When friends understand each other well, when lovers understand each other well, when families understand each other well, then we believe ourselves to be in harmony. Pure deception, mirror for larks. Sometimes I feel that between two who smash each other’s faces with blows there is much more understanding than between those who are there watching from the outside (Julio Cortázar, Rayuela).
There are those who see in postmodernism a break with the rationalist tyranny of modernity, but that is only part of it, because it is not so much a separation from modernity as a continuation of its individualistic anthropology.
Postmodernism holds that only the individual knows, so that the person could and should self-identify as he or she chooses. Not only that, but the Promethean act of self-definition would be precisely the rebellion necessary to reformulate a system where all knowledge is really a pretension, a tyrannical lie to gain access to power. I did not invent this; it is Foucault who says so.
Postmodernity goes against the idea of truth because it states that truth cannot be known in its totality, and that any pretension to the contrary is an absolutist lie. Far from feeling defeated by this, it vehemently maintains the need to express itself without justification. It does not care about contradiction because no one can be a valid interlocutor. Only oneself can know oneself, and that is enough, since understanding between two different beings is fundamentally impossible.
It is curious how this doctrine justifies itself in order to take power and even to lie shamelessly. On the one hand, it says that real sense and real knowledge are impossible; on the other hand, it uses language instrumentally, cynically, to seize power. What matters to the postmodern is his “authenticity,” his own preconception of his being, his subjectivity. He claims to be an oppressed victim, but he does not care about oppressing in order to express himself, nor about being incongruent, since congruence is impossible. His is inevitable, autochthonous, natural selfishness.
In fact, for postmodernity the only thing that really exists is power and the need to use it: that would be knowledge. Put this way it sounds like the speech of a Hollywood villain, but it is not fiction. Or at least it is not just fiction, but faith in something, in a new religion; or in one that perhaps is not as new as one would like to believe.
The “new religion” is very much like Gnosticism, an ancient belief that paraded on the same individualistic catwalks as modernity and postmodernity. It proposed that full knowledge of this world was impossible, since Earth and Heaven were at war. Creation had been a failure: the demiurge (or “artificer”), trying to emulate a superior deity, created the world without the necessary wisdom, and therefore evil and ignorance existed in the world. That is to say, it is based on alienation from reality as a fundamental principle.
Some Gnostics said that the creation was deliberately misguided, in order to mock the main god; others, that it was simply ignorance without evil intention. However, these Gnostic views agreed that, in spite of the creator’s mistakes, he was unable to eliminate the spark of divinity that lies in man. As a consequence, they proposed that man must find and recognize in himself that spark of divinity in order to transcend the world and free him from the tyranny of this creator-traitor to become what he should always have been, a god.
It is somewhat similar to Christianity, on which it was superficially based, but it is also similar to humanism (and empiricism), which believes that man has the capacity to know the world if only he uses a certain faculty natural to the individual. Such is the Gnostic apotheosis: to search within oneself for the essence of the divine, in practice presupposing that “I am god” in the human eagerness to feel good. That is the religion of today, the mystical background of Freemasonry, the worship of one’s own human nature as an image of the divine.
For the modern, the spark of divinity is the human faculty of discursive reason by which, if man studies reality deductively, then he can attain knowledge, create utopia and even transcend himself as man.
For the postmodernist, the divine spark is that everyone can know himself if he has the courage to do so. His desires are “his truth” to be expressed as existential daring, since in his interiority he knows himself to be good, and if he were not good it would be due to ignorance of that truth which he resists (and which is recursively his intrinsic goodness to be expressed). I-me-me. More of me.
If modernity sought technical mastery of the world in order to impress its own reason (and identity) on the universe, postmodernity seeks to impose politically its own arbitrariness: the emotional and political expression of its particularity.
To achieve its goal, postmodernity needs to engender gigantic monsters, disparate groups that claim to be tolerant and that the only thing they do not tolerate is “intolerance” (as in the alphabet crew). In reality, it is intolerance of everything which implies restricting their full vital expression, understood as their freedom to define reality. (In other words, psychotics at perpetual war with reality, seeking love and recognition at gunpoint).
Such is the problem of “free expression.” Since nothing exists outside of expression, if we choose to prohibit something we would either have arbitrariness and incoherence, or it would not be legitimate to prohibit anything. What would be left of freedom of expression then? It would be one more entelechy for the pile.
The point is that the error of these people is not exclusively theirs, but of the entire liberal culture that surrounds them. Carrying the rainbow banner, they represent the vanguard of the cultural ambitions of their environment in its maximum expression. They thus believe themselves to be redeemed.
Such an attempt to free man from himself can only end in a war against humanity itself, creating imaginary enemies so that some can feel good about themselves. Therefore, if today there are not enough racists, it would be necessary to invent them so that the eternal warriors would never have to face their limitations, or it would become clear that the problem is not so much external as of their own heart.
If individualism makes the individual a god, postmodernity is not so much a critique of modernity as its more maudlin “side-B” Stripped of its intellectual garb, postmodernity is the victory of the human drive in its irrepressible desire for expression, an inveterate contradiction that claims to disbelieve in the word because it would only be an instrument to prohibit or enable its insatiable hunger for recognition and fruition. The fundamental thing would be to express oneself, and congruence would be a tyrannical fiction. But why believe those who admit to lying and deny the possibility of truth?
Hegel argued that from the sum of all these processes we would arrive at full knowledge. If only everything were expressed, a synthesis would emerge from their conflict: a total order and peace. But this overcoming dialectic was neither a new idea nor is it real, but a rationalistic recapitulation of previous cosmologies—such as that of ancient Greek religion, or that of the Egyptians or the Babylonians, which extolled the human capacity to unite the disparate, the power of man to order. This is what the deistic Freemasonry that founded the new republics believes.
For the Greeks, the world was the product of a war between the gods to order each other, and Prometheus had stolen for men the reason of the gods, who did not want man to have it. The Egyptians, for their part, worshipped Horus, the god who reunited the limbs of their father Osiris, who had been betrayed and torn to pieces by his brother Set. And the Babylonians worshipped Marduk, who established the world from the corpse of Tiamat and a whole lot of the same.
All those cosmogonies as a starting point presuppose an evil creation, war as the mother of the world, which conveniently expels the guilt of evil outwards (and incidentally glorifies conflict as fruitful), as well as glorifies the consolidation of self-improvement: to unite by one’s own means physically and conceptually disparate fragments to order the cosmos. They are humanist religions!
Fascism, Marxism and social democracy were nourished by the same myths. It also turns out that the libertarian “self-made man” is not entirely a new myth, since it is again the individual imposing an overcoming order that he himself imagined to be superior.
In psychological terms, these myths express the mentality of a wayward child who believes that he can scream and kick and get his way if he is competent enough. That is, it is the idea that reality is established by tantrum or brute force, and that reality is pure power: virtue is power and weakness is insufficiency. It is the usurper who kills his own father to be king, Cronus castrating Ouranos: the man who kills god to define reality and thus attain divine fullness. It is power for power’s sake.
Gnosticism complains that the demiurge usurped the true god who, being good, would have given us the perfect paradise, without evil, and that we should therefore usurp the usurper by finding the true god within ourselves and thus awaken others from their error. Heroic and populist, he nobly pretends to enlighten us all, believes himself to be the savior, seeks to show himself virtuous, like a millennial in networks, and explains the globalist or neoconservative impulse to export democracy to the whole world as a universal panacea.
For this perspective, the biblical God is the true devil, since He tried and tries to hide the truth from us: that we are gods. It is only a matter of finding that secret knowledge within us; of eating of the forbidden fruit. “Believe in yourself,” or what is the same: “do your will.” From that lens, the devil was a Promethean hero who tried to alert us to the original betrayal so that man would be free to define himself and become god, since such divine knowledge could only be found within oneself (or we would have no way to know it).
We can keep trying to ignore religion and believe it to be empty mysticism—but religion will not ignore us. Man always has beliefs and worldviews, and they always come into play. They are what determine our identity, our loyalties and our destiny. That is why it is necessary, first, to question the idea that it is possible to be neutral, to lack cosmological axioms (which are also psychological), and then to establish how it is possible to understand or know ourselves.
On that metaphysical plane one can converse and compare beliefs; the alternative is modern primitivism. The only thing left is war—the banal struggle for power, believing that we are absolute and that the world must submit. This fatal arrogance that wants to define everything from the individual, sooner or later, will kill us.
Iván Engel writes from this Spain. This article appears through the kind courtesy of El maifiesto.
Featured: Jeune homme à la fenêtre (Young Man at the Window), by Gustave Caillebotte; painted in 1875.
The latest book by Brian Bolger has just been published. Nowhere Fast. Democracy and Identity in the Twenty First Century is a close and thorough analysis of the structural and cultural decline of western democracies, particularly the UK. The book examines the economic crisis of globalization, the emergence of a new “knowledge class,” and the phenomenon of populism. We are happy to bring you an excerpt from it.
Please consider supporting this worthy work by purchasing a copy and spreading the word.
There seemed to be an inevitability in the talk of globalisation and the ‘end of history’ which ushered in the twenty first century. This emanated from the post World War 2 era of New Deals and free trade, and of a dollar hegemony supposedly built on a dichotomy of liberalism and democracy. There was a broad consensus amongst academics and liberals, combined with a myopic belief in the progressive benefits of technology, that a brave new world consensus was forming and that war and discontent was ebbing away like the tide from an old broken Empire.
Economists tend to measure globalisation in ‘Trade in Goods’ and FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) flows across borders. Yet this is like sailing a passenger ship in the North Atlantic with ‘Icebergs’ disabled from the navigation system. There are Icebergs floating around… and lots of them. ‘Trade Openness’ (calculated as Exports plus Imports as a % of GDP) grew steadily from 1945 onward. It reached its peak in approximately 2005 and has since begun to tumble. There is now a trend to onshoring with the dual impacts of Covid and Ukraine. There are declining rates of return on investments and the problems of geopolitical uncertainty. The world, effectively, is splintering into blocs (Grossraums, ‘great spaces’) and the result is chauvinistic assertion manifested in military conflicts. But the reasons for the collapse of interrelated economies goes deeper. It is not purely economic. There is an underlying shift in what Carl Schmitt called the ‘Nomos of the Earth’.
Whilst the twentieth century may have been one of globalisation and trade, it was also one of a ‘total mobilisation’ of resources and human resources for a system of capital accumulation – which heaps excessive demands on international relations.
In political philosophy it often takes a period of nuanced reflection to assess the real ‘telos’ or ‘nomos’ of what occurred before or what is transpiring. At first Colonialism appears as a philanthropic and mercantile escapade. The ‘nation state’ appears to be the solution to the Holy Roman Empire and the despots of monarchical Europe. Democracy appeared to be the solution to the woes of the nineteenth century. However, when the dialectic unfolds, we are left with the real ‘Nomos’ (law, ‘lex’ in Latin or ‘right to the land’). The ‘Nomos of the Earth’ was the concept which Schmitt outlined which, having begun with the discovery of the ‘New World,’ the Americas replaced the ‘Old World’ of Europe and Asia. The ‘nomos’ is the real title to land, to a culture, and it is beyond International Law. In this however came the ambivalent nature of US policies of interventionism and isolationism. Establishing an American ‘Grosssraum’, as in the Monroe Doctrine, becomes problematic. The maritime Empire of the British was another ‘Grosssraum’. The nation state, however, works in contradistinction to this reality. It only works out in an international system of agreed law, of equal liberal nation states. When this breaks down, we have the polarisation of ‘Grossraums’ and the casualties of diminutive nation states. So ‘nomos’ means the real original title to land and when conflicts arise, it is usually a consequence of this disputed title, as in the Ukraine or Israel, or in Taiwan.
From the Middle Ages there developed a code of civil and ecclesiastical law to regulate conflicts of Church, Republic and Prince. The Holy Roman Empire acted as a type of ‘Katechon’ or protector against the antichrist. It was therefore more of a guiding ethos, or telos regarding Empire, an ideology even. The ascendancy of nation states in the nineteenth century sees the demise of the ‘Katechon’ or ethos. As in Washington’s final address the emblem of the modern era becomes ‘As little politics as possible, as much trade as possible’. So, nation states become largely conduits for trade, for globalised trade. Such a myriad of conflicting interests, mostly economic, has resulted in a ‘forgetting’ or rational/technical society without an underlying ethos. Now civilisational states, such as Russia’s ‘Holy Rus’, Chinese ‘Tianxia’, or Islamic states see themselves as unified (however corrupt). The American ‘Grossraum’ on the other hand, consists of liberal contradictions, the weakness of representative government, a confusion of foreign policy and an anarchic domestic world of anomie. Yet the liberal elites act as though they hold some higher moral ‘progressive’ framework. Hegel had said that there was no real American ‘state’, that it lacks a commonality of culture.
It is not in effect a process of deglobalisation which is occurring, but the fundamental dissolution of the de facto independence of nation states and its replacement with regional Grossraums, akin to Empire. The current dying pains of economic globalism are ringing around the world. Notions of International Law break down when its implementation is unequal and sporadic or when the civilisational states and empires resent encroachment. Schmitt envisaged, presciently, a world, not of globalisation, but one of differentiated ‘Grossraums’. He contrasted fixed ‘culture’ states such as Germany with flighty mercantile sea empires such as Great Britain. Land based realms, close to the soil, to nature are more stable. Again, there is a contrast between Kantian notions of universal international states based on a system of International Law and its opposite in civilisational Eurasian states who emphasise local and particular cultures. The Westphalian world, which ushered in the modern notion of nation states is under threat. The problem for modern nation states is that the sovereign no longer is able to wield the ‘exception’, to secure the safety of the state. This is due to the decadent form of liberalism which runs amok inside nation states. The absolutely sovereign Hobbesian state is in abeyance. The liberal state, based on economy, rationalism and progressive universality is unable to defend itself. The Katechon is under threat, not ostensibly from warring civilisational states, but from inside.
The liberal and Marxist world envisaged an unfolding progress to a Utopian end of history schema and its naivete is now visible. It is more akin to Hegel’s development of spirit but one rooted in nature and culture. The liberal world must accept the particularity of cultures and their equal jurisdiction; there is no universal human rights, no good and evil. Man has moved from land to sea to air, to space. Yet we need to return to the land and a ‘jus gentium’ (law of nations) based on natural law rather than positive law which protects peoples rather than land borders. This, in itself, involves a sea change to real democratic participation in the polis and a move away from nationalism to community. In the middle ages there was a recognition of an authority that existed, be it the Emperor or the Pope, and an informal common law. There were no wars between states, only competition between nobles. They largely concerned the pushing out of terrain rather than defending ‘borders’. We are now encompassed by borderlands and all its ensuing strife and war. Modern globalisation only concerns matter rather than spirit. Competition between modern states is delineated by a type of economic piracy. We have a version of maritime colonialism dressed up as globalisation. It is merely the naming which has changed.
