And therefore there is no way to set out John Paul’s point of view, to glimpse what he faces in the millennium endgame, or to explain his policy judgments, other than to understand the way he sees those four principal regions of the world and the forces that now operate throughout each of them.
John Paul’s summary assessment of the regions involved has, in one sense, the smoothness of a mathematical equation. Because he has no ax to grind politically, economically or financially, the high emotions that generally surround those issues for other leaders are absent for him. But there is one constant in the Pope’s equation, one all-important coefficient he prefixes to his assessment of these regional forces; and he does this with a certainty that is in itself beyond the reach of common emotions and the most lucid reasoning any man or group of men can perform.
In John Paul’s perspective, those forces emanating from among the nations appear as the molding influences, the impersonal architects building a new structure to house the society of nations. John Paul knows: Whatever is being wrought by those forces has been already—and even before they set to work—assumed within a framework of salvation in the all-encompassing mind and the irresistible intention of God.
That factor, according to John Paul, stands prior to all human activity; and it will be the final determinant of how effective the human activity of men will be. It is not a surprising factor in a Roman Catholic pope. But it must be clearly understood.
It is not a vague and general belief that, no matter what men do, no matter what type of structure is put together by those human forces, God will go ahead and do what God wants. Believers often think and speak—and nonbelievers just as often understand believers like John Paul to be carrying on—as if God were the Ultimate Handyman called in by the Despairing Householder who, in his stupidity and cockiness, thought he could mend that leak in the roof but has ended up floating around his own house, now invaded by the destructive waters of a deluge. This is God as the Fixer of Bad Deals, the Lone Ranger reversing what looked like death and disaster, the Last-Resort Hero. But such is not the God of John Paul.
Nor must John Paul’s persuasion be framed within the Tower of Babel scenario. Men decide to build the tower of their geopolitical dreams. Of course, it is all wrong, inspired by arrogance, reared by pride, a real challenge to God, an affront God cannot and will not suffer. So God, at the crucial moment, just as it seems men will succeed in their godless undertaking, will step in and by a unilateral action frustrate all they do, confound their plans, destroy their miserable efforts and scatter them as pygmies under the iron heels of infinitely superior strength. This is not how John Paul conceives the plan and intentions of the God he worships and serves. For he worships and trusts in a God of salvation who so loved the world and all men in it that God’s own son died so that all men might live forever.
Whether anyone shares or repudiates John Paul’s prime conviction, they must understand that conviction and the knowledge on which it is based. It is simply this: All that men under the impulse of these regional forces achieve—in the gross and in the smallest detail—has been foreseen and incorporated as working parts in God’s plan of salvation. Not in spite of men’s actions and achievements, but through them, God’s ultimate will prevails.
Right enough, in John Paul’s outlook about the present workings of men, there is one largely unnoticed element: his conviction that in our actual geopolitical situation, there will be—in John Paul’s lifetime—a direct intervention by God in those four regions of the world, with Russia as its focal point and all other regions of man’s earth profoundly affected by that focused intervention. But it will not be a Tower of Babel intervention, nor anything like a parting of the Red Sea waters to allow merely the Elect to escape terrible destruction. For John Paul’s is a God of love, indeed, is Love itself at work. Intervention there will be. Apocalypse—clear revelation of how ultimate good and consummate evil are irreconcilable—there will be. But now and throughout all regional developments, that Love is working assiduously in order to bring the ongoing drama of human things to God’s foregone conclusion.
For those who do not understand John Paul’s vision and do not know his conviction, logically the general observations he makes about all four regions and the forces at work within them may be disconcerting—especially for those who are partisans of one or another of those forces. For in every case, the change John Paul emphasizes is fundamental. In some cases, there are changes he regards as catastrophic in their present effects on the lives of ordinary men, women and children.
In general terms, within the nations of all four regions, let it be said of John Paul’s observation that all the old truths that reigned supreme are being changed. In some cases, they are being liquidated. And all the old symbols—that common shorthand by which whole populations express and share those truths—are being changed and liquidated, too.
If ever there was a nation that lived by such shorthand symbols, it was the United States.
In America, military strength was a fact; but it was more. It was a symbol of power once unique to that country. But that power has now been distributed among others. In America, man-made democracy was a fact, but it was more. It was the ideal for freedomless people elsewhere. But democracy in the United States is undergoing huge strains. In city halls and statehouses, in the Capitol and the White House, and in all three branches of government—executive, legislative and judicial—realignments are being forced that are too profound to pass off as just another little shift in the system of checks and balances.
In America, the once self-perpetuating, independent economy was a fact, but it was more. It was the symbol of ultimate protection for those who were lucky enough to live there. But now the American economy depends seriously, even avidly, on the economy of the world around it; and the lives and fortunes of the people who live there depend on what happens in the lives and fortunes of over two dozen other nations. The American Bald Eagle is still the national symbol for high-soaring strength and pride and independent daring. But it is no longer the symbol of uniquely preeminent superpower strength. Pride and daring are not even cultivated as national virtues. One has been besmirched as “imperialistic,” the other has been lampooned as inept. The propaganda of “blame America” has played its part in this. But chiefly this change is due to the new fact that the undertakings of America are no longer those of a “nation under God.” The public consensus is that a wall forbids Americans to think and act as a “nation under God.” But it was that original persuasion that instilled the pride and encouraged the daring.
