Out on a Limb

by Andrew Sullivan

  Could any sustained encyclical ever convey the power of the pope’s instinctive embrace of a man in the crowd whose skin was covered with disfiguring tumors? I don’t need to tell you about that incident because you all have an image of it instantly in your mind. It is the image that contemporaries must have seen in the life of Saint Francis as well: one of his first acts after his conversion was to wander into a leper colony and embrace its inhabitants, wash their bodies, and tend to their wounds. No words can sum up the power of overcoming visceral human disgust with transcendent love for the person behind that disfiguring mask of disease.

  Doctrine is insufficient to convey this truth. And one remembers all too quickly that this was the impact Jesus had. It was not his words alone that transfixed so many around him; it was the manner in which he lived—outside human boundaries, inside the human soul. Jesus gave us no theology. We had to wait for Paul for that. For decades after his crucifixion, it was mainly oral tales of what Jesus had done and the impact he had created that gave us any basis for a theology at all. What Jesus gave us was a mode of living—a mode beyond fear and want and even self-preservation. It wasn’t that he died in agony on a cross—thousands and thousands endured similar agonies across the brutal Roman Empire. It was the way he accepted that death, and transcended it, that changed human consciousness forever.

  And so when Francis talks of Christianity and of the Church, it is not a set of doctrines, let alone a set of politics, that animates him. It is what happens when doctrine cedes to life, and when truth transforms that life. “I have a dogmatic certainty,” Francis wryly says. “God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else—God is in this person’s life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life. Although the life of a person is a land full of thorns and weeds, there is always a space in which the good seed can grow. You have to trust God.”

  When he decided on the Thursday before Easter to wash the feet of several imprisoned juvenile offenders, including two women, it was not the first time he had broken with the tradition of only washing the feet of men. He had done the same thing as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. But it was the first time a pope had simply improvised a ritual formally set down by the Congregation for Divine Worship. And it was not hard to see the message he was sending: that the love of God knows no gender or even denominational boundaries (two of the people whose feet he washed were Muslim). More to the point, simply by doing this—and not explaining it—the act transforms the person doing it. You cannot think your way into this. You have to walk confidently into the adventure of discernment.

  And so faith becomes real through living, not thinking. In his dialogue with Scalfari, Francis wrote:

  I would not speak about, not even for those who believe, an “absolute” truth, in the sense that absolute is something detached, something lacking any relationship. Now, the truth is a relationship! This is so true that each of us sees the truth and expresses it, starting from oneself: from one’s history and culture, from the situation in which one lives, etc. This does not mean that the truth is variable and subjective. It means that it is given to us only as a way and a life. Was it not Jesus himself who said: “I am the way, the truth, the life”? In other words, the truth is one with love, it requires humbleness and the willingness to be sought, listened to and expressed.

  The truth “is given to us only as a way and a life.” And here is another core aspect of Francis’s retelling of Christianity that cannot be emphasized enough: he is an anti-ideological pope. For him, ideology means that something alive and growing has been plucked and pickled. It means that openness to God’s unknowable future has been ruled out-of-bounds. And this has a direct meaning for evangelization: “We need to remember that all religious teaching ultimately has to be reflected in the teacher’s way of life, which awakens the assent of the heart, by its nearness, love and witness.” My italics.

  And so, yes, “proselytism is solemn nonsense.” That phrase—deployed by the pope in dialogue with the Italian atheist Eugenio Scalfari (as reported by Scalfari)—may seem shocking at first. But it is not about denying the revelation of Jesus. It is about how that revelation is expressed and lived. Evangelism, for Francis, is emphatically not about informing others about the superiority of your own worldview and converting them to it. That kind of proselytism rests on a form of disrespect for another human being. Something else is needed:

  Instead of seeming to impose new obligations, Christians should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet. It is not by proselytizing that the Church grows, but “by attraction.”

  Again, you see the priority of practice over theory, of life over dogma. Evangelization is about sitting down with anyone anywhere and listening and sharing and being together. A Christian need not be afraid of this encounter. Neither should an atheist. We are in this together, in the same journey of life, with the same ultimate mystery beyond us. When we start from that place—of radical humility and radical epistemological doubt—proselytism does indeed seem like nonsense, a form of arrogance and detachment, reaching for power, not freedom. And evangelization is not about getting others to submit their intellect and will to some new set of truths; it is about an infectious joy for a new way of living in the world. All it requires—apart from joy and faith—is patience.

  V

  Then there is the name.

