My Battle Against Hitler
Page 34
Racial identity—in its objectively proper place, free from all idolization—can never enthuse or excite the Christian, because it belongs to much too low a stratum. Unlike the bonds of family love, which are primarily based in the realm of the spiritual, the feelings of kinship or estrangement which originate in blood constitute a sphere that is triumphantly transcended by faith and the supernatural attitude. The person for whom the lower levels of motivation (such as the vital sphere) play a decisive role has not yet perceived even a hint of the world of spiritual values, let alone of supernatural reality. “Who are my mother and my brothers?… Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mk 3:33 and 35).
How could false earthly messianism and a belief in the transformation of the world by means of the form and laws of the state possibly find acceptance by a living member of the Mystical Body of Christ? No earthly messianism can make any impact upon one who has heard the words of Christ, “Behold, I make all things new”; who has grasped that only being “born anew” in Christ can transform the face of the earth; who has understood that only He can refresh those who “labor and are heavy laden”; and whose life is permeated by the sole great desire: vultum tuum quaesivi, Domine, “I have sought your face, O Lord.”
Such a person is incapable of cloaking the state and the public sphere with a mystical aura, or of confusing it with an institution in which man can find salvation; he is incapable of absolutizing the political sphere and looking to it to provide the true fulfilment of life, for his heart says with the Psalmist, Desiderium eorum attulit eis: non sunt fraudati a desiderio suo, “So they ate, and they were filled: for the Lord gave them their own desire” (Ps 78:29). The Catholic who makes his own the slogan of “the totalitarian state” shows either that he is a thoughtless prattler, or that the truth of Christ has never become incarnate in him. The true Christian knows that only one thing can make a totalitarian claim, that there is only one thing which ought to give direction to our entire life, which must live in us at every moment, which has the ultimate say in everything, and to which we belong completely and unreservedly: the triune God and His incarnate Son, Jesus Christ. Only a soul that is starved and alienated from God could concede a “totalitarian” claim to earthly goods. Does not the very fact that it is possible for so many today to take questions such as those regarding the totalitarian state seriously (and even discuss them) demonstrate the existence of a horrible emptiness in their souls where Christ ought to reign as King?
How could a true Christian be impressed by phrases in which adherence to the “national community” is extolled as the conqueror of egoism and the experience of the national community is proposed as the true remedy against such egoism? For the true Christian knows, on the basis of his own living experience, that only by “dying to self” and “being reborn in Christ” can selfishness be overcome, and that any “losing of oneself” in a national community only replaces individual egoism with a collective egoism.
If someone has truly heard the words “I am the vine, you are the branches … apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5) and they have fallen on good and fruitful soil in him, how could he be in any way impressed by all the wretched counterfeits of those who are impotently caught up in vicious circles, falling prey now to one error, now to its opposite? The true Christian “sets his mind on the things that are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God” (Col 3:1–2). Can the sheer number of those who have gone astray, the fanaticism of their idolatrous devotion, and the ruthlessness of their methods avail to impress him with their deceitful offers of a purely earthly renewal of the world, with their false gods “that have eyes but do not see” and “ears but do not hear” (Ps 115:5–6)?
No—this only shows that these Christians have long since ceased to live in and for Christ. How could a true Christian regard even for a moment the submersion of the individual person into an earthly community as the ideal, confusing this act of subservience with that true gift of self to Christ in which, paradoxically, the person is given to himself anew and thereby becomes capable of the victorious love which is the foundation of authentic community? When a Christian hears statements such as “Marriage is not primarily a private matter, but the concern of the people,” how can he possibly regard this as a form of selflessness, instead of reacting with horror? Even the noble unbeliever knows that marriage primarily concerns the ultimate form of communion in love between two persons and the coming into existence of a new human being out of this most intimate, loving union. For the Christian, this ultimate community of love is an image of the unity between Christ and His Church, and therefore a sacrament. The new human being who is to be born of this mysterious, holy union, this little person endowed with an immortal soul, is not primarily a new “citizen of the state,” but a new citizen of the heavenly Jerusalem.
What an ignorant attitude toward the radiant virtue of purity is revealed when a Catholic priest extols becoming “parents and grandparents of a healthier and happier race” as the fundamental rationale of premarital abstinence! Has not every trace of the sensus catholicus been lost here?
And what about all the ludicrous respect for the “enthusiasm” of the National Socialist Youth in the Third Reich! Should not a true Catholic rather be gripped by horror and profound compassion when he sees how these youths, instead of listening to the words of eternal life and thirsting for the living waters of God, have become intoxicated with materialistic slogans and quench their thirst with rivulets of turbid water? Can we imagine St. Athanasius contemplating with admiration the “enthusiasm” of the Arians? The true Christian knows how easy it is to awaken a dynamically powerful, but qualitatively inauthentic and impure “enthusiasm,” if one resolves to appeal to the lower human instincts. A Christian must really have lost sight of the clear picture of that pure and holy fire which inspired the saints, if this pitiful flash in the pan is able to make any impression on him!
