Forgetting Ourselves

[The foolish rich man of Luke 12: 16-23] strikes me as a very exact picture of our average modern attitude. Our technical and economic capabilities have grown to an extent that could not have been imagined earlier. The precision of our calculations is worthy of admiration.

Despite all the ghastly things that have happened in this age of ours the opinion is continually becoming stronger among many people that we are now close to the point of bringing about the greatest happiness of the greatest number and finally ushering in a new phase of history… but precisely when we seem to be coming close to humankind’s redemption of itself, frightening explosions erupt from the depths of the unsatisfied and oppressed human soul to tell us: ‘Fool , you have forgotten yourself…’

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, To Look on Christ: Exercises in Faith, Hope, and Love

Reflection – This book was published in 1991, compiled from previously given talks and homilies. I think the heady optimism Ratzinger refers to here has become a little threadbare in the ensuing decades and particularly in the past ten years. The 1980s are a long time ago, and not just in terms of big hair and leggings. From financial meltdowns to Ebola outbreaks, a resurgent Russia and the steady growth of the most radical and violent forms of Islam, it would take a most determinedly optimistic sort to believe that ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ is just around the corner. Any day now! Eschatology now! Well, if not now, then… uhh…. tomorrow! Or not…

That being said, the fundamental attitude still is in place, namely that there is no happiness possible except that which we attain by our own efforts. If it cannot be a happiness for the whole of humanity, the kingdom of heaven on earth, then I will just grab as big a piece of the pie as I can get away with and make off with it.

This returns us to the precise position of the rich fool of Luke’s Gospel – once my barns are full, I can sit back and relax and let the rest of the world burn. Whether we are ‘social justice warriors’ determined to bring the final state of human happiness to pass by some type of political action or big greedy pigs concerned only for our own happiness, the same mistake is made, that happiness lies within human power of action, and that in fact there is no other happiness to be had except what we can fashion for ourselves in this world.

Of course my sympathies are more with the SJW types (I wouldn’t very well have joined Madonna House otherwise), but nonetheless it is a terrible trap, one that many decent and caring people have fallen into. We are supposed to care, deeply and passionately, about the sufferings of all humanity, and strive to do our bit, anyhow, to alleviate this suffering.

But if there is no God, no hope for redemption beyond this world and beyond our own choices and acts, if there is in fact no kingdom of heaven, then our care for humanity will either burn itself out and we will collapse into indifference, cynicism, and selfishness, or we will be prey to more and more extreme ideologies which comes at a very high price to our humanity.

Communism, fascism, and indeed radical Islam are all examples of ideological projects to create the kingdom of heaven on earth which inevitably entail killing everyone who seems to be getting in the way: the infidels, the subsersives, the Jews—whoever.

And we are not immune to this in our North American world. The ideology of the day on our continent seems to be that of gender libertarianism—if only everyone gets to express his or her (or whatever pronouns we come up with) gender identity and sexual preference without censure in absolute freedom, then we will all be happy. But to achieve that eschatological state of bliss, those religions that hold to a sexual ethos rooted in the complementariness of the genders and the sanctity of marriage must be silenced on this matter, must themselves be censured and censored by state fiat if necessary. And this is a growing sentiment in Canada and the United States.

All of this is based on this terrible loss of our true selves and the truth of human happiness, the summa bonum, the true greatest good of man and woman in God. Deprived of this, we are forced into desperate straits, into a frantic and futile quest for beatitude in this life, doomed to failure and yielding misery, despondency and rage.

Fortunately, the way back is always available to us, and the true kingdom of heaven, the redemption given by God in Christ Jesus is always ours for the asking, ours not for the taking but for the receiving as a gracious gift of God’s mercy and love, and so we are free and need not fall into the terrible traps of selfish greed, cynical apathy, or ideological extremism. The beatitude of God is as near to us as the choice to love and serve, pray and believe, in this present moment, and that is the great redemption from human folly and failure in this world.

All Things Without God

The morality that the Church teaches is not some special burden for Christians; it is the defense of man against the attempt to abolish him. If morality—as we have seen—is not the enslavement of man but his liberation, then the Christian faith is the advance post of human freedom…

Man needs morality to be himself. But morality requires faith in creation and immortality, that is, it needs the objectivity of obligation and the definitiveness of responsibility and fulfillment.

Joseph Ratzinger, A Turning Point for Europe?

Reflection – This is another nifty little book by the future Pope Benedict that I like to recommend to people. The title may sound rather euro-centric and hence of little interest to those of us in other parts of the world, but ‘Europe’ in Ratzinger’s thought really stands as the place of the modern/post-modern existential choice of man—to press forward to increasingly radical secularism and the attendant ideologies, or to turn back to the coherence of faith and its integration into life. That is what this book is really about, and as such it is relevant to all of us.

The abolition of man is a phrase that Ratzinger seems to have borrowed from C.S. Lewis, whose work of that name he cites with approval in this book. It is of the essence of modernity that there is no such thing as ‘man’, that human nature is not a thing, or that at best humanity is defined by its infinite malleability, its radical plasticity.

