or pure positions: pure atheism and pure Christianity” (Maritain 1938, 26). Maritain too will find that the logical consequence of modernity is Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God. 100 In the eighteenth century “virtues” are substituted by “virtue,” in singular, and “virtuous” becomes more and more a synonymous of “moral” (MacIntyre 2007, 233). 101 Beiner 2014, 171.

207 actualization, in time and space, of a moral tradition102 that existed before me and will survive my death. It is the morality I learned in the community in which I grew up. Morality, second, is not a set of external rules I must comply with;103 my moral commitments arise from my understanding, through education,104 of human goods and, ultimately, of the human good, the telos of life. To be educated, third, means to be able to acquire virtues,105 which in turn enable us to achieve the goods of certain practices (e.g., playing chess, governing a country, writing poems). Any practice,106 fourth, involves both internal goods—which belong to the excellence of the practice itself and are characteristically non-exclusive—and external goods, e.g., fame and money, which derive from internal goods accidentally and are enjoyed privately and exclusively.107 Thus, we can say that virtues aim to achieve the internal goods of practices, ordered by a narrative story which provides a telos.108

The return to teleology adds two political features to MacIntyre’s project: the local community and the common good. The main thesis of Dependent Rational Animals is that “the virtues of independent rational agency need for their adequate exercise to be accompanied by what I shall call the virtues of acknowledged dependence.”109 The tension dependence/independence is explicit: MacIntyre rejects the liberal notion of the autonomous individual and his or her demiurgic moral function, but also rejects the

“prerational and nonrational” bonds of the Volk.110 It is only through the tension between dependence and

102 “A tradition is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental arrangements are defined and redefined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least key parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal, interpretative debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements come to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted” (MacIntyre 1988, 12). 103 “MacIntyre… does not reduce morality to convention or rule-following. Instead, he adopts the Aristotelian approach of identifying morality with virtues, or good dispositional qualities, that may be cultivated by persons” (Knight in Blackledge and Knight 2011, 21). 104 “A capacity for identifying and ordering the goods of the good life, the achievement of which involves the ordering of all these other sets of goods, requires a training of character in and into those excellences, a type of training whose point emerges only in the course of the training” (MacIntyre 1988, 110). 105 A virtue is “an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.” (MacIntyre 2007, 191). 106 Practices are defined as “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended” (MacIntyre 2007, 187). 107 Practices are always found inside institutions. In order to survive, institutions must pursue the external rather than internal goods of the practices they promote. One function of the virtues is to resist this institutional drive towards external goods. “If practices are not to be corrupted by the goods pursued by institutions, those institutions must always be subordinated to the goods internal to practices” (Knight in Blackledge and Knight 2011, 26). 108 “Human beings, like the members of all other species, have a specific nature; and that nature is such that they have certain aims and goals, such that they move by nature towards a specific telos” (MacIntyre 2007, 148). 109 MacIntyre 1999, 8. 110 MacIntyre 1998, 241.

208 independence that the human person can flourish and make his or her community flourish, privileging neither the part nor the whole.111

MacIntyre’s aim is to revitalize politics by reuniting it with the philosophical search for the good.

Contrary to liberalism, which has reduced philosophy to an academic endeavor, Aristotelian politics is philosophical, just as philosophy is political.112 For MacIntyre, the politics of the local community is the condition of possibility of the human good. This is so because, he claims, the search for the human good is not a purely intellectual activity the individual engages in, but a dialogue between the members of a tradition, a dialogue that is only possible at the local level. To conclude, MacIntyre suggests that in the Aristotelian-

Thomistic tradition a substantial agreement on the nature of the human good is a condition of rational agreement upon moral rules.113

How, we may ask, is it possible to avoid the parochialism of becoming blind followers of our tradition at the expense of everything else outside of it? The answer is threefold: first, “there is no other way to engage in the formulation, elaboration, rational justification, and criticism of accounts of practical rationality and justice except from within some one particular tradition in conversation, cooperation, and conflict with those who inhabit the same tradition”;114 second, the nonrational adherence to any tradition must be therefore rejected;115 and, finally, dissent must not only be tolerated, but we are required to “enter into rational conversation with it and to cultivate as a political virtue not merely a passive tolerance, but an active and enquiring attitude towards radically dissenting views, a virtue notably absent from the dominant politics of the present.”116

111 It is difficult not to see in this tension between whole and part, community and individual—and in other expressions of the same tension, such as Hobbes’ Leviathan—a reverberation of a fundamental Christian idea, namely, that of the relation between Christ and his body—i.e., the church, the community of the faithful. Paul discusses this tension between the one and the many: “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ… But as it is, God arranged the organs in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single organ, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, yet one body” (1 Corinthians 12:12, 18-20). 112 “[W]hen philosophers enquire about goods and the good, and most of all when they enquire about the common good of political society, and about what kind of political society it is in which human beings can best come to an understanding of their good, they necessarily put to question the political order of their own society” (MacIntyre 1998, 247). On the classical understanding of political philosophy see Strauss 1957, 344-345. 113 MacIntyre 1990, 345. 114 MacIntyre 1988, 350. 115 An independent practical reasoner is the bulwark against an oppressive society. This, because “there are always possibilities and often actualities of victimization and exploitation bound up with participation in such networks [i.e., social networks of giving and receiving, which are unavoidably imperfect]” (MacIntyre 1999, 102). 116 MacIntyre 1998, 251. It is not clear to me how this is different from the liberal defense of the liberty of thought and discussion, for example, in the second chapter of Mill’s On Liberty. If this is the case, then we ought to ask whether it is justifiable that MacIntyre attacks liberalism for failing to engage with dissent. MacIntyre is right if by this failure he means that liberalism is failing to live up to its own standards, but we must recognize that liberal political theory deals extensively with the problem of dissent.

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MacIntyre provides three characteristics of social and political life that make possible the society he is defending. First, it will be a community wherein its members “generally and characteristically recognize that obedience to those standards that Aquinas identified as the precepts of the natural law is necessary, if they are to learn from and with each other what their individual and common goods are.”117

Thus, the authority of the positive law must derive from its conformity with natural law precepts.118 Second, these communities must be small-scale and self-sufficient. “These local arenas are now the only places where political community can be constructed, a political community very much at odds with the politics of the nation-state.”119 Finally, since capitalism precludes the deliberative relationships necessary for this kind of community, it is necessary to promote genuinely free markets, having in mind that these “are always local and small-scale markets in whose exchanges producers can choose to participate or not.”120 Finally, as for the relationship between the local, small-scale and self-sufficient community to the whole, that is, the state, MacIntyre insists on an non-utopian stance:

Any worthwhile politics of local community will certainly have to concern itself in a variety of ways with the impact upon it of the nation-state and of national and international markets. It will from time to time need to secure resources from them, but only, so far as is possible, at a price acceptable by the local community. It will from time to time have to concern itself with the conflicts between and within nation-states, sometimes aligning itself with this or that contending party in order to assist in defeating such politically destructive forces as those of imperialism or National Socialism or Stalinist communism. But it will always also have to be wary and antagonistic in all its dealings with the politics of the state and the , wherever possible challenging their protagonist to provide the kind of justification for their authority that they cannot in fact supply.121

[3] MacIntyre’s critique of liberalism and the modern state opens for us a window for Catholic argumentation that had remained closed in our study of Charles Taylor. He rejects liberalism and confronts it with an account of virtues and the polis that retrieves—as we will see below—many ideas of Catholic political thought. His political thought is an alternative to Lipovetsky’s narcissistic society, while it rejects,

117 MacIntyre 1998, 247. 118 Cf. Maritain 1998, 99. 119 MacIntyre 1998, 248. 120 Ibid., 249. Compare with Maritain’s idea that “it is towards a renewal and revivification of the family-type of economy and ownership, under modern forms and utilising the resources of mechanisation and co-operation, that the regulation of rural economy would tend” (Maritain 1938, 158- 159). 121 Ibid., 252.

210 at the same time, a return to Christendom by retrieving a concept of practical rationality that precludes the advance of this socio-political project.122 This alternative is based on a reconsideration of the place of political philosophy, the retrieval of the concept of the human good, and its implementation by means of a tradition that sees the good actualized in the virtues of an independent practical reasoner, as well as by the virtues of acknowledged dependence.

Two problems, however, emerge from this analysis. The first one is concerned with MacIntyre’s critique of the modern notion of human rights, while the second refers to his treatment of natural law. Both questions, as it turns out, converge upon a common problematic, namely, MacIntyre’s interpretation of

Thomas Aquinas’ social and political thought.

MacIntyre rejects modern human rights on the basis of their failure to provide moral justifications for their being, in fact, rights every single human has irrespective of her creed, culture, physical characteristics, or preferences. He sees a correlation between modern human rights and the emergence of liberal democracy. Samuel Moyn challenges the assumption that human rights were born as an effort to defend secularism.123 He asserts, on the contrary, that human rights were fueled by the Christian notion of the dignity of the human person. According to Moyn, the notion of dignity was very influential in mid- twentieth century’s political imagination. The 1937 preamble to the Irish Constitution shares an emphasis on the dignity of the person with Pius XI’ encyclical letter Divini redemptoris, which condemned communism on the basis that it “strips man of his liberty, robs human personality of all its dignity, and removes all the moral restraints that check the eruptions of blind impulse.”124 The preamble acknowledged the Irish people’s obligations towards Christ to ensure that “the dignity and freedom of the individual may

122 MacIntyre criticizes past Christian societies, e.g., for failing “to listen to and learn from the dissenting Jewish communities in their midst, an inability that has been both a consequence and a cause of the poisonous corruption of Christianity by anti-Semitism” (MacIntyre, 1998, 251-252). 123 “It is only in very recent times, with the collapse of European Christianity since the 1960s, that it became possible for the ideal of religious freedom to become so closely associated with secularism in the continent’s human rights regime and beyond” (Moyn 2015, 164). Elsewhere, Moyn explains that “[i]n Christian human rights, indeed, religious freedom was always the leading entitlement that alone would ensure the postponement of secularism rather than its victory” (Ibid., 140). 124 Pius XI 1937, quoted in Moyn 2015, 38. Influenced by the thought of Jacques Maritain, Pius XI turned to personalism, which rejected both liberalism and communism for their materialistic basis. Personalism demanded a reconceptualization of the human person beyond liberal individualism and all forms of collectivism. See Moyn, chapter 2.

211 be assured.”125 This idea aimed to reject both liberal secularism and totalitarianism, thus opting for a , namely, Christian conservative democracy.126

A pivotal voice in the reconciliation between the Catholic church with the notion of human rights was Jacques Maritain, by means of the philosophical reconciliation of Thomistic natural law tradition with modern human rights.127 Maritain did more than just disprove any charge of incompatibility between the two; he “claimed that the one implied the other and indeed that only the one plausibly and palatably justified the other.”128 Despite his endorsement of universal human rights, Maritain aimed beyond modern liberalism, which he understood as the catastrophe caused by “the sensualist heresiarch Martin Luther, the solipsist metaphysician René Descartes, and the bourgeois reformer Jean-Jacques Rousseau,” who “left behind St.

Thomas’s ‘person’ for the new individual.”129 However, Maritain also rejected collectivism and totalitarianism: “‘The error of those Catholics who follow Pétain in France or Franco in Spain,’ Maritain wrote to Charles de Gaulle in 1941, ‘is to convert Catholic thought, through lack of social and political education, in the direction of old paternalistic conceptions of history rejected in the meantime by the popes and condemned by history.’”130

Does this mean that MacIntyre is wrong in his critique of human rights? While it is true that his dismissal of this tradition seems hasty, his critique may survive Moyn’s account of the Christian roots of human rights. This is so because even though human rights were inspired by Christian concepts, this does not imply that they remained so. Evidently, this has not been the case.131 And, consequently, MacIntyre’s critique is still valid: human rights—even if once firmly anchored in the Christian tradition—lack today any solid foundation upon which to build and justify them as such.

125 Quoted in Moyn 2015, 25. 126 Moyn suggests that “the Universal Declaration is a profoundly communitarian document—precisely a moral repudiation of dangerous individualism, albeit one equally intended to steer far clear of communism.” The document, he continues, was conceived “as part of the moral reconstruction of Europe perceived to be necessary to stave off future world crises and conflicts” (Ibid., 98-99). 127 In Man and the State, Maritain asserts that “[t]he philosophical foundation of the Rights of man is Natural Law” and that “the history of the rights of man is bound to the history of Natural Law” (Maritain 1998, 80, 81). 128 Moyn 2015, 83. 129 Ibid., 73. 130 Quoted in Moyn 2015, 86. 131 Moyn himself acknowledges that the decline of Western Europe Christianity began in the 1960s (ibid., 137). However, as the discussion in chapter 4 of his book attests, the Christian understanding of human rights as a bulwark against secularism has remained, albeit in a modified way, in contemporary debates on international law. In fact, it is the identity of the enemy that has changed: “The Muslim has taken the place of the communist in the contemporary European imagination—and above all in the history of the religious liberty norm” (ibid., 145). 212

Moyn’s argument provides us with grounds for yet another, more general, commentary on

MacIntyre’s political project. When reading MacIntyre’s work, one gets the sense that after the

Enlightenment nothing, or at least nothing relevant, happened. However, as Moyn’s book makes clear, a lot did happen: two world wars, the end of colonialism, and the Cold War come to mind immediately. Failing to see what these historical events did to the Western social imaginary, and to its confidence in reason, produces a distorted image of the idea of “modernity.” Simply put: the modern world of Kant and other enlightened thinkers is radically different from our world. Even if we concede, as MacIntyre does, the centrality of Nietzsche for the crisis of modernity, it seems impossible to ponder Nietzsche’s impact in the contemporary world if we dissociate it from the weakened rationality of the people who read him after the two wars. Postwar human rights—based on the Christian notion of the person, as developed during the

1940s—were conceived by a rationality humbled by the horrors of the war and the collapse of Western self- confidence as the peak of civilization. This historical gap in MacIntyre’s story may offer us a clue as to why he so confidently thinks it is possible to found society upon a definite conception of human nature and the human good.

This leads to my second objection. MacIntyre aims to replace an uprooted liberalism with a community the members of which recognize the standards of natural law as the basis of both positive law and the determination of the individual and common goods. When confronted with Jeffrey Stout’s “moral platitudes,” that is, basic moral agreements into which we are socialized from childhood onwards, MacIntyre contends that “what we genuinely share in the way of moral maxims, precepts and principles is insufficiently determinate to guide action and what is sufficiently determinate to guide action is not shared.”132 We should infer that MacIntyre thinks his ideal society, founded upon natural law, will be able to create those shared moral maxims. But is that really the case? Thomas Aquinas explains that the principles of natural law, insofar as they are discovered by reason as necessary and evident truths, have a general form. Things change when we move from theoretical to practical reason because “practical reason is concerned about contingent things, which include human actions. And so the more reason goes from the general to the particular, the

132 MacIntyre 1990, 349.

213 more exceptions we find, although, there is some necessity in the general principles.”133 How general are the principles of natural law? Aquinas gives us an example: “the first precept of the natural law is that we should do and seek good, and shun evil.”134 The difficulty is this: on the one hand, Aquinas claims that truth in theoretical matters is the same for all, but truth in practical matters is the same for all only in terms of general principles, not about particular conclusions. The question is, thus, to what extent can those general principles of practical morality be the focus of a thick consensus?

Jacques Maritain offers us a different interpretation of natural law. In his opinion, the first precept of natural law is not the law itself, but its preamble. Moreover, the discovery of natural law, in Maritain’s reading of Aquinas, depends not on human reason, but on “the guidance of the inclinations of human nature.” This is problematic, since “[t]hat kind of knowledge,” that is, knowledge through inclination, “is not clear knowledge through concepts and conceptual judgements; it is obscure, unsystematic, vital knowledge by connaturality or congeniality.”135 Again we find a difficulty in building a thick consensus based on natural law.

Furthermore, Aquinas’ distinction between theoretical and practical matters makes room for two fundamental human characteristics: on the one hand, human plurality which, as we will see in the next section, can and must be defended from a Christian perspective; on the other, linguistic diversity, which produces different traditions of thought and, as a consequence, precludes a uniform application of general principles of natural law.136 This distinction is more urgent when we realize that most Western liberal democracies are multicultural societies.

A seemingly unsolvable problem emerges: the more we try to define, once and for all, the human good of the individual and of the community, the more we need to disregard important individual and cultural differences, the more force we will need, and thus the less consensual this definition becomes.

133 Thomas Aquinas, Summa I-II 94.4. Maritain explains the application of general principles using the concept of analogy: “the application of the principles is analogical—the more transcendent the principles are, the more analogical is the application—and… this application takes various typical forms in reference to the historical climates or historical constellations through which the development of mankind is passing” (Maritain 1998, 156). 134 Ibid., I-II 94.2. 135 Maritain 1998, 92. 136 Cf. Aquinas Summa I-II 95.2. I discussed this problem in chapter 1.I.2. 214

Conversely, the more we accept the general form of natural law principles, the thinner the moral consensus, thus resembling the liberal societies we wanted to reject in the first place. How, then, to escape this situation?

There is, I think, a way to preserve MacIntyre’s thought while avoiding the problem discussed above. For the purposes of our analysis of Catholic political action, MacIntyre’s political thought is closer to Catholic thought than Taylor’s. The former defends a thick conception of the person and connects his or her good with the good of the community through a notion of teleology that is fundamental to Catholic thought. At the same time, however, Taylor’s notions of authenticity, recognition, and the many ways in which modernity has developed the message of the gospel are important as signaling the limits out of which

Catholic thought may be stepping into Christendom, which would imply an immanentization of eschatology and the denial of the legitimate plurality of human society. So, we need to keep a balance between the two if we are to avoid the perils of both liberal individualism and the imposition of a new Christendom. One way to do this can be found in MacIntyre’s notion of “utopianism of the present”

We need… to acquire a transformative political imagination, one that opens up opportunities for people to do kinds of things that they hitherto had not believed that they were capable of doing. And this can happen when someone becomes involved for the first time in community organisations and actions, when parents become involved in some community that sustains their children’s school in the inner city, or when unorganized workers struggle to create a union, or when immigrants find themselves involved in forms of communal enterprise that enable them to resist attempts to treat them as no more than a disposable labour force. It is in these contexts of everyday conflict that the accusation of Utopianism becomes important, since it is in such contexts that the achievement of human goods often takes new and unpredicted forms, for which the existing social order hitherto afforded no space.137

It is telling that all the examples provided by MacIntyre refer to civil society, not to the state: it is through our participation in communities that we fight the harmful effects of a bureaucratic state and a capitalist society. We can therefore identify two different political projects in MacIntyre’s thought: in the first, non- utopian one, MacIntyre goes as far as organizing positive law according to the dictates of natural law, in order to clearly define the good of the person and the community; in the second, utopian one, he abandons the sphere of the state and concentrates on the local community as such, finding there the proper place for his “revolutionary Aristotelianism.”

137 MacIntyre in Blackledge and Knight 2011, 17. 215

In order to conceptualize Catholic political action, I propose abandoning MacIntyre’s non-utopian project and embracing his utopianism of the present. This demands three things. First, the secular state must be kept as the lesser evil, a guarantee of minimal freedom, authenticity, and recognition. However, second, accepting the secular state does not mean letting liberalism keep playing the dual role of being one among other traditions as well as framing the political debate: once we have accepted that neutrality is impossible, we must admit that the state is an arena of authentic deliberation between different traditions, none of them enjoying a privileged status. In this state, finally, Catholicism enters the public arena as one among many traditions and must be able to spell out its convictions in a free, untranslated manner, just in the same way as liberalism will present its convictions, refraining from hiding its metaphysical commitments.

The real work of Catholic political action is, thus, not localized at the level of state decisions, but in the daily confrontation of political and social projects at the local level. The real strength of Catholicism should not be found, therefore, in reshaping the state in the image of the church, or making the former subservient to the latter, or resembling the divine rule over the world, but in the struggle to build a Catholic community wherein the values, virtues, and commandments derived from the ministry of Christ are lived.

This idea of non-state civic action in local communities is found also in Maritain works. For Maritain, the best political regime—which is the one subservient to the common good—is the democratic state, but one with an active, ebullient society organized at the local level:

[A]t the very bottom, at a level far deeper than that of the political parties, the interest and initiative of the people in civic matters should begin with an awakening of common consciousness in the smallest local communities, and remain constantly at work there.138

In the previous paragraphs I have constructed the notion of Catholic political action as an unsolvable tension between Augustinianism and Thomism. I borrow from Augustine a cautious view about the possibilities of the state to promote the common good. However, my understanding of the person’s ability to do good are closer to the Thomistic view. Clearly, pessimism about the state does not imply pessimism about the potentialities of the human person. The state’s responsibility for the common good, however, must not simply be forgotten. Rather, we must insist that, while the state is not responsible for codifying and pursuing

138 Maritain 1998, 68.

216 the common good, it is indeed in charge of providing the conditions for the individual and communitarian pursuit of the good.139

III

In previous chapters I have analyzed some of Ratzinger’s political ideas. We saw that he rejects political theology, as well as the contraposition of the church and the “world,” as if they inhabited two distinct planes of reality. In fact, the church is worldly in the sense that Christians not only happen to be here, but in fact are constituted by it. We are, so to speak, indelibly impregnated by worldliness. For

Ratzinger, consequently, there are as many ways for Christianity to be in the world as different eras and contexts,140 and thus modernity is but another context Christianity must adapt to. However, we mentioned a paradox: while Christianity cannot be reduced to a specific time or context, for Ratzinger there is a strong connection between Christianity and the “West” or “Europe.” This section resumes my exposition of

Ratzinger’s political thought. First, I discuss the Catholic notion of the “person” and its dignity, which is derived from the Trinitarian mystery.141 This idea is, in my opinion, the most revolutionary and influential aspect of Catholic political thought. From this notion follows a particular understanding of truth and morality, understood as “received” rather than “created.” I then discuss their importance for the state-church relationship. The chapter closes with some critical comments on Ratzinger’s political thought.

[1] Tertullian provided the formula of God adopted by Christianity in the West. God is, he asserted, una substantia—tres personae.142 As we saw in the first chapter, Tertullian faced a double problem: on the

139 Maritain defines the state as “that part of the body politic especially concerned with the maintenance of law, the promotion of the common welfare and public order, and the administration of public affairs.” (Maritain 1998, 12) However, when discussing democracy, he goes beyond this definition: “To try to reduce democracy to technocracy, and to expel from it the Gospel inspiration together with all faith in the supra-material, supra- mathematical, and supra-sensory realities, would be to try to deprive it of its very blood. Democracy can only live on Gospel inspiration” (61, emphasis mine, cf. 176). I don’t think this is right. For, if democracy—which is “the only way of bringing about a moral rationalization of politics” (59)—must be founded upon the Gospel, then it follows that all non-Christian religions in democracy can have only a secondary role, and thus be only tolerated (cf. 173). The quality of this kind of democracy would be at least doubtful. Maritain’s use of theologico-political categories is obvious: he refers to the democratic “prophet” referring to creative and revolutionary individuals who are key in times of birth, crisis, or reform (139). The same can be said about his use of the term “vicariousness” when applied to political authority (130-134). Perhaps the most radical statement is the analogy between light and darkness applied to the political sphere: “Willingly or unwillingly, States will be obliged to make a choice for or against the Gospel. They will be shaped either by the totalitarian spirit or by the Christian spirit” (159). See Chappel 2018, 134. 140 “[T]ere is no such thing as religion in the abstract; it always has a concrete historical form” (Ratzinger 2010a, 47). 141 Another account of the same idea can be found in theological anthropology, centered in the Creation narrative. 142 Ratzinger 2013, 104.