This international sea like empire is rootless. It imagines ownership of titles rather than ownership of culture. It is extractive rather than productive or creative. It provokes ‘ressentiment’ from the poor and disenfranchised. It creates borders and division because it has no underlying theology. The theoretical underpinning of the Chinese’Tianxia’ (all under heaven) of a cultural Chinese empire is its, according to the Chinese, opposite. In this argument the empire must understand the relevant cultures it ascribes to. It is not one off dominion but understanding, however far-fetched that might seem with the present Chinese incumbents.
War has an economy of its own. When the underlying ‘telos’ to nation states is economic only, then this permeates all aspects of life. It is like a plague of sorts jumping from one realm to another: it invades healthcare, education, and war. So, war has become Keynesian in an era of diminishing capital rate of returns ( r>g). Capital follows a pattern of osmosis- seeking any host. Stocks in defence industries are booming. There seems to be no limits on technology and capital. War is not incidental to the modern era – it is a fundamental part of the ‘wealth of nations’. An International Court of Justice should be based on fundamental natural law, not allied to political institutions and particular states. Multicultural states are unrooted and their capital elites unmoored. There is in essence a dysfunctional quality to modern occidental states. Economy must be subservient to theology and telos.
Much of modern and late modern conceptions of Democracy and Identity are general, universal assumptions about how scientific research is done. Scientists and liberal philosophers start from the premise of how things ‘should’ be, not about what they, in fact, are. Our quest, then, is to find this dominion and how ‘Being,’ as an ontological concept, is not objective or fixed, but phenomenological, that is it is local and particular, in flux all the time. This conception nullifies any universalist attempts to ‘categorise’ or objectify other cultures. It therefore renders invalid much of the liberal assumptions on universal law, democracy, human rights and identity.
The map of the dominion, I believe, can be travelled in four domains, that of Political Economy, the ‘Polis’ (Democracy), Elites and Identity, although they all share common terrain. We follow Clifford Geertz in ‘believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun. I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.’ Therefore, I approach these subjects from the position of phenomenological description and hermeneutics to give access to meaning. Since Plato, philosophers have established forms, or categories, noumena or Gods, as a framework of usurping nature. These ‘systems’ have imprisoned culture in artificial reason or metaphysics, divorced from nature, from the reality of good and evil. By analysing a ‘forgetting’ of the underlying assumptions of morality (and how they have been overtaken by reason), democracy and identity can be removed from obscurity, from a hermeneutical hiding since the Enlightenment.
According to the World Health Organization, over 700,000 people commit suicide per year, and many more attempt it. Alarmingly, it is the fourth leading cause of death for people 15-29 years of age. The situation worsened with widespread lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. Even though suicide has been documented and studied for over 3,000 years, our knowledge of it remains quite tenuous. Although it’s been on the rise in recent years, historically, it’s been a problem since the revolution in human self-awareness that took place around 70,000 B.C.
In his 1942 absurdist philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, journalist and philosopher (a title which he himself denied), Albert Camus, raises one of the most notable existential questions of the twentieth century, one that cuts to the core of human existence: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” Camus was right about the fact that people who commit suicide, whatever their reasons, deem life not worth living, at least at the moment that the dreadful act occurs. (However, an altruistic suicide may not neatly come under such an understanding.) Sisyphus is a Greek mythological character who appears in Book VI of Homer’s Iliad. In post-Homeric times, a legend developed in which Sisyphus is said to have cheated Death and is punished eternally by having to roll up a boulder to the top of a mountain only to have it roll down each time he pushes it to the top. Camus forcefully uses this illustration to show the absurdity of endless repetition and the ultimate meaninglessness of life.
This unfortunate reality is no better captured than in the 1988 cult classic Permanent Record, starring Keanu Reeves, which, unlike many movies in its genre, poignantly depicts the great tragedy of suicide. Reeves’ character, Chris Townsend, loses his best friend, David Sinclair (played by Alan Boyce), to suicide. Outside of a high school party, David decides to take a walk toward the edge of a cliff that overlooks the ocean. Chris follows David and hides behind a boulder in the dark, to playfully sneak up on him, but when he jumps in front of the boulder, he discovers that his friend has disappeared.
One of the most heart-wrenching scenes of the movie is when Chris shares the suicide note he receives from David after his death (which makes Chris realize that David’s death was not accidental but intentional) with David’s parents; upon reading the note, the parents remain in denial, and that’s when Chris states, in reference to David falling: “There was no sound. He didn’t scream.” To which David’s father replies, “He should’ve screamed. I would’ve screamed, wouldn’t you?” It is shocking and heartbreaking for family and friends to learn that a loved one planned their own death.
Throughout the movie, Chris blames himself for David’s suicide and says he should’ve known there was some sort of crisis in David’s life. Later, Chris comes to the conclusion that he will never know the actual reason why his friend committed suicide. The movie effectively evokes the helplessness and emptiness that one endures when such a loss occurs and the unanswered questions that linger. It also illustrates the permanence and gravity of suicide, for known reasons such as the impact it will have on family, friends, and society, as well for unknown reasons such as the consequences for the afterlife.
Undoubtedly, the subject of suicide provokes many questions, such as: Do we continue to exist after death? Do humans have a soul? Where do our souls go after death? Is life sacred? Is there an ultimate meaning to life? Are there ultimate consequences to our actions? Is life worth living? Is there a heaven? Is there a hell? Where do our souls go if we commit suicide? And what does the Bible say about committing suicide and whether that person goes to hell?
The Question of Ultimate Meaning
Even though Camus was an atheist at the time and believed in the ultimate meaninglessness of life, as illustrated in his illustration of Sisyphus, he argues throughout the book that life is still worth living. Essentially, Camus tells us that life has no real meaning but that we must pretend that it does and trudge forward. Under atheism, there is no possibility for ultimate meaning, only subjective and personal meaning, since two important preconditions are not met: the existence of an all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing God, and immortality. Thus, life is indeed absurd in the absence of God. However, Christianity, provides ultimate meaning since God promises His followers to be delivered from sin and death into everlasting life. The God-man, Jesus, accomplishes this through His death and resurrection, redeeming and delivering humanity from eternal suffering. As Jesus states in the Gospel of John, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish” John 10:27-28. Thus, where a worldview like atheism fails, Christianity triumphs. If there is ultimate meaning, there are also ultimate consequences to our actions. Leaving that aside for the time being, let us probe deeper.
What is Suicide?
So far, we have mentioned characterizations of suicide in literature and cinema, but we haven’t given a proper definition and real-life examples. Most simply put, suicide is the deliberate act of ending one’s own life. But this definition, in and of itself, cannot speak to the moral and ethical issues surrounding each particular instance of suicide since each act of suicide can vary greatly. Consider the following examples, all of which can be considered suicide but differ greatly in intent and circumstances:
A young man fears failure and the uncertainty of the future, so he decides to jump off a cliff.
A teenage girl who is overwhelmed with bullying at school and on social media, purposely overdoses on Tylenol.
A father, foreseeing his own potential death, jumps in front of a spray of bullets to save his children’s lives.
A soldier who is captured during a time of war and takes a pill to avoid being tortured and imparting secret information.
A Jehovah’s Witness who refuses a blood transfusion and dies as a result of his decision.
A serial killer or mass murderer who evades capture by hanging himself.
Someone who is part of a mass-suicide, like in the case of the Jonestown Massacre, participates in ingesting cyanide due to mind manipulation.
A woman who suffers from medical depression kills herself and harms her husband in the process.
Some may even try, through twisted logic, to claim that the willful deaths of Jesus’ disciples and followers are a form of self-righteous suicide, but this would be best understood as martyrdom. Nevertheless, each of these cases is significantly different and mustn’t be treated equally. Intention is paramount to answering the question of what happens to someone in the afterlife if they commit suicide. (For an excellent resource on the afterlife, see Gary R. Habermas and J.P. Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality).
People may commit suicide for a multitude of reasons, including impulsive acts related to extreme stress, trauma from some sort of physical, mental, and sexual abuse, a mental disorder, substance abuse, self-sacrifice to save others, a form to end physical and mental suffering (as is the case with euthanasia and assisted suicide), relationship issues, an existential void, fear of failure, acting on false information, a way to escape justice, and others. Moral theologians and ethicists argue that there must be a distinction between the subjective and objective aspects of suicide’s morality. The subjective aspect deals with the guilt that is felt by the person who commits suicide, whereas the objective aspect refers to the morality of the suicidal act itself. What these touch upon is whether someone is blameworthy for their action or not. Although the action may be wrong, the subjective experience and surrounding circumstances, as listed in the different examples above, do make a profound difference.
The Bible and Suicide
Even though suicide is mentioned on several occasions throughout the Bible (Judges 16:29–30; 1 Samuel 31:4–5; 2 Samuel 17:23; 1 Kings 16:18; Matthew 27:3–5), it does not speak to the issue explicitly. Nevertheless, the Bible is very clear on its stance against murder, as the sixth Commandment unequivocally states: “You shall not murder” (Exodus 20:13), which was also stated by Jesus (Matthew 19:18). Much in the same way that someone can be blameworthy for an act of murder, so it is with suicide since it is a violation of the sanctity of life; human life is to be treated not as a means to an end but as an end itself. It also violates the natural law and the biological inclination to maintain existence, whether one must endure hardships or not; it is also a moral duty to one’s self, family, community, and to God. Biblical Christianity makes clear that our life is not our own but a gift from God: “We do not live for ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” (Romans 14:7-9). Thus, depending on the intention of the suicidal act, it may indeed be an eternally culpable offense. God’s will ultimately determines how and when someone dies as the Owner of life and all of existence; any betrayal of this risks elevating ourselves above God and His will.
What about Hell?
Hell is one of the most frightening concepts in all of Christendom. Traditionally, hell has been viewed as a place of eternal punishment, torment, and suffering. Hell is also described as a place that is devoid of God and, by implication, of all love, joy, and goodness. Throughout the Scriptures, there are many references to hell. In the Book of Daniel, we find the following verse: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2). The Gospel of Matthew warns us of hell: “And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life” (Matthew 25:46). The Book of Revelation describes hell in the following way: “But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death” (Revelation 21:8). Thus, the Scriptures do not paint an alluring picture of hell. It is a place that people should avoid at all costs.
Based on the Scriptures, theologians have offered different interpretations of what hell might entail. Five views are useful in outlining the main theological understandings of hell.
First, the literal view is one of eternal conscious torment in a literal fire. Second, the metaphorical understanding views hell as a place of eternal torment, but one where the authors of the Scriptures are using hyperbole and not meant to be taken literally. Third, the purgatorial view does not deny the existence of hell but advocates for an intermittent place for those who require some temporary cleansing before they are ready for heaven. According to Roman Catholic theology, living people can aid in this cleansing through prayer. Fourth, there is the annihilationist view (similar to the conditionalist), which argues for the annihilation of any soul over eternal conscious torment. Lastly, there is the universalist view of hell. Not all theologians who advocate for this view agree whether there is a hell or not, but if there is, they believe it is temporal and for corrective purposes. Interestingly, the early Christian theologian Origen believed that all rational souls would be saved, including the devil and his demons. Nonetheless, it is all dependent on God’s charity, mercy, and willingness to regenerate these fallen beings.
So, does someone who commits suicide go to hell? The answer is far more complicated than many people believe, as it involves numerous factors. First, we must understand the subjective and objective aspects surrounding the suicidal act. Second, Christian theology allows for various interpretations of hell. And last and most importantly, we must always be reminded that no one is in a position to judge whether someone has gone to hell or not. It could be that the person repented right before the moment of death, which mind-body dualists (substance dualism) view as the separation of the soul from the body. We are also in the dark about a person’s interior life, including their moral conscience and what God has deemed just for their eternal destiny.
Salvation is an incredibly complex theological reality, and in this context, a very personal one. It could be that someone who committed suicide may go to hell for reasons aside from committing suicide, i.e., for rejecting Jesus as their Lord and Saviour throughout their lives and, as a consequence, refusing God’s forgiveness. It is also vital to understand that our conception of forgiveness is infinitely flawed as compared to God’s perfect justice and love. Nevertheless, we should take Camus’ question of suicide very seriously and help prevent the tragedy of suicide. We must also not treat the doctrine of hell lightly or as solely an intellectual endeavour but as one requiring existential action.
If you or anyone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, seek professional help and discuss this with someone you trust. It is important to understand that life does have ultimate meaning and that the Creator of all existence wants a loving relationship with you.
Scott Ventureyra is an author, theologian, and philosopher. Further information is found on his website. He also offers full publishing services.
Featured: Melancholy, by Constance Marie Charpentier; painted in 1801.
I recently received this message over the transom from a disaffected reader of mine who shall remain anonymous. It was sent to a friend of mine, I received it indirectly from her. This writer was not a happy camper. (You young pups, if you don’t know what a transom is, or its significance look it up.)
Here is the message: “Did he (that is, me, Block) say, for example, that there is an ‘optimal level of rape in every society?’ I don’t know, that’s one example someone shared with me. To illustrate relative harms, did he write, for example, that a parent could justify giving one’s young child up for sexual acts with an adult benefactor to save their life? I am not making any judgements about these claims, their philosophical merit, or whether they fairly represent what Walter said (or didn’t say). If he did say and write these things there may have been good reasons to frame them in the way that he did. I am just reporting the responses I received when I started asking around…” (which were very negative).
This does sound horrendous. Reading in between the lines, it can be construed as attributing to me the view that I favor rape and child molestation. Let us consider each of these charges in turn.
Of course there is an optimal amount of rape. From an ethical point of view, that amount is precisely zero. Rape is a horrendous crime, second, only, to outright murder. All men of good will must wish it to be entirely banished from the human condition. (I write at a time when this despicable crime is now being committed in Israel). It should be banished forever.
However, from an economic point of view, the optimal amount of rape is not zero. Let me explain, lest it be thought that I am now taking back what I just about this heinous crime.
Of course, there is an optimal number of rapes (murders too, ditto for all other evil vicious crimes) and the optimal number is greater than zero – from an economic as opposed to an ethical perspective. For our society to try to ensure zero rapes would take the entire GDP, and I doubt that even this herculean effort would succeed in full eradication. That is, to somehow, doubtfully, achieve this good goal would take more than all of our wealth. If we devoted all of our economic efforts to entirely ending rape, we would thus all die of starvation, cold, disease, etc. That is no way to run a railroad.
