Habemus papam!

by John O'Callaghan

Nietzsche, as always, is relevant in times such as these. In yet another of those brilliant and fascinating reflections of his, he writes "our modern, noisy, time-consuming industriousness, proud of itself, stupidly proud, educates and prepares people, more than anything else does, precisely for "unbelief"." He goes on to talk about that indistriousness that is consumed by finding out the truth from "the newspaper," the industriousness of those for whom "it seems that they simply have no time left for religion, the more so because it remains unclear to them whether it involves another business or another pleasure."(From Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1966. p.69) We live under "the yoke of tutelage" in Kant's celebrated phrase, tutelage from the media, living the very opposite of what it is to be enlightened.

I was reminded of this passage from Nietzsche as I listened to and read the American news media coverage of the election of Pope Benedict XVI. As a friend of mine astutely deadpanned, "the media seems surprised that a Catholic was elected pope." This morning, however, Cardinal Egan was quoted, yes in the "newspaper," as giving the journalists an assignment, namely, that they should stop reporting on what their "experts" and "consultants" said about Benedict, and actually read his work, as there is plenty of it that is readily available.

Well I confess, to my shame, I am in my own way guilty of some of what Nietzsche is aiming his pentrating gaze at, and Cardinal Egan is warning against. And I fear that for most of us we will in fact let the media shape our perception of this new Pope. We will read our favorite newspapers, opinion magazines, and listen to our Sunday morning gabfests. Commonweal, America, First Things, Crisis, the National Catholic Reporter, and the National Catholic Register will all provide us with just the convenient summarys and distillations we need to tell us what to think about this new pope on this or that issue, as we are too industrious to find out for ourselves what he thinks. Reading Benedict's writings both from the past and in the future: will that be a business or a pleasure? In the same passage Nietzsche asks whether anyone has ever noted that a genuine religious life requires leisure, that is, "leisure with a good conscience." In fact, after Nietzsche, the German philosopher Josef Pieper did just that in his books, Leisure the Basis of Culture and Happiness and Contemplation.

Sadly, I had never read a single page of anything theologian and cardinal Ratzinger had actually written. I always took my views of him from the newspapers, opinion magazines, and immaculately coifed and made-up talking heads. That is, until today when I read this magnificent reflection upon "Truth and Freedom," found simply by googling the names Ratzinger and Pieper. (More in a minute on why Pieper.) It argues in a very clear and pentrating way that while we are all very wary of truth, and question its value and our ability to acquire it, we do not bother to inquire into freedom and its true nature. Truth he argues is the "measure" of freedom. It is really quite an extraordinary reflection.

For example, consider this passage: After this attempt to understand the origin of our problems and to get a clear view of their inner tendency, it is now time to search for answers. It has become evident that the critical point in the history of freedom in which we now find ourselves rests upon an unclarified and one-sided idea of freedom. On the one hand, the concept of freedom has been isolated and thereby falsified: freedom is a good, but only within a network of other goods together with which it forms an indissoluble totality. On the other hand, the notion itself has been narrowly restricted to the rights of individual liberty, and has thus been robbed of its human truth. I would like to illustrate the problem posed by this understanding of freedom with the help of a concrete example. At the same time this example can open the way to a more adequate view of freedom. I mean the question of abortion. In the radicalization of the individualistic tendency of the Enlightenment, abortion appears as a right of freedom: the woman must be able to take charge of herself. She must have the freedom to decide whether she will bring a child into the world or rid herself of it. She must have the power to make decisions about her own life, and no one else can-so we are told-impose from the outside any ultimately binding norm. What is at stake is the right to self-determination. But is it really the case that the woman who aborts is making a decision about her own life? Is she not deciding precisely about someone else-deciding that no freedom shall be granted to another, and that the space of freedom, which is life, must be taken from him, because it competes with her own freedom? The question we must therefore ask is this: exactly what sort of freedom has even the right to annul another's freedom as soon as it begins?