217 one hand, he needed to express the Christian novelty, centered on the incarnated God; on the other, he had to be cautious not to offer a formula that could be interpreted as a return to polytheism. To this end he took the Greek notion of person (prosopon)—originally used in theatrical representations to give dramatic life to events—so as to characterize the Trinitarian mystery. Ratzinger explains that the three persons of the Trinity should be understood not as different beings but in terms of relation, which is “a third specific fundamental category between substance and accident, the two great categorical forms of thought in antiquity.”143 He also points out that the idea of the person grew out reading the Bible. In the Scriptures, in fact, we find many instances wherein God speaks as a “we” (e.g., “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” in Genesis

1:26; cf. 3:22).

In the New Testament and, specifically, in Johannine theology, the notion of person is understood as pure relativity. The relationship between the Father and the Son is such that Jesus can say of himself:

“The Son cannot do anything of himself” (John 5:19), and at the same time “I and the Father are one” (John

10:30). We also find that “this structure is in turn transferred—and here we have the transition to anthropology—to the disciples when Christ says, ‘Without me you can do nothing’ (John 15:5)”;144 in Jesus’ priestly prayer, moreover, he prays to the Father so “that they may be one as we are one” (John 17:11).

Ratzinger stresses that the fundamental traits of human nature are derived from God’s self-revelation. My having been created in the image of God means here, therefore, that my inner constitution, my very nature, mirrors God’s inner life. And from this resemblance the human person receives its dignity, in virtue of which “the human being is always a value as an individual, and as such demands being considered and treated as a person and never, on the contrary, considered and treated as an object to be used, or as a means, or as a thing.”145

God’s inner relations—its three persons—are described by Ratzinger as being-for (Father), being- from (Son), and being-with (Spirit).146 Let me briefly examine these relations. In the gospels we learn that

Jesus never understood his mission as an individual project. We always see him in an intimate dialogue with

143 Ibid., 108. 144 Ibid., 109. 145 John Paul II 1988, §37. 146 Ratzinger 2013, 159-160. 218 the Father, which becomes in Jesus an act of total submission to the Father’s will (e.g., Luke 22:42). This is the “from” of Jesus, the idea of an existence completely defined by its being sent (e.g., Luke 4:43), by his having a mission to fulfill. In this sense we should understand Jesus’ words before dying: “All is finished”

(Jn 19:30). In Jesus, then, existence, word, and mission are indistinguishable: everything he does and says is ordered to the mission commended to Him by the Father. Now, this relationality is not exclusive of the

Son: the Father is not a self-sufficient emperor setting missions for their subjects, but the unconditional pouring of love for the Son (e.g. Matthew 3:17); at the same time, the Spirit is the one promised to stay, to be with the church until the end of times (John 14:26).

These brief indications are useful to introduce the basic features of Catholic anthropology. For

Ratzinger, “man is God’s image precisely insofar as the ‘from,’ ‘with,’ and ‘for,’ constitute the fundamental anthropological pattern.”147 But what does this anthropology entail? Ratzinger takes the problem of abortion as an example, his goal being to reject the argument that since the fetus is absolutely dependent on her mother’s body, and thus incapable of surviving alone, then it is the right of the mother over her body which must prevail. First of all, according to Ratzinger, that two beings are completely interwoven, while one of them is physically dependent on the other, “does not eliminate the otherness of this being or authorize us to dispute its distinct selfhood.”148 Dependence, responsibility, and solidarity (being-from, being-for, being- with) are permanent structures of human existence. The resistance against these structures is born out of the disordered desire of becoming gods, the dream of absolute independence and unbridled freedom.

Absolute independence—the idea that I am free insofar as there are no obstacles in my way—is thus alien to human nature. Just as MacIntyre establishes the need to keep the tension between independent rational agency and acknowledged dependence, Ratzinger maintains the tension between the individual and the anthropological structures of human nature. On the one hand, he affirms that

Christianity lives from the individual and for the individual, because only by the action of the individual can the transformation of history, the destruction of the dictatorship of the milieu come to pass… [I]n Christianity everything hangs in the last resort on one individual, on the man Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified by the

147 Ratzinger 2013, 160. 148 Ibid., 158.

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milieu—public opinion—and who on his Cross broke this very power of the conventional “everyone,” the power of anonymity, which holds man captive.149

It is important to note that Ratzinger is not using here the more theological term “person,” but “individual”

(einzelne).150 For Catholicism, only the free individual can be the subject of an encounter with God, so it is only at the individual level that conversion (metanoia) occurs. This is yet another reason why Christendom and some efforts to establish a Christian republic—which use the force of the state to “Christianize” society—betray, in fact, the spirit of evangelization.

But, on the other hand, if the individual remains closed to the others, living only for herself, then she precludes herself from authentic life. Augustine describes this paradox by asking: “Quid tam tuum quam tu, quid tam non tuum quam tu.”151 Just as the notion of “person” in the Trinity expresses “not a substance that closes itself in itself, but the phenomenon of complete relativity,”152 in the same way the human person is not understood as a self-sufficient monad, but as a member of the whole, to the point where the ultimate realization of human love implies sacrificing our life for our friends (John 15:13). Consequently, individual freedom can only exist in an “order of ”153 designed to achieve the common good. Henri de Lubac connects the ideas of “person” and human relativity, and asks: “[D]oes not to be a person, if we take the old original meaning of the word in a spiritual sense, always mean to have a part to play? Is it not fundamentally to enter upon a relationship with others so as to converge upon a Whole?”154

We can see here an answer to the fundamental weakness of Taylor’s notion of authenticity, namely, the difficulty of bringing the individual back to the whole. For, according to de Lubac, individual existence and communion form a permanent paradox. On the one hand, de Lubac accepts Maritain’s claim that “a person is a whole world,” stressing that “it must also be added at once that this ‘world’ presupposes others

149 Ratzinger 2004, 249-250. Ratzinger rejects Hans Kelsen’s reading of the Jesus’ interrogation by Pilate. For Kelsen, “Pilate acts here as a perfect democrat: since he himself does not know what is just, he leaves it to the majority to decide. In this way, the Austrian scholar portrays Pilate as the emblematic figure of a relativistic and skeptical democracy that is based not on values and truth but on correct procedures. Kelsen seems not to be disturbed by the fact that the outcome of Jesus’ trial was the condemnation of an innocent and righteous man. After all, there is no other truth than that of the majority, and one cannot ‘get behind’ this truth to ask further questions” (Ratzinger 2006b, 57-58, emphasis mine). 150 Elsewhere, Ratzinger says that “Christian faith has essentially a personal structure” (Ratzinger 2010a, 115). Against collectivism, he claims: “The cry that raises up from mankind for a future is not answered by an anonymous collectivity. Man longs for a future in which he himself will be included” (Ratzinger 1971a, 42). 151 “What belongs to you as much as your ‘I,’ and what belongs to you as little as your ‘I’?” quoted in Ratzinger 2013, 111. 152 Ibid., 109. 153 Ratzinger 2006b, 48; 2013, 157. “Respect for the human person goes beyond the demands of individual morality. Instead, it is a basic criterion, an essential element, in the very structure of society, since the purpose of the whole of society itself is geared to the human person” (John Paul II 1988, §39). 154 Lubac 1988, 331.

220 with which it makes up one world only,”155 and insists, on the other, that “[t]here is no real unity without persisting difference.”156

For Catholicism, finally, the call to unity does not imply the destruction of difference. Ratzinger, de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar all stress that the Catholic family is polyphonic. Von Balthasar explains that the diversity of theories and worldviews—which in our times are offered and consumed in a market-like fashion—is not a mere sign of decay, but rather it is “humanity, thinking symphonically, polyphonically.”157 Philosophy prevents human beings from giving up the question about human existence, either by resignation—where man, “tired of asking questions, deliberately limits himself to a circumscribed foreground area, settles down individually and socially in his small world, and with the help of organizations and technology, endeavors to make life as bearable as possible for himself and those who come after him”158—or by affirming that there are no questions left to which we can know the answer. For Balthasar,

“the plurality of genuine philosophies arises from the plurality of aspects of earthly existence and… from man’s partially contradictory longings with regard to his ultimate destiny.”159 There is, thus, a necessary plurality of views, arising from the very nature of reality, which Catholicism must see as wanted by God:

When revelation engages in dialogue with the seeking human being, it leaves him with all his—often contradictory—approaches; it does not compel him to follow a single path of thought that alone brings salvation. It also leaves him with his contradictory feelings; to their confused tangle it only offers its simple message: God loves the world; he loves you personally and has demonstrated it in Jesus Christ.160

The dream of unity without difference, the move from symphony to unison, corresponds to modern totalitarianism.161 Pluralism, on the contrary, was a distinctive characteristic of the early church, with

Pentecost being the paradigm of unity-across-difference. Ratzinger claims: “Man’s will to power, symbolized in Babel, aims at the goal of uniformity, because its interest is domination and subjection…

God’s Spirit, on the other hand, is love; for this reason he brings about recognition and creates unity in the acceptance of the otherness of the other: the many languages [in Pentecost] are mutually comprehensible.”162

155 Ibid., 333. 156 Ibid., 339. 157 Balthasar 1987, 48. Cf. Ratzinger 1995b 82-85. 158 Ibid., 50. 159 Ibid., 53. 160 Ibid. 161 Ibid., 13. 162 Ratzinger 1996, 43.

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Von Balthasar, on his part, reminds us that, according to Paul, “it is the unity of love that calls for pluriformity, produces it and holds it together within itself.”163

[2] Subscribing to the Catholic notion of the person requires an act of faith, the acknowledgment that the being I am mirrors the one who created me. Faith is, for Ratzinger, not the opposite of reason, but an existential statement about the world: “credo… signifies not the observation of this or that fact, but a fundamental mode of behavior toward being, toward existence, toward one’s own sector of reality, and toward reality as such.”164 It is through faith that I see the world as not exhausted by the material but open- ended, welcoming the transcendent. This existential position could be labeled as “irrational” if and only if reason had already demonstrated the opposite view, namely, that material reality comprises all there is. That this is not the case—insofar as proving this would require reason to step outside time and space, which is its proper sphere165—is the condition of possibility of faith, understood as that faculty of the human spirit by means of which a new, more original kind of confronting reality is opened. Faith bestows meaning on the world, a meaning which is not self-made.166 But faith can never be understood as a final certitude, the final stage of knowledge.167 On the contrary, doubt and belief are inescapable both for the believer and the unbeliever.168

Since God cannot be discovered by means of our abilities—thus the epistemological “weakness”169 that confronts us with doubt and belief—but is the being who freely starts a dialogue with humanity, truth is not for Catholicism something we construct. On the contrary, our relationship with truth is not productive,

163 Balthasar 1987, 70. 164 Ratzinger 2004, 50. 165 Recall Carl Schmitt’s claim that the law is only visible in, and therefore more interesting than, the exception. In the same sense, what is proper to human reason can only be described by means of that which is beyond it. Here, in the relationship between the physical and the metaphysical, we may have the foundation of Schmitt’s claim. 166 “Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received” (Ratzinger 2004, 73). 167 “[F]aith is not a way of landing on one’s feet at the end of intellectual adventures, a sort of quiet one rewards one’s self with after intellectual turmoil. Faith is not an end. It is a beginning” (Daniélou 1962, 95). 168 “No one can lay God and his Kingdom on the table before another man… In other words, both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief, if they do not hide from themselves and from the truth of their being. Neither can quite escape either doubt or belief; for the one, faith is present against doubt; for the other, through doubt and in the form of doubt… Perhaps in precisely this way doubt, which saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds, could become the avenue of communication. It prevents both from enjoying complete self-satisfaction.” (Ratzinger 2004, 46-47). 169 “Weakness,” it is important to remember, is a condition that for Christianity is always enmeshed in a paradox. Paul claims, for example, that “God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong” (1 Corinthians 1:27), and recognizes that “when I am weak, then I am strong” (2 Corinthians 12:10). The book of Kings reminds us, moreover, that God is not in strength and violence: God is not in the heavy wind, nor in the earthquake or the fire, but in a “tiny whispering sound” (1 Kings 19:11-14).

222 but receptive. The novelty of the Judaeo-Christian tradition is based on the fact that it was God who communicated with us, not us who discovered God.170 Truth, let us repeat, is not manufactured, but sought.

The same can be said about morality: a person “does not himself invent morality on the basis of calculations of expediency but rather finds it already present in the essence of things.”171 Here Catholic thought connects with Greek philosophy. For Plato, for example, virtue implies the correct ordering of the three parts of the human soul (appetite, will, and reason), so that: “to produce health is to put the elements that are in the body in their natural relations of mastering and being mastered by one another.”172 Against gnosticism, Catholicism claims there is an order which human beings can recognize, but never change.

MacIntyre, for his part, explains the Aristotelian idea of the good saying that human nature “is such that they have certain aims and goals, such that they move by nature towards a specific telos.”173 For Catholicism, then, the basic features of morality revealed by God to Moses at Mount Sinai (Exodus 20:1-17) are not mysterious in their structure, but rational, in the sense that we can arrive at them through an exercise of practical reason. That this is so, moreover, is testified to by the fact that all the great religious traditions of mankind share a basic set of common moral principles.

[3] So far, we have brought to the fore the Catholic concept of the person, emphasizing its being understood in analogy to the understanding of the Trinity’s persons. This notion is understood in terms of relativity rather than substance. From this we derived the fact that human beings’ relationship with truth is fundamentally receptive, not creative, and linked this affirmation to classical philosophy.174 At this point, however, an important challenge must be addressed: How can we uphold this notion of truth without falling into the trap of Christendom? If Catholicism professes to be in possession of the truth, how can the drive towards authoritarianism be avoided? We can offer three paths.

170 The radicalism of Christianity vis-à-vis Judaism is, of course, the Incarnation, which Paul describes in his letter to the Hebrews (1:1-2): “In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the ages.” 171 Ratzinger 2010a, 34. 172 Plato, Republic, 444d. Emphasis in mine. That goodness is intrinsically linked with our nature is recognized by Aquinas, who states that “one has so much good as it has being, since good and being are convertible” (Summa Theologiae I-II 18.1). 173 MacIntyre 2007, 148. 174 On the encounter between Christianity and Greek thought see Ratzinger 2006a, and Benedict XVI, 2006.

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First, even though there is a universal truth which in principle everyone can know, individual conscience is to be respected, even when it errs.175 Ratzinger explains this tension by distinguishing two elements in the human conscience. On the one hand, he borrows the Platonic idea of anamnesis, which captures a Pauline insight: “When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law” (Romans 2:14-15).176 Anamnesis is the intimate voice of conscience which is imprinted upon us and allows us to distinguish right from wrong. This voice, however, can be silenced. For this reason, anamnesis “needs help from outside in order that it may become aware of its own self.”177 On the other hand we find the Thomistic idea of conscientia, which is understood “not as a habitus, i.e., an abiding existential quality of man, but as an actus, i.e., an action that is performed.”178 As we saw in our critique of MacIntyre, the application of general/universal principles to particular circumstances is a difficult one. Thus, it is easy to understand that many times human beings fail to apply general principles correctly to specific situations. The importance of anamnesis, however, is clear: were we to dismiss it, establishing conscientia as infallible, there would be no way to blame the Nazis and other criminal groups who may claim to act fully convinced. But the existence of anamnesis does not obliterate the fact that we human beings can do nothing but to follow our conscience (conscientia). And acknowledging this means, to be sure, that we cannot force people to be free, or to accept a truth they don’t yet see or may never accept.

The second reason is Ratzinger’s claim that doubt and belief are permanent, unavoidable structures of the human spirit. We cannot even scratch the reality of God, if only because God is “not just he who at present lies in fact outside the field of vision but could be seen if it were possible to go farther; no, he is the being who stands essentially outside it, however far our field of vision may be extended.”179 This epistemological limitation forces religious people to be humble in their claim of possessing the truth.180

175 In other words, “it is, of course, undisputed that one must follow a certain conscience, or at least not act against it. But whether the judgment of conscience, or what one takes to be such, is always right—indeed, whether it is infallible—is another question. For if this were the case, it would mean that there is no truth—at least not in moral and religious matters, which is to say, in the areas that constitute the very pillars of our existence” (Ratzinger 2007b, 12). 176 Ibid., 31. 177 Ibid., 34. 178 Ibid., 37. 179 Ratzinger 2004, 50. 180 It is proper, on this account, to remember Augustine’s words: Si enim comprehendis, non est Deus. Sit pia confessio ignorantiae magis, quam temeraria professio scientiae (“If you understand it, then it is not God. Let’s make a pious confession of ignorance, instead of a reckless confession

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Third, Ratzinger follows Vittorio Possenti and Jacques Maritain in stressing that “[t]he source of truth for politics is not Christianity as revealed religion but Christianity as leaven and a form of life which has proved its worth in the course of history. The truth about the good supplied by the Christian tradition becomes an insight of human reason and hence a rational principle.”181 To this idea I now turn.

[4] While Ratzinger agrees that Christianity cannot be deemed a “European religion,”182 he nonetheless stresses that there is a special relationship between the two. Close to Michael Gillespie,

Ratzinger affirms that the origin and development of Europe is Christian and cannot be understood without a reference to it. Christianity developed in Europe not only as a creed, but as a tradition in MacIntyre’s terminology, that is, as a comprehensive rational, moral, and social worldview. It is this tradition that

Ratzinger has in mind when he claims Christianity behaves towards politics not as a revealed religion but as a form of life.

It was on the basis of the notion of the person that Catholicism and Europe thrived. Democracy, which cannot be understood without it, is for Ratzinger a product of the encounter between Greek thought and Christianity.183 Western democracy was also made possible by the separation between church and state

(cf. Luke 20:25). Christianity rejected the idea of civil religions based on external, public rites rather than in inner, personal spirituality. That this separation has not always been respected by both the Catholic church and the European states made necessary the modern state as a better solution, in line with Christian thought, to order the relations between the transcendent and immanent orders.

Contrary to MacIntyre, Maritain,184 and Voegelin, Ratzinger’s position on modernity and the

Enlightenment is not utterly negative. In fact, “we by no means need to retire the whole inheritance of the

of science”). Consequently, Paul’s words, “Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Corinthians 9:16), lose none of its authority and passion if we ask this preaching to be conducted in humility and absolute respect for the freedom of the subjects the gospel is to be announced. Furthermore, de Lubac will claim: “Truth is not a good that I possess, that I manipulate and distribute as I please. It is such that in giving it I must still receive it; in discovering it I still have to search for it; in adapting it, I must continue to adapt myself to it” (Lubac 1987, 48). 181 Ratzinger 2006b, 64. 182 Ratzinger 2013, 190. Ratzinger is trying to avoid here Daniélou’s contention that “[t]here is no worse betrayal of the Gospel than to be willing to make it out to be the religion of the West. Christianity is not one certain vision of the world… Did Christ rise from the dead or not? If so, this is of absolute interest for any and every man” (Daniélou 1962, 81). 183 Ratzinger 1988, 215. Democracy is deemed by Ratzinger “the most appropriate of all political models” (Ratzinger 2006b, 33). 184 Maritain claims, for example, that: “To this integral humanism it is clear that the bourgeois type of humanity is not only seriously compromised, but deserves condemnation” (Maritain 1938, 85). He also says that “liberalism is but a caricature, and even at times a mockery” of Catholic freedom (156). Finally, Maritain’s political project is a new Christendom: “The commonwealth would be vitally Christian, and the various non-Christian

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Enlightenment as such from service and pronounce it a worn-out steam engine.”185 All we need to do is to make three corrections: we must recognize that freedom can only subsist in an order of freedoms; admit that no absolutely ideal state of liberation is possible; and lay to rest the dream of absolute autonomy or self- sufficiency of reason. This is what he means by getting rid of the hubris of reason, its potential to destroy freedom.186 Ratzinger is confident, therefore, about the ties between Catholicism, Enlightenment, and modern democracy. This is nowhere better exemplified than in his analysis of human rights.

The first condition of freedom is that it can only exist in an order of freedoms, so as to promote the common good.187 A second condition is that freedom needs a content. Freedom is not absence of interference, as liberals affirm, but something closer to the republican principle of non-domination.188 There is in freedom a positive content, which is derived necessarily from the notion of the human person. This content Ratzinger defines as “the safeguarding of human rights.”189 Here we can find an alternative to

MacIntyre’s critique of human rights, regarding the incapacity of liberalism to uphold these rights as

“human,” because it denies a priori the very theoretical resources it needs to formulate them as such. In line with Moyn’s analysis, Ratzinger asserts that human rights are a Christian, not a liberal, idea. They are a metaphysical idea, because “nature contains spirit, ethos, and dignity.”190 Catholicism derives human rights from the metaphysical concept of the person: they are the practical conclusions that are derived from human beings’ reflection upon their own nature. To be sure, this definition of human rights exceeds what could be acceptable for the Enlightenment. However, it is possible to see how this rendering of human rights is consistent with Kantian practical reason. We can see the Catholic account of human rights as a metaphysical

spiritual groups included in it would enjoy a just liberty” (161). James Chappel claims that “Maritain’s 1936 masterpiece, Integral Humanism, is the clearest statement of fraternal Catholicism,” that is, the Catholic modern reaction to fascism. For this reason, rather than reading the book as a “paean to liberal democracy, it should instead be read as a furiously antifascist, antiracist, and anticapitalist tract” (Chappel 2018, 111). 185 Ratzinger 2013, 165. 186 Ratzinger 2012, 214. 187 Just as the individual must accept limitations to her freedom in order to foster the common good, in the same measure “[e]ach individual state… must subordinate its national common good to the common good of all mankind” (Ratzinger 2010a, 144). 188 According to Philippe Pettit, liberty as non-domination cannot fit in the Berlinean distinction (positive/negative), for liberty as non-domination “is negative to the extent that it requires the absence of domination by others, not necessarily the presence of self-mastery, whatever that is thought to involve. The conception is positive to the extent that, at least in one respect, it needs something more than the absence of interference; it requires security against interference, in particular against interference on an arbitrary basis” (Pettit 1997, 51). It is clear, however, that the Catholic view of freedom goes far beyond the scope of what could accept as non-domination, because Catholicism defends the metaphysical idea of the person as a necessary component of human rights. 189 Ratzinger 2006b, 54. 190 Ratzinger 2013, 153.

226 formulation which, when entering the political realm as part of a tradition of thought, presents itself as a rational account of human dignity.

