Page 1 of
2 BOOK
REVIEW 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
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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. 