  Francis is arguably the most venerated saint since the time of Jesus. His strangeness and intensity have echoed through the Christian imagination for eight centuries, marking him as a special kind of prophet. A bundle of contradictions to the modern mind, he both remains an advocate of total obedience to church authorities yet is also famous for improvising wildly in their absence; he went to Rome to ensure that his fledgling order might not be deemed heretics for their radically new way of life, and then promptly went on to cast a shadow over much of the decadent Catholicism of that era in dark, decrepit contrast with his simplicity and zeal. Bullheaded, intemperate, paranoid, and mystical, you can see the authorities of the time—secular and religious—treating him gingerly and nervously as some kind of exception to every rule. They knew he was special, but couldn’t precisely say why. What they couldn’t deny was the profound impact he had on those who encountered him.

  Just as you cannot overstate the importance of the name of Benedict that Ratzinger took, so, too, the name of Francis with Bergoglio. But unlike Benedict, no one had ever claimed that sacred name before. Such an act of presumption could not have been made lightly—especially for a Jesuit. But, as Francis has explained, the name came to him in the conclave. What meanings does that name evoke in Christian thought and history? And what signs does it foretell?

  You could make an argument that it could signal a new era of Catholic concern for the environment as climate change gathers force. One could also see Saint Francis’s famous encounter with the Grand Sultan of Egypt as a harbinger of a papal outreach to Islam. But one overwhelming theme has already emerged in Pope Francis’s words and actions that echoes the core obsession of his namesake saint: poverty.

  Pope Francis insists—and has insisted throughout his long career in the Church—that poverty is a key to salvation. And in choosing the name Francis, he explained last March in Assisi, this was the central reason why:

  He recalled how, as he was receiving more and more votes in the conclave, the cardinal sitting next to him, Cláudio Hummes of Brazil, comforted him “as the situation became dangerous.” After the voting reached the two-thirds majority that elected him, applause broke out. Hummes, 78, then hugged and kissed him and told him “Don’t forget the poor,” the pope recounted, often gesturing with his hands. “That word entered here,” he added, pointing to his head.

  While the formal voting continued, the pope recalled: “I thought of wars… and Francis (of Assisi) is the man of peace,
and that is how the name entered my heart, Francis of Assisi, for me he is the man of poverty, the man of peace, the man who loves and protects others.”

  The connection between peace and poverty is one made by Saint Francis. His conversion came after he had gone off to war in defense of his hometown, and, after witnessing horrifying carnage, became a prisoner of war. After his release from captivity, his strange, mystical journey began.

  What you see in the life of Saint Francis is a turn from extreme violence to extreme poverty, as if only the latter could fully compensate for the reality of the former. This was not merely an injunction to serve the poor. It is the belief that it is only by being poor or becoming poor that we can come close to God. Saint Francis, it must be said again, was completely pathological about this. His followers were to have no possessions at all. Their shelter had to be rudimentary, if any. They lived peripatetic lives—constantly traveling rather than settling down and achieving even minimal creature comforts. The way of life was so extreme it soon divided Francis’s followers between the true mystics and those who wanted some semblance of ordinary life. Saint Francis himself walked and walked through sickness and disease until he died in excruciating pain and blindness at the age of forty-four.

  And so when we find ourselves shocked by Pope Francis’s denunciations of the ideology of unfettered market capitalism, it seems to me we shouldn’t suddenly think of Karl Marx. We should think of a thirteenth-century mystic. There is no law of economics here; there is simply the most basic law of the Franciscan order: “To follow the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ and to walk in his footsteps.” (At the beginning of the order, there was no second law. Why, after all, did they need one?)

  And this is where the American left may find it hard to wrestle Pope Francis easily into their worldview, just as the American right has. He is obviously open to the welfare state, to protect the dignity of the vulnerable—and certainly much more supportive of it than the current, dominant Randian faction of the Republican Party. But there is little sense that a political or economic system can somehow end the problem of poverty in Francis’s worldview. And there is the discomfiting idea that poverty itself is not an unmitigated evil. There is, indeed, a deep and mysterious view, enunciated by Jesus, and held most tenaciously by Saint Francis, that all wealth, all comfort, and all material goods are suspect and that poverty itself is a kind of holy state to which we should all aspire.

  That’s why Saint Francis remains such a utopian, mystical figure. There was no weighing in his circle of the merits of a just or an unjust war in a fallen world, as Thomas Aquinas wrestled with. There was simply the urgent imperative to live now without war or possessions. There was the need not for a better doctrine—but for a way of life. Saint Francis’s inspiration for his new mode of living, according to legend, was a Gospel passage, Matthew 10:9, that he heard one day and immediately followed:

  Get you no gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses; no wallet for your journey, neither two coats, nor shoes, nor staff: for the laborer is worthy of his food.

