If You Want To Win A Religous War You Had Better Learn About Religion

This is an awsome piece from Asia Times.

The inside story of the Western mind

Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians by Fergus Kerr
Reviewed by Spengler

It may seem eccentric to hail a theological text by a Scots Dominican, ranked 133,692nd in recent Amazon sales, as the year's most important work on global strategy. Now that I have your attention, humor me for a paragraph or two. To win a gunfight, first you have to bring a gun, and to win a religious war, you had better know something about religion. America's "war on terror" proceeds from a political philosophy that treats radical Islam as if it were a political movement - "Islamo-fascism" - rather than a truly religious response to the West. If we are in a fourth world war, as Norman Podhoretz proclaims, it is a religious war. The West is not fighting individual criminals, as the left insists; it is not fighting a Soviet-style state, as the Iraqi disaster makes clear; nor is it fighting a political movement. It is fighting a religion, specifically a religion that arose in enraged reaction to the West. None of the political leaders of the West, and few of the West's opinion leaders, comprehend this. We are left with the anomaly that the only effective leader of the West is a man wholly averse to war, a pope who took his name from the Benedict who interceded for peace during World War I. Benedict XVI, alone among the leaders of the Christian world, challenges Islam as a religion, as he did in his September 2006 Regensburg address. Who is Joseph Ratzinger, this decisive figure of our times, and what led the Catholic Church to elect him? Fr Kerr has opened the coulisses of Catholic debate such that outsiders can understand the changes in Church thinking that made possible Benedict's papacy. Because Benedict is the leader not only of the Catholics but - by default - of the West, all concerned with the West's future should read his book. I do not view religion as an instrument for strategic ends. On the contrary: we are in a strategic crisis precisely because religion is not an instrument, but rather the expression of the existential requirements of humankind. Nonetheless, we are in a war, and war concentrates the mind wonderfully. Radical Islam threatens the West only because secular Europe, including the sad remnants of the former Soviet Union, is so desiccated by secular anomie that it no longer cares enough about its future to produce children. Muslims may form a majority in Russia by mid-century, and may dominate Western Europe 100 years hence. Without the demographic decay associated with the decline of religion, radical Islam would be a minor annoyance to the West rather than a deadly adversary. The pope has no strategic agenda apart from reconciliation and peacemaking.

His work is to shepherd souls, not soldiers. But Benedict is the first pope in
the past century to draw a bright line between Islam on one hand and
Judeo-Christian revealed religion on the other, and that may destine him "not to send peace, but a sword", like his predecessor. This makes
Benedict the most indispensable man of our times, and the Catholic Church, the
founding institution of the West, its still-indispensable institution.

That outcome could not have been predicted from events of the first half of the 20th century. Nazi neo-paganism rolled over the Church during World War II, such that it could not prevent the mass slaughter of Polish priests, let alone genocide against the Jews. Yet under John Paul II, the Church emerged as the world's conscience in the face of communism, and the Polish Church opposed Moscow more effectively than the German Church opposed Berlin a generation earlier. After the fall of communism, two concepts of humankind remain in contention. One regards the weak and powerless as special objects of God's love, and believes that every individual is sovereign by virtue of divine love. The other concept values strength and service, and requires submission to the collective effort of ordering the world. Christianity addresses a God who self-reveals through love, and whose loving nature must make a world that is amenable to human reason. The other concept entails worship of a despot who rules by caprice. I have addressed the theological issues at length in this publication[1] and elsewhere,[2] and do not need to repeat myself here, for the subject is how Catholic thinking came to be what it is today. Kerr's subtitle is, From Neo-Scholasticism to Nuptial Mysticism. By this he means something quite accessible to laymen and non-Catholics. Between the early years of the 20th century, and the papacies of Wojtila and Ratzinger, emphasis in Catholic theology shifted from attempting to prove the tenets of the faith by philosophical argument, to portraying God's self-revelation through love by reference to such Biblical texts as the "Song of Songs". The present pope's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est ("God is Love"), summarizes what Kerr calls "nuptial mysticism".[3] He might well have written instead, "From the God of the Philosophers to the God of the Bible". Early in the century, under the influence of the First Vatican Council of 1871, the Church taught its seminarians that correct reasoning alone could prove correct the tenets of the faith. Reliance on reason rather than revelation and faith was associated with the greatest of Catholic theologians, the 12th-century Dominican St Thomas Aquinas. What was taught in the name of Thomism, though, bore little resemblance to the actual views of the "Angelic Doctor", Kerr avers.