Now, let it not be said that the issue of abortion concerns a special case and is not suited to clarify the general problem of freedom. No, it is this very example which brings out the basic figure of human freedom and makes clear what is typically human about it. For what is at stake here? The being of another person is so closely interwoven with the being of this person, the mother, that for the present it can survive only by physically being with the mother, in a physical unity with her. Such unity, however, does not eliminate the otherness of this being or authorize us to dispute its distinct selfhood. However, to be oneself in this way is to be radically from and through another. Conversely, this being-with compels the being of the other-that is, the mother-to become a being-for, which contradicts her own desire to be an independent self and is thus experienced as the antithesis of her own freedom. We must now add that even once the child is born and the outer form of its being-from and-with changes, it remains just as dependent on, and at the mercy of, a being-for. One can, of course, send the child off to an institution and assign it to the care of another "for," but the anthropological figure is the same, since there is still a "from" which demands a "for." I must still accept the limits of my freedom, or rather, I must live my freedom not out of competition but in a spirit of mutual support. If we open our eyes, we see that this, in turn, is true not only of the child, but that the child in the mother's womb is simply a very graphic depiction of the essence of human existence in general. Even the adult can exist only with and from another, and is thus continually thrown back on that being-for which is the very thing he would like to shut out. Let us say it even more precisely: man quite spontaneously takes for granted the being-for of others in the form of today's network of service systems, yet if he had his way he would prefer not to be forced to participate in such a "from" and "for," but would like to become wholly independent, and to be able to do and not to do just what he pleases. The radical demand for freedom, which has proved itself more and more clearly to be the outcome of the historical course of the Enlightenment, especially of the line inaugurated by Rousseau, and which today largely shapes the public mentality, prefers to have neither a whence nor a whither, to be neither from nor for, but to be wholly at liberty. In other words, it regards what is actually the fundamental figure of human existence itself as an attack on freedom which assails it before any individual has a chance to live and act. The radical cry for freedom demands man's liberation from his very essence as man, so that he may become the "new man." In the new society, the dependencies which restrict the I and the necessity of self-giving would no longer have the right to exist.

"Ye shall be as gods." This promise is quite clearly behind modernity's radical demand for freedom. Although Ernst Topitsch believed he could safely say that today no reasonable man still wants to be like or equal to God, if we look more closely we must assert the exact opposite: the implicit goal of all of modernity's struggles for freedom is to be at last like a god who depends on nothing and no one, and whose own freedom is not restricted by that of another. Once we glimpse this hidden theological core of the radical will to freedom, we can also discern the fundamental error which still spreads its influence even where such radical conclusions are not directly willed or are even rejected. To be totally free, without the competing freedom of others, without a "from" and a "for"-this desire presupposes not an image of God, but an idol. The primal error of such a radicalized will to freedom lies in the idea of a divinity conceived as a pure egoism. The god thought of in this way is not a God, but an idol. Indeed, it is the image of what the Christian tradition would call the devil-the anti-God-because it harbors exactly the radical antithesis to the real God. The real God is by his very nature entirely being-for (Father), being-from (Son), and being-with (Holy Spirit). Man, for his part, is God's image precisely insofar as the "from," "with," and "for" constitute the fundamental anthropological pattern. Whenever there is an attempt to free ourselves from this pattern, we are not on our way to divinity, but to dehumanization, to the destruction of being itself through the destruction of the truth. The Jacobin variant of the idea of liberation (let us call the radicalisms of modernity by this name) is a rebellion against man's very being, a rebellion against truth, which consequently leads man-as Sartre penetratingly saw-into a self-contradictory existence which we call hell.


This passage is extraordinary for a number of reasons. In the first place, near the end we see Benedict pointing in a very Nietzschean way to the modern process of self-deification through the proclamation of the "freedom of the will". Nietzsche had written: "The desire for "freedom of the will" in the superlative metaphysical sense, which still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated; the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than...[the] audacity to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness." To absolve God! Nietzsche of course had his own solution to this ersatz freedom, which was to diagnose in it little more than a useful fiction that disguised the will to power. "That which is termed "freedom of the will" is essentially the affect of superiority in relation to him who must obey: "I am free, 'he' must obey," and "in real life it is only a matter of strong and weak wills." Benedict recognizes that Nietzschean point when he mentions the idols, Sartre, and the spectre of Hell. Indeed, he has much to say in the essay about the way in which this Nietzschean battle of weak and strong wills works itself out in contemporary society, with its "interest groups."