This means that we can shape and fashion humanity any way we please, whether it is the capitalist project of reducing people to units of production, the communist project of reducing people to the service of the collective, the genderist project of severing biology, sexuality, and personal identity in the service of an extreme form of libertinism (ironically enforced by the coercive power of the state), or the positivist project of reducing man to a unit of technical and scientific study to be shaped and managed for optimal efficiency—the trans-humanist dream of transcendence through scientific progress.

Post-modernity, meanwhile, rejects all these big ideologies and in fact all the large sweeping narratives that claim to give coherence to reality in favor of a radical individualism, perhaps a nihilistic rejection of meaning, but at any rate essentially an embrace of incoherent relativism in service of personal freedom. The problem of post-modernism is that it provides no defense nor any possibility of defense against the large ideological agendae that still operate in the world at the hands of those who wield them.

Whew—that’s a mouthful. But this is more or less the world that secularism delivers us to, isn’t it? Once God and any objectively real transcendent order of reality is either denied or ignored, considered illusory or unknowable or irrelevant, then ‘man’ is delivered over to the ideologues who hold power at the moment.

And this is quite important. We can think easily that it is a great liberation to get rid of God and the objective moral law. Sartre and Nietzsche assure us it is so. But in fact, as Bob Dylan put it, ‘You gotta serve somebody’, and the illusory freedom from God in fact delivers us to the unbearable slavery to the spirit of the age. And, more to the point, it delivers the mass of humanity to being objects of use and manipulation for the small elite who wield the levers of power at this moment.

And that is a fairly precise description of where we are right now. This little citation from Ratzinger, then, shows us the way out of this degrading slavery. There simply must be a transcendent, objective order to the cosmos, not to confine and hamper us, but to preserve us from being annihilated by the powerful and the rapacious. There must be a moral order, simply to provide us with a solid ground on which to stand against tyranny and exploitation. There can be no ab-use of a human being if there is no proper ‘use’ of one.

Without a real moral order to the universe, there really is no grounds for objecting to virtually anything anyone might do to anyone else. We may dislike people having their heads chopped off or large men belting their wives in elevators or policemen being trigger-happy (to name a few random examples plucked from my Facebook newsfeed), but we can’t really object to those things on moral grounds, unless there are moral grounds.

And there are no moral grounds without an order to creation and the personal responsibility and ultimate signification to human life that is our immortal nature. And these do not exist without God. As Nietzsche said, and Dostoevsky echoed, without God all things are permissible. It is faith, and particularly the Christian faith which on strictly theological grounds privileges the infinite worth of the individual person over any other consideration, that is the best defense and solid ground of human freedom and dignity in the world.

Answering Hate

Why, O Lord, do you stand far off?

Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

In arrogance the wicked persecute the poor—

let them be caught in the schemes they have devised…

Their mouths are filled with cursing and deceit and oppression;

under their tongues are mischief and iniquity.

They sit in ambush in the villages;

in hiding places they murder the innocent.

Their eyes stealthily watch for the helpless;

they lurk in secret like a lion in its covert;

they lurk that they may seize the poor;

they seize the poor and drag them off in their net…

Rise up, O Lord; O God, lift up your hand; do not forget the oppressed.

Why do the wicked renounce God,

and say in their hearts, “You will not call us to account”?

But you do see! Indeed you note trouble and grief,

that you may take it into your hands;

the helpless commit themselves to you;

you have been the helper of the orphan…

O Lord, you will hear the desire of the meek;

you will strengthen their heart, you will incline your ear

to do justice for the orphan and the oppressed,

so that those from earth may strike terror no more.

Psalm 10: 1-2, 7-9, 12-14, 17-18

Reflection – We return to our regular scheduled programming with the Monday Psalter. Psalm 10 is quite a lengthy one, so I have simply given sufficient excerpts to give the gist of it. It seems to me that this psalm is powerfully relevant in our times. There is a spirit of violence at loose in the world, in case you haven’t noticed, a true spirit of war and hatred and savage attack on the innocent and the helpless.

I don’t need to go into all the details of this spirit in the world today—if you aren’t aware of the tragic events unfolding in so many places, you probably aren’t the sort of person who reads my blog, I would venture.

I have been aware, though, of a real danger in the midst of all these situations. It is perhaps one that is perpetual in humanity, confronted with true evil and injustice. Namely, there is real danger of belligerence, rage, vengeance, a meeting of violence with violence, hatred with hatred. ‘You want to kill us? Fine – then we’ll kill you first!’ That kind of thing. Bring it on, baby, and let’s see who has the most guns.

I am not a pacifist, properly speaking. There is a time and a place, there are situations where armed resistance to evil-doers is sadly necessary. And in a sense I am not even thinking of those sorts of situations—we may well have to go to war against ISIS, for example—I truly hope not, but it may come to that.

I am thinking, though, more of a general attitude of bellicosity, a tendency to meet force with force, anger with anger, that it seems to me comes up in many places and situations in the world today, not just geo-political ones. And it seems to me that this is a deep spiritual malady which this psalm addresses.