Instead, the Church had adopted a form of Enlightenment rationalism deriving
from the 16th-century Jesuit Francisco Suarez. In the rationalist framework, God
was something of an afterthought. That is a caricature of the "neo-Thomist"
school that dominated Catholic theology during the first half of the century, to
be sure, but an instructive one. In Kerr's engaging account, the rationalistic
mainstream was challenged by theologians at the margin of the Church, such as
the French Jesuit Henri de Lubac and the Swiss Jesuit Hans Urs von Balthasar,
now widely regarded as the greatest Catholic theologian of the century. They
were encouraged by the research of medievalists such as Etienne Gilson and
Marie-Dominique Chenu, who challenged the Enlightenment distortion of Thomas
Aquinas These dissenters spent long and lonely years in the wilderness,
sometimes forbidden to write or preach.

Their day came with the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), and the reigns of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. A Dominican, goes an old joke, takes a vow of poverty, whereas a Scots Dominican takes a vow of thrift. Kerr is profligate in detail, but parsimonious in providing context. Unclear is what motivated the great shift in emphasis. The Church did not so much revise its Vatican I-vintage teaching as change the subject. Lost among the refined portraits of individual theologians is the landscape they inhabited. A conjecture, though, would consider the difference between the established Church prior to the First World War, and the religion of personal conscience that Catholicism became after it ceased to function as an official religion. As an official, Catholicism was the church one had to attend, not the church one chose to attend. Pope Pius IX (reigned 1846-1878) and his successor Leo XIII (1878-1903) made the Enlightenment reading of Thomism official doctrine, partly in response to the secular challenge to the political role of the Church. Pius IX was deposed as ruler of the Papal States of central Italy in the 1848 Revolution, and the Church came to grips only slowly with its transition from a position of earthly power to a purely spiritual role. An institution with secular as well as spiritual aspirations will find amenable the argument that its earthly status simply expresses the "natural" ordering of the universe. Decisive for the change in Catholic theology, I believe, was the two world wars. The Church could not dissuade Catholic countries, for example Austria and Italy, from slaughtering each other pointlessly in World War I, despite Benedict XV's attempt at peacemaking. The Church utterly lacked the power to oppose Nazism in Germany, and the Catholic political parties proved ineffective opponents. Although the papacy despised and preached against Nazism, elements of the German Church embraced Hitler, at least at the beginning of his rule.[4] War did not change the theological issues, which had been debated by the church fathers in the ancient world and again by the Scholastics in 1100-1500 (which is why De Lubac et al spoke of Ressourcement, a return to the sources). But the world must have looked quite different to the young Polish priest Karol Wojtila and the German soldier Joseph Ratzinger than to an earlier generation of seminarians. The grand edifice of the European Church lay in ruins, and had to be reconstructed with a refreshed theology. I called the Catholic Church the indispensable institution of the West, but the new thinking in the Church drew deeply on Protestant and Jewish contributions.

The great Protestant theologian Karl Barth conducted two decades of dialogue
with Hans Urs von Balthasar in the pubs of their resident city Basel. As Kerr
reports, von Balthasar's formulation of "nuptial mysticism" adopted Barth's
thinking more or less whole. Barth, for that matter, shared a Biblical view of
revelation through love with the great Jewish theologian Franz Rosenzweig.[5]
And Kerr reports of Ratzinger, "Reading the Jewish thinker Martin Buber was
a 'spiritual experience that left an essential mark' which he later compared
with reading Augustine's Confessions." In a recent essay titled "National
extinction and natural law", I quoted from the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia
the old definition of "natural law", namely, ""those instincts and
emotions common to man and the lower animals, such as the instinct of
self-preservation and love of offspring". How could this account for the
self-extinction of so many depressed and disappointed peoples today, I asked?
Henri de Lubac rejected this mechanical concept of natural law, then taught as
Thomism. What St Thomas in fact believed, de Lubac contended, is that "human
beings were destined by nature to enjoy by divine grace everlasting bliss with
God [Kerr]." This concept of "natural law" explains why peoples
who repudiate grace tend towards self-destruction. This radical way of thinking
made de Lubac a marginal figure in the Church of the 1930s, but a mentor to
Wojtila and Ratzinger. If the "new" Catholic theology depended so much
on Protestant and Jewish contributions as well as Patristic and medieval, what
makes the Church "indispensable"?