It is through human rights that we can reconcile natural and positive law. The notion of “law” is understood here not in procedural terms but rather subjected to the demand that for a law to be accepted as such, it must be consistent with society’s deepest and most original shared understandings, a fundamental part of which are human rights. Only in this way can the body politic survive, avoiding the tyranny of a majority, for only in this way is the law capable of holding together society and providing peace.191

Ratzinger’s solution to the tyranny of majorities is, consistently, a Tocquevillian one. He alerts us that contemporary democracies are too invested in institutional design, displaying on the other hand “a complete oblivion of the second basic ingredient of political life, the mores,” which he understands not in terms of “morality but about custom or lifestyle.”192 A political community cannot subsist without a set of shared understandings by which social life is ordered and the elemental relationships between its parts are regulated. The political community also draws from utopianism, that is, reflection on the ideal city and its moral content, while at the same time utterly rejecting the possibility of materializing these utopias. This symbiosis between politics and utopia, therefore, never misses the fact that the human society will never be perfect and, for that reason, must always remain open to change and reform. This is true, moreover, because there is no single moral imperative that can be deemed definitive.193

Now, since church and state are distinguished, we need to ask what is proper to the church, and what is proper to the state in modern democracy. I begin with the state. We said above that Ratzinger’s

Augustinianism leads him to adopt a modest view of the state, whose function is to uphold law and promote peace and order. It is not the function of the state to create happiness, or to imagine the new human person.194

191 Ratzinger 2010a, 54-55. 192 Ratzinger 2010b, 25. In my view, contemporary democracy is not oblivious of mores. The contrary seems true: liberal democracies invest a lot of resources trying to shape their citizens’ worlviews and lifestyles. defends the view that liberal democracies promote a comprehensive doctrine: “the polity must commit itself to specific views of human personality and right conduct, as well as to a range of external effects on other institutions and practices. In all such cases, neutrality is never violated, because it is never possible. Every polity embodies a more- than-minimal conception of the good that serves to rank-order individual ways of life and competing principles of right conduct” (Galston 1982, 627). Ratzinger’s worry can (and, in my view, should) be reformulated, in order to express the idea that the liberal ethos is not the best one for a healthy democratic society. 193 “There is no single rational or ethical or religious ‘world formula’ that could win acceptance by everyone and could then provide support for the whole. At any rate, such a formula is unattainable at present. This is why the so-called ‘world ethos’ remains an abstraction” (Ratzinger 2006b, 42). 194 Ibid., 59.

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In a word, the state should not enact utopias.195 This is clearly an anti-totalitarian stance, which is repeated over and over in Ratzinger’s work: a sober view of the state, as well as a clear separation between church and state, are necessary elements to avoid the terrors of totalitarianism. Ratzinger subscribes to Voegelin’s critique of ersatz religions, that is, the gnostic appropriation of religious elements and its immanentization through the obliteration of the cosmological order and the false proclamation that the order of being is under human control.196 Ratzinger emphatically asserts that “when Christian faith, faith in man’s greater hope, decays and falls away, then the myth of the divine state rises up once again, because men and women cannot renounce the totality of hope.”197 At this point we need to ask: Hasn’t Ratzinger fallen into Christendom again? For if the weakening of Christian faith leads to the totalitarian state, then the best safeguard against it is the bestowing of a special status on this religion. I think, however, that we can escape this charge.

We are confronted with a new paradox. On the one hand, we have defended a modest notion of the state, which implies that the state cannot produce morality by itself, nor set the ultimate goals of human life.

On the other hand, we have the claim that, in order to avoid totalitarianism—which is nothing but the state becoming the ultimate voice of morality and the human telos—we need to lean on Christianity, an action which could mean a return to Christendom. Remember that Ratzinger has said that Catholicism has a political voice only as a tradition, not as a revealed religion. This implies that Ratzinger is speaking at the level of mores, that is, at the level of practical public life and shared fundamental values and meanings that make social life possible. What he means in the previous quote must be read with this logic in mind, meaning that abandoning the Christian ethos, based on the notions of the person and human rights, opens the way for the totalitarian experiment. The rather problematic formulation quoted above can be thus rewritten as saying that the state is limited in its sphere, and consequently it cannot produce its own foundations, which must be received from outside:

We have said that the state is not the Kingdom of God; the state itself cannot generate morality. It remains a good state precisely when it keeps to these boundaries. But at the same time, it is true that the state lives on

195 For Ratzinger, “[t]he aim is not to bring about utopia in the future but to measure present politics against the highest norms and thus to achieve the optimal approximation of civil society to the norm of justice” (Ratzinger 2010b, 11). 196 Voegelin 1968, 35-36. 197 Ratzinger 1988, 148.

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the basis of transpolitical foundations and that it can remain good only when these foundations, which it does not itself produce, remain in force.198

There is therefore a complex relationship between the state, Christianity, and religion. On the one hand, the state must listen to the great religious traditions,199 which together share basic common ethical elements200 that testify to the existence of anamnesis. On the other hand, Ratzinger finds a special connection between

Christianity and Western secular rationality, making them partners in the future destiny of the West, which must, nonetheless, “include [the great religious traditions] in the attempt at a polyphonic correlation in which these cultures themselves will be open to learn from the Western complementarity of faith and reason.”201

Finally: What is the church’s political role? It is important to remember, first, that when we talk about the “church” we mean here the community of believers, without distinguishing between laity and clergy. In general terms, we can say that the political task of the church consists in contributing “our concept of God to the debate about man.”202 It is difficult to find a more concise claim that joins together the fundamental elements of Catholic political action: it is a contribution, not an imposition, that is, the church’s task is a pedagogical one, as a participant in the secular dialogue; but it is a contribution, at the same time, at the highest level, that is, at the level of the truth of the human person and her community; finally, it is a contribution that links the truth of the person, her freedom, with a teleology. This intimate interplay between authenticity and truth, freedom and a system of freedom, church and state, is explained by Ratzinger:

From the very beginning it was a constitutive element of the Christian faith that its teaching appealed to man in terms of his ultimate bond, his bond to the truth […]. [F]aith orients man at the deepest level, but it does not prescribe to him his individual social roles. For this reason, the Church is not a state, and Christians can live in diverse forms of state and in diverse social groupings […] Pluralism in the interplay of Church, politics and society is a fundamental value for Christianity. It arose from the teaching of Christianity, which inculcates the relative value of all political and social achievements by shifting theocracy, the consummated form of God’s rule and reign, into the eschaton.203

198 Ratzinger 2010a, 143. The question about the prepolitical foundations of a democratic state was discussed by Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger in 2004. Both participations can be found in de Vries y Sullivan 2006. 199 Ratzinger 2006b, 43; 2013 162-163. 200 Ratzinger 2013, 164. 201 Ratzinger 2006b, 44. Complementarity, however, must not be understood in a final way, for a complete synthesis always escapes the human mind. Consequently: “Our thinking can never completely integrate faith and knowledge, and we must never, from a very understandable impatience, allow ourselves to press on to immature syntheses, which, instead of serving faith, well and truly, compromise it” (Ratzinger 1971a, 23, emphasis mine). Clearly, this is another formulation of the same rejection of political theology we have studied throughout this work. 202 Ibid., 112. 203 Ratzinger 1995b, 80-81. 229

By refusing to play the part of the state, Catholicism enters the political arena as a tradition, as a comprehensive form of life which informs its adherents about the fundamental goals of the political community, the common good, and the value of the human person in a way that promotes democracy. As a partner in a dialogue, the church cannot impose its will, but demands its right to be heard; it can win, moreover, only by means of conviction, through the slow process of gaining the hearts of the members of the community. The importance of this latter idea is such that Ratzinger prescribes: “If we are not convinced and cannot convince others we have no right to demand public recognition. We are then dispensable, and we must admit it.”204

Three final comments are necessary. First, from our previous discussions about secularity we concluded that there is no justification for maintaining liberalism as the status quo in democracy. It must be treated as one among many ethical traditions dialoging in the democratic public sphere. The same must happen with naturalism and the undue primacy given to an epistemology that separates questions about fact from questions about value, relegating the latter to the private sphere. In particular, the technical mentality must be confronted, limited, and oriented by morality.205 This entails, moreover, bringing the questions about the meaning of life back into the public sphere or, in more precise words, refusing to accept the liberal view of human flourishing as the only one acceptable for democracy. Morality need not be a private matter: with Taylor, we must insist on the possibility of a cross-fertilizing of horizons; with MacIntyre, we can talk about traditions of thought that have been tested in their inner consistency and their ability to answer the questions other traditions cannot; and with Ratzinger we can speak of morality’s objectivity: “For practical reason, too, needs the confirmation of an experiment, but of one too large to be carried out in laboratories: it needs the experiment of human existence that has stood the test, and this can come only from history that itself has stood the test.”206

204 Ratzinger 1988, 220. 205 “The ratio technica must incorporate into itself a ratio ethica so that we would speak of something as truly functioning only when a fully responsible functioning was assured” (Ratzinger 2013, 48). Ratzinger’s article, “Man between reproduction and creation: theological questions on the origin of human life” is a powerful attack on the technical view of life (see Ratzinger 2013 70-83). 206 Ratzinger 2010a, 42. This idea is related to Daniélou’s distinction between knowledge of lower and higher objects. The former is achieved by scientific experimentation: it is the knowledge of nature, causal relations in the world, etc.; the latter refers to human and transcendent objects. For these, higher objects, experimentation is inadequate, and testimony appears as the proper way to know these higher objects (see Daniélou 1962, 88). 230

Second, according to Ratzinger, modernity has recommended that human beings define their morality etsi Deus non daretur—“as if God doesn’t exist.” Since we cannot impose the belief in God,

Ratzinger suggests that maybe Kant was right in postulating the existence of God as necessary for moral behavior:

The quest for a reassuring certitude that could stand uncontested beyond all differences has failed… Kant had denied that God is knowable within the domain of pure reason, but, at the same time, he thought of God, freedom, and immortality as postulates of practical reason, without which was impossible to act morally in any consistent way. Doesn’t the situation of the world today make us wonder whether he might not have been right after all?... We therefore have good reason to turn the Enlightenment axiom on its head and to say that even those who are unable to accept God should nonetheless try to live veluti si Deus daretur, as if God existed.207

Third, although the hierarchy of the church has a right and a duty to participate in the political life of the state, politics—which is “essentially the realm of the contingent, inasmuch as its object is to balance complementary elements”208—is the sphere of action proper to the laity. Paul VI established that the laity’s field of evangelizing activity “is the vast and complicated world of politics, society and economics, but also the world of culture, of the sciences and the arts, of international life, of the mass media.”209 This idea only reaffirms what was proclaimed by the Second Vatican Council. The dogmatic constitution Lumen gentium stressed that “[w]hat specifically characterizes the laity is their secular nature,” because it is lay people who

“seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and by ordering them according to the plan of

God” (§31). It is the task of the laity, then, to infuse the spirit of Catholicism into the secular structures of life: family, the community, the state, international relations, the economy, etc.

When discussing liberation theology, we saw that the excessive involvement of the clergy in political affairs runs the risk of consolidating a hierocracy that leads to the kind of political theology we rejected. For this reason, Catholic political action as such is the privileged sphere of the laity. Maritain understands this very well:

[O]ne may say that, while the Church itself, above all anxious not to become the adjunct of any one particular system, has been more and more freed, not from the necessity of judging things from, but of administering and directing the temporal things of this world, the individual Christian finds himself more and more engaged

207 Ratzinger 2013, 198. 208 Daniélou 1962, 134. He adds that “Jeanne Hersch has clearly shown that the political as such does not create values, but ‘a void where something is possible.’ From this no man’s land one may never expect a great deal of good; but it can prevent a great deal of harm” (Ibid.). 209 Paul VI 1975, §70.

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in exactly those things, not so much as a member of the Church, but as a citizen of the earthly city, i.e., as a christian citizen, conscious of the task incumbent on him of working for the inauguration of a new secular order.210

Two things are clear from Maritain’s idea: first, that the clergy “judges,” that is, that it is the right and duty of the clergy to supervise and aid the laity, by constantly reminding the latter of the general principles of morality that must guide their action (this is the external help anamnesis demands), as well as providing counsel and advice to them. As Daniélou claims:

[T]he specific task of the laic in the Church is to be the agent who in a certain fashion turns upon the things of earth what is received by the grace of Christ. The function of the priest is to transmit this grace. And the function of the laic is to cause it to penetrate into all human things.211

Second, Maritain emphasizes that the Christian engages the secular “not as a member of the Church, but as a citizen of the earthly city.” This attitude is consistent with the notion that the political truth of Catholicism can only be formulated as a tradition. The lay person engages the secular world as part of a tradition of thought that provides insights about the ends of political life, the hierarchy of public goods, and the fundamental moral principles which make democracy possible. De Lubac rightly points out the limit of political action: “I do not have to win the world, even for Christ: I have to save my soul.”212 The goal of

Catholic political action is not, we must insist, to bring God’s kingdom here and now, but to secure a life lived in faith, hope, and charity. In this sense we can understand the gospel words:

[D]o not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on… But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself (Matthew 6:25, 33-34).

In line with the spirit of the gospel, de Lubac will assert: “We must seek the realization of Christianity in society in order to be faithful to the Gospel—and not make use of the Gospel in order to achieve Christianity in society. The latter attitude would pervert the Gospel by reducing it to the role of a means.”213

From the previous considerations we can elucidate the proper relationships between church and state, and between clergy and laity. For Catholicism, the church is not opposed to the state, nor confronted to it in terms of the civitas terrena and civitas caelestis. Rather, the church is in the world as a pilgrim, a

210 Maritain 1938, 112-113, emphasis mine. 211 Daniélou 1962, 151. 212 Lubac 1987, 72. 213 Ibid., 152. 232 paradoxical existence characterized by being here and not being here, belonging and being alien, etc. This tension was made possible by Jesus’ separation of politics from religion, i.e., from his attack on civil religions. From this point on, a process of secularization occurred that brought, in the modern age, the notion of the state. Along with secularization, Christianity’s revolutionary notion of the person pushed for an equality and freedom that, working in tandem with Greek political thought, helped bringing about modern democracy in Europe. For Catholicism, then, democracy is the best political regime possible, despite acknowledging that no political regime, or ethical formula, will ever be ideal and final. Participation in the political is the sphere proper to the laity, whose task in the political arena is to proclaim the Christian truth, not as a revealed religion, but as a comprehensive tradition. The clergy’s role is not to get involved in politics—which, of course, does not imply they must be silent about the political situation but implies that their specific sphere is the administration of grace, not the impregnation of the secular with the Catholic spirit.

[5] In this final section I want to develop a criticism of Joseph Ratzinger’s political theory. In this work I have suggested that Catholic political action is not exhausted either by the thought of Charles Taylor or that of Joseph Ratzinger. Instead, what we need is to keep the tension between the two, allowing a cross- fertilization by means of which we can penetrate the meaning of Catholic political action in postsecular societies. What I find problematic in Ratzinger’s political thought is his apparent Eurocentrism, which seems to be caused by a failure to distinguish between the ideal and the empirical planes. This, in turn, causes some problems for his discussion of morality and the state.

In the first place, there seems to be an excess of meaning in Ratzinger’s treatment of notions like

“Europe” and the “West.” There is no doubt he is right in pointing out the tight relationship between the historical evolution of Europe and Christianity. However, a question still remains: When Ratzinger is talking about Europe and the West, is he describing real entities, formulating an idealized version of them, or rather manipulating these notions by a process of “figuration,” that is, the transformation of an element with a particular history and characteristics into a “sign” or a “paradigm,” universalizing its meaning?

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We can begin our exploration of these question by going local, to Ratzinger’s thoughts on Germany.

There’s no doubt that Ratzinger has a deep love for his country, one that in some moments leads him to idealize this nation.214 However, along with this love we can also detect some ethnocentrism. For example, in A Turning Point for Europe? we find a Hegelian moment: “It is in Germany that the common European task of this hour is posed with the greatest concreteness and emphasis.”215 From this we can move to

Ratzinger’s Eurocentric view. Two examples must suffice. First, in his discussion of afterwar politics and the triumph of democracy, Ratzinger correctly points out that immediately after the war, Catholic politicians played an important role in the consolidation of democracy. Thus, in Germany, Winston

Churchill in England, Robert Schuman in France, and Alcide de Gasperi in Italy were all Christian politicians committed to democracy. It is telling that Ratzinger’s focus is strictly European, leaving aside all the other continents. This picture leaves out the Unites States, a fundamental player in the construction of postwar liberal democracy, and seems to be deaf to other democratic movements happening around the globe, like anti-colonial struggles. A second example testifies to the existence of ethnocentric prejudices in

Ratzinger’s thought. Discussing the global south and its relationship with the West, he claims: “Certainly one cannot make the West alone responsible for the fact that the economic distance between North and

South did not diminish but rather increased in the last decades. There are also internal causes in the Third

World itself, especially the often prevalent corruption and, in not a few places, the lack of a work ethic.”216

While it is justified that blaming the West—i.e., the once colonial powers—for all the problems of the underdeveloped world is doing bad political science, it is far less justifiable to adopt an old, widely- disproved prejudice that distinguishes between the hard-working European and the lazy non-European.

It seems justified to conclude that in Ratzinger we find elements of Eurocentrism, prejudice, and an idealized idea of “Europe” which is forced to appear as the natural companion to Christian thought. It seems to me that Ratzinger cannot idealize “Europe” and then use this idealized notion to evaluate current political

214 For example, in his memoirs Ratzinger deems Tittmoning his childhood’s dreamland (1998, 10) and then he reminisces about returning home after World War II, claiming that “[s]eldom have I ever experienced the beauty of my homeland as on this return from a world disfigured by ideology and hatred” (34). 215 Ratzinger 2010a, 153. 216 Ibid., 166. 234 problems in Europe. By pouring the ideal and the factual into the same bowl, Ratzinger betrays his own suggestion, namely, never trying to bring about our own utopias.

This confusion between the ideal and the empirical permeates his thoughts about morality and the

State. We have said that, following Augustine, Ratzinger adopts a modest view of the state, the task of which is the preservation of law, order, and peace through law, which in turn is derived from public mores.

However, in some places Ratzinger seems to be aiming to enlarge the faculties of the state in the direction of Christendom. Consider the following paragraphs, which are found, interestingly, in his book about

Europe’s destiny:

Men cannot really be united by a common interest but only by the truth; in this way, freedom and justice are brought to realization in their inherent unity. [A] state that is in principle agnostic vis-à-vis God and constructs justice only on majority opinions inherently sinks down to the level of the robber band. In this one must simply accept as correct Augustine’s definitive interpretation of the Platonic tradition: where God is excluded, the principle of the robber band exists, in variously harsher or milder forms.217

When we confront these ideas with Augustine’s actual words, we find important differences. Augustine asks: “Justice removed… what are kingdoms but great bands of robbers?”218 As we saw in the first chapter,

Augustine rejects as idealistic the notion that a people is a community of people bonded by a common idea of right and justice, and proposes instead a modest definition: “a people is an assemblage of reasonable beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love.”219 Moreover, Augustine emphasizes that true justice is not possible in this life, because “the capacity ‘to do justice and righteousness’ is of God.”220 All these elements considered, it seems that Ratzinger goes beyond Augustine when assuring us that a state that fails to recognize God—and, to be sure, this means the Christian God—resembles

Augustine’s band of robbers.

We can, however, accept the claim that only truth brings human beings together, only if we understand “truth” in a very inclusive way. If by truth we mean the most elemental moral concepts shared by the great religious and moral traditions, which are more or less equivalent with the modern doctrine of human rights, then Ratzinger is correct. If, however, “truth” means “Truth,” that is, a thick agreement on

217 Ibid., 136, 137. 218 Augustine, City of God, IV.4, emphasis mine. 219 Ibid., XIX.24. 220 Ibid., XVII.4. 235 human nature, the structure of the cosmos, and social life, then he has overstepped his own political ideas.

However, Augustine does not require belief in God as a condition for a successful state. This idea fails blatantly to do justice to Ratzinger’s political thought understood as a whole.

I don’t think we can reconcile Ratzinger’s Eurocentrism, which leads him to confuse the ideal with the factual, and to demand a morality from the state that surpasses the Augustinian rendering of the state, with the vast majority of texts where this theologian attacks political theology, the capture of the church by the state or vice versa, and the aggrandizement of the state in order for it to be the purveyor of happiness and meaning. Perhaps we will just have to accept these problems as the limits of Ratzinger’s thought, as limitations imposed by the circumstances in which the author lived. This, however, cannot imply dismissing his thought altogether, for that would fail to distinguish between a systematic argument which holds again and again throughout his work, and a couple of outlier ideas which—although they must be criticized and dismissed—can be opposed without losing the kernel of a doctrine.

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CHAPTER 5. CATHOLICISM AND DEMOCRACY.

To me the Christian nations of our day present an alarming spectacle; the movement which carries them along is already too strong to be halted, but it is not yet so swift that we must despair of directing it; our fate is in our hands, but soon it may pass beyond control.1

The nations of our day cannot prevent conditions of equality from spreading in their midst. But it depends upon themselves whether equality is to lead to servitude or freedom, knowledge or barbarism, prosperity or wretchedness.2

John’s rendering of the dialogue between Pilate and Jesus (18:28ff) unfolds in the context of a trial:

Cai’aphas has brought Jesus before Pilate to obtain from the Roman prefect the death penalty, which the

Jewish authorities couldn’t impose. In the Gospel we find a complex characterization of Pilate: he is not the blood-thirsty bully, ready to condemn as many Jews as necessary, depicted by Jules Isaac (see 3.II.2), but a

Roman official whose curiosity has been piqued by the self-proclaimed Messiah condemned by his own people, a man whose very identity—his being a Roman—is being questioned not only by a Jew, but by one who is being charged with political rebellion.

Pilate’s perplexity grows along with Jesus’ answers (“Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?”). He is a Roman, and yet in front of him a Jew confronts him, ignoring the apparent pathos of distance and forcing him to face the question of “truth.” Jesus’ answers are not those of a prisoner trying to be exculpated. He displays confidence and a dignity that challenges Pilate’s authority

(“You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above”). His kingdom does not belong here on earth.3 The explanation is overwhelming: if Jesus’ kingdom were of this world, he would have been defended by his servants. The power Pilate feels himself to have over the prisoner is efficient

1 Tocqueville 1966, Introduction, 6. In this chapter, quotes from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America are indicated in the text’s body, referring to the volume, part, chapter, and page, in the following way (V.P.C:PP). 2 Ibid., II.IV.8:680. 3 Giorgio Agamben describes the scene in the following terms: “In the trial that unfolds before Pilate, two bēmata, two judgments and two kingdoms seem to confront each other: the human and the divine, the temporal and the eternal… And it is the world of facts that must judge that of truths, the temporal kingdom that must pronounce a judgement on the eternal kingdom.” (2015, 14-15).