So, what, then, is the optimal number of rapes from an economic point of view?
It would be the number that would ensue if we privatized the police forces and thus employed the “magic of the market” so as to most efficiently combat this scourge. In similar manner, what is the optimal amount of cookware, or carrots, or cars? It is the quantity of each that emanates from the free enterprise system.
Under present statist institutional arrangements, the optimal number would be at the point when the full cost of stopping the marginal or last rape just equaled the harm done by this crime. This of course it totally theoretical, since none of these statistics are available to us.
Now, let us consider the second issue, allowing children to be raped in order to save their lives.
“Death before dishonor” is all well and good for adults who can chose for themselves. But guardians of children are supposed to guard them! If a guardian of a child were confronted with the choice of allowing the child entrusted to him to die, or to be raped, and he chose the former, he should be considered a criminal. And not just a slight malefactor; rather an outright abettor of murder.
I have two children, they are adults now. If I were ever faced with such a dire choice, I would unhesitatingly choose the latter. My kids could always get therapy if they were alive. If they were dead, due to my choices… well, it would never happen.
Yes, in some cultures, “Death before dishonor” is widely accepted. But justice is justice. Allowing a dependent to be put to death when the alternative was a far lesser rights violation, should be severely sanctioned. Even the Godfather, in the movie of that name, drew a sharp distinction between these two crimes rape and murder.
My first point; it is a veritable staple of the dismal science; the optimal rate of rape or any other such heinous crime, is not zero, paradoxically. The second is a basic libertarian point; the optimal amount is precisely zero. The critic cited above is not a good economist, nor a libertarian. He is an economic and an ethical illiterate.
Walter Block is the Harold E. Wirth Eminent Scholar Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics at Loyola University, New Orleans. Read more of his work on his Substack.
Featured: The Rape of Proserpina; artist unknown; painted ca. 17th century. Nizhny Novgorod Art Museum, from the collection of Fyodor Mikhailovich Kamensky (1836 – 1913).
The Vatican has just allowed the blessing of irregular couples, homosexuals in particular. A crisis has ensued; and it is only just the beginning. In this short article, I would like to offer a few thoughts on this crisis, as a way of orienting oneself and considering possible options.
I think I am what is known as a staunch Catholic. I do not believe a pope is infallible all the time—but I do believe him (Vatican I) to be infallible when he teaches ex cathedra. I tend to respect his ordinary teaching. With that in mind, the pope’s absolute power is only just, like all absolute power, if it is strictly limited and framed, with absolute respect for the Deposit of Faith and the institutions willed by the Church’s Founder, Holy Scripture and Church tradition as its counterpart. I also understand that we may not always have at the head of the Church a saint who doubles as a genius and triples as a hero. More generally, my piety is not papocentric. And like John-Henry Newman, I like to drink to the Pope, but first to my conscience.
In previous years, I have always had mixed feelings towards Francis, but overall I have tended to defend his positions, attracting the hostility of high-flying Bergogliophobes.
I took the time to read the text carefully, to reflect and to pray. And now, I have to admit, I have lost it. It’s as if I have come to the end of my tether.
Perhaps we are living in one of those exceptional moments in the history of the Church, and its future now depends on the outcome of the discussion, or struggle, that is taking place.
The essential tradition of the Church is concentrated in Scripture, the Word of God. The Bible includes Paul’s epistles. Saint Paul is the major source of all Catholic theology. The most important of these is his letter to the Romans. The first chapter is absolutely fundamental. So, here is how Paul wrote to the Romans to characterize sin in its essence and root:
And they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.
Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the degrading of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error (Romans 1:23-27).
These are not very mysterious texts. Even without being a great theologian, or a qualified exegete, one can understand. It is very clear that homosexuality has a particularly close relationship with idolatry and the overthrow of the Glory of God.
With that said, we are all poor sinners whom Christ wants to save. We are all capable of anything. Jesus prefers the lost sheep. He prevents the stoning of an adulteress, but says to her, “Go and sin no more.”
There is nothing of the sort in Cardinal Fernandez’s text.
We understand that there are an infinite number of lost sheep, and it is not a bad idea to try to bring them into the fold with a kind offer, rather than crushing condemnation.
But Saint Paul knew the love of Christ, which surpasses all knowledge, at least as well as we do. And yet, after dwelling on the atrocious mass of sin, he concludes this first chapter with these words:
They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them (Romans 1:32).
Is it contrary to mercy to speak this way? Who are we to judge the Word of God?
Mercy means calling the sinner not to die in sin, not to lose his soul, not to tarnish the glory of God. Is this what Cardinal Fernandez’s text does?
His text is subtle, I agree. But how can we ignore what the simplifying media will say and do with it? Trouble for believers? The scandal for the weakest? How can we ignore the monstrous global LGBT propaganda? That Rome seems to be going along with these perverse, totalitarian monstrosities? What an immense scandal! What an obstacle to the evangelization of the South and East, which can no longer bear the tyranny of a degenerate West!
So, I cannot help but wonder:
Would the author of the 1st chapter of the epistle to the Romans have signed Cardinal Fernandez’s text? Who is Cardinal Fernandez, to tear up the text of Holy Scripture? Does he not understand that the whole world looks on in amazement and wonders: Has Rome lost its faith? Is the Catholic Church still worthy of faith? Is the Pope here to weaken the faith of his brothers? Has Cardinal Fernandez lost all fear of God? Does he have no fear of hell?
A friend told me: “In my doubts, I used to turn to Rome. In my doubts about Rome, where do I turn?”
And he added: “Why stop there? Every criminal association has its values. Mafiosi have a sense of family, loyalty, sacrifice and friendship. They also want, in their own time, to get back on the straight and narrow, and to gently remind themselves that God remains their Father. Eminence, why do you not bless the mafias?”
And he added: “Of course, we do not change the doctrine, but in practice we do the opposite. I cannot express the disgust I feel at this hypocrisy. How can anyone say that this won’t upset anyone? If an educated person like me is troubled, what about the weak-minded person informed by TV?”
And he said in conclusion: “Facts are facts. Either God abandons His Church, or Rome is no longer in Rome.”
What could I say?
And what will I think?
I am told I have a phlegmatic temperament. I tend to consider all hypotheses coldly.
Here are the main hypotheses:
The Pope is super-Christian (A) and his critics are sinister Pharisees (B).
The Pope is ill, slightly senile, not very intelligent, too much of a camarilla, and Fernández has abused his weakness.
The pope is a real pope in full vigor and is joyfully heretical in good faith and freely, although hypocritically.
Bergoglio is not the pope and never has been. He is an antipope, put in place by the powers of this world, who have cunningly organized an orange revolution in the Church. A legitimate pope must therefore be elected without delay.
Bergoglio is a political pope, like Urban II or Julius II, a Machiavellian defender of Church freedom.
That this discussion could even take place at all might seem overwhelming.
If option 3 were true, the question would arise whether to remain Catholic. It is not the most likely.
Option 4 is the most romantic. But conspiracies are not always wrong. However, there are some facts that do not fit the hypothesis.
Option 5 seems the truest, probably, given our current state of knowledge. To be combined with 2 and 1—especially 1 B, because 1 A is not the case. And if Bergoglio is a saint, I have my chances of being canonized, too.
I will now reconstruct the (hypothetical) political reasoning:
The pressure is too great. If we say no to the gays, we will be in trouble, and the clever anti-German maneuvering (we can talk about that later) requires some veering to the left if it is to succeed.
But, of course, we cannot say, yes.
So, Fernandez is asked to give the homos the kiss that kills. He invents an ingenious, theologically-incongruous distinction between first-rate benediction and junk benediction.
And we give homos the junk benediction.
Having thrown them a bone to gnaw on, which the media will turn into a royal feast, they will leave us in peace.
This concoction will go down well, served in a sauce of merciful sentimentality. We cannot rule out the possibility that its aroma will genuinely make the Pope weep with tenderness.
Let us be politicanti. All these LGBT aberrations will soon end along with the power of the West. It is just a matter of time. In the meantime, the power of militant homos to cause trouble must be taken into account. (God knows how much blackmail power they can wield in practice.) The powerful of the world are horribly instrumentalizing poor, grassroots homosexuals. And when the tide of history turns, these unfortunates will be the ideal scapegoats for reaction. So, it is only right to love them, since they will be so much to be pitied tomorrow.
In short, it is worth it to keep our backs to the wall until all these nice people have lost their power. Good Catholics will grumble, but they will stay. There is no explaining it. Intelligent believers must understand that Francis’ word is like Pius XII’s silence.
This kind of analysis may not do Bergoglio any favors, but at least it leaves Peter essentially untouched.
Unless, that is, it is a huge error of governance. This, seen from my window of competence, is indubitable. It ruins the relationship with Islam, bears the seeds of the loss of Africa and the disinterest of Asia, and the bridges will be burned with the Orthodox, while the Evangelicals will have the argument they needed to gain the upper hand in South America. Does Francis want to sink Rome with Washington?
Catholicism needs a pope. Loss of trust now goes hand-in-hand with loss of respect. Tomorrow, the loss of authority will lead to schism, as with the Anglicans.
The Church and the world are decidedly large objects. They do not fit into a too-narrow brain, and global responsibility does not sit well with coffee-shop talk and sub-prefecture Machiavellianism.
We will have to think about that at the next conclave.
In the meantime, it seems clear to me that dismissing Fernandez would be the only way to save this pontificate, which otherwise risks ending in disaster.
Featured: The Vision of Pope Innocent III, by Giotto; painted ca., 1295-1300.
A fresh translation of Dostoevsky’s short story, which was first published in 1877.
I
I am a ridiculous fellow. They call me crazy now. That would be a step up in rank, if I were not still as ridiculous to them as I was before. But now I am not angry, they are all nice to me now, even when they laugh at me—and then they are especially nice. I would laugh with them myself, not at myself, but out of love for them, if I were not so sad to look at them. Sad because they don’t know the truth, and I know the truth. Oh, how hard it is to know the truth all alone! But they won’t understand it. No, they won’t.
And earlier on, I used to feel very sad because I seemed ridiculous. I didn’t just seem ridiculous, I was ridiculous. I’ve always been ridiculous, and I’ve known it maybe since I was born. Maybe as early as seven years old I knew I was ridiculous. Then I went to school, then I went to university and well—the more I studied, the more I learned that I was ridiculous. So, for me all my university learning seemed to exist only for that purpose—to prove and explain to me, as I went deeper into it, that I am ridiculous. Similarly, as in science, so it went in life. With each passing year the same consciousness of my ridiculousness in every respect grew and strengthened in me. I was laughed at by everyone and at all times. But they did not know or guess that if there was a person on earth who knew more than anyone else that I was ridiculous, it was me—and that was the most offensive for me that they did not know it, but here I was to blame—I was always so proud that I never wanted to admit it to anyone. This pride grew in me as the years went by, and if I had ever let myself confess to anyone that I was ridiculous, I think I would have blown off my head with a revolver that very evening. Oh, how I suffered in my adolescence that I would not be able to bear it and that I would suddenly confess it to my friends. But since becoming a young man, though I’ve learned more and more about my terrible quality every year, I’ve somehow become a little calmer, somehow, though I still can’t quite put my finger on it. Perhaps because in my soul a terrible melancholy was growing for one circumstance that was already infinitely above me: it was the conviction that had come over me that nothing in the world really mattered. I had felt this for a very long time, but the full conviction came suddenly in the last year. I suddenly felt that I wouldn’t care if the world existed or if there was nothing anywhere. I began to hear and feel with all my being that nothing was with me. At first it seemed to me that there had been a lot of things before, but then I realized that there had been nothing before, but only seemed to be for some reason. Little by little I became convinced that there would never be anything. Then I suddenly ceased to be angry with people and almost began not to notice them. For instance, I would happen to be walking down the street and bump into people. And it was not out of thoughtfulness: what was there for me to think about, I stopped thinking completely—I did not care at all. And it would have been good if I had solved issues; oh, I had not solved a single one, and how many were there? But I did not care, and the issues disappeared.
And so, after that time, I learned the truth. I learned the truth last November, on the third of November, and since that time I can remember every moment of that day. It was on a gloomy evening, the gloomiest evening there can be. I was returning home at eleven o’clock at night, and I remember thinking that there could not be a darker time. Even physically. It had been raining all day, and it was the coldest and gloomiest rain, a sort of threatening rain, I remember, with an obvious hostility to people, and then suddenly, at eleven o’clock, it stopped, and there was a terrible dampness, wetter and colder than when it rained, and there was steam coming from everything, from every stone in the street and from every alley, if you looked into it from the street. I suddenly imagined that if the gas had gone out everywhere, it would have been more cheerful, because with the gas it was sadder to my heart, because it lit everything all up. I had hardly eaten lunch that day, and from early evening I had sat at an engineer’s house, while two other friends were sitting with him. I kept quiet and I think I bored them. They were talking about something provocative and suddenly they even got all fired up. But they didn’t care, I could see that, and they only pretended to be all fired up. I suddenly said to them: “Gentlemen, I say, you don’t care.” They were not offended, but they all laughed at me. It was because I said it without any reproach, and simply because I did not care. They saw that I didn’t care, and they were amused.
When I was outside thinking about gas, I looked up at the sky. The sky was terribly dark, but you could clearly make out torn clouds, and between them fathomless black spots. Suddenly, I noticed a star in one of those spots and began to stare at it intently. It was because this star gave me an idea: I had decided to kill myself that night. I had firmly decided two months ago, and poor as I am, I bought a fine revolver and loaded it the same day. But two months passed, and it was still lying in the drawer; but I did not care so much that I wanted to find a moment when I would not care so much, for what reason I do not know. And so, during those two months, every night when I came home, I thought I would shoot myself. I kept waiting for the minute. And now this little star brought me the thought, and I decided that it would certainly be this night. I don’t know why the star gave me the idea.