It has to do with Margaret Mead's quip that the best thing about marriage is that you are able to finish your conversations. Karl Barth may have been the greatest theologian of the past century, but he has nary a successor among today's Protestants. No institution furthers his work. Franz Rosenzweig, the greatest of Jewish theologians of the past century, has a worthy successor in Prof Michael Wyschogrod, now retired from teaching, but Rosenzweig in many respects remains uncharted territory. No Jewish theologian, for example, is willing to tread within a stone's throw of Rosenzweig's analysis of Islam, for all its obvious relevance to the situation of Jews in the 21st century. One still encounters the influence of Rosenzweig and Buber in pronouncements from the throne of St Peter, but not in Commentary Magazine, which just appointed a movie critic as its editor-in-chief. After 2,000 years, the Catholic Church has learned to finish its conversations, or at least continue them. In the person of Benedict XVI are embodied contributions of Jewish and Protestant thinkers, which miraculously converged upon the innovations in Catholic theology recounted by Kerr. This convergence is one of the most inspiring stories of the past century, and waits in obscurity for the historian who will bring it to light. God's self-revelation through love, as I noted, is the subject of mainstream Catholic theology. Revealed religion does not merely teach doctrine to its members, but changes their lives. Whether one can prove that God exists, for example, is not the right question. It is not even the wrong question, for it makes the subject of the discussion existence, rather than God. What Christians and Jews yearn for is the love of a personal God, that is, a God who is not mere Being, but a personality. It is the experience of Divine Love that makes it possible for humane and civilized societies to flourish, for the imitation of God must honor the sovereignty of the weak and helpless within the human family. Modern democracy is a Christian phenomenon, born of the Dutch rebellion against Spain in 1568, and borne by the Puritan migration to the New World. It arose as a religious response to Europe's crisis, not as a political scientist's cookbook recipe. That is why secular political philosophy fails so miserably in the context of religious war. I have ridiculed Washington's search for a "moderate Islam" and its efforts to "democratize" the Muslim world. One cannot simply teach political systems, or as Immanuel Kant put it, devise a constitution for devils, if only they be rational. More than mere rationality is at stake. If there were nothing more to human consciousness than knowledge, what one man knows could be taught to any other man. Democracy, rule of law, free institutions, would be techniques to be learned, like brain surgery. Yet we observe Muslims who learned brain surgery as well as any Westerner building car bombs in Britain. There are things we know for certain on the strength of our own intelligence, and things that must be revealed to us. We do not have to take on faith the Pythagorean theorem, but we cannot prove that planting car bombs in front of night clubs is wrong. It is not only the character of Benedict XVI that emerges with clarity from this story. From acidic asides in Kerr's volume, we learn some disturbing things about the "metaphysics of modernity". that is, the philosophical project of Martin Heidegger and his ilk to substitute the neutral concept of Being for faith in a personal God. Heidegger never produced a consistent theory; God put Heidegger in a circular room, and told him that Being was in the corner. Yet he mesmerized the likes of Leo Strauss, the patron saint of American neo-conservatism, who thought Heidegger the greatest mind of the century, despite Heidegger's public support for Hitler through the whole of 1933-1945, and his refusal to apologize for this or to repudiate Nazism through the rest of his life. Heidegger, though, imbibed from his teachers the "sawdust Thomism" (Urs von Balthasar) of the 16th-century Jesuit Suarez. As Urs von Balthasar wrote, Suarez thought of Being as the "univocal and neutral principle that is beyond God and the World". God, in other words, is subject to Being, along with things animal, vegetable, and mineral. It is a short hop from this viewpoint to the clockwork universe of 18th-century rationalism. And if Being is superior to God, should we not investigate the metaphysics of Being rather than divine revelation? That is precisely what Heidegger set out to elaborate, albeit without the appendage of a God who already had become ossified inside Suarez' system. As Kerr reports, Chenu, De Lubac and Urs von Balthasar argued that the irreligious deism of the 18th century followed from the efforts of the Catholic Counterreformation to propagate rationalism against the Protestant emphasis on faith. That opens an investigation in intellectual history not for the squeamish. If the "new theologians" are correct, the secular philosophers beloved of the American neo-conservatives merely added footnotes to the work of 16th and 17th-century Jesuits. Heidegger, supposedly the founder of modernist metaphysics, becomes a minor commentator on the work of Francisco Suarez. Leo Strauss and his students, as it were, have lived off the intellectual refuse that the Church of Vatican II consigned to the dustbin. The recycled rationalism of the Vatican I Church reappears as the metaphysics of American foreign policy, which in its arrogance proposes to remake the world in the image of Peoria. Where is the Father Merrin who at last will exorcise the dybbuk of Heidegger from America's National Security Council?[6]