  Not only was Saint Francis to become homeless and give up his patrimony; he was to travel on foot, wearing nothing but a rough tunic held together with rope.

  Whatever else it is, this is not progressivism. It sees no structural, human-devised system as a permanent improver of our material lot. It does not envision a world without poverty, but instead a church of the poor and for the poor. The only material thing it asks of the world, or of God, is daily bread—and only for today, never for tomorrow. If this seems extreme, it’s because it is—an unreasonable, radical rebellion against the very nature of our physical selves. It allows for no comfort or security in a bodily sense. It suggests instead that it is only by losing both materially that we have a chance for anything like them spiritually. Of course, the religious association with extreme poverty is not restricted to the Christian tradition. But in Saint Francis, it achieves almost transcendent integrity. Many of his followers, it is worth remembering, were often of his own well-to-do class, just as many early Christians were prosperous traders and businesspeople. It was not so much the experience of poverty that propelled them so much as the renunciation of their own wealth and power. This, observers sensed and recorded, gave them a liberation like no other.

  It’s only when you absorb this radical—and, frankly, impossible—worldview in its original Franciscan form that you can begin to see what it might say to the world today. Remember that Pope Francis believes we exist in human history and need to discern the signs of the times in our own lives. And Saint Francis is a part of his answer. From this perspective, the idea that a society should be judged by the amount of things it can distribute to as many people as possible is anathema. The idea that there is a serious social and political crisis if we cannot keep our wealth growing every year above a certain rate is an absurdity.

  To put it mildly, this is a twenty-first-century heresy. Which means, I think, that this pope is already emerging and will likely only further emerge as the most potent critic of the newly empowered global capitalist project. In this, of course, Francis is not new. John Paul II was as aggressively critical of Western capitalism as he was of Eastern communism. But there is an obvious difference between the early 1980s and the 2010s. Back then, communism existed as a rival to capitalism and as a more proximate threat to world peace. Now, the only dominant ideology in the world is the ideology of material gain—through either the relatively free markets of the West or the state-controlled markets of the East. And so the Church’s message is now harder to obscure. It stands squarely against the entire dominant ethos of our age. It is the final resistance.

  For Francis, history has not come to an end, and capitalism, in as much as it is a global ideology that reduces all of human activity to the cold currency of wealth, is simply another “ism” to be toppled in humankind’s unfolding journey toward salvation on Earth.

  Doctrinal change—in the sexual or institutional terms that the secular world wants—is not likely to be immediately forthcoming in this papacy (although there is no knowing where the newly invigorated debate Francis has enabled will take us). Doctrine, after all, is not the area where the pope believes the action is, or where he believes our true human ability extends. But a new clarity and passion in the critique of global materialism has emerged already. Francis’s criticism of the American-style “golden age” of inequality applies, it should be noted, with even more force to the Chinese model, which does not even allow for religious and political liberty within its planet-destroying plunder. What this pope is clearly doing is pitting a church with renewed moral authority against a market ideology which either denies the unforgivable sin of man-made climate change or celebrates it in a materialist dead end.

  But these remain hints and guesses about Francis. And he will surely grow as the Church he accompanies evolves once more. The growth will not come, I suspect, by a total or immediate transformation of the Church’s institutional structure (although I wouldn’t bet against it in due course), nor by some dramatic concession to secular priorities. Francis will grow as the Church reacts to him; it will be a dynamic, not a dogma, and it will be marked less by the revelation of new things than by the new recognition of old things, in a new language.

  It will be, if its propitious beginnings are any sign, a patient untying of our collective, life-denying knots.

  Democracies End When They Are Too Democractic

  May 1, 2016 | NEW YORK magazine

  As this dystopian election campaign has unfolded, my mind keeps being tugged by a passage in Plato’s Republic. It has unsettled—even surprised—me from the moment I first read it in graduate school. The passage is from the part of the dialogue where Socrates and his friends are talking about the nature of different political systems, how they change over time, and how one can slowly evolve into another. And Socrates seemed pretty clear on one sobering point: that “tyranny is probably established out of no other regime than democracy.” What did Plato m
ean by that? Democracy, for him, I discovered, was a political system of maximal freedom and equality, where every lifestyle is allowed and public offices are filled by a lottery. And the longer a democracy lasted, Plato argued, the more democratic it would become. Its freedoms would multiply, its equality spread. Deference to any sort of authority would wither, tolerance of any kind of inequality would come under intense threat, and multiculturalism and sexual freedom would create a city or a country like “a many-colored cloak decorated in all hues.”

  This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed—with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehending. And when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal, when elites are despised, and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy. There is no kowtowing to authority here, let alone to political experience or expertise.

  The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher… is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.