As I was looking up at the sky, I was suddenly grabbed by elbow by this girl. The street was already empty, and there was hardly anyone about. In the distance, a cabman was sleeping on a coach. The girl was about eight years old, in a kerchief and one dress, all wet, but I remembered especially her wet torn shoes, and I remember them now. They caught my eye particularly. Suddenly she started tugging at my elbow and calling me. She was not crying, but somehow she shouted some words that she could not pronounce well, for she was shivering with a bit of tremor in the chill. She was somehow terrified, and cried out desperately, “Mammy! Mommy!” I turned my face toward her, but I did not say a word and kept on walking, but she ran and tugged at me, and there was that sound in her voice which in very frightened children means despair. I know that sound. Even though she didn’t finish the words, I realized that her mother was dying somewhere, or something had happened to them, and she ran out to call someone, to find something to help her mother. But I didn’t follow her, and on the contrary, I had the sudden idea to chase her away. I first told her to find a policeman. But she suddenly folded her arms and, sobbing and panting, kept running sideways and would not leave me. That’s when I stomped my foot and shouted. She just shouted: “Sir, Sir!” But suddenly she left me and ran across the street: a passer-by appeared there, and she must have rushed from me to him.
I went up to my fifth floor. I rent a room from the owners; there are other renters who also have rooms. My room is poor and small, and the attic window is semi-circular. I have a cloth sofa, a table with books on it, two chairs, and a tired armchair, old as old can be, but a Voltaire one. I sat down, lit a candle and began to think. Next door, in the other room, behind a partition, the pandemonium continued. It had been going on for the past three days. A retired captain lived there, and he had guests, six men, who drank vodka and played Stoss with old cards. Last night there was a fight, and I know two of them dragged each other by the hair for a long time. The landlady wanted to complain, but she is terribly afraid of the captain. We have only one other tenant in our rooms, a small and thin lady, from the regiment, who came here, with three small children who got sick when they took loding. Both she and the children are frightened of the captain to the point of fainting and trembling and crossing themselves all night, and the youngest child had a seizure out of fear. This captain, I know for sure, stops passers-by on Nevsky and begs for money. He is not accepted for service, but, strange to say (I am telling you this just for the sake of telling you this), the captain has not aroused any annoyance in me during the whole month since he has been living with us.
Of course, I avoided getting to know him from the very beginning, and he was bored with me from the very first. But no matter how much they shouted behind their partition, and no matter how many of them there were, I never cared. I sit up all night, and I don’t hear them, that is how much I forget them. I’ve been up till dawn every night for a year now. I sit all night at my desk in my armchair and do nothing. I only read books during the day. I don’t even think; I just let my thoughts wander and let them go. The candle burns out in the night. I sat down quietly by the table, took out my revolver and put it in front of me. As I put it down, I remember asking myself: “Is it like this?” and I answered myself in the affirmative: “Like this.” I mean, I’m going to shoot myself. I knew that I would probably shoot myself that night, but I did not know how long I would sit at the table until then. And I certainly would have shot myself if it hadn’t been for that girl.
II
You see, even though I didn’t care, I could feel pain. If someone had hit me, I would have felt pain. And so it is in moral terms: if something very miserable happened, I would feel pity, just as I did when I still cared about life. I did feel pity the other day: I would have helped the child. Why didn’t I help the girl? It was because of an idea that appeared at that time: when she was pulling and calling me, a question suddenly arose before me and I could not solve it. It was an idle question, but I was angry. I was angry because of the conclusion that if I had already decided that I would kill myself this night, then everything in the world must now, more than ever, become indifferent to me. Why did I suddenly feel that I cared and felt sorry for the girl? I remember that I felt very sorry for her; to a degree that was even strangely painful and quite unbelievable in my position. I do not know how best to convey this fleeting feeling of mine at that time, but the feeling continued at home, when I was already sitting at the table, and I was very irritated, as I had not been for a long time. One rationale followed another. It seemed clear that if I am a human being, and I am not yet a nonentity, and I have not yet turned into a nonentity, then I live, and consequently I can suffer, get angry and feel shame for my deeds. So be it. But if I kill myself, for example, in two hours, what is the girl to me, and what do I care about shame and everything in the world? I turn into nothingness, into absolute nothingness. And could the consciousness that I would not exist at all right now, and therefore nothing would exist, not have the slightest influence—either on the feeling of pity for the girl, or on the feeling of shame after the mean deed I had done? After all, that is why I stomped my foot and shouted in a wild voice at the unhappy child that, not only do I not feel pity, but if I do an inhuman meanness, I can do it now, because in two hours everything will be gone. Do you believe that’s why I shouted? I am now almost convinced of it. It seemed clear that life and the world right now as it were depended on me. One could even say that the world is right now as if made for me alone: if I shoot myself, there will be no world, at least for me. Not to mention that, perhaps, there will be nothing for anyone after me, and the whole world will fade away as soon as my consciousness fades away, fade away immediately as a ghost, as belonging to my consciousness alone, and will be abolished, because, perhaps, this whole world and all these people are myself alone.
I remember that, sitting there and reasoning. I turned all these new questions, which were crowding in one after another, in a completely different direction and came up with something completely new. For example, I suddenly had a strange thought that if I had lived before on the moon or on Mars and had done there some of the most shameful and dishonorable deeds imaginable, and had been scolded and dishonored there for it in such a way as can be felt and imagined only sometimes in a dream, in a nightmare, and if, when I found myself back on earth, I continued to be conscious of what I had done on the other planet, and, moreover, knew that I would never and ever return there, then, looking from earth to the moon, would I care or not? Would I feel shame for that deed or not? The questions were idle and superfluous, for the revolver was already in front of me, and I knew with all my being that it would probably be so, but they made me excited and mad. It was as if I could not die now without having resolved something beforehand. In a word, this girl saved me, because I had putting off the gun shot. In the meantime, everything began to quiet over at the captain’s room: they had finished playing cards and were getting ready for bed, but in the meantime they were grumbling and lazily arguing.
I suddenly fell asleep, which had never happened to me before, at the table or in the chairs. I fell asleep quite unnoticeably. Dreams, as you know, are an extremely strange thing: one thing appears with terrifying clarity, with jeweler-fine details, and you jump through another, as if not noticing at all, for example, through space and time. Dreams seem to be driven not by reason but by desire, not by the head but by the heart, and yet what cunning things my reason sometimes did in my dreams! Meanwhile, things quite incomprehensible happen to me in dreams. My brother, for example, died five years ago. I sometimes see him in my dreams: he takes part in my affairs, we are very much interested, and yet I know and remember that my brother is dead and buried. How can I not marvel at the fact that he is dead, but still is here beside me and concerned about me? Why does my mind absolutely allow all this?
But enough. I shall now proceed to my dream. Yes, I had that dream then, my dream of the third of November! They tease me now that it was only a dream. But does it matter whether it was a dream or not, if it was a dream that announced the Truth to me? For if you recognize the truth and see it, you know that it is the truth and there is no other and cannot be, whether you are sleeping or living. Well, let the dream be a dream, and let it be, but this life, which you so exalt, I wanted to extinguish by suicide, but my dream, my dream—oh, it announced to me a new, great, renewed, strong life!
Listen.
III
I said that I fell asleep imperceptibly, and even as if continuing to reason about the same matter. Suddenly I dreamed that I took a revolver and, sitting up, pointed it straight at my heart—at my heart, not at my head; I had decided to shoot myself in the head, and it was in the right temple. I waited a second or two, and my candle, the table, and the wall in front of me suddenly moved and rippled. I fired quickly.
In a dream you sometimes fall from a height, or you get or beaten, but you never feel pain, except if you really hurt yourself in bed, then you feel pain and always wake up almost from pain. And so it was in my dream—I felt no pain, but I imagined that with my shot everything in me was shaken and everything was suddenly extinguished, and it became terribly black around me. It was as if I were blinded and numb, and here I was lying on something hard, stretched out, on my back, unable to see anything and unable to make the slightest movement. People are walking and shouting around me, the captain’s bass voice, the landlady’s shrieking, and suddenly there is a break again, and now I am being carried in a closed coffin. And I feel the coffin swaying, and think about it; and suddenly I am struck for the first time by the idea that I am dead, quite dead, I know it and do not doubt it; I do not see and do not move, and yet I feel and reason. But I soon put up with it and, as usual in a dream, accept the reality without argument.
And then they bury me in the ground. Everyone leaves. I’m alone, completely alone. I’m not moving. When I had always imagined being buried in a grave, the only thing I had ever connected with the grave was the sensation of dampness and cold. Now I felt that I was very cold, especially to the ends of my toes, but I felt nothing else.
I lay there and, strangely enough, waited for nothing, accepting without dispute that there is nothing to wait for in the dead. But it was damp. I don’t know how much time had passed—an hour, or a few days, or many days. But suddenly a drop of water that had seeped through the roof of the coffin fell on my left closed eye, followed a minute later by another, then a minute later by a third, and so on and so forth, all in a minute. A deep indignation was suddenly kindled in my heart, and suddenly I felt a physical pain in it: “This is my wound,” I thought, “this is the shot, there is the bullet.” And the drop kept dripping, every minute and right on my closed eye. And I suddenly cried out, not with my voice, for I was immovable, but with my whole being, to the ruler about everything that was happening to me:
“Whoever you are, and if you really exist, and if there is anything more reasonable than what is now being done, then let it be here right now. If you are avenging my unreasonable suicide by the ugliness and absurdity of my further existence, then know that no torment, whatever may befall me, can ever compare with the contempt which I shall feel in silence, even if it be for millions of years of martyrdom!”
I cried out and was silent. For almost a whole minute there was a deep silence, and even another drop fell, but I knew, I knew and believed without limit and without fail that everything was about to change. And then suddenly my grave opened. That is, I do not know whether it was opened and dug, but I was taken by some dark and unknown to me being, and we found ourselves in space. I had a sudden epiphany: it was deep night, and never, never had it been so dark! We were traveling in space far away from the earth. I did not ask the one who was carrying me anything; I waited and was yet proud. I assured myself that I was not afraid, and winced with admiration at the thought that I was not. I don’t remember how long we were traveling, and I can’t imagine; everything was happening as it always does in dreams, when you jump through space and time and through the laws of being and reason, and stop only at the spots your heart dreams about. I remember suddenly seeing a single star in the darkness. “Is that Sirius?” I asked, suddenly unable to help myself, for I did not want to ask anything. “No, it is the same star you saw between the clouds on your way home,” answered the being who was carrying me away.
I knew that it had a sort of human face. Strangely enough, I did not love this creature, even felt a deep disgust. I waited for perfect nothingness, and with that I shot myself in the heart. And here I was in the hands of a creature, certainly not human, but which lived, which existed: “And so there is life beyond the grave!” I thought with the strange levity of a dream, but the essence of my heart remained with me in all its depths: “And if it is necessary to be again,” I thought, “and to live again by someone’s indefeasible will, I do not want to be defeated and humiliated!”
“You know that I am afraid of you, and for that you despise me,” I said suddenly to my companion, unable to resist the humiliating question in which the confession consisted, and feeling my humiliation like the prick of a pin in my heart. He did not answer my question, but I suddenly felt that I was not despised, or laughed at, or even pitied, and that our journey had a purpose, unknown and mysterious, and concerning me alone. Fear was growing in my heart. Something mutely, but with anguish, was communicated to me by my silent companion and seemed to penetrate me. We were traveling through dark and unknown spaces. I had long ago stopped seeing constellations familiar to the eye. I knew that there were such stars in the celestial spaces, from which rays reach the earth only in thousands and millions of years. Perhaps we had traveled through these spaces before. I was waiting for something with a terrible, heart-wrenching longing. Suddenly a familiar and highly inviting feeling shook me: suddenly I saw our sun! I knew that it could not be our sun, which had given birth to our earth, and that we were at an infinite distance from our sun, but I recognized somehow, with all my being, that it was exactly the same sun as ours, a repetition of it and a double of it. A sweet, beckoning feeling resounded in my soul: the original power, the light, the same light that gave birth to me, echoed in my heart and revived it, and I felt life, the old life, for the first time since my grave.
“But if it is the sun, if it is a sun like ours,” I cried, “where is the earth?
And my companion pointed to a star that glowed emerald in the darkness. We were heading straight for it.
“And is it possible that there can be such repetitions in the universe? Is it a natural law? And if that’s the earth there, is it the same earth as ours? Completely the same, miserable, poor, but dear and eternally loved, and the same painful love that gives birth to itself even in the most ungrateful of its children, as ours does?” I cried out, shaking with irrepressible, rapturous love for that native former land which I had left. The image of the poor girl whom I had wronged flashed before me.
“You will see everything,” replied my companion, and there was a kind of sadness in his words.
But we were rapidly approaching the planet. It was growing bigger before my eyes, I could already distinguish the ocean, the outlines of Europe, and suddenly a strange feeling of some great, holy jealousy flared up in my heart: “How can there be such a repetition, and for what purpose? I love, I can only love that land which I left behind, on which my blood spattered when I, ungrateful, extinguished my life with a shot in my heart. But never, never have I ceased to love that land, and even that night, parting from it, I may have loved it more agonizingly than ever. Is there torment in this new land? In our land we can truly love only with agony and only through agony! We do not know how to love otherwise, nor do we know any other kind of love. I want agony in order to love. I want, I long at this moment to kiss, to pour tears over only that one land, which I left, and I do not want, I do not accept life on any other!”
But my companion had already left me. Suddenly, as if unbeknownst to me, I was on this other land in the bright light of a sunny, paradise-like day. I was standing, I think, on one of those islands which make up the Greek archipelago on our earth, or somewhere on the coast of the mainland adjoining that archipelago. Oh, everything was exactly as it was with us, but it seemed to shine everywhere with some kind of festivity and great, holy and accomplished triumph at last. The gentle emerald sea was quietly splashing against the shores and kissing them with love, explicit, visible, almost conscious. Tall, beautiful trees stood in all the splendor of their color, and their countless leaves, I am convinced, greeted me with their quiet, affectionate murmurs and as if they were uttering some words of love. The meadow was ablaze with bright fragrant flowers. Birds flew in flocks in the air and, unafraid of me, sat on my shoulders and hands and beat me joyfully with their sweet, fluttering wings. And at last I saw and recognized the people of this happy land. They came to me by themselves, they surrounded me, they kissed me. Children of the sun, children of their sun—oh, how beautiful they were! Never have I seen such beauty in man in our land. Only in our children, in the very first years of their age, could one find a distant, though faint, glimmer of this beauty.
The eyes of these happy people shone with a clear luster. Their faces shone with intelligence and some kind of consciousness that had already been restored to calmness, but their faces were cheerful; there was a childlike joy in their words and voices. Oh, I immediately, at the first sight of their faces, understood everything, everything! This was a land not defiled by the fall into sin, where people who had not sinned lived, in the same paradise in which, according to the traditions of all mankind, our sinful forebears also lived, with the only difference that the whole earth was the same paradise everywhere. These people, laughing joyfully, crowded to me and caressed me; they took me to themselves, and each of them wanted to comfort me. Oh, they did not ask me anything, but as if they knew everything, so it seemed to me, and they wanted to drive away the suffering from my face as soon as possible.