All of the really important issues were fought out over generations in the one
Western institution with a long enough memory. That is why the Catholic Church
remains the world's indispensable institution. I do not know whether that will
be true a generation from now. The Church has produced a few great leaders, but
it is desperately short of sandals on the ground. Where is the monastic order
that will fight the spiritual battles of the Church as the Dominicans did in the
12th century, the Jesuits in the 16th, and the Benedictines in the 19th? Where
are the missionaries who will preach Christianity to Muslims? Perhaps they are
being trained now in secret Protestant seminaries in China, but not by the
Catholic Church. For the time being, the West has only one public figure to
enunciate its fundamental character and interests, and that is Pope Benedict
XVI.

Fergus Kerr has done a service in making him more comprehensible to the broad public. Kerr's book has been criticized by specialists over matters beyond the scope of this review, and beyond my competence to assess (see, for example, R R Reno's review in First Things, May 2007). For the requirements of lay readers, though, it is a godsend. Alan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind claimed that the semi-educated American undergraduate is the intellectual slave of some German philosopher. The truth is even more disconcerting: the "American mind", such as it is, runs in tight little circles around issues that the theologians of the Catholic Church have debated for centuries. Notes1. Most recently in The faith that dare not speak its name Asia Times Online, June 12, 2007.2. See "Christian, Muslim, Jew", in First Things, October 2007.3. Encyclical letter Libreria Editrice Vaticana. 4 See The Laach Maria monster Asia Times Online, June 1, 2005. 5. A 2005 book by Professor Randi Rashkover of George Mason University attempts to draw close parallels between the theologies of Barth and Rosenzweig. She writes:
Religions, Judaism and Christianity in particular, as we will see in detail alter, are guardians of the human experience of divine love. Rosenzweig's phenomenological account in II:2 is an extraction from his reading of the Song of Songs. Consequently, the phenomenology here provided by Rosenzweig is not the result of a theoretical effort, nor is it even an account of a raw human experience. Rather it is a gloss on the human experience of love as described by biblical text and tradition. Rosenzweig is simply translating into prose the account of love that is already in the poetic text ... God reveals his distinction from creation by performing an act of love that is ever renewed and always momentary and therefore cannot be established as a fact. Thus, says Rosenzweig, "love is not an attribute, but an event". See Barth, Rosenzweig, and the Politics of Praise (T and T Clark, 2005), pp 57-58. This is a complex tale, for Barth claimed never to have read Rosenzweig's major work, although they frequented the same theological study circle for some years after World War I. 6. For an account of the Leo Strauss problem, along with a summary of Heidegger's philosophy, see The secret that Leo Strauss never revealed

Asia Times Online, May 13, 2003. Twentieth-Century Catholic Theologians by Fergus Kerr. Wiley (November 29, 2006) . ISBN-10: 1405120843. Price US29.94, 240 pages.

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