There are people who hate, true. There are people who are set on courses of action that are genuinely wrong and evil. They may have varying degrees of culpability, but the evil done is real and grave. There may be people who hate me, and who are doing evil to me, and of course that is very hard to deal with.

The great temptation is to meet evil with evil, force with force, violence with violence. Anger for anger, blood for blood. It is the great temptation of humanity, and always has been, and has left our world awash in blood, choked with anger.

Psalm 10 opens for us another door, another path, a path which will only be fully revealed in Jesus Christ. ‘I offered no resistance to those who tore at me… turn the other cheek… Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ This is a very serious call in our days of violence, this season of war in the world. We are Christians; we are called to love our enemies, and this love must be real and incarnated, not some vague meaningless abstraction.

It’s not really about what’s happening in Iraq or Syria or Ukraine, although of course it applies there. It’s about what’s happening at the office or around the supper table, in the neighborhood or the parish, online and offline and in every other line. We are to love, and we are to look to God to show us how the injustices or wrongs of our world are to be healed. The way of violence heals nothing; the way of peace and of love is the hope of the world.

Living As If God Exists

The attempt, carried to extremes, to shape human affairs to the total exclusion of God leads us more and more to the brink of the abyss, toward the utter annihilation of man.

We must therefore reverse the axiom of the Enlightenment [to live by only those truths that would be true even if God did not exist] and say: even the one who does not succeed in finding the path to accepting the existence of God ought nevertheless to try to live and to direct his life veluti si Deus daretur, as if God did indeed exist. This is the advice Pascal gave to his non-believing friends, and it is the advice that I should like to give to our friends today who do not believe.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures

Reflection – I am back from holidays, nicely rested up thank you, and ready to roll for another year of blogging (among other things). I thought I would start off this round with a return to some vintage ‘Ratzinger blogging’. Those who have discovered my blog more recently may not know that it used to be called ‘Life with a German Shepherd’ and was dedicated exclusively to the writings of Pope Benedict. I did my licentiate thesis on his thought, and have a wealth of references from him in my files.

I always recommend the book quoted here as a good starting point for those who want to read something by Ratzinger. It is short, topical, lively, provocative. Today’s quote is a good example. Fashioning a social world without reference to God seems to many to be the path of freedom and tolerance. Let everyone think what they wish, privately, about religious matters, but let our public life together be officially agnostic, if not atheistic. This has been advanced, and continues to be advanced, as the most peaceful way to live together.

It is illusory, though. We cannot, individually or communally, avoid ultimate questions. If there in fact is no God, or if we at least live our lives as if there is no God, the ultimate questions about truth and meaning and what is good do not simply wither away on the vine. Human beings are made for meaning—we cannot stop looking for meaningfulness in life. And if that meaning is not given, it must be fashioned. If it is not something to discover, it is something to make. It cannot be, and never is, something we just forget about. We’re not really built that way.

And so we have, in this seemingly tolerant agnostic/atheist approach to social life, the transference of questions of ultimate meaning, truth, and goodness to the sphere of political and sociological transformation of the world. When there is no God in heaven to which we can refer the matter of ultimate happiness and the consummation of human striving for perfection, then we must labor to create a heavenly life (or some poor facsimile of same) on earth.

And if this does not take place in the sphere of political ideologies or moral crusades (some people, after all, are genuinely apolitical by temperament), then it will take place in the naked pursuit of wealth, pleasure, power, or some potent combination of these. But all of this—ideological agendae and self-seeking gratification—are in fact matters that occur in public that affect all of us. The religious impulse, the sense of God and of ultimate reality that is outside of us, is forced into a private expression that is more and more hemmed in, while all of the other efforts to force meaning upon a meaningless reality rampage publicly and increasingly intrude upon us all.

And so we have the seemingly mild and irenic advice given by Cardinal Ratzinger. Act as if God exists, even if you can’t see your way to really believe that. Act as if the questions of ultimate meaning and happiness are in fact given and not made, as if there is a hope for human fulfillment that lies outside our own striving and violent effort. Act as if we do not have to press so hard to make this life on earth a heaven for ourselves, as if there might just be a heaven awaiting us.

It seems like a very mild and simple prescription for what is truly a complex and very serious problem, but I believe he is pointing the way to a real remedy for our post-modern ills. If God does not exist, we are plunged into an abyss of meaninglessness which forces us into a terrible strife and clash with one another and with a cold and lifeless cosmos. 

If we but grant the existence of God, leaving aside for the moment the specific questions of His nature and revelation to us, we find ourselves on solid ground, able to simply work with a measure of peace to make this world a more kindly and lovely place, since at the bottom of the abyss lies not black nothingness but a Living Presence that sustains and supports us and gives us hope that all is not lost, that all, in fact, shall be well in the end, well not by our own efforts and virtues but by a mercy that comes to us from the One who made all that is. And that is what we have, if we decide to live ‘as if God exists’.