Ideas have consequences

It’s really interesting to see Friedrich Nietzsche turn up in the current writings of some top Catholic clergy and scholars, and in the arena of ideas that is the great Catholic tradition. Homiletic & Pastoral Review has this extensive article on Pope Benedict carrying on John Paul’s “challenge to modernity” of comprehending the true nature of love.

Pope Benedict’s response to the charge that Christianity alienates men and women from human love appears disarmingly simple. But it runs extremely deep. He turns the tables, showing that what has actually poisoned eros is not Christianity, but modern secular culture itself, by exalting sensual pleasure. Pope Benedict goes well beyond refuting Nietzsche, as he exposes the roots of a profound crisis affecting modern man: the splitting up of the human person, the alienation of our body from our soul due to Enlightenment rationalism. What is the specific form this alienation assumes? The body-soul dualism introduced by Descartes in the seventeenth century.

Addressing the profound crisis affecting modern man is the business of the Church, to continue the post below.

Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput gave a superb address recently that take in, and takes on, “the illusion of choice rhetoric,” false concepts of happiness and the true meaning of “the common good.” It is posted in its eloquent entirety over at First Things.

Sooner or later, every teacher hears the same old joke about the philosophy student and his dad.

The dad asks, “Son, what are you going to do with that goofy degree?” And the son says, “I’m going to open a philosophy shop and make big money selling ideas.” I smile every time I hear it, because nobody yet has figured out how to get rich off the Sartre or Kierkegaard or Friedrich Nietzsche franchise. Or that’s what I thought until a couple of weeks ago, when a friend of mine came back from a local bookstore with a bag full of Nietzsche’s Will to Power Bars.

You’ll remember that Nietzsche first claimed that God was dead. Then he went insane. Then he argued that he was God himself. Now he has his own candy bar. In fact, the wrapper not only claims to be filled with “chocolaty goodness” but also to be “the official nutritional supplement of the superman.” Unfortunately, the wrapper also urges us to “think beyond good and evil,” so I’m not sure it’s telling the truth.

Chaput has a great opener here.

I don’t know if Nietzsche himself would endorse these bars. Given his mental state at the end of his life, I’m not sure he’d care. But he did have a ruthless sense of humor. Nietzsche might enjoy the fact that he’s the kind of thinker young college men quote to impress young college women. He has some of the same rebel appeal that Milton gave to Lucifer and Goethe gave to Mephistopheles. He’s bold. He’s radical. And the fact that he also went mad adds just the right touch of drama. In other words, he makes a great cultural icon for Americans to eat as a candy bar, because most Americans will never read a word of what he actually said.

The trouble is, once upon a time, some people in Germany did read him. And they did take him seriously. And they acted on what he said. Ideas have consequences. When Nietzsche asks us on the back of a Will to Power candy bar, “Is man merely a mistake of God’s, or God merely a mistake of man?,” we Americans can swallow our chocolate along with our Starbuck’s and grin at the irony from the comfort of 2007. Sixty years ago, no one would have gotten the joke. There was nothing funny about the Holocaust.

In other words, ideas have consequences—which brings me to today’s topic. When Cardinal Rigali first invited me to come to Philadelphia to talk about religion and the common good, I accepted for two simple reasons. First, I’m tired of the Church and her people being told to be quiet on public issues that urgently concern us. And second, I’m tired of Christians themselves being silent because of some misguided sense of good manners. Self-censorship is an even bigger failure than allowing ourselves to be bullied by outsiders.

Only one question really matters. Does God exist or not? If he does, that has implications for every aspect of our personal and public behavior: all of our actions, all of our choices, all of our decisions. If God exists, denying him in our public life—whether we do it explicitly like Nietzsche or implicitly by our silence—cannot serve the common good, because it amounts to worshiping the unreal in the place of the real.

Religious believers built this country. Christians played a leading role in that work. This is a fact, not an opinion. Our entire framework of human rights is based on a religious understanding of the dignity of the human person as a child of his or her Creator. Nietzsche once said that “convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”

In fact, the opposite is often true. Convictions can be the seeds of truth incarnated in a person’s individual will. The right kinds of convictions guide us forward. They give us meaning. Not acting on our convictions is cowardice. As Christians we need to live our convictions in the public square with charity and respect for others, but also firmly, with courage and without apology. Anything less is a form of theft from the moral witness we owe to the public discussion of issues. We can never serve the common good by betraying who we are as believers or compromising away what we hold to be true.