237 only because God has sanctioned it. In Agamben’s words, “the representative of the earthly kingdom is competent to judge the ‘kingdom that is not from here’ and Jesus… acknowledges his authority, which comes to him ‘from above.’”4 An inevitable tension therefore emerges when we ask what Jesus’ kingdom means. For, as was discussed above (see 2.IV.3) God is at the same time the absolutely Other and “God with us,” and thus his kingdom is necessarily here but also awaits unfolding at the end of time.5 Agamben claims that “[t]o testify to the truth, Jesus must affirm and, at the same time, deny his kingdom, which is far away (‘it is not from this world’) and, at the same time, the very closest, indeed, at hand (entos humōn; Luke

17:21).”6 Agamben concludes his book in theologico-political terms:

He [Jesus]—who has not come to judge the world but to save it—finds himself, perhaps precisely for this reason, having to respond in a trial, to submit to a judgment, which his alter ego, Pilate, in the end will not pronounce, cannot pronounce. Justice and salvation cannot be reconciled; every time, they return to mutually excluding and calling for each other.7

This means, for Agamben, that “every possibility of a Christian political theology or of a theological justification of profane power turns out to fail. The juridical order does not allow itself to be inscribed so clearly into the order of salvation nor the latter into the former.”8

I begin this last chapter picking up the general conclusion of the first one, namely, that although the theological and the political are necessarily linked—so that politics has always a theological dimension and theology necessarily affects the political—we must at the same time insist upon the impossibility of reducing the theologico-politico to the theocratic. This means that, for Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, there is an eschatological gulf between the kingdom of God—understood in its fullness—and the

4 Ibid., 31. In a late work, Joseph Ratzinger claims: “This ‘confession’ of Jesus places Pilate in an extraordinary situation: the accused claims kingship and a kingdom (basileía). Yet he underlines the complete otherness of this kingship, and he even makes the particular point that must have been decisive for the Roman judge: No one is fighting for this kingship. If power, indeed military power, is characteristic of kingship and kingdoms, there is no sign of it in Jesus’ case” (Ratzinger 2011b, 190). 5 The end of times is prologued by many wars, famines, etc. (Matthew 24:3ff), after which “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven, and then the powers of the heavens will be shaken; then will appear the sign of the Son of man in heaven, and then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of man coming on the clouds of heaven with power and great glory” (Matthew 24:29-30; cf. Mark 13:24-27, Luke 21:25-28). 6 Agamben 2015, 44. The problem of truth is central to the story. Ratzinger claims: “If Jesus bases his concept of kingship and kingdom on truth as the fundamental category [instead of power and dominion], then it is entirely understandably that the pragmatic Pilate asks him: What is truth?” (Ratzinger 2011b, 191). Ratzinger reminds us of Aquinas’ claim that God is ipsa summa et prima veritas, the ultimate and first truth (Summa Theologiae I, q.16, a. 5c). 7 Agamben 2015, 44. For Ratzinger, on the contrary, “ultimately it was the pragmatic concept of law that won the day with him [Pilate]: more important than the truth of this case, he probably reasoned, is the peace-building role of law, and in this way he doubtless justified his action to himself” (Ratzinger 2011b, 200). While I subscribe to Ratzinger’s depiction of Pilate as a pragmatic, I believe he misses the nuances of the trial, which Agamben captures. 8 Agamben 2015, 57.

238 earthly city, between God’s Providence and human action, between human justice and salvation. In

Augustine’s terms, the heavenly city can never be immanentized,9 be it by identifying it with the pilgrim church or by a total collapsing of the transcendental dimension in the form of the Christian Republic, or

Christendom.

No one, in my opinion, has understood the perpetual tension between religion and politics in modern, democratic societies, as well as Alexis de Tocqueville. In De la démocratie en Amérique, his masterpiece and one of the most important works on modern democracy ever written, Tocqueville tirelessly follows the consequences of this confrontation of planes: he welcomes democracy but immediately recognizes the many dangers lurking in its path; he then introduces, against the prevalent view, the thesis that Christianity is the best ally of democratic regimes. But he does not stop here: Christianity can mean

Protestantism just as well as Catholicism. Between the two versions of the same core belief in the person of

Jesus, Tocqueville watches the human drama: one of these renderings of the Christian message bolsters freedom but lacks authority, thus leading toward individualism; the other supports authority and equality of conditions, democracy’s very engine, but, given enough power, could lead to oppression and tyranny.

Tocqueville’s book is not a recipe: democracy is not just about mixing together some ingredients

(institutions),10 injecting them with freedom, and letting the system do the rest. Democracy is a dangerous experiment, maybe a salvific one, wherein the interplay of human passions, societal forces, and institutional design create an open-ended juggling game. Democracy is, moreover, incredibly demanding: without a strong citizenry eager to participate in the public arena, it quickly evolves into soft despotism, that is, into a political regime where chains may be discreet, but just as constraining.

In this last chapter I undertake an analysis of the Tocquevillean thesis—namely, the harmony between the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty—in order to unify the many discussions presented in this work. It is my contention that Joseph Ratzinger, Charles Taylor, and Alasdair MacIntyre, the three main

9 Cf. Lumen Gentium §13. 10 This is, in my opinion, one of the most important problems with political science today. The overemphasis on institutional analysis, completely disregarding what Rousseau and Tocqueville describe as “habits of the heart” or mores, leads to a false picture of democracy. Without mores, that is, without the set of fundamental, non-written convictions about social and political life that democracy instills in the human soul, an institutional framework can be deemed democratic in a society where democracy is death (i.e., soft despotism, inverted totalitarianism, etc.; see below).

239 thinkers I have dealt with, are indebted to the genius of Tocqueville.11 In the first section I analyze the problem of Tocqueville’s religious views, contending that, rather than a Deist or an advocate for civil religion,12 he was an anguished Catholic. The second section analyzes what Joshua Mitchell calls the

11 Ratzinger acknowledges: “de Tocqueville’s analysis in Democracy in America has always impressed me” (2006a, 51). He is indebted, for example, to Tocqueville’s insight on mores: “[Tocqueville] showed that the unwritten foundations are much more essential for the continued existence of this democracy than all written law” (2010a, 157; see also 2010b, 11). The idea that democracy has pre-political foundations, which Ratzinger develops on the basis of Tocqueville’s thought, was central in the Habermas-Ratzinger debate in 2004. As for Charles Taylor, the influence of Tocqueville in his thought is ubiquitous. In The Malaise of Modernity he mentions Tocqueville’s idea of “soft despotism” as one of the three malaises of modernity (1991, 9). In Sources of the Self, Taylor claims Tocqueville took the notion of public liberty “on a more sophisticated level (1989, 414), and discusses his critique of “instrumental societies,” which “both saps the will to maintain this freedom and at the same time undermines the local foci of self- rule on which freedom crucially depends” (1989, 502). In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor discusses, among many other topics, Tocqueville’s fears about democracy: “Tocqueville continually tempers his endorsement of democracy with the fear of a decline in freedom” (2004, 181). In Philosophical Arguments the shadow of Tocqueville looms large especially in the article “Invoking Civil Society” (1995, 204-224). As for A Secular Age, Tocqueville is mentioned regarding the need “to give our allegiance to more than one principle, and that those we essentially hold to are frequently in conflict,” (2007, 52); as well as regarding modern individualism (169), the reaction against the excision of the heroic dimension from human life (231, 319-320), and the dangers that threaten the democratic age (372). The case of MacIntyre is much more difficult. My contention is that, while there’s no mention in MacIntyre’s work of his indebtedness to Tocqueville, we can still discover at least three links between them. First, both Tocqueville and MacIntyre are Catholics with deep social worries. As discussed below, some sections of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America can be read as proto-Marxist critiques of capitalism. Second, there is in both a preoccupation with the disappearance of the pathos of distance by the normalization and dumbing-down of the human element (MacIntyre’s virtue politics is not far from Tocqueville’s praise of the aristocratic spirit). Third, both thinkers focus their attention on local politics. Thomas Hibbs, however, correctly identifies three differences between them in their treatment of local politics: “First, the townships were much more accommodating of certain kinds of economics than MacIntyre’s communities would be. Second, Tocqueville describes the citizens of the townships as transferring their allegiance from the local community to the nation, whereas the members of MacIntyre’s communities must see themselves in a state of undeclared war with the nation-state. Third, Tocqueville’s emphasis on the primacy of the township for the practice of self-government does not preclude reflection on, and taking a position about, issues of modern constitutions, national politics and so forth” (Hibbs 2004, 369, n.29). Notwithstanding these valid differences, my own view on MacIntyre— that is, the rejection of his perfectionism and the embracement of his utopianism of the present—is in my opinion more in line with Tocqueville’s thought. We could, thus, speak at least of affinity, if not indebtedness, of MacIntyre to Tocqueville. 12 My understanding of the meaning of “civil religion” is indebted to Augustine. In books IV and VI of The City of God we find his critique against civil religion. He analyzes Varro’s typology of theologies (cf. Scaevola’s typology in IV:27). Mythical theology belongs to the poets and is filled, in Varro’s words, with “many falsehoods which are contrary to the dignity and nature of immortal beings” (VI:5). Physical theology, which Augustine renames as “natural,” is the theology of the philosophers, about which Varro finds “nothing to condemn,” but which nonetheless he enclosed inside the walls of academia, preventing it from reaching people. Finally, civil theology, which is “that which the citizens in their towns, and especially the priests, should know and administer.” Augustine finds Varro guilty of dishonesty: in IV:31 Augustine depicts Varro as a closet monotheist, since he claimed that “the only men who have truly understood what God is are those who have believed Him to be the soul of the world.” Notwithstanding his conviction of the superiority of natural religion, Varro embraces civil religion for political reasons, suggesting that “there are many truths which it is not useful for the common people to know” (on the utility and even nobility of political lies, see Plato’s myth of metals in Republic 414c-415c; cf. Laws 663d. In his Laws, 664a, the Athenian stranger uses myths as “a great example for the lawgiver of how it is possible to persuade the souls of the young about anything else”). The climax of Varro’s contradiction occurs in VI:4: discussing the structure of one of Varro’s works, Augustine finds the reason the book deals first with human issues and only later with divine ones, in Varro’s claim: “Just as the painter exists before the picture and the builder before the building, so do cities precede the things instituted by cities.” This is an explicit admission of the human character of civil religion, which was caused, according to Augustine, by Varro’s fear of openly attacking a religion he knows to be false. This attack, Augustine continues in VI:10, was finally made by Seneca. Civil religion, then, is understood as a human endeavor designed to convince the people of some fundamental ideas that political power is unable to support. Augustine thus claims: “It certainly seems that this [the acceptance, common to mythical and civil religion, of divine anthropomorphism] occurred for no other reason than that supposedly prudent and wise men made it their business to deceive the people in matters of religion… For just as the demons cannot possess any but those whom they have falsely deceived, so also men who are princes—not, indeed, righteous princes, but men like the demons—have persuaded the people in the name of religion to accept as true those things which they knew to be false: they have done this in order to bind them more tightly, as it were, in civil society, so that they might likewise possess them as subjects (IV:32, emphasis mine). To conclude, Augustine opposes civil religion on two related grounds: first, civil religion is a human endeavor to use religious language for political purposes (cf. Rousseau: “Since… the legislator is incapable of using either force of reasoning, he must of necessity have recourse to an authority of a different order, which can compel without violence and persuade without convincing,” Social Contract, bk. II, ch. 7). Secondly, because of this, civil religion is openly false, since it is a human endeavor, and for that reason, not an authentic opening of that which transcends humanity. Civil religion is but a façade, a vulgar caricature of religion. Therefore, Christianity—and Tocqueville is no exception here—cannot be a civil religion. While the Christian must obey political authority (see Jeremiah 29:7, Romans 13:1-7), Christianity refuses to kneel before the state in worship: “It is precisely in its profane character that the state must be respected; it is required by the fact that man is essentially a social and political being… At the same time, this entails a limitation on the state. The state has its own sphere, within which it must remain… The refusal to adore the emperor and the refusal in general to worship the state are on the most fundamental level simply a rejection of the totalitarian state” (Ratzinger 2006b, 20). Christianity is called to obey the state, but the call is limited by the primacy of God: the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to adore the golden statue of King Nebuchadnezzar is a beautiful example of this limitation (Daniel 3:1-20). In the end, as it is portrayed in the Jesus-Pilate exchange, politics is unable to confront the question about truth. When politics is respectful of its own sphere, it lets itself be informed by the great religious traditions; when it oversteps, it attempts to present itself as truth in the form of an ersatz religion, to use Voegelin’s words. The solution is thus to accept the tension between the two levels of existence, not by radically separating them (which, as we have seen, is impossible in practice), but by placing human existence at this juncture.

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“Augustinian self” as the model to understand the Tocquevillean subject. In the third section I concentrate on Tocqueville’s analysis of the dangers present in any democratic regime and its importance in today’s world. Finally, in the last section I review Tocqueville’s solutions as well as their relationship with some of the most important topics of this work.

I

Doris Goldstein stresses that the task of establishing Tocqueville’s religious beliefs is not easy: “he was reticent, and rarely discussed personal matters, even with his family and closest friends.”13 Our task is not to scrutinize the soul of a man14 but rather to listen to what he has to say about his own experience with the fundamental questions of the purpose of life and transcendence.

Aristide Tessitore summarizes the answers given to this question in four main groups: (a) the

“dominant scholarly view,” which describes Tocqueville as a deist;15 (b) those who hold that Tocqueville remained a Catholic throughout his life;16 (c) those who deem Tocqueville as a “nonbelieving proponent of civil religion”;17 and (d) a middle position, held by Cynthia Hinckley, who maintains that Tocqueville suffered “the anguish of a believer.”18 Here I subscribe to Hinckley’s claim that, while Tocqueville’s life

“was plagued with religious doubt,” he was closer to Pascal than to religious skepticism or deism.19

13 Goldstein 1975, 1. 14 I follow here Tocqueville himself: “I do not know if all Americans have faith in their religion—for who can read the secrets of the heart?” (I.II.9:269). 15 See Goldstein 1975; Jardin 1988; Zunz and Kahan 2002. 16 Rédier 1925; Lukacs 1964. I think placing Lukacs in this group may be misleading. While it is undisputable that Lukacs thinks Tocqueville lived and died a Catholic—Lukacs would claim, in his introduction to the Tocqueville-Gobineau correspondence, that “his letters to Gobineau especially after 1852 indicate that he was then a believing Christian” (Tocqueville 1959, 25, emphasis added)—there are nuances, ignored by Tessitore, which place him closer to Hinckley. At the end of his article on Tocqueville’s last days, for example, Lukacs claims that “Tocqueville’s religious experiences were also very modern ones… Thus we must understand his earlier utterance ‘je crois mais je ne puis pratiquer’ as a contrast to the often widespread but also often superficial respect accorded to religion in democratic societies and democratic ages. In this sense the evidence of Tocqueville’s last days only confirms the evidence of his extraordinary moral introspection and his intellectual fastidiousness. They were the culmination of his life and of his beliefs which were those of a tormented Christian, and not merely those of an agnostic aristocrat respectful of the social and political functions of religion” (Lukacs 1964, 170, emphasis added). 17 Lively 1962; Zetterbaum 1967; Koritansky 1990/2010; Kessler 1994. 18 Hinckley 1990, 42-43, quoted by Tessitore in Zuckert 2017, 28. 19 Hinckley 1990, 42. I discard the interpretation of Tocqueville as a nonbeliever (a utilitarian who saw the benefits of civil religion) as an evidently false appreciation of his life. There’s no indication showing that he saw religion only as a political institution. And, conversely, the evidence about his struggle to come to terms with his Catholic backgroun is abundant. James Schliefer rejects the utilitarian thesis as well: “An emphasis on the functions of religion should not be interpreted as an assertion that Tocqueville’s treatment of religion was essentially utilitarian. He clearly recognized that religious faith was useful, but his argument went beyond that observation” (Schliefer in Zuckert 2017, 60).

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Two events in Tocqueville’s life are central for our discussion of his religious beliefs. The first one happened when he was sixteen and curiosity drew him to study the modern philosophers,20 whose works were eye-opening but at the same time filled him with great anxiety. In a letter to Madame Swetchine, written thirty-five years later of the incident, he confides:

All of a sudden I experienced the sensation people talk about who have been through an earthquake, when the ground shakes under their feet… I was seized by the blackest melancholy, then by an extreme disgust with life… Strong passions drew me out of this state of despair; they turned me away from the sight of these intellectual ruins and led me toward tangible objects. But still, from time to time, these feelings experienced in my early youth… take possession of me again. Then once more I see the world of ideas revolving and I am lost and bewildered in this universal motion that upsets and shakes all the truths on which I base my beliefs and my actions.21

There’s no doubt that his confrontation with philosophy struck a hard blow at Tocqueville’s childhood’s

Catholicism. From then on, his spiritual life resembled an aporia. But Tocqueville also states that, after the

“earthquake,” he managed to escape despair, bringing himself back to a situation wherein the basic truths on which he based his life, although often upset by that “universal motion,” still played a role. Tocqueville was, thus, no skeptic: doubt was rather a tortuous condition.22

The second moment refers to the circumstances of his death. John Lukacs relates that, on his deathbed, Tocqueville made confession and took communion in the company of the curé of Cannes, Abbé

Gabriel, and that he displayed a religiosity that astounded the sisters who assisted him.23 This picture was discredited by Gustave de Beaumont’s account of Tocqueville’s death. Beaumont, himself an atheist,

“succeeded in contributing to the impression that Tocqueville, too, was an unbeliever, that he had been, at best, a Christian but not a Catholic, and that his last religious acts were of little importance, since they had been undertaken out of respect for the wishes of Madame de Tocqueville.”24 Lukacs’ response is ad hominem: he questions the honesty of Beaumont who, as the editor of Tocqueville’s papers, was “very unscrupulous,” sometimes burning texts, in others cases tampering with them or even fabricating others.25

20 Three central influences of Tocqueville, as he confided to Louis de Kergorlay in a letter on November 10, 1836, were Pascal, , and Rousseau. See Mitchell 1995, 29, n.78. 21 Jardin 1988, 61. 22 According to Sheldon Wolin “[d]oubt became Tocqueville’s equivalent of hell. In Dante’s version hell had its circles of increasing gravity. For Tocqueville they were, in sequence, three: personal, political, and theoretical” (Wolin 2003, 81; cf. Beiner 2011, 251, n.9). 23 Lukacs 1964, 158. 24 Ibid., 160. 25 Ibid., 159.

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In Jardin’s biography of Tocqueville we learn that Beaumont indeed modified his original appraisal of Tocqueville’s death, being pushed, in Jardin’s opinion, by Madame de Tocqueville, herself a devout convert. Beaumont relates that, on his deathbed, Tocqueville refused confession on the basis that he lacked faith in the Catholic dogmas.26 Then, persuaded by his wife that belief was not a requirement for confession, but only a contrite heart, he accepted confession and took communion, which caused him great happiness and “created yet another bond between his dear wife and him, the only one lacking to make their union complete.”27 However, in his preface to Tocqueville’s Oeuvres et Correspondence, in 1860, Beaumont wrote: “Tocqueville’s end was as Christian as his life. People have spoken of conversion, and this is wrong; he did not have to convert, because there had never been the slightest trace of irreligion in him.”28 There is, then, an obvious slide from a description of Tocqueville as a nonbeliever who participates in the Catholic sacraments out of love for his wife, to one in which he is presented as a convinced believer.

Rather than trying to adjudicate between the two narrations of Tocqueville’s last days, we can look at the experience of the tension itself. Joseph Ratzinger illustrates the fragility of modern spirituality with the opening scene of Paul Claudel’s Soulier de Satin. A Jesuit missionary survives a shipwreck. His ship has been sunk by pirates and he has been lashed to a mast from the ship. Drifting in the ocean, he addresses

God:

Lord, I thank thee for bending me down like this. It sometimes happened that I found thy commands laborious and my will at a loss and jibbing at thy dispensation. But now I could not be bound to thee more closely than I am, and however violently my limbs move they cannot get one inch away from thee. So I really am fastened to the cross, but the cross on which I hang is not fastened to anything else. It drifts on the sea.29

Listening to Tocqueville’s anxiety and doubts conveys an odd sense of affinity: something in common seems at work both in Tocqueville’s tormented faith and in our present condition. For, does not his experience remind us of the tragedy of the human condition, namely, that our unquenchable thirst for meaning stumbles, once and again, with the shortcomings of our faculties; that the yearning for eternity and transcendence is always countered by our own mortality, which pulls us down to earth? This situation, of

26 “Don’t ever speak to me of confession—ever! Ever! No one will ever make me lie to myself and make a pretense of faith when I don’t have faith. I want to remain myself and not stoop to telling lies” (Jardin 1988, 529). 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 528. 29 Quoted in Ratzinger 2004, 43-44, emphasis added. 243 course, is not exclusive of believers: a quick review of postwar philosophy will convince us that the Second

World War obliterated our trust in the unlimited power of human reason, leaving us with a paranoid personality disorder that condemns us to keep looking over our shoulder to make sure our thoughts didn’t drag any hidden metaphysics along with them, since a full-blown metaphysical commitment in politics may let mayhem loose in a world in (perpetual?) crisis.

Faith is not a cure-all. It is rather an existential posture, a response to the question: “how am I to live the good life?” Tocqueville’s suffering, Hinckley points out, “was not the anguish of a skeptic trying to believe in God, but the anguish of a believer deprived by his Creator of the unwavering certitude that characterizes faith of the highest order.”30 Tocqueville’s doubt manifests a mature faith. And remembering that a mature faith cannot be achieved without some degree of doubt and anxiety is crucial in a time when believers feel themselves drifting in the open sea with no anchors, no buoys, and no compass.

That this is a more plausible explanation of Tocqueville’s beliefs can be illustrated by delving into

Tocqueville’s correspondence, which shows both that he never abandoned Catholicism but rather frequented the sacraments and defended the Catholic church against what he saw as doctrinal errors, and that in the course of his life he kept a critical attitude towards Catholicism.

Even though in his works Tocqueville limits himself to treating religion “from a purely human point of view” (II.I.5:410), he deems himself a “practicing Catholic” (I.II.9:272). In a letter to his mother he mentions, with the familiarity of one who narrates his daily routine, having attended Catholic mass.31 More important is Tocqueville’s memory about his father. In a letter to his friend Francisque de Corcelle, he movingly describes his father’s piety:

I used to observe in my father what I have never seen in any one else: religion presided over every action, and every minute of his life, and, without ever seeking to display itself, filled all his thoughts, influenced not only his belief, but modified and sanctified his whole character… Indeed, to me, the greatest proofs of religion have been the life and death of my poor father.32

30 Hinckley 1990, 43. Qualifying this statement, we may ask: Is it ever possible to achieve an “unwavering certitude” about God? Doesn’t the very idea of certitude cancel the very distance between Creator and creature? In any case, what good is faith when one has achieved an unwavering certitude? Cf. John 20:29: “You have believed becase you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” 31 “I take up my letter again, dear Mama, after returning from high mass at a Catholic Church five minutes from our residence” (Tocqueville 2010, 24). James T. Schliefer, however, informs us that Tocqueville attended not only Catholic services: “He also attended Roman Catholic, Unitarian, Quaker, Methodist, Shaker, and possibly Anglican religious services” (Schliefer in Zuckert 2017, 51). 32 Tocqueville 1862, 307.

