Page 2 of
2 BOOK
REVIEW The inside
story of the Western
mind Twentieth-Century Catholic
Theologians by Fergus
Kerr
Reviewed by Spengler
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.
Notes 1. 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.
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