There is no question that our reaction as Catholics to National Socialism constitutes an inescapable litmus test of our true attitude to Christ. In the many who oppose this horrible heresy with unequivocal courage, their response reveals a radiant heroism and a profound rootedness in Christ. We need only call to mind, for example, the [anti-Nazi] circle associated with the Junge Front in Düsseldorf. The opposite response exposes a religious vacuum in all those who have allowed themselves to be influenced in any way by the National Socialist movement, whether they defend it with apologetic zeal or hesitantly and tepidly approve of its so-called “positive aspects.” The result of this litmus test cannot be altered merely by a visit to a church, no matter how fervent; nor by reception of the sacraments, no matter how frequent; nor by any profession of allegiance to the Church, no matter how emphatic.
We cannot close our eyes to the fact that some believing Catholics today (we may thank God that it is only a weak minority!) are bogged down in a merely theoretical, literary Catholicism, and no longer possess the sapere Christum, “knowing Christ.” In a few days, we shall celebrate the holy feast of Corpus Christi—the feast which presents to our eyes the triumphant reality of the unfathomable love of God in the incarnation of His only begotten Son and the sacrament of the Eucharist. He who allows us to behold the glory of the Father and who once said to us: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:20), He to whom alone we belong unreservedly, and for whom we exist, He stands in our very midst. He seeks each of us in merciful love, saying to us: “Gustate et videte, quoniam suavis est Dominus! O taste and see how sweet the Lord is!” (Ps 33:9).
In light of this, how could false prophets still impress us? Have we forgotten that He said to us, “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves” (Mt 7:15)? Let us awaken to the light that envelops the Risen Lord. Let us break the spell that the false doctrines of a world alienated from God are spreading all around us, doctrines long since obsolete, disposed of, and discarded even before they arose again
in our time. Let us open our hearts to the gifts of the Holy Spirit. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, repent unto the Lord your God!”
THE STRUGGLE FOR THE PERSON
Der christliche Ständestaat
January 14, 1934
Von Hildebrand is known in philosophy for his Christian personalism, developed from his teachers Edmund Husserl and Max Scheler. It was, then, only natural for him to express his rejection of the Nazi ideology by showing that it is based on radical distortions of the human person. This essay is a good specimen of his personalist refutation of Nazism.
He begins the essay by speaking of the weariness felt by many people with “individualistic liberalism.” By liberalism he means a certain approach to the human person that detaches man from God and has the effect of isolating men and women from each other. Von Hildebrand realizes that many people, weary of the bad fruits of liberalism, were being drawn into the Nazi orbit by thinking that Nazism was the true antidote to liberalism. They thought, for example, that the revival of German nationalism in Nazism restored the sense of community that they were missing. Von Hildebrand argues that the distorted image of the person in Nazism renders this ideology completely incapable of renewing authentic community. Only by setting the human person in relation to the personal Christian God can we overcome at its roots liberalism and its depersonalizing effects.
The spirit of the age is characterized by disaffection with individualistic liberalism. There are at least three positive elements in this trend, which can be summarized as follows: first, the subjectivism and relativism of the past few centuries have prompted a yearning for the realm of the objective: a longing for objective being, which rests in itself and cannot be reduced to a mere product of our imagination or thought; and for the realm of objective values, which possesses a significance and validity that is independent of our arbitrary will and subjective satisfaction.
Second, there is a yearning for the organic, and a growing aversion to the dominion of the mechanical, to the machine taken as the covert causa exemplaris (“paradigm”) of all of life. In concert with such tendencies, there is also a rejection of the brutal construction of all things “from without,” of the violent and artificial, and of the delusion that everything is doable. There is a longing for what is saturated with meaning, for what has developed organically and “from within,” for what has grown instead of what has been made.
Third, there is a yearning for genuine community and a renunciation of any conception of the human person which fails to recognize his essential ordination to community and degrades community to a mere “means” which is indispensable only in a technical or practical sense. People are rejecting the dissolution of the essence and value of community, which reduces it to a mere sum of individual persons juxtaposed atomistically. They yearn for organic communities instead of merely artificial and arbitrarily constituted social structures.
This elementary craving for the objective, the organic, and community is the positive side of the coin of our time. The elementary breakthrough is the healthy, welcome response to the sins of liberalism and Enlightenment rationalism, the barren subjectivism and relativism of the nineteenth century, and the reduction of the cosmos—so saturated with meaning and illuminated by value—and the spiritual person, created in the image of God, to a bundle of sensations and sublimated drives (be it the libido or the drive for prestige).
It is a response to the reduction of the world of eternal truths, reposing in themselves, to merely subjective necessities of thinking. It is a response to the technological transformation and mechanization of the whole of life, to the excess of action at the expense of contemplation, to the bustling haste of the modern way of life, to the lack of reverence and understanding for the mysterious law of growth “from within,” to the overgrowth of organization, and to the so-called “Americanism” in which the category of the quantitative suppresses the category of the qualitative.