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This admiration of a pious life helps us understand Hinckley’s suggestion that Tocqueville belonged to those who actively look for God without having found him.33 His suffering derives from his inability to fully embrace faith,34 which seems to force a comparison between himself—perhaps too-rational, too-modern, and all-too-human—and his father, who experienced faith as a second nature. The contrast couldn’t be more dramatic: the father’s spirituality is joyful and intense, in deep harmony with his whole self; the son’s spirituality unfolded in a time of world-crisis, and is but a reflection of its time, a spirituality struggling with the tension between the simplicity of the religious experience lived at home and the complexity of the rational search for truth.

Tocqueville’s care for Catholicism is also found in his exchange with his friends. He writes to

Gobineau: “I confess that the reading of your book left doubts in me about the solidity of your faith.”35 In a similar way, discussing a work of Henry Reeve, his English translator, Tocqueville claims: “I have read, indeed studied, with much interest and instruction, your article on the Austrian Concordat. You have put into it, knowingly or not, an anti-catholic spirit, which is a symptom of our times.”36

Tocqueville also shares his religious convictions with his friends. In a letter to Francisque de

Corcelle, in 1851, he confides: “I desire as ardently as you do to see religion reinstated in our country”; and, in 1853, he affirms: “I am quite of your opinion as to the impertinence of the ‘Progressive Catholicism.’ It is detestable, let alone its doctrines. A religion must be absolutely true or false.”37 As for his views on deism,

Tocqueville wrote to his cousin, Louis de Kergorlay: “Picture if you will concentric circles around a fixed point, which is the Catholic faith; with each successive circle, religion draws that much closer to pure deism.”38

33 Hinckley 1990, 43. Cf. Pascal, Pensées, §257. 34 Notice that here I am talking about faith and not, as Hinckley does, of “certitude.” Faith does not provide us with certitude but transposes us in relation to divinity. The world around us changes because it is understood differently, gaining meaning. Here we are not in the realm of reason but of faith, which opens the way for the transcendent by adding, or acknowledging the existence of another layer of reality beyond biological life. 35 Tocqueville 1959, 306. Some lines after, Tocqueville explains this affirmation: “If I spoke badly… about the devout, it is only because I am revolted every day when I see petty people in their gossipy circles with their foolish affairs who are capable of every sort of despicable and violent action talking devoutly of their holy religion. I am always tempted to shout at them: ‘Rather than be Christians of this kind, be pagans with pure conduct, proud of your soul and with clean hands!’” (Ibid.). 36 Tocqueville 1862, 337. 37 Letters to Francisque de Corcelle, September 13, 1851 and December 31, 1853. In Tocqueville 1862, 171, 244. 38 Tocqueville 2010, 89. The relationship between Catholicism and Protestantism, moreover, is included in this image of concentric circles. For Tocqueville, Catholicism is undoubtedly truer than Protestantism, which he fears might slide toward atheism: “For the selfsame spirit that in Luther’s day had led several million Catholics to break away from the mother church incited others, year by year, to go still further and to repudiate Christianity altogether; thus after heresy came unbelief” (Tocqueville 1955, 148).

245

Nevertheless, Tocqueville was not an apologist. He harbored doubts about the direction religion would take. He saw an aristocratic, monarchic tendency in Catholicism, which provided doctrinal unity but tended to intolerance and the silencing of rationality and liberty in the name of sound orthodoxy. He confessed to Kergorlay: “[I] suspect that they [Catholics] would start persecuting if they had the upper hand.”39 And to Corcelle, he confided: “Catholicism, I am afraid, will never adopt the new society. It will never forget the position it had in the old one and every time that [it] is given some powers, it will hasten to abuse them.”40 On the other extreme, he deemed deism as more welcoming to freedom and rationality, but also as a watered-down religion not suitable for most people: “the populace, unless it undergoes some radical transformation, will conceive this natural religion to be merely the absence of belief in the afterlife and fall plumb into a doctrine based on self-interest.”41

It seems justified to suggest that Tocqueville lived his life looking for the Christian God and practicing, at least to some extent, Catholicism.42 Although pierced by doubt, he never stopped bringing forward his religious views in his social and political analyses. Doubt is not an epistemological failure, but an existential necessity exacerbated by modern rationality.

II

In this work I have suggested that Catholicism can keep the tension between the human person and the community without trying to solve it. I propose to follow this logic in our study of Tocqueville, starting from the individual and moving upwards to more complex human structures.43 This procedure mirrors, at the same time, a fundamental tension in Tocqueville’s thought: on the one hand, he is constantly worried about the person being sucked into the anonymity of the mass; on the other hand, without political life this

39 Ibid., 90. 40 Quoted by Schliefer in Zuckert 2017, 61. 41 Ibid., 92. 42 Joshua Mitchell holds a similar view. In discussing the analogy between belief and social and political theory he asserts that “Tocqueville’s Catholicism, fragile though it may be, cannot be ignored here!” (1995, 86). In a Schmittian tone, he claims that: “It would be correct, though somewhat abstruse, to say at the outset here that Tocqueville’s social theory, like Catholicism, requires the mediation of the saints! Yet this is the case. Associations, as it turns out, are the functional equivalent of mediators who stand between the Sovereign and the all who are beneath him” (Ibid., 120). See other instances of Tocqueville’s Catholicism in pages 102 and 154. 43 Although this may sound as an Aristotelian characterization of political life, we must acknowledge the distance between Tocqueville and Aristotle. Mitchell observes that “[u]nlike Aristotle, for whom participation in the polis offers a site at which men may be who they are qua human… for Tocqueville, politics offers a forum that may draw the self out of its self-enclosed world and unto the domain of direct hands-on experience that is so necessary for the success of democracy” (Mitchell 1995, 114).

246 anonymity of the individual can never be overcome. It seems, then, that in order to be independent individuals we must first learn how to be citizens.

This section analyzes Tocqueville’s fears about democracy.44 First, I review his anthropology in order to discover the passions that govern human behavior; then I analyze the notion of “equality” and the dangers the excess of it poses to democratic regimes; finally, I offer some brief remarks about the contemporary application of Tocqueville’s thoughts on the malaise of democracy.

[1] Tocqueville’s mind is a complex system wherein the interplay of opposite forces permanently threatens its equilibrium. Imagine a structure built by the contraposition of many balances, where the weight put on one of them triggers a movement that causes new counterweights, reigniting the system over and over again.45 Two axes dominate this system: the two immoderate passions that inhabit the human heart, which Joshua Mitchell labels the “Augustinian self,” and the juxtaposition of equality and liberty. The next two subsections deal with each axis respectively.

Mitchell defines the Augustinian self as

the kind of self that is prone to move in two opposite directions: either inward, in which case it tends to get wholly shut up within itself and abandon the world; or outward, in which case it tends to be restive, overly active, and lost amid the world, searching at a frenzied pace for a satisfaction it can never wholly find there. Neither of these two opposing tendencies can bring happiness in its wake; and they are liable to succeed one another in turns as the vacuity of each is dimly intuited.46

The retreat into private life is what Tocqueville calls individualism, “a calm and considered feeling which disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of his fellows and withdraw into the circle of family and friends; with this little society formed to his taste, he gladly leaves the greater society to look after itself”

(II.II.2:477).47 Individualism is a modern phenomenon made possible by what Taylor calls the reaffirmation of ordinary life. When the distinction between “higher” and “lower” forms of life was abolished by the

44 I am not attempting here a complete analysis of Tocqueville’s works, but only to highlight some essential aspects by means of which to organize the notion of Catholic political action in contemporary democracies. My presentation of Tocqueville is, therefore, necessarily fragmentary. Far from trying to say anything new about Tocqueville, moreover, I am subscribing here to Joshua Mitchell’s interpretation of his thought. 45 Mitchell explains this dynamic in the following way: “The character formed in one arena of life affects the dispositions, capacities, and thoughts exhibited in another. While there may be a logical separation between the two spheres, family and polity, there is a real-life spillover; habits of thought produced in one domain dispose persons to behave in certain ways in another domain” (Mitchell 1995, 24). 46 Mitchell 1995, 3. 47 Individualism is fueled by the erosion of traditional ties: “For, in a community in which the ties of family, of caste, of class, and craft fraternities no longer exist people are far too much disposed to think exclusively of their own interests, to become self-seekers practicing a narrow individualism and caring nothing for the public good” (Tocqueville 1955, xiii). 247

Protestant demotion of priesthood from a sacrament to an office the tenure of which is contingent on the community of believers’ will, the dignity of family life and work appreciated. Being a good father or mother, a good husband or wife, a hardworking employee, became a path to a holy life. It seemed possible at that time to concentrate ourselves in our private life and be doing God’s will. It is important to note, however, that while the affirmation of ordinary life was a necessary step towards the dismantling of Christendom and the reinvigoration of the dignity of the laity in the church, the change didn’t come without dangers.

When individuals ignore public life and focus exclusively on their private affairs, a vacuum of power is created—since democracy’s fundamental dogma is that of popular sovereignty, and sovereignty only works properly when citizens are public-spirited and civic-minded. This vacuum can only be filled by the government, with the acquiescence of the citizens. The reason for this is that while individualists are not willing to engage in public action, they still want to feel themselves safe and protected.48 Thus, a Hobbesian fear lurks in the citizens’ minds even when they willingly turn their backs on public life.

Our contemporaries are ever a prey to two conflicting passions: they feel the need of guidance, and they long to stay free. Unable to wipe out these two contradictory instincts, they try to satisfy them both together. Their imagination conceives a government which is unitary, protective, and all-powerful, but elected by the people. Centralization is combined with the sovereignty of the people. That gives them a chance to relax (II.IV.6:667).

At the antipodes of the retreat from the world we find the feverish pursuit of material pleasures, a restless activity in the world. In the United States, restlessness was a consequence of the Puritan doctrine of predestination combined with a high social mobility. By dislocating faith and works and embracing a radical

Augustinianism that refused to allow a place for the merits of human action enlightened by grace, Protestants were confronted with the problem of predestination. Calvin had asserted on this matter that “[God] does not indiscriminately adopt all into the hope of salvation but gives to some what he denies to others.”49 However, he rejected any visible sign of divine predestination.50 English Puritans, on the contrary, “wished to trace the natural history of conversion in order to help men discover their prospects of salvation; and the result of

48 The reduction of popular sovereignty to the election of a government in order to protect the lives and property of the individuals takes us back to Locke’s political doctrine. According to him, “[t]he great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property” (Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ch. IX, §124). Locke’s government appears, when seen from this perspective, as the best one suited for an individualistic, liberal society. 49 Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, vol. 2, bk. 3, ch. 21, 921. 50 “The fruits of election are in no respect visible in any outward advantage of prosperity enjoyed in this life, where impiety prospers and the pious are forced to bear a cross. The blessing of the elect lies rather in their assurance of God’s sufficiency and unfailing protection amid their afflictions, and in the happy anticipation of the life to come.” (Ibid., Introduction, lix).

248 their studies was to establish a morphology of conversion, in which each stage could be distinguished from the next, so that a man could check his eternal condition by a set of temporal and recognizable signs.”51

A consequence of the Puritan version of predestination was an overemphasis on the importance of labor, which eventually became a sign of divine favor. Labor was transformed into a sacrament,52 insofar as it functioned as a visible sign of divine grace, something that not only distinguished but also elevated the human being above the mere pursuit of wealth.

In the United States, the counterpart of the doctrine of predestination was a higher social mobility caused by the introduction of inheritance laws (cf. I.I.3:44-45). Tocqueville claimed: “I know no other country where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts or where stronger scorn is expressed for the theory of permanent equality of property. But wealth circulates there with incredible rapidity, and experience shows that two successive generations seldom enjoy its favors” (I.I.3:47). It was thus the combination of a theological insight and a particular social context that threw individuals into a feverish activity that reconciliated the yearning for eternal salvation and the day-to-day struggle to survive.

But, what happens when individuals throw themselves eagerly into labor with the goal of making fortune as quickly as possible?53 The exclusive contentment with material pleasures, Tocqueville affirms, reduces human beings to animality: “If men ever came to be content with physical things only, it seems likely that they would gradually lose the art of producing them and would end up by enjoying them without discernment and without improvement, like animals” (II.II.16:518). At the same time, the excessive care for work and industry leads to inequality. In a chapter Marx could have very well written (II.II.20), Tocqueville criticizes how big capital industry works:

In the midst of universal movement, he is stuck immobile. As the principle of the division of labor is ever more completely applied, the workman becomes weaker, more limited, and more dependent. The craft improves, the craftsman slips back… While the workman confines his intelligence more and more to studying one single detail, the master daily embraces a vast field in his vision, and his mind expands as fast as the other’s contracts… The former becomes more and more like the administrator of a huge empire, and the latter more like a brute (II.II.20:529).

51 Morgan 1965, 66, emphasis added. 52 These ideas are close with the Pelagian heresy, according to which individuals can obtain salvation without the mediation of grace, that is, by means of their own just actions. The heresy was attacked by Augustine. 53 Tocqueville explains American’s preference for industry over agriculture as a logical consequence of the high social mobility in the country: “To cultivate the ground promises an almost certain reward for his efforts, but a slow one. Agriculture only suits the wealthy, who already have a great superfluity, or the poor, who only want to live.” This is why the eyes of Americans are turned to trade and industry, “for these seem the quickest and best means of getting rich” (II.II.19:524-525). 249

In short, the immoderate attention to work and wealth, which is one of the disordered passions of the

Augustinian self, leads to brutishness and the destruction of the very condition of possibility of a democratic regime, namely, the equality of conditions.

These two passions, restiveness and self-enclosure, are for Augustine the signs of a misguided love for the earthly city. Mitchell explains that:

The avowed proclamation, of course, is that the world is sufficient unto itself, that time does not need Eternity, that the light of worldly happiness cannot be overwhelmed by the void. Yet melancholy lurks in the shadow of alacrity; the burden of time unfilled intervenes. Silenced despair forever intercedes.54

Immoderation in the human heart, therefore, is the name of the spectacle of the human drama described in the previous section: we yearn for meaning and truth in a world which seems to dodge all our attempts to grasp something solid. These immoderate appetites appear, in Augustine’s account, at the very beginning of human existence: they are nothing but different ways of breaking ourselves free from our contingency.

The book of Genesis describes this temptation as the desire to become God. Augustine’s solution—the gist of which is preserved by Tocqueville—is that liberation is possible only by an act of submission.55 For

Tocqueville absolute autonomy, that is, complete independence, is a dangerous thing to ask for. Human beings will submit one way or another: either they will run to their chains in order to escape the anxiety produced by perpetual motion56 (recall Tocqueville’s abhorrence of the earthquake which made the floor beneath his feet tremble) or they will counteract both inwardness and restiveness by embracing the salutary effects of civic life informed, in the form of mores, by religion.

[2] At the very end of De la démocratie en Amérique, Tocqueville confesses to be “full of fears and of hopes” (II.IV.8:679). A revolution was transforming social conditions in Europe and abroad, to the point

54 Mitchell 1995, 51. 55 The great paradox, the great scandal of Christianity, is not the necessity to humble ourselves before God—which all monotheistic religions accept. The radicalism of Christianity is that God humbled himself in order to show human beings the path to follow. In doing that, service to others is exalted while human power and human wisdom (which are but different versions of the same desire to be like God) are abashed (see Luke 14:8-11; John 13:12-16). 56 Tocqueville has in mind Rousseau’s analysis of voluntary servitude. When the rich came up with the idea of the corrupt civil society, designed to protect their interests while oppressing the poor, Rousseau claims that the poor “all ran to chain themselves, in the belief that they secured their liberty” (Second Discourse, part II). For Tocqueville, however, the corrupt civil society is soft despotism, the corruption of democracy.

250 where it was impossible to know what would remain and what would be wiped away from the old regime.

He admired democracy but painfully regretted the loss of that pathos of distance Nietzsche thought was responsible for all that is great and elevated in the world.57 However sad this loss of greatness was,

Tocqueville recognized that “[e]quality may be less elevated, but it is more just, and in its justice lies its greatness and beauty” (II.IV.8:678).58 The birth of modern democracy is, for Tocqueville, nothing less than a Providential design. Its survival, however, depends on how well human beings maintain the balances between equality and liberty, private and public interest, authority and obedience.

Tocqueville seems to be following Aristotle’s ethics59 when discussing the malaise of democracy.

Equality, the former claims, turns into vice when pushed to its extremes, either by scarcity or excess:

Two tendencies in fact result from equality; the one first leads men directly to independence and could suddenly push them right over into anarchy; the other, by a more roundabout and secret but also more certain road, leads them to servitude (II.IV.1:643).60

The passion for equality leads human beings to detest the very thought of following another human being.

This, because equality is not about material wealth61 but is based on the idea that the person next to me is not better suited than me to provide answers about how to live a good life. This is “the theory of equality

57 “Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be so again and again—a society that believes in the long ladder of an order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other. Without that pathos of distance which grows out of the ingrained difference between strata… that other mysterious pathos could not have grown up either―the craving for an ever new widening of distances within the soul itself, the development of ever higher, rarer, more remote, further- stretching, more comprehensive states―in brief, simply the enhancement of the type ‘man,’ the continual ‘self-overcoming of man,’ to use a moral formula in a supra-moral sense” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §257). What pains Tocqueville is precisely that tendency to shrink all distances: “Almost all extremes are softened and blunted. Almost all salient characteristics are obliterated to make room for something average, less high and less low, less brilliant and less dim, than what the world had before” (II.IV.8:678; cf. I.I.3:48; I.I.5:53; I.II.6:226; II.IV.7:675; II.II8:498; II.III.14:582; and II.IV.7:675). 58 Cf. Beiner 2018, 8-9. While Beiner is right in pointing out Tocqueville’s rejection of the aristocratic principle in favor of equality as a more just ideal, it seems to me that he loses a crucial nuance in the Tocquevillean project, namely, his idea that democracy will never work without some degree of authority—and the Catholic church is his first candidate. So, for Tocqueville, while democracy is unthinkable without equality of conditions, this does not mean the abolition of all authority. Beiner’s upholding of the Protestant idea that “judgment regarding the ultimate questions of human existence could repose on their own responsibility rather than being appropriated by supposed spiritual elites” betrays an evident disconnection with Tocqueville’s thought. 59 In Aristotle’s words: “there is an excess, a deficiency and a mean in actions. Virtue is concerned with feelings and actions, in which excess and deficiency constitute misses of the mark, while the mean is praised and on target, both of which are characteristics of virtue. Virtue, then, is a kind of mean, at least in the sense that it is the sort of thing that is able to hit a mean” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. II, ch. 6, 1106b). 60 A similar preoccupation inspired a later book of Tocqueville’s, L’Ancien Régime et la Revolution, published in 1856. In the foreword, he advances the goal of drawing attention “to the events, mistakes, misjudgments which led these selfsame Frenchmen [the makers of the Revolution] to abandon their original ideal and, turning their backs on freedom, to acquiesce in an equality of servitude under the master of all Europe” (Tocqueville 1955, xi). 61 Tocqueville found material equality as a chief characteristic of the first colonies (I.I.2:37). Its effect on material life is twofold. First, since equality was caused by the laws on inheritance (I.I.3:44-45), democratic equality abolished the aristocratic paternalistic hierarchy which promoted tight familial order as well as attachment to the land. This in turn modified family relations, to the point where “the natural bond grows tighter as the social link loosens” (II.III.8:561-563). At the same time, and given the abolition of the old paternalistic structure, the acquisition and loss of fortunes acquire a dynamism not known in the aristocratic world: “wealth circulates there with incredible rapidity, and experience shows that two successive generations seldom enjoy its favors” (I.I.3:47). This fragility makes democratic citizens more inclined to help others in need, since “experience is not slow to teach them that although they may not usually need the help of others, a moment will almost always arrive when they cannot do without it” (II.III.4:546).

251 applied to brains” (I.II.7:228). From equality of conditions follows the desire to be our own masters, to be ruled by no one, and to be independent of others. When this desire is taken to the extreme, however, the passion for equality can overflow the boundaries of communal life, pushing towards anarchy. 62

Tocqueville quickly qualifies this danger as uncommon in democratic regimes. The reason why anarchy is seldom a problem for democracy is that this political regime tends to enfeeble rather than empower its citizens. The overthrowing of all political power, which is the precondition for achieving absolute equality,63 demands tremendous energy from individuals, an energy rarely present in democratic regimes. A powerful dialectic does emerge: our efforts to be equal—which ultimately are all about dismissing as unjust any attempt to bring the pathos of distance back, thus empowering the individual—end up divesting us of any power, reducing us to a number, the umpteenth element in a series of faceless, powerless repetitions of a mold:

As conditions become more equal, each individual becomes more like his fellows, weaker, and smaller, and the habit grows of ceasing to think about the citizens and considering only the people. Individuals are forgotten, and the species alone counts (II.I.7:417).

In short, in order to free ourselves from the yoke of a master we end up being crushed by the anonymous weight of the mass. It is precisely its anonymous character, the impossibility of identifying it in any specific instance, what makes the mass ubiquitous and omnipotent.

A contemporary of Tocqueville—one who shared with him a premature death64—Søren

Kierkegaard, provides us with a bleak diagnosis of the pernicious effects of equality upon society.

Kierkegaard too saw equality as the main force of his age—“the dialectic of the present age tends towards equality”—and he also found it worrisome, for “its most logical—though mistaken—fulfillment, is

62 Here, Tocqueville seems to be following Hegel’s description of the negative moment of the will, for which “every limitation, every content, whether present immediately through nature, through needs, desires, and drives, or given and determined in some other way, is dissolved; this is the limitless infinity of absolute abstraction or universality, the pure thinking of oneself.” This negative freedom, Hegel continues, “if it turns to actuality, it becomes in the realm of both politics and religion the fanaticism of destruction, demolishing the whole existing social order, eliminating all individuals regarded as suspect by a given order, and annihilating any organization which attempts to rise up anew. Only in destroying something does this negative will have a feeling of its own existence” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §5). 63 Bakunin sees anarchy as the only possible way to reconcile freedom and equality. By freedom, which has to be unconditional, he means “that freedom of the individual which, instead of stopping far from the freedom of others as before a frontier, sees on the contrary the cementing and the expansion into the infinity of its own free will, the unlimited freedom of the individual through the freedom of all; freedom through solidarity, freedom in equality; the freedom which triumphs over brute force and over the principle of authoritarianism, the ideal expression of that force which, after the destruction of all terrestrial and heavenly idols, will find and organize a new world of undivided mankind upon the ruins of all churches and States” (Bakunin 1973, viii). As we will see below, Tocqueville’s answer is at the antipodes of Bakunin’s. According to the former, in order to keep a healthy tension between equality and freedom we need associations able to mediate between the isolated individual and the government’s tendency to centralization. 64 Tocqueville was born in 1805 and died in 1859 at the age of 53; Kierkegaard was born in 1813 and died in 1855, at the age of 42.