IV
You see the point, again—well, let it have been only a dream! But the feeling of the love of these innocent and beautiful people has remained in me forever, and I feel that their love is poured out upon me even now from there. I saw them myself; I knew them and became convinced about them; I loved them; I suffered for them afterward. Oh, I immediately realized, even then, that in many respects I would not understand them at all; to me, as a modern Russian progressivist and a vile Petersburger, it seemed insoluble, for example, that they, knowing so much, did not have our science. But I soon realized that their knowledge was replenished and nourished by different insights than ours on earth, and that their aspirations were also quite different. They wanted nothing and were calm; they did not strive to know life as we strive to know it, because their life was full.
But their knowledge was deeper and higher than that of our science; for our science seeks to explain what life is, and seeks to realize it in order to teach others how to live; but they knew how to live without science; and this I understood, but I could not understand their knowledge. They pointed to their trees, and I could not understand the degree of love with which they looked at them—it was as if they were speaking to their own kind. And you know, perhaps I would not be mistaken if I said that they spoke to them! Yes, they found their language, and I am convinced that they understood them. Thus, they looked at all nature—at the animals that lived peacefully with them, did not attack them, and loved them, overcome by their own love. They pointed me to the stars and spoke to me about them, about something I could not understand, but I am convinced that they were in touch with the heavenly stars in some way, not by thought alone, but in some living way. Oh, these people did not want me to understand them; they loved me without it; but I knew that they would never understand me either; and therefore I hardly ever spoke to them about our land. I only kissed the land on which they lived, and adored them without words, and they saw this and let themselves be adored, not ashamed that I adored them, because they themselves loved a lot.
They did not suffer for me when I, in tears, sometimes kissed their feet, knowing in my heart with joy what power of love they would reciprocate. At times I asked myself in wonder—how could they not, all the time, insult someone like me and never once stir up feelings of jealousy and envy in someone like me? Many times I asked myself, how could I, a braggart and a liar, not tell them of my knowledge, of which, of course, they had no idea, not wish to surprise them with it, or at least only out of love for them? They were as frisky and merry as children. They wandered through their beautiful groves and forests, they sang their beautiful songs, they fed on easy food, the fruit of their trees, the honey of their forests, and the milk of their beloved animals. For their food and for their clothing they labored only a little and lightly. They had love and children, but I never noticed in them the impulses of that cruel voluptuousness which befalls almost everyone on our earth, everyone and everything, and is the only source of almost all the sins of our mankind. They rejoiced in their children as new participants in their bliss. There was no quarreling or jealousy between them, and they did not even realize what it meant. Their children were the children of all, for all were one family.
They had almost no illnesses at all, though there was death; but their old men died quietly, as if falling asleep, surrounded by the people who were bidding them farewell, blessing them, smiling at them, and accompanied them by their bright smiles. I did not see any sorrow or tears, but only a love that multiplied as if to rapture; but a calm, replenished, contemplative rapture. One could think that they were still in contact with their dead even after their death and that the earthly unity between them was not interrupted by death. They almost did not understand me when I asked them about eternal life, but apparently they were so unaccountably convinced of it that it was not a question for them. They had no temples, but they had a vital, living, and uninterrupted union with the Whole of the universe; they had no faith, but they had the firm knowledge that when their earthly joy had been replenished to the limits of earthly nature, there would come for them, both for the living and the dead, a still greater extension of their contact with the Whole of the universe. They waited for this moment with joy, but not in a hurry, not suffering for it, but as if they already had it in the anticipations of their hearts, which they communicated to each other. In the evenings, when they were going to bed, they liked to form consonant and harmonious choruses. In these songs they conveyed all the feelings of the passing day, glorified it, and said goodbye to it.
They praised nature, the earth, the sea, the forests. They loved to write songs about each other and praised each other like children; they were the simplest songs, but they poured out of their hearts and penetrated their hearts. And not in songs alone, but it seemed that they spent their whole lives in admiring each other. It was a kind of love for each other, all-embracing, universal. Their other songs, solemn and rapturous, I hardly understood at all. While I understood the words, I could never penetrate into their meaning. It remained as if inaccessible to my mind, but my heart was penetrated by it unaccountably and more and more. I often told them that I had long before felt all this, that all this joy and glory had appeared to me on our land with an urgent longing, sometimes reaching unbearable sorrow; that I had felt all of them and their glory in the dreams of my heart and in the dreams of my mind, that I often could not look, on our land, at the setting sun without tears…. That in my hatred for the people of our land was always a longing—why can I not hate them without loving them? Why can I not forgive them, and in my love for them a longing—why can I not love them without hating them? They listened to me, and I saw that they could not imagine what I was saying, but I was not sorry to tell them; I knew that they understood the full force of my longing for those whom I had forsaken. Yes, when they looked at me with their sweet, loving gaze, when I felt that in their presence, and my heart became as innocent and true as their hearts, I was not sorry that I did not understand them. The feeling of fullness of life took my breath away, and I prayed silently for them.
Oh, everyone now laughs in my face and assures me that it is impossible to see in a dream such details as I now relay, that in my dream I saw or felt only one sensation generated by my own heart in delirium, and that I had just made up the details myself when I awoke. And when I told them that it might have been so, God, how they laughed in my face, and what amusement I gave them! Oh yes, of course, I was defeated by only one sensation of that dream, and it alone survived in my bleeding heart—but the actual images and forms of my dream, that is, those which I actually saw at the very hour of my dream, were filled up with such harmony, were so charming and beautiful, and so true, that when I awoke, I was certainly unable to translate them into our feeble words, so that they must have become as if stifled in my mind, and indeed, perhaps, I myself, unconsciously, may have been forced to compose the details afterwards, and certainly to distort them, especially when I was so eager to convey them as soon as possible and at least as much as possible.
But how can I not believe it all happened? A thousand times better, brighter and happier than I’m telling you? It may have been a dream, but it couldn’t have happened. You know, I’ll tell you a secret—it may not have been a dream at all! For something happened here, something so terribly true that it could not have been dreamt. My heart may have given birth to my dream, but could my heart alone have given birth to the awful truth which then happened to me? How could I alone have invented it, or could I have dreamed it with my heart? Could my shallow heart and my capricious, petty mind have risen to such a revelation of truth! Oh, judge for yourselves: I have hitherto concealed it, but now I will also tell this truth. The fact is that I have corrupted them all!
V
Yes, yes, it ended in my corrupting them all! How this could have been accomplished—I do not know, I do not remember clearly. The dream passed through the millennia and left me with only a sense of the whole. I only know that I was the cause of the fall into sin. Like a foul trichina, like a plague atom infecting whole nations, so I infected all this happy, sinless earth before me. They learned to lie and loved lies and knew the beauty of lying. Oh, it may have begun innocently, with a joke, with coquetry, with a love-play, indeed, perhaps with an atom, but that atom of lying penetrated their hearts and took a liking to it. Then quickly voluptuousness was born; voluptuousness gave birth to jealousy; jealousy gave birth to cruelty…. Oh, I don’t know, I don’t remember, but soon, very soon the first blood spurted—they were surprised and horrified, and began to separate, to divide. Alliances were formed, but against each other. They began to rebuke and reproach. They recognized shame and raised shame into a virtue. The notion of honor was born, and each alliance raised its banner. They began to torture animals, and the animals went away from them into the forests and became their enemies. The struggle for separation, for isolation, for identity, for mine and thine began. They began to speak different languages.
They knew sorrow and loved sorrow; they longed for torment and said that the Truth is only attained by torment. Then science appeared to them. When they became evil, they began to speak of brotherhood and humanity and realized these ideas. When they became criminal, they invented justice and prescribed for themselves whole codes to preserve it; and to enforce the codes they put up the guillotine. They little but remembered what they had lost, did not even want to believe that they had once been innocent and happy. They laughed even at the possibility of this former happiness of theirs and called it a dream. They could not even imagine it in forms and images; but, strange and wonderful thing—having lost all faith in the former happiness, calling it a fairy tale, they so much wanted to be innocent and happy again that they fell before the desire of their heart like children, deified this desire, built temples and began to pray to their own idea, their own “desire,” at the same time quite believing in the impracticability and unattainability of it, but with tears adoring it and worshipping it. And yet, if only it could happen that they could return to that innocent and happy state which they had lost, and if someone suddenly showed it to them again and asked them whether they wanted to return to it—they would probably refuse.
They answered me: “We may be false, wicked and unjust; we know it and weep for it, and we torment ourselves for it, and we torture ourselves and punish ourselves more than even, perhaps, that merciful Judge who will judge us and whose name we do not know. But we have science, and through it we will find the truth again, but we will accept it consciously. Knowledge is higher than feeling; consciousness of life is higher than life. Science will give us wisdom; wisdom will reveal the laws, and knowledge of the laws of happiness—beyond happiness.” This is what they said, and after these words each one loved himself more than anyone else, and they could not do otherwise. Everyone became so jealous of his own personality that he tried his best only to humiliate and diminish it in others, and in that he based his life. There was slavery, even voluntary slavery—the weak submitted willingly to the strongest, only so that they helped them to crush the even weaker than they themselves. The righteous came to these people in tears and told them of their pride, their loss of measure and harmony, their loss of shame. They were mocked or stoned. Holy blood was poured on the thresholds of the temples. But people began to appear, who began to think of ways to unite everyone again in such a way that everyone could love himself more than everyone else, but at the same time not interfere with anyone else, and thus live together as if in a harmonious society.
Whole wars were fought over this idea. All those at war firmly believed at the same time that science, wisdom and a sense of self-preservation would finally make man unite into a coherent and reasonable society; and therefore, for the time being, in order to speed things up, the “wise” tried to exterminate as soon as possible all the “unwise” and those who did not understand their idea, so that they would not interfere with its triumph. But the sense of self-preservation began to weaken quickly, and there appeared proud and lustful people who demanded everything or nothing. To acquire everything they resorted to villainy, and if it failed—to suicide. Religions appeared with the cult of nothingness, and self-destruction for the sake of eternal rest in nothingness. Finally, these people became tired of meaningless labor, and suffering appeared on their faces, and these people proclaimed that suffering is beauty, for in suffering there is only thought. They sang of suffering in their songs. I walked among them, wringing my hands, and wept over them, but I loved them, perhaps even more than before, when there was no suffering on their faces and when they were innocent and so beautiful. I loved their defiled earth even more than when it was paradise, for the mere fact that grief had appeared on it. Alas, I have always loved sorrow and grief, but only for myself, for myself, and for them I wept, pitying them. I stretched out my hands to them, blaming, cursing, and despising myself in despair.
*****
I told them that I did it all; I alone. That it was I who brought corruption, contagion, and lies to them! I begged them to crucify me on the cross; I taught them how to make the cross. I could not, I was not able to kill myself, but I wanted to take the torment from them; I longed for the torment; I longed that in this torment my blood should be spilled to the drop. But they only laughed at me, and at the end of it they considered me a fool. They justified me; they said that they had received only what they themselves wished for, and that all that is now could not but be. At last, they declared to me that I was becoming a danger to them, and that they would put me in a madhouse if I did not keep silent. Then grief entered my soul with such force that my heart constricted, and I felt that I was going to die, and then… well, that’s when I woke up.
It was already morning; that is, it had not yet dawned, but it was about six o’clock. I woke up in the same chair, my candle burned out. The captain was asleep, and there was a rare silence in our apartments. The first thing I did was to jump up in extreme surprise; never had anything like this happened to me, even in a trivial way—never yet had I, for instance, fallen asleep like this in my chair. Then suddenly, while I was standing and coming to myself—suddenly my revolver flashed before me, ready, loaded—but I pushed it away from me in an instant! Oh, now life, life! I raised my hands and cried to the eternal truth; not cried aloud with words, but wept; rapture, immeasurable rapture lifted my whole being. Yes, life, and—preaching! I made up my mind about preaching that very minute, and certainly for my entire life! I am going to preach. I want to preach what? The truth, for I have seen it. I have seen it with my own eyes. I have seen all its glory!
And I’ve been preaching ever since! Besides, I love everyone who laughs at me more than anyone else. Why this is so, I do not know and cannot explain it, but let it be so. They say that I am going astray now; that is, if I am going astray now, what will happen next? The truth is true—I am going astray, and maybe it will get worse. And, of course, I will go astray several times while I am trying to find how to preach; that is, with what words and what deeds, because it is very difficult to fulfill it. I see it all now as if it were a day, but listen to me—who does not lose his way! And in the meantime, everyone goes after the same thing; at least everyone strives for the same thing, from the wise man to the last robber, but by different roads. This is an old truth, but what is new is this—I cannot go astray, because I have seen the truth. I have seen and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the ability to live on earth. I don’t want and I can’t believe that evil is a normal state of people. And they all laugh at this belief of mine. But how can I not believe—I have seen the truth; not that I invented it with my mind, but I have seen it. I have seen it, and its living image has filled my soul forever. I have seen it in such a replenished wholeness that I cannot believe that men cannot have it.
So, how can I lose my way? I will slip up, of course, even a few times, and I will speak even, perhaps, in someone else’s words, but not for long—the living image of what I have seen will always be with me and will always correct and guide me. Oh, I am awake. I am fresh. I keep going, I keep going, and at least for a thousand years. You know, I wanted even to conceal at first that I had corrupted them all, but that was a mistake—that was the first mistake! But the truth whispered to me that I was lying, and guarded me and guided me. But how to bring about heaven—I do not know, because I do not know how to put it into words. After my dream I lost words. At least, all the main words, the most necessary ones. But not to worry—I will go and say everything, unceasingly, because I have seen with my own eyes, though I cannot retell what I have seen. But this is what the mockers do not understand: “A dream,” they say, “I saw, a delusion, a hallucination.” Oh, is that supposed to be so clever? And they are so proud! A dream? What is a dream? Isn’t our life a dream? Let it never come true; let it never come true, and let there be no paradise (for I already understand that!), but I will still preach. And yet it is so simple—one day, one hour—everything will be settled at once! The main thing is to love others as yourself; that’s the main thing, and that’s all; nothing else is needed—you will find a way to settle down immediately. But in the meantime, it is only an old truth, which has been repeated and read a billion times, but it has not managed to get along! “Consciousness of life is higher than life. Knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness”—that’s what you have to fight against! And I will. If only everyone wanted to, everything would be settled now.
*****
And that little girl I found. And I’ll go on! I’ll go on!
Featured: A screenshot from the animated film, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1992), directed by Aleksandr Petrov.