Finally, it is a response to the uprooting of the individual from the community, to the atomistic juxtaposition of persons in social life, to the replacement of the social ranks by social classes, to the overgrowth of committees and associations, and to the dissolution of genuine communities into purely purpose-oriented associations, which possess a merely juridical reality but no proper value of their own. It is a response to a basic attitude which is not merely anthropocentric, but egocentric, because it sees the ultimate goal of life as the material prosperity of the individual, around which everything else revolves.
This reaction is, as such, good and healthy, but the paths to which it is presently leading are anything but good. Today the spirit and the spiritual person have been devalued, thanks to humanitarian liberalism’s failure to understand the essence, destiny, and true dignity of the human person, and this discrediting is being preserved, not overcome. Out of weariness and disappointment with the image of the human person which, as developed by liberalism, has dominated non-Catholic Europe for centuries, many are turning to the subhuman and sub-spiritual for the fulfilment of the yearning described above.
But those who are doing so have not yet grasped the real cause of the trivialization of the cosmos, namely, the separation of the world from God, who is the epitome of all values and the archetype of all that exists, in whom all beings find their source, for whom they all exist, through whom all that exists has its meaning and value, and to whom all existence ultimately leads. When the light that “enlightens every man” was extinguished, every being was emptied of its meaning and value. Naturally, this has had radical and profound consequences, above all in the highest sphere of creaturely existence—i.e., in the sphere of the spirit and the spiritual person. For the greater the image of God in a being is, the more is its meaning and essence falsified when it is detached from God.
As I have already stated in these pages, nothing is more needed in the present-day chaos than a clear recognition of the hierarchy of being, as taught both by Revelation and the philosophia perennis [the tradition of Greek and Roman philosophy]. We may add another task of immediate urgency: the rehabilitation of the spiritual person and the whole sphere of that which is specifically spiritual. The following remarks are meant, above all, to help overcome the pernicious anti-personalism which threatens to undermine the whole of Western culture.
To begin with, we must grasp the causes of the discrediting of the spiritual person brought about by liberalism. We must also recognize that the true return to the objective, the organic, and to community does not lead away from the spiritual person, but rather back to his real essence and value.
It is entirely inadmissible to posit an antithesis between the person and that which is objective. It is indeed true that only the human being (insofar as he is a spiritual person) possesses the freedom which allows him to deviate from the objective logos which governs being. Just as only the human being can sin in a free revolt against values, so also only he can go astray. Material objects, plants, and animals simply “are”; the objective laws of matter and life operate in them. Only the spiritual person, as a conscious and free being, can behave “non-objectively,” building up a world of mere outward appearances and denying the objective order of being in his judgments, choices, and emotional responses.
Only the person is capable of behaving in a merely subjective manner which is not in accordance with the objective logos of being. But this does not mean that the person as such is excluded from the realm of objective being, or is incapable of behaving objectively—in conformity with the objective logos of being. Insofar as he is a spiritual, personal substance with a conscious existence that unfolds in meaningfully motivated acts such as knowing, willing, and loving, the human person is not something “subjective” that stands outside of objective being. On the contrary, the person is not even in the slightest less objective and metaphysical in his being than the realm of matter or life; indeed, he is a higher, much more potent being. Above all, he is a being who possesses an incomparably greater fullness of meaningful activity.
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br /> The human person did not create himself by his own power. He discovers his personal existence as an antecedent gift of God, just like the existence of his own body, of other persons, and indeed of the entire cosmos created by God. In the same way, he discovers his freedom and his abilities to know, love, and will as an objective fact. In other words, neither he himself nor his abilities belong to the realm of the “subjective,” of what is illusory, of that which exists only for the perspective of a subjective consciousness. The human person and his abilities, indeed his entire structure as a person, are objective par excellence. They are, in fact, a much more authentic image of God, the source of all objective existence, than all other created beings.
Furthermore, while the person’s ability to gain knowledge and his freedom of response do entail the possibility of error and sin—i.e., the world of the merely “subjective” and “non-objective” which contradicts the objective logos of being—they also entail the possibility of a form of objectivity which is much higher (because it is more like God) than everything else in existence. Such is the objectivity that lies in knowing the truth and freely affirming the realm of objective values. True judgment and morally good behavior represent a highpoint of “objectivity,” a kind of marriage with the objective logos of being.
Accordingly, true longing for the world of the objective need not lead away from the world of the personal; rather, it ought to lead into this world. To lose sight of the dignity and nobility of ratio, its classically formative power, and its illuminating fullness, simply because the rationalist intellect of the Enlightenment thinkers was flat and uninspired, would make for a lamentable misunderstanding.
The realm of the conscious, when it is wedded to the objective meaning of things and their place in the world of values, soars to spectacular heights far above all non-personal being, including the unconscious sphere to be found in the person.