In the Soviet Union, three symbols reigned supreme. Instead of the Eagle, they had the Russian Bear of incalculable menace. Instead of man-made democracy, they had the man-made Party-State, housed in the Kremlin and dominating all the Russias (and much more besides) from Red Square, Moscow. And with no parallel anywhere, they had the vast stretches of winter snows that were the ultimate guarantee that Mother Russia could never successfully be invaded—not by Napoleon Bonaparte, who skulked back to France with barely 10,000 ragged survivors out of an invading force of 400,000; and not by Adolf Hitler, who lost three entire armies to those Russian snows. Not by anyone, went the Russian saying. Mother Russia was impregnable.
Now, by contrast, the West has to deal with what appears to be a very friendly, unthreatening teddy bear, who wants to eat our food and be like us. It appears that the professionally subversive Party-State has renounced all wishes to subvert democracy; it actually wants to democratize itself as far as possible. And were the Russian snows to drift even higher and even into summer, they would not affect the invisible invaders that penetrate everywhere and are welcomed everywhere as the new global information and communications networks fall across this region.
In China, too, there was a time not long ago when three symbols spoke everywhere of that nation that is a vast region in itself. These were symbols of its leaders and its people, of its inner strength and of its outward threat.
Th
e Dragon was China’s fierce and vengeful exterminating angel; it was the incalculable protector of China as the center of the world, the “Middle Kingdom”; and it symbolized the role of the ultimate dictator of China’s fate. The man-made Great Wall told the world that China was separate, self-contained, a place that could not and would not be assimilated into the rest of the world. The long, winding Yellow River mirrored it its ever-flowing waters the perpetuity of the Chinese identity itself. Foreign devils come and go, that river had always said, but China goes on forever.
These days, the Dragon has been transformed into another reality: the diminutive figure of Deng Xiaoping heading the CP of China from behind the guarded walls of Zhongnanhai Compound, where China’s emperors once lived and from where he and the dyed-in-the-wool members of the CP intend to maintain control through the classical means of Leninist terror.
Like the Russian snows, the Great Wall is no longer a barrier to information and ideas, or to jet planes and missiles. So weak is that barrier as a symbol now that, just as in an old Chinese legend the tears of Meng Jiangnui washed away that part of the Wall where she found her dead lover, so the tears of hope and suffering shed by China’s people can threaten to sweep aside all that Wall has stood for.
As to the Yellow River, it does still flow as surely as it always has. But for the Chinese mind today, its symbolism has been shunted rudely aside by its practical function. Now it is the key to the flow of goods and services required to satisfy the new capitalist desire among the people. And those who talk about its color breathe not a word about the perpetuity mirrored in its yellow waters. Instead, they see riverine industrialization, on which China’s near future will depend; and they see pollution.
As profound as the changes are in those first three of John Paul’s crucial regions, it is in Western Europe that he sees the deepest change and the source of the greatest pathos in terms of human destiny. Long before the symbols of identity lost their meaning for the United States, the Soviet Union and China, Europe freely cast away the institutions that housed the symbols of the only identity that region ever achieved as a unit.
Europe never relied on the natural protection of snows, or on the man-made defense of a 1,500-mile wall, or on a river as the symbol of its continuity.
During the centuries when European unity was at its height and vibrant, Europeans housed their hopes and found their believing trust beneath the domes and Gothic spires of the churches they built. They called that whole territory by a kind of family name: Christendom; and in the span of just a hundred years—between 1170 and 1270 alone—they built eighty cathedrals and major churches, the living symbols of the reality in their lives: the Catholic faith.
Europe’s protection was centered on its faith. Its identity was provided in the papacy. The unifying principle of its civilization lay in its common acknowledgment of the primacy of the Pope.
That Christendom has ceased to exist. The faith that was once Europe’s protection is now dead in those nations. And the papacy is no more a symbol of their identity than the primacy of the Pope is their preoccupation or concern.
While it is true that Christianity is no longer understood as a force to be reckoned with in Europe of the 1990s, it is just as true that Pope John Paul displays no pointless insistence that it should be. This is one of the mystifying traits of his papal policy. In a 1988 address startling to some for its frankness, John Paul told a visiting group of European delegates and students that they did not have to build their new Europe of 1992 and beyond on Roman Catholic principles. He did raise the caution that they should not forget Europe’s traditions of civilization and culture. And while the Pontiff knows that was a far cry from standing in their midst as the living symbol of that civilization and that culture, such was not for a moment his intent.