Hopes for a peaceful development of mankind in the 21st century have not come true, and the predictions of polemologists led by Gaston Bouthoul have largely become the reality of today. In this regard, theories that have not recently had a wide reception, as they chose war as the object of research, are now coming to the fore. Among them we should mention the area of the “philosophy of war,” which has found numerous proponents among French political philosophers.
Continuing the French tradition of viewing war through the prism of philosophy, a study by the renowned French philosopher Henri-Paul Hude, A Philosophy of War, was published in France, in November 2022, and in English in 2023. In it, Hude poses the problem of the emergence and the possibility of eliminating war from the life of mankind in our time. On April 11, 2023, at the Department of Philosophy of Politics and Law, Faculty of Philosophy, Lomonosov Moscow State University, a discussion of this book was held online with the participation of the author of the book. The event included a fruitful dialogue on the causal links between war and politics. The French professor presented his point of view on the importance of penetrating into the essence of war through its philosophical interpretation. Obviously, his views are based on a solid foundation created by French political philosophers and thinkers over several centuries, which I would like to describe in this article.
Philosophical Understanding of War: The Emergence of the Term, “Philosophy of War”
Since ancient times, philosophers have tried to understand the meaning of war and the reasons for its emergence. The philosophical approach fundamentally differed from other forms of understanding this phenomenon: mythological, religious, historical. Rational comprehension of this phenomenon allowed us to identify its essential features and thereby understand the cause-and-effect relationship between the factors that give rise to it and the coming consequences. We find such attempts in European antiquity in Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and others. War as an essential part of the life of society was reflected in the works of military leaders, thinkers, philosophers, but for a long time there was no separation of the field of knowledge about war into a separate branch.
One of the first to speak of a “philosophy of war” was Marquis Georges de Chambray, a participant in the Russian campaign of 1812. In the preface to his work called Philosophie de la guerre (Philosophy of War), (first published in 1827, then continuously reprinted), he explains in what sense he treats the concept of “philosophy,” which he connects with the concept of “war” to penetrate into the essence of this phenomenon:
As the word “Philosophy” has several meanings, I feel I must make known the one I have given it in the title of this work. There are four stages in the exercise of human intelligence: 1. Craft; 2. Art; 3. Science; 4. Philosophy. Craft is a routine or skill acquired through practice, without knowledge of principles and rules; art is subject to rules or principles; science is a system of knowledge about a useful object; philosophy is the background, the positive, the essence or even the generalities of a science. I have used the word Philosophy in this sense: (a) Linné, (b) Voltaire, (c) Fourcroy, (d) Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and many other authors have used it in the same sense (Philosophie de la guerre, pp. v-vi).
It should be noted that the Marquis de Chambray’s book was published several years earlier than Carl von Clausewitz’s work, On War, in which the Prussian military thinker did not use this term. Of course, this does not indicate that his work had no philosophical significance. Clausewitz is rightly written about as a representative of the philosophy of war, but the priority in the creation of the term does not belong to him.
Formation of the Field of the “Philosophy of War”
It is noteworthy that at the initial stage of the emergence of the philosophy of war, a significant contribution to the formation of this field was made by professional military men (von Clausewitz, de Chambray). The continuator of this tradition was the French author, Captain R. Henry, who wrote another book on the philosophy of war. It is not by chance that his work is referred to by the Russian and Soviet military commander Andrei E. Snesarev, who created a training course on the philosophy of war for officers-in-training at the Military Academy of the Red Army, of which he was the head from 1919 to 1921.
On the eve of the 19th century, pacifist sentiments prevailed in European philosophical and socio-political thought. In France, as in other European countries, there were illusions among intellectuals that war would be replaced by a new system of relations between states, when wars would become unnecessary because an adequate substitute would be found. In this case, war becomes pointless, as it is replaced by other ways of conflict resolution: diplomatic, economic, expansion of cultural contacts, etc. Among those who did not share optimism about the peaceful development of mankind was the French philosopher and sociologist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who doubted that war could be done away with. In his two-volume study, War and Peace (La guerre et la paix), he comes to the conclusion that war is inseparable from the life of society and that it is a necessary condition for its existence:
In my own view, it is plain that war has deep roots, scarcely discernible, in the religious, juridical, aesthetic and moral sentiments of peoples. It might even be argued that it has its abstract formula in dialectics. War is our history, our life, our very soul; it is legislation, politics, State, homeland, social hierarchy, the rights of people, poetry, theology; it is, once again, everything. We hear talk of doing away with war, as if it were some sort of toll or tariff. And there is no appreciation that if we discount war and its associated ideas, nothing, absolutely nothing remains of humanity’s past and not a single atom upon which to build its future. Oh, I may well say to these clumsy peace-mongers, as I myself was once told in respect of property: How do you envision society, with war abolished? What ideas, what beliefs are you offering? What literature, what poetry, what art? What would you make of man, that intelligent, religious, justice-dispensing, free, individual and, for all of those very reasons, a warring creature? What would you make of the nation, that independent, outgoing, autonomous collective? What becomes of the human race in its eternal repose?
Proudhon was not satisfied with the superficial reasons by which wars are usually explained; he wanted to penetrate into the essence of the phenomenon. Another French author, François-Odysse Barot, reflecting on the philosophical problems of history, in particular on the paradoxes of war, noted:
Above all these numerous species of animals is man, whose destructive hand does not spare anything living. He kills to feed.He kills to clothe.He kills to dress up.He kills to attack.He kills to defend.He kills to educate.He kills to have fun.He kills to kill. An arrogant and formidable king, he needs everything, and nothing resists him. However, what creature would destroy the one who destroys them all?He himself?. It is upon man that the killing of man is entrusted.
In doing so, he points to the cause of wars, which lies in man himself. The illusions inspired by optimistic authors were not justified. The First World War, which the French called the Great War (La grande guerre), was a severe test for the participating countries, showing the depth of contradictions that became the real cause of the cataclysm, and gave food for more realistic assessments of this phenomenon.
Teilhard de Chardin, who participated in this war as a medic, in his free time from duty kept notes, which were later included in a collection under the general title, Writings in Times of War. In them, musings on various topics are interspersed with thoughts about the war. Life on the front line gave, strangely enough, rich food for philosophical reflections on war and peace. And it is quite natural, as it is difficult to separate one from the other. It is noteworthy that the observations of an eyewitness, a participant in the events and at the same time a thinker and philosopher give this collection a special value. In one of the essays in this collection, entitled, “Nostalgia of the Front,” he writes:
And so, when the desired peace of the nations (and of me first of all) comes, something like a light will suddenly be extinguished on earth. War had torn through the crust of banalities and conventions. A “window” had opened onto the secret mechanisms and deep layers of human becoming. A region had opened up where men could breathe air charged with heaven. With peace, all things will be covered by the veil of monotony and ancient pettiness.
He contrasts this with war, which reveals to the participants a superhuman reality:
Happy, perhaps, those whom death will have taken in the very act and atmosphere of war, when they are driven, animated by a responsibility, a conscience, a freedom greater than their own, when they are exalted to the very edge of the world—very close to God!
Thus, war becomes for him an encounter with the Absolute.
Henri Bergson, a representative of intuitionism and philosophy of life, published a text in November 1914 in the Bulletin des armées de la République, in support of France and its soldiers. In the first line, he declares that the end of battle is beyond doubt: Germany will fall. This is not really a foresight; it seems like a prophecy. Jean-Philippe Cazier evaluates this short address to the French soldier:
Thus, Bergson’s text carries out a series of shifts from the very beginning: history and politics overlap there with metaphysics, chance is shifted to a higher necessity, the singular is placed in the category of the political and the moral, as well as the vital, which embraces the individual and the subject, defined as the means of this order. The soldier becomes a kind of antique hero, and France becomes both a mythical and metaphysical figure.
The theme of war, although not explicitly expressed, is also constantly present in Bergson’s work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, published in 1932. We find elements of nihilism and mysticism in the conceptualization of war Georges Bataille’s works Inner Experience, The Limit of the Useful. The theme of war in Marcel Proust acquires a real philosophical resonance in his work In Search of Time Lost. Philippe Mengue argues that Proust has two types of understanding of war: orthodox, integrated into the state apparatus, and the second, original, anticipating the views of Gilles Deleuze, showing the existence of “war machines,” independent and external to the state. The war also influenced the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, who participated in the Second World War. The period at the beginning of German hostilities against France was called the Phoney War (in French, “Funny” or “Strange War”). During this time, the French philosopher served as a private at a surveying station in the Vosges. There he had the opportunity to devote his leisure time to writing diaries in which he described the events around him. These entries were later published under the title, War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War, 1939-40. The war was a turning point in Sartre’s destiny: a break with pacifism and a transition to active citizenship.The time spent in captivity and participation in the Resistance also played an important role in his philosophical formation. His diaries have a syncretic character. They contain observations, reasoning and inferences of a socio-philosophical nature. In War Diaries, Sartre applied the experience of his philosophical novel, Nausea (1938), where he had already used the genre of diary entries kept by the protagonist Antoine Roquentin. The influence of previous philosophical works is also evident. His observations on the “world of war” are not yet philosophy, but they are no longer mere eyewitness notes:
Man—I want to say, the enlisted herd? The messiness of war and the ambiguity of the warrior’s nature stem from the fact that man is treated simultaneously as a machine and as a psychic being sensitive to ceremony. 1) Like a machine. Like the worker, the soldier provides work. But it is unproductive work. Its ultimate purpose is to destroy, and when it is not actually destroying, it is nothing more than a simulacrum—firing blanks, big maneuvers, endless drills. So, you cannot rob him of his labor, because his labor doesnot provide value, in the Marxist sense. It is a naked effort. A soldier is not exploited, but even more than the worker, we maintain him like a machine. 2) Like a ceremonial being. Yesterday’s gathering emphasized “the high significance of saluting.” We see the conservative thinking process: the salute as ceremony. Then there is the search for a higher meaning. This is the thinking of Maistre and Bonald. We are bound by ceremonies and dances; we are captives of military politeness. The men of Verdun were forced to exercise during their rest periods, to “keep them well in hand.” Here, Alain’s analysis is perfectly accurate. It is obvious, however, that he is far from complete. The ambiguity is that command, in its representation of the enlisted herd, cascades endlessly from the material to the ceremonial and from the ceremonial to the material. And, of course, following the command in his representation of himself, the man himself jumps?
In his Dairies, Sartre’s reasoning about freedom, democracy, fascism, civilization, values is close to political philosophy:
One should not confuse the origins of this war, which may be clear to the historian, with the motivations that drive us to fight, which, as I indicated above, are unclear. Indeed, one should try to think of this war as an event, as a meaningful reality and as a value. It is precisely the value of this single war that is elusive.
The widespread assertion that the phenomenon of war is a common theme for twentieth-century intellectuals is well-founded. Many French writers, politicians, and thinkers wrote about this phenomenon. Among the famous names is Raymond Aron, Sartre’s friend at the École Normale Supérieure, who later became his opponent and ideological adversary. Aron’s versatile oeuvre did not ignore the fundamental theme of modernity—war. As a prominent theorist of international relations, Aron paid great attention to the phenomenon of war.
Among Aron’s significant works in this regard are, The Century of Total War (Les guerres en chaîne), Peace and War (Paix et guerre entre les nations), and Clausewitz: Philosopher of War (Penser la guerre, Clausewitz). In The Century of Total War, Aron emphasizes the idea of the ratio of quantity and quality in the process of creating a “critical mass.” Wars can reach it, thus creating the conditions for the emergence of a “chain reaction.” Thus, the First World War developed into the Second, and has the possibility of moving into the Third. Another of his works, Peace and War, published in 1962, is devoted to the justification of the theory of international relations. In an extensive article on the publication of this book, the French historian and political scientist Jean-Baptiste Duroselle elaborated on the contribution made by Aron to the development of the theory of international relations:
This abstract theory, which consists in conceptualization, presupposes, naturally, a second part: the search for determinants. Theory suggests what elements are to be analyzed; sociology influences these elements. The sociologist’s task “lies between that of the theorist and that of the historian.”The historian interprets the totality of the particular, the singular. The sociologist looks for judgments of “some universality.” So, there are two categories of possible determinants. One is physical or material: space, population, resources; the other is of a social nature: the nation and its regime; “civilization,” a phenomenon of the future whose relatively stable features (regularities) and transformations must be comprehended; and, finally, humanity, that is, a regularity related to the essence of human nature. The great problem relating to the last concept is to know whether man is aggressive by nature, whether there is biological aggressiveness or whether war is a consequence of the social condition. “The difficulty of peace refers rather to the human essence than to the animal beginning of man.”
In our opinion, this part of the task belongs not only, and not so much, to the competence of a historian or sociologist, but to the competence of a philosopher. Therefore, it is quite appropriate to talk about Aron’s contribution to the philosophy of war, but not only. At the same time, in his work he tries to reflect on the future of humanity. To an even greater extent, Aron reveals himself as a proponent of the philosophy of war in one of his later works, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War. André Glucksmann, who was influenced by his teacher during his tenure as an assistant to Aron, published his first book, Le discours de la guerre (A Discourse of War), in December 1967, which he characterized twenty years later as a mixture of philosophy, military strategy, nuclear deterrence and game theory. Nevertheless, it determined his interest in military issues, conflicts, the problem of violence, and terrorism.
At this time in the study of the phenomenon of war was developed polemology—”a new science of war”—in the words of creator Gaston Bouthoul. This field aroused interest in scientific and political circles in France. The French Institute of Polemology in Paris (Institut français de polémologie) has been under the auspices of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of National Education and the Ministry of State for Scientific Research. Although Bouthoul believed that polemology was the sociology of war, this field was characterized by interdisciplinarity in the study of the phenomenon “war-peace.” Polemologists widely used heuristic possibilities of related disciplines. The fundamental works of the founder of polemology often contain reasoning that is philosophical in nature. This is noted by Alexis Philonenko in his Essais sur la philosophie de la guerre (Essay on the Philosophy of War), identifying the philosophy of war and polemology. He highlights the philosophical orientation of the reflections in the works of Bouthoul, who felt the urgent need to move away from the sociologism of his theory andtoward generalizations of a philosophical nature. A similar idea is formulated by the Romanian author Vasile Secăreş: “The ideas of the father of polemology, which are controversial, no doubt returning unexpectedly for our days to Durkheim’s sociologism, nevertheless have the merit of emphasizing the need for a holistic view of man and his past.”
