By divorcing Biblical faith from Greek reason, Luther, Kant, and Marx destroyed the roots of the Christian concept of hope.
by Massimo Introvigne.
Article 4 of 5. Read article 1, article 2, and article 3.
In this fourth article, I continue to summarize Benedict XVI’s great treatise on hope, the 2007 encyclical “Spe salvi,” as if it was a theatrical play. Having traced in Act One the origins of our concept of hope to the birth of Christianity, and having defined it in Act Two as a reality rather than a delusion, in Act Three Benedict presents the modern crisis of hope. He shows how hope, born with Christ and specified in its conceptual terms through firm anchorage in both faith and reason, has been attacked in the modern history of Europe and the West through the passages of the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and Marxism.
Luther, Benedict argues, “was not particularly fond of the ‘Letter to the Hebrews’” (no. 7). To him—after his radical “dehellenization” and devaluation of the Greek philosophical foundation of Christianity—“the concept of ‘substance’… meant nothing” (no. 7). He took the first, but decisive, step by translating “hypostasis” in the definition of faith of Hebrews 11:1 we discussed in the previous article (“the hypostasis of things hoped for, the elenchos of things not seen”) not with the German equivalent of “substance” but with “Feststehen,” “to stand firm.” He also translated “elenchos” in the same passage not with “proof” but with “Überzeugtsein,” “to be convinced” (no. 7). Unfortunately, Benedict notes, these translations passed into the ecumenical translation that today is approved also by the German Catholic bishops. The translation “in itself is not incorrect, but it is not the meaning of the text” (no. 7). As we discussed in the previous installment of this series, Benedict wanted “hypostasis” translated as “substance” and “elenchos” as “proof.”
Here, Benedict runs the risk of appearing pedantic to the casual reader, the stereotypical German “Herr Professor,” as it occasionally happened to him. But in fact he was not dealing with philology but with philosophy. For we notice at once that with Luther the translation moves from nouns to verbs, from “things” to attitudes of the person, who “stands firm”—something that immediately evokes, if not a punch on the table, a form of voluntarism—and “is convinced,” which is evidently a different thing from having “proof.” Proof is objective, conviction is subjective: after all, there are wrong convictions too. In contrast, Benedict insists that in the original text of Hebrews 11 “the Greek term used (‘elenchos’) does not have the subjective sense of ‘conviction’ but the objective sense of ‘proof’” (no. 7).
Of course, voluntarism and subjectivism can also appear as very strong, sheltered as they are in Luther under the umbrella of faith. However, according to Benedict, faith separated from reason exercises its dominion over a rather narrow, strictly theological field. “It is not that faith […] is simply denied”—not yet—but “rather it is displaced onto another level—that of purely private and other-worldly affairs—and at the same time it becomes somehow irrelevant for the world” (no. 17). The public square is left to “others,” who make use not of faith, nor of a reason that dialogues with faith and seeks truth (for this reason was systematically devalued and marginalized by Luther), but of an instrumental reason, the reason of power and praxis.
These “others” quickly appear to occupy the public square, under the sign of science raised by Francis Bacon (1561–1626). The true is replaced by the useful; hope, by the “ideology of progress” (no. 17). When the “others” realize that the whole public square is free from faith and religion, they try to take over all culture and politics with the Enlightenment, which shows its violent aspect with the French Revolution. Of course, the flag of science is flanked here by that of freedom: but “freedom” is also a word with multiple meanings, which lends itself to deception. It is not, in the Enlightenment marching toward the French Revolution, a freedom for the sake of truth but a freedom from the limit, from the “shackles” of faith and of politics itself as it was then conceived, a “freedom” that carried within it a false idea of reason and a sinister “revolutionary potential of enormous explosive force” (no. 18).
Benedict’s critique of the French Revolution is conducted by analyzing two writings by the main philosopher of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), separated by only two years but very different in their judgment of events in France. The first, from 1792, is entitled “Der Sieg des guten Prinzips über das böse und die Gründung eines Reiches Gottes auf Erden” (The Victory of the Good over the Evil Principle and the Founding of a Kingdom of God on Earth). The title already says a lot. Nothing less than the establishment of God’s kingdom on Earth seems possible to Kant through the admittedly painful but providential replacement of the “ecclesiastical faith,” encrusted with old age and superseded by the Enlightenment, with “religious faith” that would be “simple rational faith” (no. 19). This was the “religion within the limits of reason” according to the philosopher’s own famous formula.
