The Shaping of Reality

The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that although the fallacy of the communist economy has been recognized… the moral and religious question it used to address has been almost totally repressed. The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man’s original certainties about God, himself, and the universe.

“The Spiritual Roots of Europe,” in Without Roots: Relativism, Christianity, and Islam, 73-4

Reflection – Communism may seem to most people today to be, outside of a few small enclaves like North Korea or Cuba, a historical phenomenon. China, ostensibly communist, has a thriving free market economy combined with a repressive central government: problematic for sure, but not exactly Marxist.

Ratzinger rightly points out, though, that while communism collapsed as an economic system in the 1990s, its spiritual and moral underpinnings have never collapsed, but take new and strange outward forms in the world today.

Who or what is God, or is there a God? Who or what is man, the human person? What is the relationship of man to the world? Underneath the specific tenets of Marxist theory lie certain answers to those questions, namely, that there is no god, that man is the sole shaper of reality, that this shaping of reality is wrought through seizing control of the levers of power. Along with this can come a certain historical determinism, a sense of inevitability of social progress along this or that line, which can then be used as a pretext to rather ruthlessly suppress dissent.

Might makes right! This is the crude expression of the underlying stance of Marxism. Whatever group has the upper hand is thereby endowed with moral probity and can punish its enemies as it sees fit.

And so… opponents of same-sex marriage routinely receive death threats. Those who question the ‘consensus’ on global climate warming (oops, I mean change), are compared to Holocaust deniers who should be jailed. And yes, those who question the ideology of sexual libertinism by suggesting that contraception is not a good thing are to be driven out of public life, by way of government mandates.

Underneath all of this is a sense that is fundamentally Marxist, that the whole point of the human project is to seize control of reality and shape it to our unfettered will. The corrosive crushing power of ideology, when man himself, the human person is to be shaped and fashioned according to the agendae of those who are in power.

This is indeed, as Ratzinger says, the central problem of Europe and of North America in our days. The answer—well, I’ve written a whole book about that! Suffice to say we need to recapture a vision of humanity that is first and fundamentally receptive and contemplative. Only from this receptive contemplative humanity can we fashion the world in peace and in love. That is our response.

Big Mama Sourpuss

Here… is the decisive reason for the abandonment of Christianity: its model for life is apparently unconvincing. It seems to place too many restraints on humankind that stifle its joie de vivre, that limit its precious freedom, and that do not lead it into open pastures—in the language of the Psalms—but rather into want, into deprivation… today it is a matter of the greatest urgency to show a Christian model of life that offers a livable alternative to the increasingly vacuous entertainments of leisure-time society, a society force to make increasing recourse to drugs  because it is sated by the usual shabby pleasures.

“Letter to Marcello Pera,” in Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, and Islam, 125-6.

Reflection – Ratzinger in this passage shows how very much in touch he is with the tenor of our times. Religion ruins everything, Christopher Hitchens sums it up quite succinctly. Religion: the global spoilsport, the sour nanny watching over all humanity and boxing our ears whenever we start having too much fun. This, sadly, is the image of religion in general, the Christian religion in particular, and the Catholic Church especially, for many many people.

We’ve all run across this picture of religion and the Church, right? And (do I know who’s reading this blog? No I do not…) maybe some of my readers have precisely this idea of it, too.
It is difficult to dialogue with this view of religion. For one thing, it is simply true that the Church does say ‘no’ to certain activities that cause considerable pleasure to those engaging in them (fornication, for example; also drug use). There is a virtue called temperance, which is the proper ordering and restraining of our boundless human appetite for sensual pleasure, whether for food, drink, sex, or any other body-pleasing activity.
A perfectly reasonable case can be made for such restrictions; certainly, when it comes to food and drink we all know that too much of good thing results in 'too much of me', especially around the middle, and probably far too little of me in terms of longevity. And, as I’ve been pointing out on this blog in multiple posts, unrestricted sexual activity has manifestly not led to great happiness in our society—clearly some kind of structure around sexual expression is needed, and this means having to practice self-control, continence. Just saying no, in other words, at least some of the time. All of this is perfectly reasonable.
But it is the nature of desire that the first thing it shuts down is sober logical analysis—and the stronger and more intense the desire, the quicker we become blind to reason and argument.
‘Sin makes you stupid,’ as Aquinas put it (it sounds more erudite in medieval Latin). ‘I want what I want when I want it’ – as long as that is the prevailing ethos in a person or society, the Church with its rules and regulations and lists of virtues is going to be Big Mama Sourpuss. And who needs that?
So, what are we to do? I think the deepest witness of Christians today is the witness of joy. People aren’t happy in general—modern secularism has not delivered on its promise by and large. To see Christians leading faithful obedient lives and possessing joy in this is more powerful a witness than a dozen rational arguments. And the witness of our lives opens the door to these arguments – when people see that we have something real, something that gives us life, they might just be willing to entertain the idea of temperance or chastity or obedience. And this is the challenge before us today.