Philosophical Paradigm for the Study of War
Since the emergence of the “philosophy of war,” its representatives have sought to consider war within the philosophical paradigm. Thus, the above-mentioned R. Henry in his essay tried to depart from the established standards of considering war from the point of view of military science. He wanted to give his study a philosophical character. His book in structure and style resembles the work of Carl von Clausewitz, On War. Henry combined philosophical and political reasoning about the phenomenon of war with military-strategic inferences. In a number of instances, he managed to find a connection between war and other areas of human activity. He points out that war “…is linked to politics and social science by its causes and results; it combines all the knowledge accumulated by mathematics, physics, and the natural sciences to increase man’s strength a hundredfold and to raise the intensity of his collective action.Finally, it gives rise to a real philosophy through the consideration of simple principles and natural laws with which the thinker can relate all the social, moral, and technical questions put at stake by these conflicts, in which the mind and vitality of the human race are periodically tempered.”
The Dutch ethnologist and sociologist,Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz, writing on the eve of the First World War, devoted his work (Die Philosophie des Krieges) to a philosophical consideration of war as a phenomenon inherent in the human race.In it, he analyzed the causes, consequences and trends of this phenomenon. Relying on a solid base of sources, he paid tribute to the contribution of researchers who devoted their research to the study of war. Among them he mentioned the names of French colleagues: Gustave Lagneau, Charles Létourneau, Ernest Lavisse, Alfred Nicolas Rambaud, Jean Lagorgette, Maurice Loir. Later, Emile Ollivier devoted his work to this problem. Following Loir’s example, he analyzed the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 in his book, Philosophie d’une guerre: 1870 (The Philosophy of One War: 1870). In the context of sociology’s offensive against philosophy, the position of the philosophy of war was weakened. However, the outbreak of the First World War brought philosophy of war to the fore. Paul-Louis Landsberg published an article entitled, “Réflexions pour une philosophie de la guerre et de la paix” (“Reflections on the Philosophy of War and Peace”) in the October 1939 issue of Esprit, a journal aimed at French-speaking intellectuals. He writes at the very beginning of the article: “…philosophical thought must remain clear and pose problems in its own way.”
A great contribution to the formation of the philosophy of war was made by Charles de Gaulle. His political and philosophical thought covered the most diverse aspects of the development of the French state and nation. Military and national security issues were not the least important. His concept of “defense in all directions” was influenced by the French philosophers Jean Bodin and Montesquieu, who attached great importance to the geographical and psychological factors in the political development of nations. The concepts of “nation” and “national interest” became the axis of the policy pursued by de Gaulle during his presidency. French military policy became a derivative of these determinants. The problem of national interest remains very important to this day, although it is interpreted differently by some theorists (Raymond Aron, Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Régis Debray, Thierry de Montbrial). The realistic approach of a number of French political thinkers, philosophers and sociologists to the interpretation of the concept of “universal values,” which under certain circumstances can cause conflict situations at different levels, deserves attention. The position of the famous French polemologist Julien Freund, who warned about the danger of fighting for mythical “universal values,” which he perceived as an acceptance of political dependence, is interesting in this regard.
Philosophy of War and Modernity
Years and centuries pass, but the relevance of the philosophy of war does not diminish. The French philosophical community has reacted vividly to the military conflicts and wars that periodically arise in various corners of our planet. Publications devoted to this problem are multiplying. Alexis Philonenko’s work, Essais sur la philosophie de la guerre is a large-scale work on the coverage of problems and personalities. The author refers to the concepts of such thinkers and philosophers as Machiavelli, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Saint-Just, Clausewitz, Proudhon, Tolstoy, and de Gaulle. The comparison of Tolstoy’s and Clausewitz’s views on war is certainly unexpected.
Philonenko’s reflections on the correlation between language and war, logic and strategy, respectively, are interesting. The philosophical tradition in discussing the phenomenon of war continues in the socio-political and professional philosophical thought of France, and the 21st century has convincingly proved it. The debate involves members of the public and professional philosophers. Lecture-debates such as those organized by the Philosophical Society of Nantes in 2003-2004 around the theme of “Philosophy in the Face of War” demonstrated the interest in the philosophical treatment of the phenomenon of war in relation to modernity. During the debate, presentations were made by well-known French philosophers J. Gobert, Thierry Ménissier, B. Benoit, and P. Hassner. In addition to the already mentioned experts on this problem, we should name P. Gallois, J. Guitton, D. David, Régis Debray, A. Joxe, Roger Caillois, E. Murez, P. Lelouch, C. Le Borgne, D. Herrmann and others. The philosophy of war has attracted the attention of many French philosophers. In particular, the work of Clausewitz was the subject of research both by Raymond Aron and René Girard.
The views of the French philosopher and political scientist Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer on the problems of modern wars are of interest. In his book, La guerre au nom de l’humanité (War in the Name of Humanity), he considers a whole set of problems affecting the basics of understanding the phenomenon of war. His multifaceted education (philosophy, law, political science) allows him to consider war in a political-philosophical way with the knowledge of legal issues. Former French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine, in the “Introduction” to this book, notes his commitment to realism, a sense of proportion, balance, without any theoretical excesses or dogmatic simplifications. Early 2019 saw the publication of a book by the French engineer, philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy, La guerre qui ne peut pas avoir lieu: Essai de métaphysique nucléaire (The War That Cannot Happen: An Essay in Nuclear Metaphysics). It would seem to be a return to the old theme of the inadmissibility of nuclear war. One recalls the statements of progressive scientists who put forward pessimistic predictions of the fate of humanity after nuclear war, about the possibility of a “nuclear winter.” Dupuy is concerned that the world has come even closer to the brink of nuclear war than during the Cold War, but most people ignore the danger. He discusses the possibility of war breaking out uncontrollably regardless of the will of politicians, because of the triggering by “apocalyptic machines.” He raises in a new way the problem of the effectiveness and morality of nuclear weapons.
Conclusion
Given the presence of competing approaches to the cognition of war, there have been and are different points of view on the way to penetrate to the essence of this phenomenon. At the present stage, we can say that none of the paradigms has clearly proved its superiority in the realization of the epistemological goals set by the supporters of one or another direction. Apparently, mutual complementarity remains the fundamental principle of truth comprehension. In this respect, there are proposals to create a “new science of war.” Here, however, conceptual questions arise. One of them is the question of what a “new science” is. For example, the Russian military scientist Nikolai N. Golovin meant by this “the sociology of war,” as Gaston Bouthoul later did (though with significant inclusions of philosophy). Andrei E. Snesarev called the “philosophy of war” a universal tool for understanding the phenomenon of war. Gustave Le Bon considered war from the standpoint of psychology. The need in our time to create a “new science of war” requires combining different approaches, which can give a positive effect of understanding this phenomenon and the influence upon it.
This is all the more relevant now, since terrorism is gaining such a scale that a number of authors consider it as a kind of war. In the complex of methodological approaches to the study of wars and military conflicts, philosophy occupies an important place, as it perceives and conceptualizes this phenomenon in the most general way, which allows us to get close to its essence and find methods and means of counteraction. It is philosophy that can answer the following questions: what is war? What are the causes of wars? What is the relationship between human nature and war? Are there just wars, etc.?
The Department of the Philosophy of Politics and Law, in the Faculty of Philosophy, at the Lomonosov Moscow State University does a lot to study the phenomenon of war in keeping with the times: special courses devoted to this problem are offered, such as “The Philosophy of War” (since 2009), “Fundamentals of Polemology” (since 2016); numerous articles devoted to polemological problems have been published; members of the department have participated in various conferences on the problems of wars and military conflicts. One of the features of the departmental approach to the study of the phenomenon of war is the focus on the comparison of different points of view on this problem. As a result, we have formed the opinion that the concepts of French philosophers writing about war, in the paradigm of the “philosophy of war,” are characterized by originality and deserve careful study in the context of the dominance of Anglo-American theories.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909 – 1999) gave this lecture at Hillsdale College in 1974. He was true Renaissance Man, with expertise in linguistics, theology, history, economics, philosophy, political science and art.
A few years ago a friend of mine, a professor of zoology at an American university, invited several of his colleagues for a little party in my honor. I was curious to know their attitude towards Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but when I raised that question I received only blank looks. I spelled the name—still no reaction. “Well,” I finally said, “Teilhard was, after all, mainly a paleontologist and his works might not be of direct interest to you, but surely you know those of Pierre Lecomte du Nouy, a biologist. Like Teilhard he also died in this country and his books have been translated into English.” And again the learned assembly shook their heads. I gave up. Now, I do not want to be misunderstood. There was nothing specifically American about this conversation; exactly the same might have happened almost anywhere in the world—nowadays.
When all the guests had left my friend explained. “You must know,” he said, “that these professors are not only unable to coordinate zoology with the neighboring disciplines—paleontology or biology for instance, not to mention philosophy—but neither have they ever acquired a truly comprehensive knowledge of zoology as a whole. Like surgeons at an operation, denuding only a minute part of the patient’s body, they work in their own small, special compartment of science and except for their admittedly very thorough specialized research, nothing really interests them. They watch ball games and TV, read detective stories, play golf and canasta, but that’s about all. Erudition requires an enormous effort, and although it would be of an intellectual interest, it no longer has a practical, least of all a cash value.”
This kind of specialization is found all over the modern world and one of its immediate results is the Hillsdale College Hillsdale, Michigan 49242 Vol. 3 No. 10 October 1974 extinction of the polyhistor, the all-round scholar. Men like William Graham Sumner, or more recently like Roepke and Ruestow, two economists who also were at home in history, sociology, philosophy, theology, geography, politics and the fine arts, are becoming rarer and rarer. As a matter of fact, in many fields of scholarship and research—especially so in the natural sciences—great names appear hardly anymore, since larger tasks can only be accomplished by groups and teams. Prizes and honors are then accredited to an individual merely as a sort of primus inter pares. There still are discoverers, but exceedingly few inventors. The computer gradually takes over large sectors of learning, though not of the humanities, because it is unable to create a new philosophy with a new vocabulary, and so forth. It might be able to replace engineers and chemists, but not Kierkegaard, St. John of the Cross or Rouault. Thus technology, strangely enough, restored a certain hierarchy of knowledge, thought and creative work.
Specialization, however, has other effects as well. While it concentrates a man’s knowledge within restricted areas, it produces in others an increasing ignorance. And this ignorance is growing in an absolute as well as in a relative sense. A theologian-philosopher-scientist on the scale of St. Albert Magnus is quite inconceivable today. Shrinking in width, though gaining in depth, the areas of specialized knowledge are surrounded by fallow wastelands of neglected and abandoned fields of research. This relative ignorance increases inevitably and quite independently of the curse of specialization simply due to the accumulation of “registered” knowledge which the individual mind no longer can cope with.
This applies by no means only to the natural sciences; it occurs in the humanities as well. In theory somebody could develop a new, original philosophy without having gone through either extensive or intensive philosophical studies. The historian, on the other hand, has to deal with the steadily growing volume of stocked knowledge (“on file”). The subject matter grows and grows. Are men like A.J.P. Taylor to be called “historians,” an honorary term formerly bestowed on scholars of the caliber of Macaulay or Trevelyan? However, this decline is not only, nor even mainly due to narrowness, laziness, parochialism, superficiality or to the lack of a universal point of view, but is simply the result of the “practical” and excusable inability to master the Gaurisankar of classified and codified knowledge. Thus today specialization seems—justifiably? unjustifiably?—”realistic” (the great art of limitation!), whereas a universalist outlook unfortunately appears to be amateurish. The alternative seems to lie between “serious limitation” and “irresponsibly unfettered dilettantism.” “Research” today has come to imply narrow specialization.
In order to grasp the fatal proportions of our relative ignorance we have to take another aspect into consideration: the steady “shrinkage” of our globe in regard to subjective distances. In the old days it more or less sufficed to know what went on in one’s own and a few adjoining countries. Before World War I many French professors flatly refused to accept references from foreign sources in the doctorial dissertations of their students. Quotations from “barbarians” were not admitted. An “educated person” (as against a scholar) was judged and evaluated from this rather provincial point of view. But in an age when a jet takes one around the world in less than 24 hours and the daily news contains at least as many items from overseas as from the “home front,” the scholar’s outlook is necessarily directed towards other continents. The American library, the Canadian laboratory, the Australian research center, the badly (or not at all) translated Japanese or Russian periodical—he cannot disregard either of them. In fields of politics and economics, to quote some especially glaring examples, this geographical shrinking process makes even greater, more time-consuming and more expensive efforts necessary. Often we can merely cast a glance at a subject which needs to be studied thoroughly. The abundance of material within the various domains of learning leads or, rather, misleads modern man into a helpless eleaticism, and this in the very age when specialization and “complete” knowledge are trumps.
Thus we are faced with an insoluble dilemma. The desperate attempts on the part of modern medicine not to lose itself in details but to see the patient as an entity to heal, to cure man as a whole, encounters serious difficulties due to the lack of a truly comprehensive knowledge. Here especially the abyss between the scita and the scienda, between what is (generally) known and what should be known, widens from year to year. The result? On the one hand, because it has become indigestible, recorded knowledge is unavoidably more and more neglected and replaced by sheer intuition. One has to guess whenever it has become impossible to know and, therefore, to think rationally. (In medicine the diagnostician often does just that.) On the other hand, authoritarianism grows beyond measure. A layman, even a thoroughly educated one, can only listen in awe to the specialist’s elaborations, just as we listen respectfully to the watchmaker’s verdict about our ailing timepiece and pay grumbling and reluctantly whatever he charges. Gone are the times when an educated person was able to form an opinion on all the subjects that interested him or were necessary for his work. Specialized knowledge can still give strength and freedom in certain instances; thus an otolaryngologist suffering from ulcers still can judge the therapy proposed by a surgeon because, after all, he too has studied medicine. But from a general point of view the increase of accumulated and recorded knowledge also has increased our dependency in so many domains. Our self-confidence is being constantly weakened. Again and again we find ourselves facing a specialist who points out the sanction we incur if we do not follow his—to us, most incomprehensible—orders. Thus a new and outright humiliating fideism is being bred in the very shadow of rationality and scientism.