However, only two years pass and Kant in a new work, “Das Ende aller Dinge” (The End of All Things), from 1794, expresses the fear that the reign of the “Antichrist,” “presumably founded on fear and self-interest” is now coming, “the (perverse) end of all things” (no. 19). Someone less charitable than the German Pope might have paused to observe that to this “(perverse) end of all things” Kant brought his not even too modest contribution. But it was not the ascertainment of the responsibilities of individual protagonists of Europe’s cultural history that interested Benedict.
Benedict XVI is willing to consider the critique of the Enlightenment that in the 20th century came from the Frankfurt School, in particular from Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (1903–1969) who “formulated the problem of faith in progress quite drastically: he said that progress, seen accurately, is progress from the sling to the atom bomb” (no. 22), and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973). This was a significant critique, because it arose from the very heart of post-Enlightenment thought, yet according to Benedict proved incapable of restoring hope.
For Adorno and Horkheimer indeed, the dramas of the twentieth century no longer allow us to believe in the Enlightenment; but the critique that the Enlightenment has carried out of Christianity and faith in God remains in itself definitive. From this critique there is no turning back, and God “remains inaccessible” (no. 42). Despite the conceptual rigor, which Benedict appreciated, of the Frankfurt School’s analysis of the Enlightenment, when thinkers are “equally critical of atheism and theism” (no. 42) only nihilism remains as a perspective; not hope, but despair.
On another occasion, in a dialogue in the same year 2007 with the local clergy during his summer mountain holidays in Auronzo di Cadore, the German Pope referred to 1968 and its aftermath, as “the beginning or ‘explosion’… of the great cultural crisis of the West” and at the same time as “a collapse, we might call it, into nihilism.” We may wonder about the role played by the Frankfurt School itself in the formation of at least part of the “1968” ideology.
In “Spe salvi,” however, Benedict quickly moves to a third passage. After the first revolution constituted by Protestantism, and after the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution comes. Here the reversal of cognitive reason, i.e., the reason oriented to the knowledge of truth, into instrumental reason is revealed in the most brutal way. Not utility for humankind marching on the path of progress of scientist and Enlightenment utopias is the criterion to which everything is subordinated, but utility for a social class, for the Communist Party, for those who are ultimately able to grasp history in their hands and prevail by violence.
For Marx, an atheistic version of God’s reign on Earth is established not through science, but through politics. “The critique of Heaven is transformed into the critique of earth, the critique of theology into the critique of politics. Progress towards the better, towards the definitively good world, no longer comes simply from science but from politics—from a scientifically conceived politics that recognizes the structure of history and society and thus points out the road towards revolution, towards all-encompassing change. With great precision, albeit with a certain one sided bias, Marx described the situation of his time, and with great analytical skill he spelled out the paths leading to revolution—and not only theoretically: by means of the Communist Party that came into being from the Communist Manifesto of 1848, he set it in motion. His promise, owing to the acuteness of his analysis and his clear indication of the means for radical change, was and still remains an endless source of fascination. Real revolution followed, in the most radical way in Russia” (no. 20).
According to Benedict, there was, however, in Marx a “fundamental error” (no. 21). His theory was presented as designed for the “new Jerusalem” of realized communism (no. 21), on whose path the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was supposed to be only an intermediate and transitory stage. But of Marxism, which promises us concreteness while accusing religions of being vague, it can be said precisely that it “gave no indication” about this earthly kingdom of God without God. It ended up speaking only of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But on this point, by 2007 when “Spe salvi” was published, communism had been historically and morally defeated. By then, the German Pope could write that, “This ‘intermediate phase’ [the dictatorship of proletariat] we know all too well, and we also know how it then developed, not ushering in a perfect world, but leaving behind a trail of appalling destruction” (no. 21). Destruction, desolation, and lies.
The itinerary through which hope was eroded and deconstructed in the history of the West—which culminated, starting with Luther’s subjectivism, in the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the nihilism that followed the failure of ideologies—allows Benedict to close this third act with a moral. The German Pope does not assert at all that science and politics are useless and harmful. They become so only when they think they can establish paradises on Earth and intramundane kingdoms of God. “Anyone who promises the better world that is guaranteed to last for ever is making a false promise” (no. 24). Those who announce Heaven on Earth build Hell on Earth instead.
Conversely, a science and politics that know how to be modest, aware that Paradise is a reality of another nature and completely beyond their horizon, are not only not harmful but may offer the humble, necessary building blocks for “the task of engaging anew in the arduous search for the right way to order human affairs; this task is never simply completed” (no. 25).