The Seeds of Totalitarianism

The scientific façade [of totalitarianism] hides a dogmatic intolerance that views spirit as produced by matter and morals as produced by circumstances. According to its dictates, morality should be defined and practiced on the basis of society’s purposes, and everything is deemed moral that helps to usher in the final state of happiness.

This dogmatism completely subverts the values that build Europe. It also breaks with the entire moral tradition of humankind by rejecting the existence of values independent of the goals of material progress. Depending on the circumstances, anything can become legitimate and even necessary; anything can become moral in the new sense of the term. Even humankind itself can be treated as an instrument, since the individual does not matter, only the future, the cruel deity adjudicating over one and all… the greatest catastrophe encountered by such systems was not economic. It was the starvation of souls and the destruction of the moral conscience.

“The Spiritual Roots of Europe: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” In Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, and Islam, pp. 72-3.

Reflection – Joseph Ratzinger grew up in a country ravaged by totalitarian Nazism, and lived the great part of his life as a cleric confronted by the Iron Curtain bisecting this same country, and all of Europe. Understandably, he has written quite a bit over the decades about the confrontation of Christianity with totalitarian ideologies.

Totalitarianism outside of China, North Korea, and a handful of other states, is in abeyance in the last decades. But he points out here that the underlying spiritual impulse of these ideologies is far from absent among us. When we determine that  nothing, but nothing, matters except material happiness and prosperity, that there is no moral rule we will even acknowledge, let alone keep, if it will lessen our immediate prospects of these, that everything, every standard, law, right, must be sacrificed for the immediate good of the individual or society as a whole—well, when this is afoot in our lands, then totalitarianism is not so much in abeyance, at least in prospect.

Can we torture to obtain information to make ourselves secure from attack? Can we kill human embryos to harvest their stem cells for medical research that may cure this or that disease? Can we silence dissenting voices on contentious social matters such as same-sex marriage with threats of fines and costly legal actions? Is society, represented by the power of the state, of course, allowed to do just about anything to advance whatever goals it sets before itself?

It seems to me that many in our own societies would answer yes to these questions—certainly, if they were being honest. Behind that ‘yes’, however, is a view that the universe is essentially amoral, that moral rules or laws are some added and optional feature to reality. Also behind that ‘yes’ is an attitude to suffering that sees it as intolerable, as utterly unacceptable. Better to massacre embryonic human beings by the million, better to torture everyone, better to do anything, than to have to endure suffering.

There is a deep spiritual crisis in all this. We are made by God to live in conformity to his will and being; suffering is a necessary presence in every human life in our current situation. To reject the first and the second of these propositions places us on a road that terminates in the Gulag, in the killing fields of Cambodia, in the camps of the Third Reich. We are a long, long way from the terminus of that road, but we must be clear that that’s where it leads.

And if we are that road, there is only one human course open to us. Repent, and believe the good news.

Be Not Afraid

“The Christian model of life must be manifested as a life in all its fullness and freedom, a life that does not experience the bonds of love as dependence and limitation but rather as an opening to the greatness of life.”

“Letter to Marcello Pera.” In Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Christianity, and Islam.

Reflection – It is so important for us, in our call to evangelize the world, to live as people fully alive and free. The modern world values freedom above almost all other goods – this is practically the defining characteristic of modernity.

And so, if we present a face of Christianity (alas, all too common) of a sort of pinched, fussy, moralistic, prudish, repressed and repressive figure, we risk  actually repelling our brothers and sisters from the path of the Gospel.

We will also be untrue to Christ. Christ came to make us free, and it is the truth that sets us free. He came that we may have life, and have it in abundance. Christ came to make our joy complete. The demands of the Gospel – and they are real, and serious, and heavy – are nonetheless demands that draw us into precisely this ‘greatness of life’ that Ratzinger writes of. The way of Christ, the way of love, service, humility, purity, acceptance of the Cross, is a way of spiritual greatness, heroism, magnanimity.

We do live as dependents on God. We do live ‘bound’ by the commitments to love that we have made. But the mystery of faith is that it is in being so bound that we become truly free. By binding ourselves to Christ and to whatever vocation he offers us, we become caught up into a mystery that is far greater and bigger than what we can achieve as little atomic individuals, and in our commitments and the sacrifice they entail we are summoned to the royal road of the imitation of Christ.

Fear of commitment is so endemic today, especially in the young. Those of us who have made life commitments need to be sure that we show forth the beauty and joy of doing this; we need to be bold in proclaiming that to freely bind oneself in love is the path to joy and life. Those who may read this who are struggling to commit themselves to a life path – be not afraid. Christ is waiting for you there, and his grace opens us up to a life beyond our own selves, a life of adventure, excitement, yes, suffering, but great beauty and joy. Be not afraid.