252 leveling.”65 This leveling, this normalization that obliterates human greatness by dumbing-down the human element, cancels the individual and leaves her at the mercy of the “public”:

The public is a host, more numerous than all the peoples together, but it is a body which can never be reviewed, it cannot even be represented, because it is an abstraction. The Press is an abstraction… which in conjunction with the passionless and reflective character of the age produces that abstract phantom: a public which in its turn is really the levelling power… The fewer ideas there are at any time, the more indolent and exhausted by bursts of enthusiasm will it be; nevertheless, if we imagine the Press growing weaker and weaker because no events or ideas catch hold of the age, the more easily will the process of levelling become a harmful pleasure, a form of sensual intoxication which flames up for a moment, simply making the evil worse and the conditions of salvation more difficult and the probability of decline more certain.66

Kierkegaard, a staunch defender of the individual against the crowd, joins together the press and public opinion in a very pessimistic fashion. He saw in his age only mediocrity and softness, which he characterized as a lack of spirit. His age—in many ways the prelude to our age—was one of advertisement and publicity, one wherein the individual was discouraged to ever engage politically or socially, an age that convinced the individual that “the shrewdest thing of all is to do nothing.”67

Now, this smallness and powerlessness of the democratic individual is produced by the combination of two factors. The first is the fact that, in democracy, where equality reigns, the relative political weight of a single individual is almost insignificant. Here we see Claudel’s castaway without the cross, that is, a human being in the social ocean, unable to utter a word because the deafening clamor of the mass, like the roaring of boiling waves, prevents anything else from being heard. This phenomenon Tocqueville describes as the omnipotence of the majority.

What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny. When a man or a party suffers an injustice in the United States, to whom can he turn? To public opinion? That is what forms the majority. To the legislative body? It represents the majority and obeys it blindly. To the executive power? It is appointed by the majority and serves as its passive instrument. To the police? They are nothing but the majority under arms. A jury? The jury is the majority vested with the right to pronounce judgment; even the judges in certain states are elected by the majority. So, however iniquitous or unreasonable the measure which hurts you, you must submit (I.II.7:233).

65 Kierkegaard 1962, 52. 66 Ibid., 60-64. 67 Ibid., 34. In our days, a similar phenomenon is described by Zeynep Tufekci: “In the network public sphere, the goal of the powerful often is not to convince people of the truth of a particular narrative or to block a particular piece of information from getting out (that is interestingly difficult), but to produce resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment among the people” (quoted in Kakutani 2018, 143). 253

The second factor has to do with the psychological consequences of the weakness of the individual.

Deprived of a personal sovereign, democratic power dwells in all. However, this identification of sovereignty and the people calls for a mechanism capable of avoiding the atomization of power—what

Rousseau calls the “general will” in contrast with the “will of all.” In other words, if power is to remain effective, a solution must be found that prevents power from being divided into as many individuals as there are, thus becoming sterile. Tocqueville sees here a theologico-political device at work. In the United States, he explains, “[t]he people reign over American political world as God rules over the universe. It is the cause and the end of all things; everything rises out of it and is absorbed back into it” (I.I.4:53). Tocqueville’s use of religious language serves a double purpose: first, it enables him to conceptualize the kind of power he sees operating in democratic soil; and second, it helps him to describe a force that is at the same time present and absent, visible and completely obscured. The “sovereign people” is an abstraction, a locus of power the effects of which are everywhere but the identity of which is permanently hidden. Therefore, while we can always feel its immense power, its influence over us, we can never confront it face to face.68 Power belongs to everyone, and for that very reason, to no one.69 Recall the consecration of the revolutionary people described by Michelet at the beginning of the first chapter: what is raised on the republican altar is “the people,” not a bunch of individuals. The mutilated bodies embellish the altar upon which the Revolution is anointed, but they are no more than momentary receptacles, vessels infused with the popular spirit. The real subject, always present and absent, is the “people.”

The tyrannical potential of the majority is felt especially in public opinion. It pervades everything with an authoritative voice. It is through the authority of public opinion that mores are settled and pervade every aspect of life.70 The individual, enfeebled by the sheer number of her equals, is compelled, not by physical force but by means of a gentler, subtler force, to acquiesce with the will of the majority.

68 A difference between Rousseau and Tocqueville is that Rousseau thinks a disproportionately large territory or population leads to the destruction of the body politic (see On the Social Contract, bk. II, ch. 9) while Tocqueville is following the modern solution for republican government in a large territory defended by James Madison in his Federalist #10. This is helpful to explain Tocqueville’s worry about the problems the dogma of sovereignty may cause. The bigger the territory and population, the more abstract the notion of the “people” becomes. 69 “In a democracy… no one has authority by virtue of who he or she is; indeed it is almost correct to say that no one has authority because everyone is no one. This absence of authority, conjoined with the fact that ‘when social conditions are equal every man tends to live apart, centered in himself and forgetful of the public,’ [II.III.21:614] makes it especially difficult to draw the self out, to forge links with others” (Mitchell 1995, 125). 70 For example, Tocqueville mentions the apparent contradiction between the liberty that young women enjoy in the United States—“Long before the young American woman has reached marriageable age, the process of freeing her from her mother’s care has started stage by stage” (II.III.9:565)—and the strict control it applies on the married one. Tocqueville recognizes that “[w]hile there is less constraint on girls there than

254

The nearer men are to a common level of uniformity, the less they are inclined to believe blindly in any man or any class. But they are readier to trust the mass, and public opinion becomes more and more mistress of the world (II.I.2:399).

Public opinion’s influence is felt, therefore, not as physical coercion, but as a psychological weakening of my will, so that when my opinions clash with the majoritarian consensus, I prefer to remain silent or even to adopt the majority’s opinion.71 Anarchy, which requires a radical break from custom, is therefore not the fatal danger of democracy. What threatens democracy is rather the dissolution of the individual into the mass, the becoming anonymous of the human person.

Three centuries before Tocqueville, Etiénne de La Boétie—yet another thinker who suffered a premature death72—discussed a phenomenon he called “voluntary servitude.” Perhaps the most interesting thing about La Boétie’s work is the psychology behind it. The study begins by asking how is it conceivable for so many people to live under the yoke of a tyrant “who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him.”73 Instead of digging for the mechanisms of coercion at the tyrant’s hand, La Boétie focuses on the missing power of the oppressed:

Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing: there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude.74

anywhere else, a wife submits to stricter obligations” (II.III.10). Far from being contradictory, what we see is a pedagogical project by which women are trained to be the guardians of mores. It is useful to remember that the idea of women as the guardians of more was taken from Rousseau. In his address to the Republic of Geneva, which inaugurates his second Discourse, he praises women: “Therefore always be what you are, the chaste guardians of mores and the gentle bonds of peace, and continue to assert on every occasion the rights of the heart and of nature for the benefit of duty and virtue.” 71 In his seminal work on public opinion, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann says that “Tocqueville was the first discerning observer of the spiral of silence at work” (Noelle-Neumann 1984, 88). According to her: “The fear of isolation seems to be the force that sets the spiral of silence in motion. To run with the pack is a relatively happy state of affairs; but if you can’t, because you won’t share publicly in what seems to be a universally acclaimed conviction, you can at least remain silent, as a second choice, so that others can put up with you” (Ibid., 6). The spiral of silence refers to the process by which individuals, fearful of repression or ostracism, restrain themselves from externalizing their true opinions when confronted with what they see as a majoritarian view, thus making the majoritarian view “appear to be stronger than it really was and the other view weaker.” This is what Tocqueville had in mind when he wrote: “I know no country in which, speaking generally, there is less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion than in America” (I.II.7:235). 72 La Boétie was born in 1530 and died in 1563, when he was only 32 years old. 73 La Boétie 1975, 46. 74 Ibid., 50. Rousseau agrees with La Boétie: “the establishment of tyranny was voluntary” (Second Discourse, Part II).

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Two things contribute to voluntary servitude: custom and fear. The first one combats natural equality, imposing upon men and women a yoke of servitude until, eventually, they become accustomed to it.75 The second one triggers our natural survival instinct, for “people easily become cowardly and submissive under tyrants.”76

La Boétie is committed to scrutinizing the human heart in order to find the springs that govern human sociability. When we transpose his analysis to Tocqueville’s world, we find a surprising resemblance: the enemy is a human creation that, for some reason, has escaped from their creators’ control.

Its oppressive power, moreover, had been voluntarily transferred from the victims to the victimizer, but it remains a power that can be resisted—especially in democracies. However, an important difference emerges: in Tocqueville’s work the tyrant, the enemy, has become one that I am and fail to be, one I belong to and which, at the same time, bends me to its will. Our feelings towards this new master, however, remain unchanged: custom has evolved into public opinion, the silencing voice of the majority; and the fear of a visible oppressor has become the fear of isolation and social exile. In the end, however, La Boétie’s solution remains: escaping the yoke is as simple as wanting to be free. Tocqueville knows that the fall of the last king—even one strangled with the entrails of the last priest—does not mean the end of submission, oppression, and tyranny.77

To summarize: The process by which individuals are systematically and increasingly being silenced by a majority opens the way for a new kind of despotism. This is, for Tocqueville, the real danger democracy faces. When citizens abandon the public sphere, convinced of their own feebleness and impotence, the anxiety about peace and order that democratic societies need increases. The enfeebled citizen quickly allows the government to seize more power.78 This tendency to concede too much power to the government is strengthened by the very passion for equality, which is “ardent, insatiable, eternal, and invincible.” When

75 “It is incredible how as soon as a people becomes subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and so willingly that one is led to say, on beholding such a situation, that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement” (La Boétie 1975, 60). Rousseau follows La Boétie when he affirms that “[f]orce has produced the first slaves; their cowardice has perpetuated them” (On the Social Contract, bk. II, ch. 2). 76 La Boétie 1975, 67. 77 John Stuart Mill, among many others, will retrieve this idea in On Liberty, warning about the mistaken thought that republican government means the end of our problems and the beginning of an ideal society. The fact of oppression remains even when the face of the tyrant changes. 78 “Love of public peace is often the only political passion which they retain, and it alone becomes more active and powerful as all the others fade and die. This naturally disposes the citizens constantly to give the central government new powers, or to let it take them, for it alone seems both anxious and able to defend them from anarchy by defending itself” (II.IV.3:647).

256 forced to make a decision, the democratic citizen always leans toward equality: “They want equality in freedom, and if they cannot have that, they still want equality in slavery” (II.II.1:476).79

[3] That equality of conditions is the irresistible tendency of the modern world was, for Tocqueville, obvious. It was part of Providence’s design.80 What was less obvious was the direction this social state would take: here and there we find Tocqueville filled with anxiety about the future, because both servitude and freedom appear as possible outcomes of the democratic experiment. This implies that Providence always leaves space for human action; world history is thus not predestined but open to human creativity.

Despite this uncertainty, Tocqueville saw a constant tendency in human relations: “All the ties of race, class, and country are relaxed. The great bond of humanity is drawn tighter” (II.IV.8:678).81

This remained, to be sure, a strong tendency in the West from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Liberal democracy’s presence in the West grew steadily, bringing countries closer and promoting, perhaps more than ever, the idea of the fundamental unity of humanity, even when the disappointments and horrors of the first half of the twentieth century challenged the democratic experiment. At the end of that century, John Ikenberry’s thesis still made some sense: from 1945 on, he said, “the leading state has resorted to institutional strategies as mechanisms to establish restraints on indiscriminate and arbitrary state power and ‘lock in’ a favorable and durable postwar order.”82 However, that world entered into a period of crisis

79 Mitchell notes here a Nietzschean idea: “the age of equality, of democracy, has as its inner secret the ethic of resentment. Slave morality (Nietzsche), the love of equality (Tocqueville), amour propre (Rousseau): however this is understood, a secret force that the modern soul would not wish to avow is the real engine of history” (Mitchell 1995, 108). Rousseau claims that “consuming ambition, the zeal for raising the relative level of his fortune, less out of real need than in order to put himself above others, inspires in all men a wicked tendency to harm one another, a secret jealousy all the more dangerous because, in order to strike its blow in greater safety, it often wears the mask of benevolence,” and elsewhere: “citizens allow themselves to be oppressed only insofar as they are driven by blind ambition; and looking more below than above them, domination becomes more dear to them than independence, and they consent to wear chains in order to be able to give them in turn to others.” (Second Discourse, Part II). 80 It is telling that Tocqueville opens and closes his book with references of the Providential character of the advent of equality of conditions. In the Introduction, he claims it has “the sacred character of the will of the Sovereign Master,” and that “effort to halt democracy appears,” consequently, “as a fight against God Himself” (Introduction: 6). In the last chapter, as seen above, Tocqueville concedes that equality is more just and, for this very reason, “more pleasing in the sight of the Creator and Preserver of men” (II.IV.8:678). The works of Providence are also seen in the temporary possession of land of the Natives (I.I.1:24), the unique geography of the United States (I.II.9:256), and Eusebius’ view that God paved the way for Christianity by means of the Roman Empire (II.I.5:411). 81 As we saw in the previous chapter, this is a by-product of Christianity’s expansion throughout the world. The Christian ethos weakened traditional allegiances to family and town and substituted a call to the universal call to holiness, a call which is blind regarding races, nations, and tongues. See, e.g., Mark 3:31-35 and Romans 2:17-29. See 3.II.2 above. 82 Ikenberry 2001, 4. I say his thesis makes “some” sense because, against Ikenberry’s picture of the United States as a mild, lenient hegemon respectful of democratic rules, we need to oppose the reality of a nation often deluded by its own prowess; one which has systematically failed to live up to the very principles it imposes on other countries; and one which from its very beginning harbored an unquenchable desire for expansion. In Wolin’s words: “In the United States, from the beginning, there has been a persistent tension between the drive for expansion (the Louisiana Purchase, ‘Westward, Ho!’) and the struggle to derive new institutions for adapting the practices of democracy and its ethos of political commonality. An enlarged spatial scale both requires and promotes a technology of power that can make occupation and rule effective” (Wolin 2008, 61).

257 after 9/11. The collapse of the Twin Towers in New York was framed symbolically in order to generate a new paradigm: the war on terror led to, knowingly or not, the progressive dislocation of the democratic order.83

It seems that we have transitioned from a world wherein equality84 created the conditions for an international order tending asymptotically to Kant’s perpetual peace85 to one in which rich countries fall prey to the numbing song of demagogues and their far-right policies—the protection of internal markets, the closing of borders, racial discrimination, the retreat of citizens from the public arena, and increasing powers given to the government. The causes of this new era are too vast to be studied here. It is enough, for my purposes, to remember the profound crisis both liberalism and institutional religions are suffering

(discussed in the Introduction), combined with a growing inequality of wealth that renders vulnerable

Tocqueville’s starting point, namely, the equality of conditions as the motor of democratic life.

In this new scenario we must ask: Has Tocqueville something to say to us? Are his formulas for a healthy democracy still pertinent in a world where the certainties and hopes of modernity and Enlightenment were shattered by the horrors of a war that reminded us of the limits of our own power, and where the international order seems to be taking a Hobbesian rather than a Kantian direction? In my opinion, the answer is a resounding Yes. Tocqueville is more important and more urgent than ever before. While it is true that we must incorporate new insights that were unavailable to Tocqueville, it can be clearly shown that the gist of his thought is alive and well in some of the most profound analyses of the malaise of today’s democratic regimes. In the rest of this section I analyze Claude Lefort’s and Sheldon Wolin’s views on the malaise of democracy—in fact, two critical positions of Tocqueville—trying to show, first, that Tocqueville

Ikenberry’s argument that “democracies—employing interlocking institutions—can create an order that mutes the importance of power asymmetris within international relations,” (6) is an exaggeration, if not plainly false when confronted with the historical record. 83 Reflecting on these events, Agamben affirms that “President Bush’s decision to refer to himself constantly as the ‘Commander in Chief of the Army’ after September 11, 2001, must be considered in the context of this presidential claim to sovereign powers in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct reference to the state of exception, then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible” (Agamben 2005b, 22, emphasis added). Sheldon Wolin, on his part, claims that “[t]he mythology created around September 9/11 was predominantly Christian in its themes. The day was converted into the political equivalent of a holy day of crucifixion, of martyrdom, that fulfilled multiple functions: as the basis of a political theology, as a communion around a mystical body of a bellicose republic, as a warning against political apostasy, as a sanctification of the nation’s leader, transforming him from a powerful officeholder of questionable legitimacy into an instrument of redemption, and at the same time exhorting the congregants to a wartime militancy, demanding of them uncritical loyalty and support” (Wolin 2008, 9). 84 I understand equality, as Tocqueville did, in Rousseauean terms: “that, with regard to power, it should fall short of any violence and never be exercised except by virtue of rank and laws; and, with regard to wealth, no citizen should be so rich as to be capable of buying another citizen, and none so poor that he is forced to sell himself” (On the Social Contract, bk. II, ch. 11). 85 A representative study of this idea is Oneal and Russett 1999.

258 remains one of the most influential voices in democratic theory, and second, that what he foresaw almost two centuries ago is astonishingly helpful for thinking and understanding the dilemmas we face today.

While influenced by Tocqueville, Claude Lefort separates himself from the former in his analysis of the malaise of democracy. As Steven Bilakovics points out, while for Tocqueville the generative principle of modern democracy is equality, for Lefort the generative principle is “the dissolution of the markers of certainty.”86 For Lefort, “[d]emocratic modernity is constituted politically, as the revolutionary beheading of hierarchy and the concomitant absence of self-evidence—of an authority that can speak for itself.”87

Tocqueville failed to follow through the consequences of his own analysis. The destruction of paternalism operated by the democratic revolution leads, Lefort contends, to the impossibility of power ever being represented:

The revolutionary beheading of the father-figure—of the symbolic embodiment of sovereignty—necessarily signifies the exclusion of ruling authority from the democratic body politic. One may claim to speak in the name of Truth or Law or Nature, but no one re-presents the Uppercase Absolute. A gap opens between the real and the transcendent, the particular and the universal, and representation becomes a function of the imagination… Indeed, the sovereign present is discernible only as silence, as felt absence. The essence of modern democracy thus takes shape as the essential contestability of all claims to authority.88

Rather than the omnipotent majority personifying (in the sense of masquerading as) sovereign power, Lefort focuses on the ultimate destruction of markers of certainty, which leads to the representation of democracy as that political regime wherein the locus of power is empty. Democracy is thus understood as the political regime which, by its very design, renounces ever being transparent to itself, because the locus of power is continually filled and emptied by the mechanisms of representation. In this sense, Lefort continues,

Democracy thus proves to be the historical society par excellence, a society which, in its very form, welcomes and preserves indeterminacy and which provides a remarkable contrast with totalitarianism which, because it is constructed under the slogan of creating a new man, claims to understand the law of its organization and development, and which, in the modern world, secretly designates itself as a society without history.89

This emptying of power necessarily implies that popular sovereignty is translated to the symbolic level.

Thus, in the end, the kind of despotism predicted by Tocqueville becomes impossible insofar as it implies a return to the very paternalism—or, as Bilakovics prefers, a new materialism—that was cancelled by the

86 See Lefort 1988, 19. 87 Bilakovics in Plot 2013, 137. 88 Ibid., 138. 89 Lefort 1988, 16. 259 democratic revolution, that is, by the destruction of the markers of certainty. What awaits us on the other side of the crisis of democracy, Lefort would say, is totalitarianism, plain and simple:

When individuals are increasingly insecure as a result of an economic crisis or of the ravages of war, when conflict between classes and groups is exacerbated and can no longer be symbolically resolved within the political sphere, when power appears to have sunk to the level of reality and to be no more than an instrument for the promotion of the interests and appetites of vulgar ambition and when, in a word, it appears in society, and when at the same time society appears to be fragmented, then we see the development of the fantasy of the People-as-One, the beginnings of a quest for a substantial identity, for a social body which is welded to its head, for an embodying power, for a state free from division.90

Indisputably, there is some truth in Lefort’s analysis of the transition from a democracy that fails to keep conflict inside the boundaries of the political to a totalitarian regime that solves political conflict artificially by resorting to the chimera of perfect unity. It is enough to remember Richard Spencer’s speech in 2016 to understand the depth of the Lefortian analysis.91 Fragmentation—which in our day becomes manifest in growing diversity and multiculturalism—pushes for a restoration of a mythical unity. This unity, of course, can only be achieved by coercive, if not criminal, means. Lefort thus correctly identifies a danger hidden in the very workings of democracy: the failure of the project based on equality and freedom, that is, the right of being myself and being respected as a full member of the community—remember Taylor’s authenticity and recognition—unfolds into its very opposite: a yearning for uniformity, homogeneity, and normalization.

However, it is still not clear that we are, in fact, walking that path. The contrary seems true:

Tocquevillean soft despotism seems today a better description of the contemporary crisis of democracy. The brilliance of Tocqueville lies, in my opinion, in his reluctance to understand sovereignty only in symbolic terms. According to him, the effects of the majority are both factual and psychological. While there is a symbolic dimension in the notion of popular sovereignty, we cannot just discard the mechanics of majoritarian oppression, which today seem to be working not so much for the realignment of the markers of certainty but for its relaxation and mutation under what some have called truthiness or the post-truth era.

90 Ibid., 19-20. 91 “Despite these supposedly egalitarian values, America was, until this past generation, a white country designed for ourselves and our prosperity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us… What we are fighting for is a new normal, a moral consensus that we insist upon, and Donald Trump is a step forward, a step toward this new normal… Think of the concepts that are now designated ‘problematic’ and associated with whiteness: power, strength, beauty, agency, accomplishment. Whites do, and other groups don’t… To be white is to be a striver, a crusader, an explorer, and a conqueror. We build, we produce, we go upward. And we recognize the central lie of American race relations: we don’t exploit other groups, we don’t gain anything from their presence; they need us and not the other way around.” (Discourse given at the annual conference of the National Policy Institute, November 19, 2016, Washington D.C., goo.gl/f7V9mG). 260

Democracy, then, seems to be sliding not into totalitarianism but into soft despotism, just as Tocqueville predicted.

Sheldon Wolin’s book, Tocqueville Between Two Worlds, is a critical, patient, and brilliant meditation on the paradoxes in Tocqueville’s thought. Bernard Yack describes the book as “surprising, frustrating, and ultimately exhilarating book.”92 Wolin invites us to discover the many tensions in the French politician and theoretician, for “it is precisely Tocqueville’s internal inconsistency, the tension between his political activity and his theoretical insights, that is most interesting”93

But here I want to focus on another work by Wolin, namely, Democracy Incorporated, in order to show that, despite his criticism of Tocqueville, his political thought is still greatly indebted to him. In this work, Wolin describes the present crisis in the United States as “inverted totalitarianism.” His story begins with the transition from the envisaged by New Deal’s policies in the 1930s to the “wartime exception” politics in the 1940s and its continuation during the Cold War, which “consolidated the power of capital and began the reaction against the but without abandoning the strong state. What was abandoned was all talk of participatory democracy.”94 This new paradigm demanded a tight collaboration between corporations and the military as well as ideological conformity. This ideology was, furthermore, deeply religious: Christianity was turned into a civil religion, and the confrontation between democracy and communism was framed in terms of the cosmic struggle between good and evil.95

Democracy, weakened by the government’s hyperplasia—promoted and even demanded by an ever-fearful people—as well as by the growing power of corporations, the power of which widens the gap between the very rich and the rest,96 veers towards a new kind of despotism, one resembling the one described by Tocqueville. Inverted totalitarianism, thus, is

92 Yack 2003, 919-922. 93 Ibid. 94 Wolin 2008, 26. 95 Wolin observes that the Catholic church played its part in this story. Pope Pius XII blessed senator Joseph McCarthy’s marriage. Two decades before, Pius XI (1937) had published Divini Redemptoris, an encyclical condemning communism. 96 For an analysis of the problems that economic inequality brings to democracy, see Stiglitz 2013.