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One fact of geopolitical life John Paul must deal with is that the disappearance of the forces that, until recently, dominated in these four major regions has not resulted in a neutral situation for any of them. And certainly not for the Pope.
In the United States and Europe—in all the market economies of the West nations, in fact—Pope John Paul sees one mentality, a single persuasion. In its broadest lines, he sees the same mentality reflected in the words and actions of Poles and Hungarians, Romanians, East Germans, Czechoslovaks and Bulgarians—and, not surprisingly, of the Soviets themselves—as they grapple with the newfound liberties Gorbachevism has so far proffered to them. He detected the same persuasion in the student protests of 1989 in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square; and it obviously stood behind the policies of Beijing’s central government. It is, finally, a persuasion that has always been shared by several of the aspiring globalist groups that have the Pope’s attention—by New Agers, Mega-Religionists and Humanists, to be sure; and in most concrete terms by Internationalists and Transnationalists.
So common is this persuasion, in other words, that John Paul identifies it as one principal force molding the society of nations today. There are a lot of arguments about this force, but no single name for it has been agreed upon. Those who exalt this mentality and defend its qualities against all comers give it such general names as “secularism,” or “realism,” or “hard-headed practicality.” Critics refer to it by another set of names. “Materialism,” “secularism” and “this-worldliness” are used frequently. Those who condemn this persuasion outright see it as “neopaganism,” “godlessness,” “apostasy,” and even as “Satanism.”
By whatever name it may be defended or attacked, there is very little difficulty in recognizing this force—the power of this persuasion—as an operating influence in individuals and in corporate groups. And there is no difficulty, either, in identifying the obvious preferences and phobias that are the constant companions of those who are guided by this mentality.
If there were a motto for this point of view, it would be something like “Let experience be your guide.” Your only guide.
Those who live by this motto—or, in any case, by its meaning—display a constant and fundamental preference in every area for the experience of living. In the practical business of daily life, in the grind or excitement of daily work and in the daily dream and quest for prosperity, concrete experience is acknowledged to be superior to any principle or rule that might come by any other means—no matter what the source. That is about as far as preferences extend. Experience is about it. Phobias, on the other hand, are around every corner.
The primary phobia is for all principles and rules that come from any source outside one’s own experience. It is a rule of experience itself, in fact, that one must refuse to be guided by any rule or any principle one hasn’t seen demonstrated with one’s own eyes, and preferably in one’s own life. “What goes around comes around” is all right as a principle, for example. Every person and every group over the age of three has seen that one work in terms of experience, and it has practical applications.
But a rule or principle such as “Seek first the Kingdom of God” or “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” is not hardheaded and practical. In fact, anyone of this persuasion will tell you that such rules and principles are “abstract” and “impractical.” The few who still speak in philosophical terms condemn such rules and principles as “aprioristic.”
For people—individuals, groups and nations—who share this persuasion, the judgment of what is true depends, as everything does, on their own experience. How they must act in order to be “morally good” in their own eyes, and in order to be successful in the business of living, cannot be deduced from “abstract” principles. And it cannot be announced by pope or prophet, priest or philosopher. It can only be concluded by individual or common—but always concrete—experience.
At its highest reach, this supreme deference to experience means that, in and of itself, only mankind has the ability to avoid defeat and despair. In and of itself, only mankind has the ability to create salvation, right here. And, if that brand of
salvation isn’t the Paradise of the Bible, or the Heaven of Christians, it does hold the promise of greater or lesser relief from pain and want. In fact, it holds the promise of material circumstances as favorable as can be fashioned.
Given such a reigning phobia for absolute rule and principles, and given the companion phobia for any authority proclaiming absolute rules and principles, it must be clear that secularists do not defer to the Bible of Christians or Jews, or to the Koran of Islam. But they don’t rely on personal whim either. Unpredictable happenstance does not govern secularist behavior. Accumulated experience does that.
The accumulated experience of a nation is to be found in its national documents, in its national story, in its folklore and in its traditions. All of that, working in combination with presently lived experience, provides a set of lessons and practical values for the members of each nation and for each nation as a whole.
Within that setting, organized religion may well have a valuable function, provided that none of the moral precepts or doctrines of organized religion be insisted upon as the absolute rules and principles that must govern human behavior. Indeed, in order to be a useful element in preserving what secularists call the “soul” of a nation, religion must join art and literature in adjusting to the concrete level of experience.
Thus, Humanist Schuyler G. Chapin can safely speak of the arts as “vital to sustaining our national existence,” despite our “present greed-oriented, anti-intellectual society” in America. But no good secularist would say the same of organized religion as long as it insists upon its absolute rules and principles, and upon its recourse to absolute authority—even if that authority is God’s.
Historian Arthur Schlesinger put organized religion neatly in its place within the secularist scheme of things. Americans must save themselves, Schlesinger wrote, “at whatever risk of heresy or blasphemy … sustained by our history and traditions”; for “the American mind is by nature and tradition skeptical, irreverent, pluralistic and rationalistic … relativism is the American way.”
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