minds of high German culture. A converted Jew, Rosenstock-Hussy collaborated
with his cousin Franz Rosenzweig, although their view of the world is quite
different. Underneath the surface of European civilization, Rosenstock-Hussy
perceives ancient undercurrents that erode the seemingly stable ground.
It is encouraging that Rosenstock-Hussy, who is nearly forgotten in his
adoptive American home, remains in the curriculum at the University of Hong
Kong. Although I reject many of his conclusions, the great German scholar is an
inexhaustible mine of insights in several fields of inquiry. Cristaudo's
present book is dense - it reads less like narrative than lecture notes - and
saturates the reader with German cultural references that I find
less distracting than Elsthain's folksy citation of rock-band lyrics. He has
published creditable work on Franz Rosenzweig, and - full disclosure - cited
this writer's study of Rosenzweig's analysis of Islam.
"There is something about our species," Cristaudo writes, "that cannot simply
let the past be. Perhaps it is the resilience of whatever it is that has been
divinised that haunts the solitude of the self." The struggle for Europe's soul
lies between idolatry and divine love. Of the latter, Cristaudo's exemplars are
the anti-Hitler conspirators Dietrich Bonhoffer and Helmut von Moltke. Between
Nazism and these Christian martyrs there lay
the opposition between
loves, between one who saw the sacrificial nature of love as divine, and who
willingly went under for that, and those poor souls serving a phantastic
beloved who could only deliver mass death, who could only promise a world
worthy of life by killing ... the difference between divine love and idolatry.
Idolatry in the form of ethnic self-adoration never waned among the European
peoples, despite their centuries of Christian tutelage. Was it coincidence that
the political backing for Luther’s schism came from Saxony, seven centuries
after Charlemagne killed the Saxons or converted them at sword-point? Christian
universal empire broke up into the nation states whose sovereignty was
affirmed at the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, dictated by France to the decimated
German states.
Some aspects of Cristaudo's (and Rosenstock-Hussy's) theology disturb me. They
ferret out the sources of evil in Europe's sad history, in the form of national
idolatry and its undead gods. But Cristaudo seems to believe that the worst
forms of evil fit into a grand plan of necessity. He writes, for example,
Evil
teaches us what we must never repeat unless we want to reap the same
consequences. Evil forces us to bond when we steadfastly refuse to take more
benign paths of cooperation. It forces the love that we refused to give
freely …for example, nothing has contributed more to expanding consciousness
about the moral intolerableness of racism than the evils of Nazism. Only when
humanity saw its evils did it seriously confront the link between its
thoughtless everyday cruelties, envy and bigotries.
That
sounds a bit like Voltaire's Dr Pangloss, who assured Candide that without all
the unspeakable tortures he had suffered, he would not now be eating
strawberries. In his broad and erudite vision of Western culture, Cristaudo
wants to see an ultimate purpose for everything, even the ugliest consequences
of evil choices. I cannot agree. It is dangerous to arrogate unto ourselves the
capacity to detect the traces of Providence in history. We have faith that they
are there, but we dare not sit in judgment of Providence without reducing God
to an immanent principle of history, rather than the personal God of the Bible.
Sometimes Mephistopheles is right: what arises well may be worthy of its own
destruction, and to be past sometimes is as good as never having been at all.
The peoples of Europe failed, not only their political theorists. A new people
had to come into existence with the founding of America before limited
constitutional government could be created. Aquinas conceived of a Christian
empire whose citizenship transcended ethnicity, continuing the original design
of the Church fathers. The disintegration of this design required a fresh
start, in the formation of the first non-ethnic nation in Western history, the
United States.
Elsthain, like Novak and some other researchers, traces American constitutional
government back to Aquinas' concept of natural law. The transmission of ideas
from Aquinas to the American Founders is a tricky matter, which I will let the
specialists debate. A simpler thought is that a people capable of governing
itself was one in which Christianity had changed every individual, (in
Augustine's words) "so that, as the individual just man, so also the community
and people of the just, live by faith, which works by love, that love whereby
man loves God as He ought to be loved, and his neighbor as himself". America
selected its citizens out from among the nations to form a new people uniquely
capable of self-government.