261

a new type of political system, seemingly one driven by abstract totalizing powers, not by personal rule, one that succeeds by encouraging political disengagement rather than mass mobilization, that relies more on ‘private’ media than on public agencies to disseminate propaganda reinforcing the official version of events.97

The echoes of Kierkegaard, La Boétie, and Tocqueville98 are clear. We are confronted with a new despotism that works, as Tocqueville suggested, on the souls rather than on the bodies, one which keeps the appearance of democracy as the means of legitimizing the concentration of power at the very top of the hierarchy of public servants. Democracy is understood “as ‘managed democracy,’ a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned how to control.”99 The control over the population is achieved by infusing fear into the hearts of the population, creating mystical adversaries which demand extraordinary measures, and by the anesthetizing effect of the consumerist logic.

Contrary to totalitarian experiments, which present themselves as alternatives to democracy, seen as weak, inefficient and, with a touch of sexism, not manly enough for the glory demanded by the fatherland, inverted totalitarianism hides behind a democratic veil: it speaks the same vocabulary as democracy, but emptying its words of their meaning; it uses the same tools as democracy, but divesting them of their relation to the common good or to the will of the people. It is thus not a direct confrontation with democracy, but its wicked representation in a Halloween costume. It is only by looking through the appearance of democracy that we find that what looks like democracy is but a carcass, a faint trace of a regime that was:

An inverted totalitarian regime, precisely because of its inverted character, emerges, not as an abrupt regime change or dramatic rupture but as evolutionary, as evolving out of a continuing and increasingly unequal struggle between an unrealized democracy and an antidemocracy that dare not speak its name. Consequently while we recognize familiar elements of the system—popular elections, free political parties, the three branches of government, a bill of rights—if we re-cognize, invert, we see its actual operations as different from its formal structure. Its elements have antecedents but no precedents, a confluence of tendencies and pragmatic choices made with scant concern for long-term consequences.100

It seems clear to me that the current malaise of democracy resembles inverted totalitarianism more than its original, twentieth-century version. Even in the case of radical movements, like the Alt-Right, the emphasis is not on the fantasy of the People-as-One as a military project, but on the attempt to guarantee the privileged

97 Ibid., 44. 98 Wolin is explicit: “inverted totalitarianism thrives on a politically demobilized society, that is, a society in which the citizens, far from being whipped into a continuous frenzy by the regime’s operatives, are politically lethargic, reminiscent of Tocqueville’s privatized citizenry” (Ibid., 64, see page 80). 99 Ibid., 47. 100 Ibid., 213.

262 position of a faction over the rest. It is not a coincidence, to be sure, that the triumph of Donald J. Trump happened in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007-2008, when many white Americans lost their homes and jobs.101 It seems to me that the energies and radicalism the totalitarian experiment demands will hardly be found in a democracy allied with financial capitalism that produces enfeebled, apathetic citizens. The dangers of radicalism, to be sure, still hover over us but, we must insist, in a new form.102

Seen in this light, Tocqueville appears today as one of the most clear-sighted analysts of modern democracy. He was able to find the correspondence between the passions that inhabit the human heart and their interplay in societies dominated by the desire for equality mixed with . He saw the dangers that awaited democracy when human passions go berserk. But Tocqueville also provided us with remedies against the malady. To this problem I turn now.

III

Joshua Mitchell explains that “Tocqueville focuses upon three institutional mechanisms that moderate the democratic soul: family, religion, and associational life—of which local politics plays an important part.”103 Individualism is countered by participation in local politics; the effects of restiveness, on the other hand, can be ameliorated by family life and religion.

For Tocqueville, the democratic family—that is, the specific way the relations between parents and children develops in a democratic regime—is a school of mores, and it is through women that mores permeate every corner of the family. In democracy, the center of gravity in the family is inverted: while in the aristocratic family social ties are stronger than natural ones, “democracy loosens social ties, but it tightens natural ones. At the same time as it separates citizens, it brings kindred closer together”

(II.III.8:564). In the aristocratic society everything is fixed and organized beforehand. But this very

101 Lefort seems to be trying to correct the Marxian suggestion that economy precedes politics. In his analysis there is not enough thought given to the influence of economy on politics. Wolin, on the other hand, thinks that economic corporations drive political interests. Interestingly, Tocqueville’s analysis is more sophisticated, with economy and politics influencing each other, following the “circularity of cause and effect” described by Mitchell. As we have seen throughout this work, it is by keeping the tension, rather than by unilaterally deciding for one or the other side, that our analyses have rendered its best outcomes. Staying in the tension seems to be more realistic, more in accord with the systemic nature of human social life. 102 In the 1995 movie The Usual Suspects, Roger Kint (Kevin Spacey), affirms that “the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” In a similar way, we can say that the greatest trick soft-despots and anti-democrats ever pulled was convincing the world they were committed democrats. While totalitarianism inspires fear and anguish in the democratic mind, inverted totalitarianism assuages the democratic soul by keeping appearances, creating the illusion that everything is business as usual. 103 Mitchell 1995, xi. 263 rigidity—which structures the family patriarchally by means of the system of primogeniture (cf. I.I.3:45)— precludes the development of natural feelings between parents and children and among children themselves.

In the democratic society, on the contrary, wealth and social positions are in a continuous flux, but family relations remain stronger:

as mores and laws become more democratic the relations between father and sons become more intimate and gentle; there is less of rule and authority, often more confidence and affection; and it would seem that the natural bond grows tighter as the social link loosens (II.III.8:562-563).104

Not only the relations in the family but also the functions of its members change. In the aristocratic family it is the father, as its head, who acts as the instrument of tradition and the transmitter of mores. In democracy, on the contrary, “it is women who shape mores” (I.II.9:268). The life of a woman in democracy has two perfectly delineated stages: in the first one, as a young woman, she enjoys more liberty than in any other political regime; in the second one, however, she relinquishes this freedom and willingly submits to the will of her husband (II.III.12:577) without this implying her being reduced to servitude. While Tocqueville disagrees with “the sort of equality forced on both sexes” as something degrading both, he nonetheless sees a “similarity” between them in terms of intelligence and rights. Tocqueville asserts that while man and woman are equal as citizens, there are differences between them that call for a differentiation of roles in society.105

The second institutional mechanism, political participation at the local level, serves also a pedagogical function: “The purpose of politics,” Mitchell claims, “is less to represent than to educe, to draw the self out of its self-enclosed world.”106 Convinced as he was of the intellectual superiority of aristocratic

104 Tocqueville is closely following Rousseau in his account of the family. In the Second Discourse (Part II), Rousseau describes paternal power as “that authority which looks more to the advantage of the one who obeys than to the utility of the one who commands; that by the law of nature, the father is master of the child as long as his help is necessary for him; that beyond this part they become equals, and the son, completely independent of the father, then owes him merely respect and not obedience; for gratitude is clearly a duty that must be rendered, but not a right that can be demanded.” (cf. On the Social Contract, bk. I, ch. 2). 105 I am not advocating here for a Tocquevillean separation of roles based on sex. Clearly, our societies are way beyond this point… and for good reasons. Tocqueville’s thoughts on the sexes are too restrictive and put too much power in one sex against the other. However, I think it is important to notice that he raises important questions regarding the relations between men and women which remain open in our societies. Today we witness, I think, a cacophony of incommensurable theories about the sexes. On one extreme we find those who try to justify the distribution of social roles based on differences between the sexes. On the other extreme we find many instances of the idea that bodies have no influence on human behavior (e.g., some radical versions of transsexualism and gender-fluidity, which seem to be transforming the body into a vessel which the sexless “I,” or “ego,” or “spirit,” inhabits and bends to its will). In my opinion, the problems we experience today are but new cases of immoderation. That the female and male bodies are different seems to be a certitude from a scientific point of view, i.e., bodies matter! (cf. Deneen 2018, 121). However, this difference does not justify social arrangements based on sex, not just because when dealing with human beings we have to admit, with Sartre, that “existence precedes essence,” but also because biology and psychology notwithstanding, the human person has a right to be authentic. It is, I think, the recognition of these two poles, which must remain in tension, that can promote a more serious and fruitful debate on the topic. 106 Mitchell 1995, 102. 264 rulers, Tocqueville sought democracy’s strength elsewhere. He found it in the way democracy entices the habits of the heart to become more sociable and milder, gently pushing citizens—with an almost imperceptible centripetal force—to the public arena, convincing them that working with and for the others is, in the end, healthy and beneficial for oneself. It is precisely because of this pedagogic function that

Tocqueville affirms that: “It is certainly not the elected magistrate who makes the American democracy prosper, but the fact that the magistrates are elected” (II.II.4:483).

Participation, however, must be placed in its proper scale. The federal government is too big and too far away to arouse the curiosity of the citizens. National problems are too general for the citizens to find themselves directly affected by them. For that very reason, only a group of citizens deal with them, and only temporarily, so that a lasting bond is never formed between them. On the contrary, the problems of the town immediately resonate with the citizen’s wellbeing, forcing them to gather together:

The general business of a country keeps only the leading citizens occupied. It is only occasionally that they come together in the same places, and since they often lose sight of one another, no lasting bonds form between them. But when the people who live there have to look after the particular affairs of a district, the same people are always meeting, and they are forced, in a manner, to know and adapt themselves to one another (II.II.4:482).

Local politics is, therefore, the place where democracy counteracts individualism. Here we find a justification for MacIntyre’s utopianism of the present: it is only at the local level that the human community is formed; only there the feelings of mutual assistance, solidarity, and reciprocity naturally arise. Self- interest well-understood rules in the local community, for the members of the community become aware of their own weakness and of the benefits of communal life. Tocqueville subverts here Aristotle’s teleology:

“in America one may say that the local community was organized before the county, the county before the state, and the state before the Union” (I.I.2:37). It is not simply that, logically, the local community pre- exists the national government. The important nuance is that it is in the local community where real politics is made.

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Associations play the role of mediation, which is so central in the Tocquevillean system.107 Through associational life citizens engage in local politics and pursue their own goals.108 This activity has a twofold benefit: first, it combats individualism by giving citizens incentives to look outside themselves; and, second, it keeps a healthy tension between self-interest and community sense. For, on the one hand, associations stand for private interests which are pursued, necessarily, against the interests of other associations; on the other hand, however, the interplay of associational life guarantees individual liberties by protecting democracy from the tyranny of the majority (cf. I.II.4:177).109

We must address, finally, religion in a democratic regime. Three main ideas define Tocqueville’s position on religion. First, religion is a fundamental institution of democracy because “one cannot establish the reign of liberty without that of mores, and mores cannot be firmly founded without beliefs”

(Introduction, 10). Joshua Mitchell asserts that

Religion must hold sway in a democratic society; without it… mores are not fortified and the menacing natural dispositions of the democratic soul more readily emerge. Religion may not, however, enter directly into matters of politics. This insight was, in Tocqueville’s estimation, a large part of the American genius. The political effects of religion must be indirect; habits of thought produced by religion spill over into other arenas of life, that is all. Given the extraordinary power of religion in its proper sphere, that is enough.110

Religion is “the guardian of mores” (I.I.2:40), it rules human beings’ hearts, not their bodies; that is, religion’s power is general,111 soft, indirect, and independent of political power, and for that very reason unable to ever side with a specific party or faction. Convinced of the many dangers of the marriage between

107 Mitchell explains that: “Associations… are the functional equivalent of mediators who stand between the Sovereign and the all who are beneath him” (1995, 120). In aristocracy, the nobles are the mediators between the prince and the people; in democracy, associations serve the function of mediators. Tocqueville claims: “I think that associations of plain citizens can compose very rich, influential, and powerful bodies, in other words, aristocratic bodies. By this means many of the greatest political advantages of an aristocracy could be obtained without its injustices and dangers” (II.IV.7:672). 108 Tocqueville understands associations in a Madisonian way: an association is a faction, that is, “an educated and powerful body of citizens which cannot be twisted to any man’s will or quietly trodden down, and by defending its private interests against the encroachments of power, it saves the common liberties” (II.IV.7:672). In the Federalist Papers (#10), James Madison explains that in a republican government we can only deal with the effects of factions—since in order to deal with its causes we would have to instill the same passion in everyone, or eradicate liberty altogether, both of which are worse than the disease. Madison’s solution is thus to inject freedom into the system in order to multiply factions, so that no single faction can gather enough power so as to become tyrannical. 109 Rousseau hints at the tyranny on the majority while contrasting the general will and the will of a large (majoritarian) association: “When one of these associations is so large that it dominates all the others, the result is no longer a sum of minor differences, but a single difference. Then there is no longer a general will, and the opinion that dominates is merely a private opinion” (On the Social Contract, bk. II, ch. 4). 110 Mitchell 1995, 25. 111 This is true especially of Christianity, which “deal[s] only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man” (II.I.5).

266 institutionalized religion and a political regime, as was the case in the France of the Ancien Régime,112

Tocqueville advocated for a clear separation between the spheres of the church and the state.113

Second, religion counteracts restiveness by imposing “a salutary control on the intellect” (II.I.5:

409). Every religion, Tocqueville continues, “places the object of man’s desire outside and beyond worldly goods and naturally lifts the soul into regions far above the realm of the senses,” (II.I.5:410), imposing at the same time obligations toward mankind.

Religion, for Tocqueville, is innate to human beings.114 It is a special form of hope, which is “as natural to the human heart as hope itself.” Tocqueville goes as far as claiming that “[i]t is only by a sort of intellectual aberration, and in a way, by doing moral violence to their own nature, that men detach themselves from religious beliefs… Incredulity is an accident; faith is the only permanent state of mankind”

(I.II.9:273). It follows, logically, that the human ability, and necessity, to look beyond the world of the senses—materiality, comfort, sexual pleasure—is in Tocqueville’s analysis as natural as the human need to feed. In a Rousseauean move, Tocqueville suggests that it is the corrupting effects of civil society that create the illusion of pure immanence, while in truth our eyes are designed to aim beyond biological life.115 Seen in this light, the political utility of religion is best explained by Ratzinger’s idea of “anamnesis,” as the inner voice that brings to the present, in full actuality, the mystery of redemption, which necessarily restraints the

112 “The Church was hated not because its priests claimed to regulate the affairs of the other world but because they were landed proprietors, lords of manors, tithe owners, and played a leading part in secular affairs; not because there was no room for the Church in the new world that was in the making, but because it occupied the most powerful, most privileged position in the old order that was now to be swept away” (Tocqueville 1955, 7, cf. 151). Tocqueville, however, praises the patriotism of the French clergy: “By and large… there has probably never been a clergy more praiseworthy than that of Catholic France just before the Revolution; more enlightened, more patriotic, less wrapped up in merely private virtues, more concerned with the public good, and, last but not least, more loyal to France… When I began my study of the old régime I was full of prejudices against our clergy; when I ended it, full of respect for them” (Ibid., 114). 113 On the separation between church and state, Tocqueville is emphatic: “There have been religions intimately linked to earthly governments, dominating men’s souls both by terror and by faith; but when a religion makes such an alliance, I am not afraid to say that it makes the same mistake as any man might; it sacrifices the future for the present, and by gaining a power to which it has no claim, it risks its legitimate authority” (I.II.9:273). Elsewhere he claims: “I am so deeply convinced of the almost inevitable dangers which face beliefs when their interpreters take part in public affairs, and so firmly persuaded that at all costs Christianity must be maintained among the new democracies that I would rather shut priests up within their sanctuaries than allow them to leave them” (II.II.15:517). Beiner puts Tocqueville’s critique in a dialogue. For Tocqueville, Rousseau “is wrong to encourage the vague quasi-theocratic longings that run through much of the civil-religion chapter. Rather than plumping for Hobbes over Locke on the question of theocracy, Rousseau would be better off wholeheartedly affirming a Lockean separation of church and state and expunging any trace of theocratic aspirations for the sake of religious liberalism. As Tocqueville correctly perceives, you cannot have both—theocratic politics and liberal religion, Hobbesian unity of church and state and Lockean toleration—and so Rousseau ends up in a contradiction” (Beiner 2011, 251). 114 Tocqueville asserts that “the total rejection of any religious belief [is] contrary to man’s natural instincts and so destructive of his peace of mind” (Tocqueville 1955, 150). 115 This “salutary control” described by Tocqueville, therefore, is not a “noble lie”—like the one used by Plato in bk. III, 415a-c, of his Republic— but the restoration of the natural order. Tocqueville’s claim is that what religion offers is not superstition, but enlightenment—if we understand this term in the Socratic way, as an education about the limits of human reason.

267 person’s anxiety for the present by enlarging his or her temporal horizon and suggesting that “this is not all there is.”

Without the salutary checks of religion—combined, of course, with a crisis of local politics, associational life, and the democratic family—a free society may derail into individualism or despotism:

“For my part, I doubt whether man can support complete religious independence and entire political liberty at the same time. I am led to think that if he has no faith he must obey, and if he is free he must believe”

(II.I.5:409).

Third, while any religion, considered from the institutional point of view, is beneficial to democracy, some religions are more compatible with democracy than others. For Tocqueville, surprisingly,

Catholicism is the best companion to democracy.116 As pointed above, Tocqueville feared that if Catholicism became powerful enough, it would resort to its thirst for domination, that is, to Christendom. However, he saw in Protestantism the seed of deism and, from there, disbelief. In any case, what Tocqueville admired in

Catholicism and saw lacking in Protestantism is a robust notion of authority. While Luther rejected all kinds of mediation between the believer and God, Catholicism preserves a complex system of mediations, one that, as we saw with associations, is present in a healthy democratic regime. Mitchell accurately captures the idea:

The analogue in the domain of social and political theory to the belief—Tocqueville’s Catholicism, fragile though it may have been, cannot be ignored here!—that there must always be a Church to deflect (but never wholly absolve) sin is, I suggest, that there must always be institutions that keep human beings from “choosing between two excesses,” from missing the mark of moderation that is sin. Not being capable of choosing their own salvation, of using the light of reason well, human beings must be bounded by institutions that light the way for them. Here is the task of the new political science! Without understanding the importance of nurturing mediating institutions that stand between the many and the one—how this is more Catholic than Protestant should be clear!—tyranny is the likely outcome.117

Tocqueville, therefore, clearly distinguishes between an “institutional” utility of religion—in which having a religion, even if a false one, is better than none—and one based on the ultimate truth of religion. In this latter sense he asserted, recall, that religion must be absolutely true or absolutely false. Religion is, then, not

116 This is surprising because Tocqueville himself recognizes, from the very beginning, that it was the Puritan spirit, not the Catholic one, which gave birth to American democracy. It is in the Puritan New England that the spirit o freedom and the spirit of religion merge. 117 Mitchell 1995, 86.

268 a civil religion in the sense of a religion of the city, i.e., an appendage of political power designed to numb citizens and submit them to the civil authority’s yoke.118 As a human natural instinct, however, religion is beneficial for the social existence of humanity.

IV

What does Tocqueville’s analysis of the dangers of democracy and its remedies teach us? In this final section, I join together some of the most important topics discussed in this work with Tocquevillean insights, with two objectives: first, to show the consistency throughout the work between the different issues discussed so far; and, second, to make explicit, by way of a conclusion, the nature and extent of Catholic political action in democratic societies.

a. Local v. Universal. We have learned that, for Tocqueville, local politics have pre-eminence over national ones, as well as the salutary effects of local participation of the citizens on the whole functioning of democracy. In short: if citizens are not compelled119 to abandon their solipsism and participate in local politics through associations, democracy decays.

This idea finds parallels MacIntyre’s idea that the politics of the local community is the condition of possibility of the human good (cf. chapter 4.II.3). Confronted with the paradoxes that emerge when we try to erect society upon natural law principles, we suggested abandoning MacIntyre’s non-utopian project

118 Although still pertaining to those who see Tocqueville as a proponent of civil religion (for instance, “Tocqueville,” Kahan claims, “insist[s] that democratic societies must have a democratic God… Religion cannot be too different from the society in which it seeks to exist,” 2015, 106), Alan S. Kahan is right in claiming that religion in Tocqueville provides a dual service to politics, which he describes as checks and balances for the democratic soul. This implies two functions, a utilitarian (i.e., restricting the majority’s unchecked power) and a perfectionist one: religion “presents an alternative ideal to democratic society, an ideal of a certain kind of human perfection (e.g., the love of God) as a good in itself regardless of its utility.” (2015, 103). Religion is a force in its own right, one that cannot be reduced to the Durkheimian function of mirroring the society it inhabits, “because a Durkheimian religion cannot perform the functions of checks and balances for a society to which it is too close” (106). But if religion is a force on its own right, and one which is not exhausted by the society it exists in, then something “outside” of society is predicated, something society cannot create and at the same time forms it. And since the goal of religion is not exhausted socially, i.e., the love of (the Christian) God transcends the city, then we are not in the presence of a civil religion, at least because, evidently, there will be occasions when the love of God contradicts the laws of the city. 119 I understand “compulsion” here in a similar way as Socrates explains that the educated person must be “compelled” back into the cave—even at her own risk—in order to teach those who remain imprisoned (Republic, bk. VII 519d-e); or Rousseau’s famous claim that “whoever refuses to obey the general will, will be forced to do so by the entire body. This means merely that he will be forced to be free” (On the Social Contract, bk. I, ch. 7). Contrary to some critics of both Plato and Rousseau, who label them as totalitarians, some degree of compulsion is inevitable even in a democratic regime. Education, to be sure, is a form of compulsion, whether we focus on family life or educational institutions (I owe this idea to Mark Lippincott). With Taylor, we must recognize our ability to distinguish between forms of compulsion that aim to improve human life and forms of compulsion that aim at base oppression, negating human freedom and dignity. 269 in order to embrace his utopianism of the present, based on active participation in civil society at the local level. This latter project resonates with Tocqueville’s description of the role of associations.

Catholic political action follows this insight: it renounces occupying the state and its institutions, devoting its strength, instead, to influencing civil society. It is by participating in local politics, by its continuous efforts to inform the family and civil society, that the voice of Catholicism, understood as a tradition of thought rather than a dogmatic doctrine, is heard in postsecular societies. In trying to subsume the state under its control, Catholicism renounces the healthy separation between church and state at the risk of immanentizing what must remain transcendent (i.e., salvation). It is thus only as a tradition (MacIntyre);

“less as a revealed doctrine than as part of common opinion” (Tocqueville, II.I.2:400); or as a teacher of mores (Ratzinger),120 that the effects of Catholicism are felt in democracy. This task is, furthermore, the specific arena of the laity.121 While the state must protect the basic political rights of the clergy—liberty of expression and association, to be sure, but also the right to vote and to participate in the political life of the country—it is laymen and women who are called to infuse Christ’s message on the public sphere. This, we must insist, cannot mean imposition, but a civic confrontation of ideas between different perspectives and traditions of thought.