It would be effective enough to stop on that sobering statement. But there’s so much more treasure to mine in this elegant address, I want you to hear it, and consider its wisdom.

Unfortunately, I think the current American debate over religion and the public square has much deeper roots than the 2006 and 2004 elections, or John Kennedy’s 1960 election—or the Second Vatican Council, for that matter. A crisis of faith and action for Christians has been growing for many years in Western society. It’s taken longer to have an impact here in the United States because we’re younger as a nation than the countries in Europe, and we’ve escaped some of Europe’s wars and worst social and religious struggles.

No one understood this better than Georges Bernanos. Most of us remember Bernanos for his novels, especially The Diary of a Country Priest and Under Satan’s Sun. Some of us may remember that he was one of the major European Catholic writers to reject the Franco uprising in Spain. He spent the Second World War in South America out of disgust with European politics, both right and left. He didn’t have a sentimental bone in his body. He criticized Catholic politicians, Church leaders, and average Catholics in the pew with the same and sometimes very funny relish. But he loved the Church, and he believed in Jesus Christ. And exactly sixty years ago, in 1946 and 1947, he gave a final series of lectures that predicted where our civilization would end up today with complete clarity.

Among other things, Chaput says, Bernanos made clear that…

our problems began with the machine age—the industrial revolution—but not simply because of machines. They were the fruit of a “de-spiritualization” that had been going on for some time…

Incidentally, if he were alive today, Bernanos might throw an interesting light on the language of the abortion debate. When we examine “pro-choice” vocabulary, it really isn’t about choice at all. Instead, it’s phrased in terms of “what choice did I have?” “I couldn’t choose not to have sex.” “I couldn’t choose not to kill the child.” “You have no right to expect more from me; I had to have an abortion, and so I had a right to do it.” In the abortion debate, pro-choice means agreeing to the fiction that nobody really had a choice.

This clarification is critical to engage in, a course-correction for a society that got derailed and continues to be deluded by rhetoric about the “common good.” Chaput addresses that boldly.

The “common good” is more than a political slogan. It’s more than what most people think they want right now. It’s not a matter of popular consensus or majority opinion. It can’t be reduced to economic justice or social equality or better laws or civil rights, although all these things are vitally important to a healthy society.

The common good is what best serves human happiness in the light of what is real and true. That’s the heart of the matter: What is real and true? If God exists, then the more man flees from God, the less true and real man becomes. If God exists, then a society that refuses to acknowledge or publicly talk about God is suffering from a peculiar kind of insanity.

What can the “common good” mean in the context of Nietzsche’s superman or Marx or Freud or Darwin? These men became the architects of our age. But they were also just the latest expressions of a much deeper and more familiar temptation to human pride. We want to be gods, but we’re not. When we try to be, we diminish ourselves.

That’s our dilemma. That’s the punishment we create for ourselves. There’s a terrible humor in a man who claims that God is dead, then starts believing he’s Dionysius or Jesus Christ, and then ends up on a candy bar made by out-of-work philosophers for middle-class consumers who just want some “chocolaty goodness.”

Humility is the beginning of sanity. We can’t love anyone else until we can see past ourselves. And man can’t even be man without God. The humility to recognize who we are as creatures, who God is as our Father, what God asks from each of us, and the reality of God’s love for other human persons as well as ourselves—this is the necessary foundation that religion brings to every discussion of free will, justice, and truth, and to every conversation about “the common good.” Sirach and the Psalms and the Gospel of Luke and the Letter of James—these Scriptures move the human heart not because they’re beautiful writings. They’re beautiful writings because they spring from what we know in our hearts to be true…

This is long, but the original has still more brilliance. I hope you read it, and pass it on. The truth is ennobling.

We most truly serve the common good by having the courage to be disciples of Jesus Christ. God gave us a free will, but we need to use it. Discipleship has a cost. Jesus never said that we didn’t need a spine. The world doesn’t need affirmation. It needs conversion. It doesn’t need the approval of Christians. It needs their witness. And that work needs to begin with us. Bernanos said that the “scandal of Creation [isn’t] suffering but freedom.” He said that “moralists like to regard sanctity as a luxury; actually it is a necessity.” He also said that “one may believe that this isn’t the era of the saints; that the era of the saints has passed. [But] it is always the era of the saints.”