Sovereignty as the appropriation of divine whim works its way from the theory
of the state to the individual, Elsthain observes in her concluding chapter,
also with deleterious consequences in the form of previously undiscovered
"rights", for example, to abort fetuses. This is not freedom, in her view, but
the mass production of little monsters of the will. As she quotes Bonhoffer,
Freedom
is not a quality of man, nor is it an ability ... it is not a possession, a
presence, an object, nor is it a form of existence - but a relationship and
nothing else. In truth, freedom is a relationship between two persons. Being
free means "being free for the other", because the other has bound me to him.
Despite my boundless admiration for Bonhoffer, his later vision of
"religionless Christianity" in a new "Johannine epoch" of spiritual uplift
seems quite inadequate. Without organized faith communities founded in some
theological tradition, it is very hard to imagine what entity might oppose the
arbitrary sovereignty of the individual that Elshtain deplores. Cristaudo sets
the martyr-theologian more clearly in context.
Other scholars, as noted, have drawn the connection between theological and
political debates, but none with the audacity to call into question the entire
notion of sovereignty of nations as well as self. She leaves the reader
disturbed at a concept that slips carelessly off the tongue, but which is found
wanting upon consideration. Her conclusion, however, does not match the
ruthlessness of her argument. She appears to believe that the idea of
sovereignty is the changeling brat of bad theology, but we can do nothing
except to qualify it a bit:
We presuppose - we believe - that God is
sovereign (and this for hundreds of reasons), but we cannot assume that a
nation-state is sovereign until it demonstrates its ability to be independent
from the protection of another state, to treat its citizens decently, and to
foster a vibrant civil society: sovereignty as responsibility.
That
is a feeble formulation after her attack on the arrogation of God's sovereignty
to secular institutions.
Perhaps we should follow Elshtain's logic instead to an unsettling conclusion:
the sovereign nation-state defined by ethnicity and language might be a flawed
experiment. Perhaps the future of the world lies in the supra-ethnic state,
represented in quite different ways by the United States, China and India,
which together comprise half the world's population. The Islamic world, which
also embraces a supra-ethnic principle of governments, includes another sixth
of humanity. The world's political future may depend not upon the character of
sovereign states at all, but upon the character of supra-ethnic states, as much
as it depended upon the character of Christian Empire a thousand years ago. The
heritage of Western thought prepares us inadequately for these questions, but
Augustine is not a bad place to start.
Notes
1. Aquinas and
the Heretics Michael Novak, December 1995.
2. Aquinas wrote: "Wherever there are several authorities directed to one
purpose, there must needs be one universal authority over the particular
authorities, because in all virtues and acts the order is according to the
order of their ends (Ethic i, 1,2). Now the common good is more Godlike than
the particular good. Wherefore above the governing power which aims at a
particular good there must be a universal governing power in respect of the
common good, otherwise there would be no cohesion towards the one object. Hence
since the whole Church is one body, it behooves, if this oneness is to be
preserved, that there be a governing power in respect of the whole Church,
above the episcopal power whereby each particular Church is governed, and this
is the power of the Pope. Consequently those who deny this power are called
schismatics as causing a division in the unity of the Church. Again, between a
simple bishop and the Pope there are other degrees of rank corresponding to the
degrees of union, in respect of which one congregation or community includes
another; thus the community of a province includes the community of a city, and
the community of a kingdom includes the community of one province, and the
community of the whole world includes the community of one kingdom. (
Supplement, Question 40)."
Sovereignty: God, State and Self by Jean Bethke Elshtain (Basic Books:
NY, 2008). US$35, 334 pages. Power, Love and Evil by Wayne Cristaudo
(Rodopi: New York and Amsterdam, 2008)US$52, 166 pages.
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