In the religious camp, the contraposition between local and universal becomes manifest in the distinction between the local church and the universal church. and Joseph Ratzinger discussed this issue.122 Kasper’s argument is that if the universal has primacy over the local, then Vatican politics will crush the vitality of the local church. His argument, based on the Lukan understanding of the

“Pentecost Church,” is that “[f]rom the beginning the Church is constituted ‘from and in’ local churches.”123

Giving primacy to the ontological and temporal priority of the universal church “becomes completely problematic when by some secret unspoken assumption (unter der Hand) the Roman church is de facto identified with the pope and the curia.”124 To this we must add Rahner’s contention that it is only at the local

120 “The Church does less, not more, for peace if she abandons her own sphere of faith, education, witness, counsel, prayer, and serving love and changes into an organization for direct political action” (Ratzinger 2010a, 65). 121 “To be secular is the special characteristic of the laity, they seek the kingdom of God by engaging in temporal affairs and directing them according to God’s will” (Lumen gentium §31; cf. §7). 122 A study of the debate can be found in McDonnell 2002. 123 Ibid., 231. 124 Ibid. 270 level that the church becomes an “event.” Ratzinger, for his part, defends the ontological priority of the universal over the local church. He thinks that by emphasizing “communion” as the link between the local and universal, we risk reducing communion ecclesiology “to the [bureaucratic] relationship of the local church to the universal Church,” which may in turn degenerate into “the church-political question of the competencies of the local church and the universal Church.”125 What Ratzinger fears is that the emphasis on the local may lead to a political analysis of functions between two “levels of government” in the church.

I’m not interested in pursuing this debate to the end—for it is beyond the scope of this work—but it is still important to note the political consequences of this ecclesiological debate. While I think the

Ratzingerian formula that the universal church “is not the result of the communion of the churches, but in its essential mystery, it is a reality ontologically and temporally prior to every individual particular church”126 is correct, it is important to recognize that Kasper’s worry is today more timely than ever, when the rarefied air127 inside the Roman Curia makes it difficult to feel the breeze of genuine Catholic faith.

There is no doubt in my mind that the reform of the Curia is today an urgent matter: the windows of the

Vatican must be opened so that laypeople, and especially women, can participate.128 Emphasis must be made on the Vatican II’s point that the church is not exhausted by the Pope and the bishops. Both Ratzinger and

Kasper, we must have in mind, share the worry of the politicization of the Curia. Kasper’s insistence on the vitality of the local strikes a chord of the Tocquevillean sensitivity: the local church is not an appendage, but the true Church of Christ in a particular place, lacking only in universality. Emphasis on the local is not only justified in terms of the ecclesiology of Vatican II but it appears today as a remedy against the petrification and corruption of the Roman Curia.

125 Ibid., 234. 126 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 1992, §9, quoted in McDonnell 2002, 228. See my discussion of the topic in 3.II.1 above. 127 Recall, on this matter, Nietzsche’s harsh advice: “One should not go to church if one wants to breathe pure air” (Beyond Good and Evil §30). This contraposition between “bad air” and “pure air” is explicit in On the Genealogy of Morals I:12: “What is it that I especially find utterly unendurable? That I cannot cope with, that makes me choke and faint? Bad air! Bad air! The approach of some ill-constituted thing; that I have to smell the entrails of some ill-constituted soul!” The church is composed by sinners. When these sinners are consumed by resentment, then the Nietzschean critique becomes not only valid, but urgent. Without a permanent disposition to conversion—which requires, first, the recognition of our faults, and then, repentance and reparation for the hurt we caused—the Church becomes “our church,” that is, a human faction in the game of power, control, and self-aggrandizement we see everywhere. It is, thus, only “His Church” that saves, only the willful submission of the human will to His will. 128 I am not defending a specific role for women in the church (e.g., as priestesses), but only insisting on the necessity to strengthen the feminine element in the Catholic church. In my opinion, however, the church needs a serious discussion about its understanding of priesthood today, one aiming to be faithful to Jesus’ teachings while acknowledging that some traditions are historically-conditioned and, thus, inessential—the process Ratzinger identifies as ablatio. An interesting discussion of Paul’s view on women, which have surely influenced the church, is found in Caird 1956, 17-22.

271

Catholic political action demands, thus, a charitable but firm resolution on the part of the laity to denounce the shortcomings of the clergy.129 This, especially when the latter engage in illegal actions covered by some of the church’s members in complicity. The laity cannot be a mute spectator nor a servile facilitator but an active member of the church to which he or she belongs to. The voice of the laity is necessary today.

On the other hand, Ratzinger’s insistence on the necessity of unity and authority also finds a correlate in Tocqueville’s thought: authority—which is, perhaps, the major political difference between

Protestantism and Catholicism—is necessary if religion is to be an aid to democracy. Without authority, religion quickly slides into individualism, thus supporting, rather than countering, the malaise of democracy.

b. Bringing the person to the fore. In his journey to Ireland, in 1835, Tocqueville was shocked by the extreme poverty suffered by people. He describes his impressions entering a hospice:

The sight inside. The most hideous and disgusting aspect of destitution. A very long room full of women and children whose infirmities or age prevent them from working. On the floor the paupers are lying down pell- mell like pigs in the mud of their sty. One has difficulty not to step on a half-naked body. In the left wing, a smaller room, full of old crippled men. They are seated on wooden benches, all turned in the same direction, crowded together as in the pit of a theatre. They do not talk at all, they do not move, they look at nothing, they do not appear to be thinking. They neither expect, fear, nor hope for anything from life. I am mistaken, they are waiting for dinner, which is due in three hours. It is the only pleasure that is left to them, after which they will have nothing more than to die.130

Everything we do on earth, from the Catholic perspective, have consequences in the afterlife. That the church is a pilgrim reminds us that it has no possessions, that all it can do on earth is to sow the seeds of the kingdom, some of which will grow in our time, some later, and others await for the consummation of times

(cf. Matthew 13:1-9). The kingdom is, we have often repeated in this work, never fully here, but our responsibility is to work as if things depend on us, as if a kingdom of perfect justice is possible here on earth.

Catholic political action, called to infuse civil society with the Christian spirit, cannot but recognize its debt towards those who have been discarded in the world. When liberation theology insists that the

129 Of course, this cannot mean transforming the papacy into an elected official. The Pope is not the representative of a sovereign body of laypeople. This way of democratizing the church fails to understand its sacramental structure, which demands a hierarchical form not in terms of power, but as the best way to preserve and communicate God’s revelation. Today, when many Catholics are “demanding” the Pope explanations, we must not forget that he is not a public servant, but the vicar of Christ. I greatly benefited from my conversations with Amanda Arulanandam on this topic. 130 Tocqueville, 1990, 24-25. 272 church is the church of the poor, it does nothing but emphasize Jesus’ message of charity and compassion.

In this regard, liberation theology is absolutely right, and its message is of the outmost urgency. Pope Francis has tirelessly called upon human beings to embrace the poor:

Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a “throw away” culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new. Exclusion ultimately has to do with what it means to be a part of the society in which we live; those excluded are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised—they are no longer even a part of it. The excluded are not the “exploited” but the outcast, the “leftovers.”131

Francis calls for a change in our relationship with money, denouncing as false the proclamation of “the absolute autonomy of the market and financial speculation.”132 The church must promote—among its members and clerics first, to be sure—a return to the spirit of Rerum Novarum, which established a distinction between the possession and use of material goods:

The chief and most excellent rule for the right use of money is one the heathen philosophers hinted at, but which the Church has traced out clearly, and has not only made known to men’s minds, but has impressed upon their lives. It rests on the principle that it is one thing to have a right to the possession of money and another to have a right to use money as one wills. Private ownership, as we have seen, is the natural right of man, and to exercise that right, especially as members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary… But if the question be asked: How must one’s possessions be used? the Church replies without hesitation in the words of the same holy Doctor [Aquinas]: “Man should not consider his material possessions as his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need.”133

Catholicism thus adopts the liberal principle of private property but limits it by means of a second principle, that of the use of material goods in order to prevent the immoral accumulation of wealth, inequality, and individualism.134 Thus, the answer lies neither with liberalism nor with Marxism but in the objects of our love. Material goods are not bad in themselves, but their individualistic use, which completely disregards the needs and of others, fails to live up to the Christian message, mistaking the accessory for the substantial. In this sense we must understand James’s admonition to the rich:

Came now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned, you have killed the righteous man; he does not resist you. (James 5:1-6)

131 Francis 2013, §53. 132 Ibid., §54. 133 Leo XIII 1891, §22. 134 Seen from this perspective, Rawls’ second principle of justice is but a moderate version of Catholic social doctrine on property. 273

The task, finally, is to promote an integral economy that “calls for openness to categories which transcend the language of mathematics and biology, and take us to the heart of what it is to be human.”135 Integral economy is, finally, tightly correlated to the notions of the human person and the common good:

Underlying the principle of the common good is respect for the human person as such, endowed with basic and inalienable rights ordered to his or her integral development. It has also to do with the overall welfare of society and the development of a variety of intermediate groups, applying the principle of subsidiarity. Outstanding among those groups is the family, as the basic cell of society. Finally, the common good calls for social peace, the stability and security provided by a certain order which cannot be achieved without particular concern for distributive justice; whenever this is violated, violence always ensues. Society as a whole, and the state in particular, are obliged to defend and promote the common good.136

As the activity of the laity par excellence, Catholic political action is directed toward the construction of a more just world, where every human person is seen as an end in him or herself. A world where bare existence makes it virtually impossible for a large part of the world’s population to worry about anything besides day- to-day survival fails to meet the Christian commandment of love in its most basic form. What is asked is not radical equality—or, as it is often called, “equality of outcome”—but an economic system based on freedom and respect for the person’s basic rights and where the power of big corporations and capital is inhibited by a regulation that makes sure no one will be oppressed into servitude.

Working for the poor does not mean, from the Catholic perspective, making an effort to abolish all kinds of inequalities. It is not about achieving the utopian dream of a classless society. But it is also not only about helping the poor advance economically. For Catholicism, as we discussed, “poverty” is not fundamentally understood in economic terms, but in terms of human dignity. Thus, Catholicism rejects an equality in servitude, that is, the equal dispossession of the dignity of human person in a despotic regime or, in other words, the instrumentalization of all.

That Catholics live like pilgrims in this world cannot be understood as a justification for excluding ourselves from the problems of the world. Quite the contrary: presuming to be caring only for the things above while ignoring the pain of millions of human beings is not an act of piety but of profound egoism, not a Christian act but a self-aggrandizing ruse. For “[i]f any one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar, for he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen.

135 Francis 2015a, §11. 136 Ibid., §157. 274

And this commandment we have from him, that he who loves God should love his brother also” (1 John

4:20-21). That this is a task Catholics must perform along with other Christians, believers from other religions, agnostics, and atheists, should by now be obvious.

c. Authority in the Catholic church. In the third chapter we raised the question about what kind of authority must the Catholic church hold in democracies. Two Tocquevillean insights are pertinent here: first, the authority displayed by Catholicism is a fundamental pedagogical tool for the proper education of democratic citizens; and, second, the kind of authority the church exerts does not refer to political coercion but is directed to the human heart. The authority of the church’s goal is to inform mores, not to constraint the freedom of individuals; it seeks to bring about a kingdom of persons rather than a collection of individuals (or, worse, a uniform, faceless mob), but in this task its only weapon is its ability to convince.

This authority, in short, does not mirror political authority—as was the case in the age of Christendom— nor should it dream of becoming the basis of positive law—as in MacIntyre’s non-utopian project. It fights on the level of ideas, traditions, mores, and opinion, having always in mind the limits imposed by the notion that personal conviction is the only way toward conversion.137

Clearly, then, Tocqueville’s understanding of authority demanded a change in the nineteenth- century church. My suggestion is that Tocqueville foresaw in more than one way the changes that were bound to happen a hundred-and-thirty years after he stepped on American soil.138 Tocqueville worried about

137 Let me give an example. I think Catholicism is entitled to discuss abortion publicly, even to the point of convincing people that this medical procedure is legally problematic because of the existence of an affected third party (recall Mill’s ). While I agree with the Catholic church in the moral reprobation of abortion, my justification is not that it is evident that we are confronted with a human person since the conception. I believe the contrary is truer: it is because we don’t know when human life starts, because any unilateral determination of the start of human life is as metaphysical as it is arbitrary, that it makes sense to protect life from the beginning. In my opinion, saying that life starts when there is neuronal activity, or a heartbeat, or whatever biological activity, says nothing of the status of a human person, which is a metaphysical question. This, however, cannot mean the characterization of abortion as “murder” in a criminal sense, because, as we have said, there are too many metaphysical questions involved that prevent us from criminalizing women making this decision. On the other hand, euthanasia cannot be restricted legally. In this case, we are confronted with a free individual who willingly decides to end his or her own life due to a medical condition. The only possible way to oppose this right, in my opinion, demands a religious argument, namely, God’s existence, for only if God exists can I formulate the idea that wanting to end my suffering from a terminal illness is morally reprehensible. Only if life survives earthly existence does the argument against euthanasia work. These two cases illustrate the extent and modalities of moral and, eventually, legal debate about moral issues in democracy. In my opinion, an evident problem is the over-politicization and, worst, judicialization of these issues, which have transformed a necessary debate into a battle tainted by partisan colors resulting in these topics being used as quick cues for party identification. The interesting dispute, in my opinion, is not in the courts, but in civil society. Following Tocqueville and Rousseau, I believe it is more important to change mores than laws. 138 Nietzsche opens his Antichrist claiming that his words are ahead of his time: “There are ears to hear some people—but how could I ever think there were ears to hear me?—My day won’t come until the day after tomorrow. Some people are born posthumously.” I believe something similar can be said about Tocqueville: perhaps we are today in a better position to understand him than in his own time. Today, when democracy has prevailed over Western civilization and it is giving its first signs of exhaustion; today when Catholicism has endured a council that radically changed its face, an effort that aimed at bringing to the fore what is most original and central of the church while leaving behind what is transient, and when

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Catholicism using coercion, and also thought that “religions should pay less attention to external practices in democratic times than in any others” (II.I.5:412).139 We can thus ask: Did not Vatican II give a mortal blow to Christendom, thus making it illegitimate, in terms of sound orthodoxy, to bring the kingdom of God to earth by means of coercion? And, furthermore: Did not the council promote a liturgy more in line with the simplicity of the early church, opening spaces for the local (e.g., mass in the vernacular)? In short, it seems that what Tocqueville had in mind was brought at the fore, more than a century after, by the Second

Vatican Council. The postconciliar church looks much more like the one Tocqueville imagined. This is not, to be sure, a democratized church (wherein the qualifier implies the subsumption, almost the domestication, of the church in conformity with the ways of democratic life), but one the voice of which was modulated so as to be heard by democratic ears. It is not the message that changed, but its tone. It cannot be denied, finally, that Lefebvre had a point: in some ways, Vatican II did listen to Protestantism. However, while for Lefebvre this was a cause for condemnation, in my opinion ignoring the truth in Martin Luther’s critique leads not to a more authentic church, but to one estranged by its own will to power, one resembling more the church of the Great Inquisitor than that of Christ. Tocqueville understood this better than most: he saw the tension between equality and liberty mirrored by the confrontation between Catholicism and Protestantism; he saw that the fragile balance between the spirit of religion and the spirit of liberty works only when religion has accepted its own restrictions, that is, when it has given up the theocratic dream but at the same time recognizes that a church without authority slides towards individualism.

Charles Taylor discusses the issue of the authority of the Catholic church, pointing out the difficulty—which we mentioned in chapter 4 regarding natural law—of going from universal principles, taken from either revelation, natural law, or tradition, to moral imperatives about particular situations. He takes Paul VI’s encyclical letter Humanae Vitae140—doubtless the most controversial encyclical of modern

that same church is experiencing a deep crisis of authority; today we understand better the French aristocrat’s fears and reservations about the promise of democracy, as well as his fears about Catholicism and the hubris of religion. 139 “I believe firmly in the need for external ceremonies. I know that they fix the human spirit in the contemplation of abstract truths and help it to grasp them firmly and believe ardently in them… Nevertheless, I think that in the coming centuries it would be particularly dangerous to multiply them beyond measure, indeed that they should be limited to such as are absolutely necessary to perpetuate dogma itself” (II.I.5:412). 140 The encyclical demands that “each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life” (§11). Besides condemning artificial methods, it stresses that “[i]f therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical

276 times—as exemplifying the undue privileging of one source of morality (Thomistic natural law in this case) as the only valid perspective from which to analyze a moral issue—ignoring, for example, John Paul II’s . Taylor correctly warns us that an undue encroachment upon the Christian’s “capacity to work out by his or her own intellect and groping spiritual maturation… can lead to an infantilization of the laity,” forgetting, he adds, “the fundamental Christian stress on conscience.”141 While I subscribe to

Taylor’s critique, I must insist on my own critique: Taylor’s theory correctly supports the person’s right to authenticity, but he lacks the theoretical insights to bring the individual back to the kind of community, informed by truth, that the church is.

d. As if God exists. One of the most intriguing examples of what Mitchell calls “the spillover effects of one sphere upon another” is the way democratic education leads, almost naturally, to religious beliefs.

Tocqueville explains this effect in his analysis of the supplemental works of governmental education in a world wherein religious beliefs are progressively weaker:

Governments must study means to give men back that interest in the future which neither religion nor social conditions any longer inspire… Once men have become accustomed to foresee from afar what is likely to befall them in this world and to feed upon hopes, they can hardly keep their thoughts always confined within the precise limits of this life and will always be ready to break out through these limits and consider what is beyond. I have therefore no doubt that, in accustoming citizens to think of the future in this world, they will gradually be led without noticing it themselves toward religious beliefs. Thus the same means that, up to a certain point, enable men to manage without religion are perhaps after all the only means we still possess for bringing mankind back, by a long and roundabout path, to a state of faith (II.II.17:521).

Here, the circularity between cause and effect is complete: religion is the guardian of mores, a salutary check imposed on the drive toward restiveness. Thus, religion is a political institution of the first order in any democracy. On the other hand, when religion limps, government is supplementary, placing the sight of human beings beyond the immediate. Thus, a healthy democratic regime is the best ally of religion.

or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles… thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles” (§16). Some problems emerge from these notions: Why is it that to be open to life implies that “each and every marital act” should be open to procreation? Is it not possible to understand the commandment (“be fertile and multiply,” Gen 1:28) as one to be fulfilled along the whole project of marriage life, so that the goal is not to scrutinize one sexual act, but generosity throughout marriage? Also, it is not clear what “well-grounded reasons” (in the Spanish and French translations this idea is rendered as “serious reasons”) are in the context of this decision. Finally, the moral distinction between “unlawful” and “lawful” methods is never fully explained. In my opinion, the claim that artificial methods “open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards” is neither logically nor empirically sustained. 141 Taylor in Lacey and Oakley 2011, 263. 277

In this work I have insisted that faith cannot be understood as an epistemologically inferior form of knowledge. Affirming that because faith belongs to the realm of the “not-falsifiable” (understood in

Popperian terms) it must be catalogued in the group of superstitious beliefs misconstrues the meaning of religion. To be sure, the three great monotheisms—Islam, Judaism, and Christianity—have at their core dogmatic tenets which cannot be verified but only accepted. The nature of a dogmatic assertion is that we cannot predicate its truth or falseness with the methods, say, of analytic philosophy. A dogma is not to be analyzed but received: its fundamental characteristic is that it discloses something about the divinity or, in other words, that it opens a clearing in the cloudy sky wherein human begins approach God. But this is not reason enough to reduce religion to superstition. Attempting this forgets that in denying God, the nonbeliever embraces another non-falsifiable, metaphysical argument. In short, the question about God is inescapable when confronted with the human inability to fully understand both the origin of the universe and human exceptionality to their ultimate causes.142 Believing and refusing to believe are but two answers to the problem of existence. The agnostic position implies, on its part, the affirmation of the primacy and, more importantly, sufficiency, of the material world.

Given that both believers and unbelievers suffer the same fundamental uncertainty, there are two ways of approaching individual and social life. We can choose to live as if God does not exist or, on the contrary, as if God exists. Tocqueville’s suggestion is that when a government takes the necessary precautions to inhibit restiveness, religion naturally arises. Thus, since for Tocqueville democracy cannot subsist without the healthy externalities of religious life, he boldly asserts:

What I am going to say will certainly do me harm in the eyes of politicians. I think that the only effective means which governments can use to make the doctrine of the immortality of the soul respected is daily to act as if they believed it themselves. I think that it is only by conforming scrupulously to religious morality in great affairs that they can flatter themselves that they are teaching citizens to understand it and to love and respect it in little matters (II.II.15:517).

Tocqueville thus embraces the second alternative, which is closer to Pascal’s wager: acting as if we are convinced of God’s existence is a better idea.

142 This does not mean, of course, that all kinds of explanation must be equally regarded as valid. Thus, for example, creationism must not be presented as a rival to modern science’s explanation of the origins of life. In the first place, this would imply the confrontation of a metaphysical argument with a scientific one. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the facts obtained by science are undisputable—unless by means of a rational refutation based on new, or better understood, facts. This implies, finally, that creationism, as a metaphysical, non-falsifiable doctrine based on a sacred book, cannot be included in an academic curriculum as an alternative to science. 278

But, isn’t this plain hypocrisy? Are we not stripping religion of its very dignity, that is, its pretension to being true, of describing the true state of human affairs? (see 3.II.3). I believe we are not. This is so because we are here trying to conceive the meaning of Catholic political action; with Tocqueville, we are restricting our analysis to the effects of Catholicism on the public sphere. Thus, I am not suggesting that being hypocritical about our beliefs in God is a smart move; all I am saying is that, following Tocqueville, it is possible to suggest that a world wherein we act (let’s insist, we are concerned here with praxis) as if

God exists may be a beneficial way to preserve civic virtues in a democratic society.

This is what Ratzinger recommends: veluti si Deus daretur, to live as if God exists. Since Catholic political action is discrete, and focused on mores, or the habits of the heart, and thus non-coercive, this recommendation cannot be understood as part of a larger theocratic project. The goal is not a hierocracy nor a Catholic Republic, but just a suggestion, namely, that perhaps life would function better under different presuppositions. In a world where power and wealth seem to be the only determinants of the worth of a human person, Catholicism’s proposal is to reintroduce the notion of the human person as a being the dignity of which surpasses all other creatures in the world. But rather than opening the door to licentiousness and narcissism, the notion of the human person demands that we reinsert the order of liberties into the order of responsibilities.

We cannot, finally, forget that in Christianity all social and political action is captured by a single commandment (John 13:34): Christians in general, and Catholics in particular are called to instill love in the world, to serve and not to be served (Matthew 20:28). This implies that Christianity is called to be, borrowing Marx’s words, the heart of a heartless world.

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