But in the second place he suggests the alternative of the figure of mother and child as the image of genuine freedom. If we simply listen to many of the coifed heads, no doubt we will have this image psychologized for us in a way that very often borders on anti-catholic prejudice. Notice, instead, Benedict's desire to say that this relationship is no mere exception, but the exemplar of genuine freedom for human beings. I have often been perplexed when fellow Christians who oppose abortion nonetheless treat certain unexpected pregnancies as a problem to be solved, even as abortion is not granted as an option for solving the problem. On the contrary, against the background of the deposit of faith expressed in Scripture, the unexpected pregnancy is always a sign of God's covenant, and the birth of our salvation. As we treat these pregnancies as problems to be solved, often times testing our faith, God, on the contrary, says to us through them, "I have faith in you; these children are given to you for your salvation." In a sea of turmoil, they are the lifesavers that He casts to us, to be clung to with all of our might. And here Benedict is saying to us that in the relationship of mother to child, we have not simply an expression of God's faith in us, but the very imago dei. As mother and child are "for," and "through," and "with," so "the real God is by his very nature entirely being-for (Father), being-from (Son), and being-with (Holy Spirit)." What a profound insight into human interdependence. In such being-for, being-through, and being-with is found genuine freedom, a participation in the divine. Thus the question of abortion is not simply a question of "rights" and competing freedoms, but of the genuine nature of human dignity and destiny. Extraordinary.

Finally, the passage is significant for another reason. "We scholars" have a tendency to dismiss the importance and originality of a figure by reducing him or her to "the sources." Thus we do not have to ask ourselves whether what the author writes is actually true or not. "'The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement from an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates...and so on'." (C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, as found here in Benedict's reflections upon the encyclical Fides et Ratio, delivered when he was Cardinal Ratzinger. Yet another piece I read just today.) If we rely upon the newspapers, magazines, and coifed heads, we will find out that Benedict is fundamentally "an Augustinian." With a wink, and a smile, a nod, and a knowing glance, as if we could make sense of what such a broad generalization means, we thus won't have to look at the arguments he adduces, and whether they support the truth claims he makes in works of philosophy and theology. And yet in this passage we see him departing in part, but in a significant way, from Augustine's discussion of the imago dei in his De trintitate. Augustine had ruled out reproduction as a source for a proper image of God, as such an image would be part of the"outer" life of man, not the inner life of the mind in which the image of God is to be found. In some ways, Benedict shares his insight more closely with Aquinas who had argued that in our reproductive capacity, in a certain way, human beings are greater images of God than even the angels are, for we can reproduce our own kind, "man from man, as God from God," the latter phrase in Aquinas bringing to mind the Nicene Creed. The point then is not to reduce Benedict to Aquinas rather than Augustine, but to recognize his own freedom of insight as he seeks to develop and express the faith he shares with these great figures, and all of us Christians.

Along those lines, I mentioned the German philosopher Josef Pieper. I saw a passage from Benedict's memoirs in which he mentions some of the most formative influences upon his thought being the theologian Romano Guardini, and the philosopher Josef Pieper. Sadly, I am not as knowledgeable of Guardini as I should be. But I do know a bit about Pieper. Reading this essay on Truth and Freedom, I am reminded of two specific books of Pieper's, Living the Truth, and The Silence of St. Thomas. To recognize these works as perhaps part of the horizon in which Benedict is writing is not to reduce his essay to them. But, for those not interested in living under the yoke of tutelage of the coifed, reading them may will provide some insight into what Benedict is arguing, in particular about the theme of truth as the "measure" of freedom.

I am no betting man, but I will not be surprised if Benedict's first encyclical is entitled, Veritas Vos Liberabit--the truth will set you free.

Habemus papam! Deo Gratias.