The result is man’s reduction to a dwarfish slave. The watchmaker who just pronounced a verdict beyond appeal on a customer’s alarm clock trembles before the diagnosis of his ophthalmologist or urologist who again prescribes in “good faith” medications concocted by a team of biochemists. There exist entire chains of “authorities” which, thanks to their individual monopoly of certain fragments within the gigantic complex of accumulated knowledge, exert very definite power in certain areas. This knowledge has become esoteric not only due to an artificial screening, but also due to its colossal volume. For the individual it is available only in part and with great effort. (The time required for a university degree is becoming longer and longer: the average mechanical engineer in Europe is today at least twenty-six, the practicing physician in the United States twenty-eight years old.) School knowledge too is affected by this development. A hundred or a hundred-fifty years ago a boy left school (lycee, Gymnasium) with an adequate fund of “general knowledge.” Today he has managed to grasp only a measly fragment of the scienda, the things he really needs to know in order to rate as an “educated man.” Whoever in the old days understood the working principle of the steam engine or the electromotor today ought to grasp the principles of the atomic reactor or the computer. But does he? Mathematics, philosophy, history and literature also constantly enlarge the body of accumulated knowledge. Homo discens, learning man, is being dwarfed by an immense, if not to say monstrous material.
Only the artist, the man who gives form to ideas and feelings, escapes this process. One can give piano concerts at the age of twelve, write poetry when eighteen and paint pictures not much later. This is possible. But it is interesting to see that today even art has become highly esoteric and subject to Horace’s Odi profanum vulgus. The art of the Middle Ages, of the baroque period, even of the Renaissance was somehow accessible to the average man. But how do most of the contemporary Germans react to the paintings of Marc, Klee, Kandinsky or Feininger? And the average American just managing to comprehend Melville, has he any relations to Robert Lowell or Karl Shapiro? National socialism which must be regarded as a “left” rebellion of the masses, the “regular guys” against all sorts of elites, revolted also against the esoteric character of the so-called “degenerate art” which gave little minds an inferiority complex or filled them with gnawing envy for the “easily earned money” of “infantile paint brush clowns.”
Now, there are two domains which, in theory, should be esoteric due to their great complexity, whereas in practice they are still the layman’s happiest hunting grounds: religion and politics. However, the situation is different in each case because religion has not only intellectual, but also spiritual and psychological aspects. The purely personal element which dominates in religion (as in love, whether we mean Eros or friendship) cannot be rationalized or reduced to mathematical formulas. We all are called to religious life, but not to shoemaking, cooking, race-driving or journalism. Without particular learning we can legitimately hold certain opinions in regard to religion in general, but not on a systematized level, not to theology. We can complain about the pains brought upon us by a serious illness, we can voice our despair or our impatience with the results of the treatment, but this does not give us the right to produce a scientific analysis of our ailment. Most cancer specialists have never suffered from cancer, few ear specialists from deafness. And daily communion does not put one in a position to pontificate about the Eucharistic mystery. In practice, however, the situation is quite different and, curiously enough, theology has. become an intellectual free-for-all. The tendency has always existed, but now the enterprising religious amateur has intrepidly rushed into theology. Atomic scientists will nowadays be pleased to give interviews on theological problems, zoologists lecture about the divinity of Christ and in television we find physicians and biologists dogmatizing about the Immaculate Conception (which they most invariably mix up with Christ’s birth from a virgin). Ignorance does not hamper anybody. On the other hand, a theologian would hardly ever attempt to lecture on nuclear fission, inheritance factors or the origin of thyroid diseases. He knows—or, at least, until recently knew—only too well that in this case scita and scienda are too far apart. (The intrusion of theologians into the fields of sociology, politics and economics, with very little preparation, is a very modern phenomenon.)
Theology, indeed, is a “last frontier,” as D. Riesman conceives this term, but so is politics. Man is doubtless an animal religiosum, but whether he is also a zoon politikon (and not only an animal sociale) is debatable—in spite of Aristotle. He naturally reacts towards political events and decisions and is not indifferent about administrative measures. But whether he has a natural bent to be politically active on the national level is not unequivocally established. On the other hand it is evident that the political systems of our time, either honestly motivated by ideological convictions, or hypocritically and for the sake of propagandistic “managing,” invite or force all adult citizens to go to the polls. Thus one cannot avoid the polls even in a totalitarian dictatorship. In that case, of course, only the most naive voter can harbor the illusion that he has been seriously asked for his opinion.
Things are different in the still free world because there a certain accumulation of votes has usually a decisive impact on the political process. The voter is called upon to consider and judge important questions and to form an opinion about subtle points by voting for or against the advocates of specific viewpoints. He is forced to take sides, to join this or that party, to express preference for one man or the other. This is easily said and often also too easily done.
This procedure was meaningful in the past and still is in narrowly circumscribed areas. The history of democracy in Athens has shown that there the general level of education was perhaps, in a way, sufficient for self-government, but that the passions whipped up by the demagogi (most of all envy!) had disastrous effects. Socrates was condemned to death by the democrats because he ridiculed their system of government and held monarchical views (as we know from contemporary sources). Plato, his disciple, despised democracy, and Aristotle fled from Athens in order to avoid the hemlock cup. On the other hand, direct democracy is successful and impressive even today in certain Swiss Cantons. Thus the citizens gather on the market place of Glarus in order to vote for the various propositions. In this limited framework scita and scienda are still very close. The problems concerning the Canton can be grasped by almost everybody. But this is an exceptional case in the present age.
We have the data of numerous polls in a great variety of countries which prove that the vast majority of the population is utterly baffled by the great problems facing their countries in our day. Their replies to the questionnaires testing their knowledge of current affairs would often be hilariously funny if the implications were not so tragic. However, it must be born in mind that the politics of a larger country (as against a village or small province), not to mention the global ones which directly concern the citizens of large nations, cannot be grasped without thorough preparation. This, in turn, presupposes years of time and money consuming studies far beyond the means of the average voter. True, subconsciously many people begin to suspect that they know less than they should and, in addition, they sometimes have the sinking feeling that their vote is a drop in an ocean. Their votes, as Aristotle a long time ago has stated, are counted and not weighed. The young playboy’s or prostitute’s vote has the same effect as that of a scholar or of an elder statesman. This realization still rarely affects the people in the newer democracies, but does it all the more so in the countries where the voting has been customary for centuries—in the United States and in Switzerland, for example, where now only 68 to 75 percent of the qualified voters go to the polls. In Austria and in Germany participation is way above 90 percent and in the totalitarian tyrannies it is almost one hundred.
The situation is not so very different wherever persons rather than parties are voted for. If the voter’s task facing parties is overtaxing his intellectual equipment, he is humanly helpless when he has to make choices between individual candidates. The demand on his psychological (if not psychiatric) experience is even bigger. In an age of TV and broadcasting a photogenic candidate has a huge advantage over a rather unattractive candidate, the brilliant speaker over a reticent though highly educated and experienced thinker. Undoubtedly a Hitler-type excites the masses far more than a personality like Heinrich Bruning. Here we see the fatal effects of what Ernst Junger once called “the fleeting Eros.” And since the candidates’ wives also appear in television, the male voters too can be emotionally attracted. Here, too, scita and scienda diverge sharply because the intrinsic superficiality of the mass media avoids all depths. “To dislike him properly you have to know him really well,” a disillusioned Republican once said about a Presidential candidate whose main handicap was his shortness.
The discrepancy between scita and scienda appears not only among the voters but also among those who govern. In former times rulers and administrators used to come from those layers who had the tendency to train their male progeny from childhood on for the higher forms of civil service. Promoters of the monarchist system could point out that future monarchs were given a very special education beginning in their infancy and this, together with the initial guidance of their predecessors (often the father or a near relative) enabled them to assume their duties fairly well prepared. In addition, a monarch could learn from experience in the course of many years, whereas in the modern republics a head of government is always suspected of wanting to monoplize all power and when, at long last, he finds his balance and acquires the necessary experience, he is dismissed like an insolent servant and replaced by another amateur who has to start from scratch. Of course, the monarchic system gave no special regard to talent, but is not the ungifted expert preferable to the green amateur? Who will make you a better coat: a bad tailor or a bright endocrinologist? The history of Europe with its steady ascent from 800 to 1918 and its cataclysmic descent from then on gives us without pity the right answer.
Similarly the statesman is more and more frequently replaced by the politician. The Congress of Vienna created a system for Europe which, in spite of certain deficiencies and misconstructions (like the continued partition of Poland), staved off another great war for 99 years. In this connection one also should remember the Paris Peace Treaties of 1919-1920 where rancor, meanness and sheer ignorance celebrated true orgies. At the Congress of Vienna, Talleyrand, the representative of a defeated nation, was allowed to play an important and highly constructive part, whereas in 1919 the German representatives were humiliated and the Austrian ones handled like obnoxious criminals. The Hungarian, Turkish and Bulgar delegates were, of course, given a similar treatment.
What interests us here in the first place, however, is not the purely political or moral aspect of these fateful conferences, but the problem of scita and scienda. At the time of the Vienna Congress the economic factor was not yet generally recognized as of great importance; geopolitical considerations were rare; the psychology of nations was not studied since the masses, the plebs only intermittently became politically active. All nations represented at the Congress of Vienna had more or less only one common ideological enemy: la Revolution, The Revolution, that is to say, nationalistic democracy. This alone united them all in one camp as far as Weltanschauung was concerned. For the statesmen at the Vienna Congress it sufficed to know history, geography, the genealogy of royal families, international law and a few items taken from military science. In addition, one had to be able to move deftly on the slippery parquet of the great salons and to speak French well (the language of the “enemy”), for the mere thought of conducting important and confidential discussions with the help of interpreters would have seemed preposterous (and dangerously inadequate) to everybody.
For a politician of international status today the knowledge held by a Metternich, a Talleyrand, a Castlereah or a Hardenberg would be utterly insufficient. In addition to the informed expertise of the statesmen 150 years ago he ought to be versed in economics, finance, agriculture, mining, religious affairs, nuclear fission, electoral laws, the psychology of nations, party politics and the personal background of his foreign colleagues—a truly encyclopedic volume of information. To all this comes an endless variety of problems due to a shrinking globe! A newly accredited ambassador in Washington now has to call on over 120 heads of foreign missions. And not only the number of politically active countries has increased, international organizations, too, have mushroomed. There is the Red Cross, the UNO, UNICEF, UNESCO, UNIDO, the World Bank, ILO, FAO, NATO, GATT, the European Common Market, Euratom, Comecom, the Warsaw Pact, the OAS, the World Council of Churches, the Council of Europe, the CENTO and SEATO pacts. The world has become immensely complicated and, politically speaking, all information and knowledge pertaining to government must, one way or the other, be integrated. The minister of defense has to know about nuclear fission, the foreign minister about fishing rights, the minister of commerce about gold mining in distant continents, and so forth.
Still, the specific learning of our present-day cabinet ministers and presidents is not greater—although it desperately needs to be so—than that of the statesmen at the end of the Napoleonic Wars: it is, in fact, often vastly inferior. And do not suggest that modern politicians, having been raised to the highest offices through elections or parliamentary procedure, can simply rely on the advice of experts. The effects of such advice on the mood of the electorate has seriously had to be considered, as well as the effects on the coalition partners, if any. But let us, for argument’s sake, assume that a given politician, filled with a sense of genuine moral responsibility, is prepared to proceed according to his best knowledge and without regard to public opinion, perhaps even ready to accept unpopularity and to withdraw into private life after the next elections. If he really wants to listen to the experts, what does he do if the experts disagree? This is frequently the case. How does he get the insight to coordinate the contradicting specialists, to separate the wheat from the chaff? Even the experts are sometimes overwhelmed by the immense material confronting them. How is the politician to cope with the conflicting data offered him by the various experts?
In the case of the peace conferences and treaties one has to add the passions aroused by war (and war propaganda) which render balanced decisions almost impossible. Remember the “Hang the Kaiser!” slogan of a demagogue like Lloyd George who later became a boundless admirer of Hitler. With his catchword he won the Kaaki-Elections of 1918. His ignorance of historic and geographic facts equalled that of Clemenceau and was surpassed by Wilson, a former professor of government at Princeton. Here specialization made itself felt with a vengeance. To this helpless “scholar” with a Messiah-complex, who was thoroughly duped by Italian informants with forged maps, we owe the fact that the South Tyrol is still a political cauldron. (There are some worse contemporary problems too.) After World War II only few formal treaties were signed, but the decisions of Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam are ample proof for the continued decline since 1919-1920. Compared to Roosevelt, Wilson was a sage and a saint, just as the German chancellors in World War I were geniuses when compared to Hitler.
Thus we observe in the present political development twin tendencies which, at first glance, seem paradoxical. On the one hand there is the growing number of experts who, however, are not rarely chosen for all too personal reasons; on the other hand, in democracies as well as in dictatorships, we encounter the rule of the absolute amateur who is at the mercy of experts, provided he does not arrogantly disregard all advice. Thus reason, knowledge and experience are all too frequently neglected. In the desperate dilemma caused by the contradictory suggestions of experts, clear thinking and serious study are rejected in favor of intuition and “prophetic visions.” This leads only very occasionally to the desired goal but in many more cases to disaster. Wilson, Roosevelt and Benes also boasted of their “inspirations,” and we still remember Hitler’s claim to his “inner security of a sleepwalker,” his traumwandlerische Sicherheit. They all had fatally transferred artistic principles to the art of governing. Art, religion and love are generally human, generally accessible, and universal. But, as Goethe already had pointed out, a work of art is complete, perfect in itself, whereas knowledge knows no bounds. Through art (as through religion, through love) man grows, but the realization that knowledge and science are bottomless makes him feel dwarfed. The wise will thus say with Socrates, resigned but calmly: “I know that I know nothing.” Knowledge and science are acquired with enormous efforts, yet they always remain fractionary. One also has to ask oneself whether the dictum that “knowledge renders free” is true to fact or whether it does not rather weigh man down with added responsibilities, make him his brother’s keeper, create a kind of thirst which in this life cannot be quenched. The fulfillment which art, religion or love can give is unknown to mere knowledge.
But—and this is a great “but”—knowledge brings power, or is at least a means to power. And precisely for this reason we have to ask what lies `historically’ beyond the amateurism of the popular intuition-motivated visionaries. Is the rule of experts, who still lack in scienda but represent the scita to a remarkable degree, somewhere in sight? Such a development began in Europe between the 17th and 19th centuries when the monarchs, realizing their limitations (and the increasing importance of the bureaucracies), ruled with the help of specialists. (These, in turn, had to correct subtly the blatant mistakes of diets and parliaments.) Even if today we speak of `statesmen’ we rarely think of truly popular presidents or prime ministers but rather of men who had the confidence of their monarchs and sometimes, to a certain degree, of the elected parliaments, men like Bismarck, Cavour, Witte, Disraeli, Guizot, Metternich, Richeliem, Oxenstjerna, Kaunitz, Pasic, Bratianu, Stolypin, Schwarzenberg.
This phenomenon has largely disappeared in the age of dictatorships because although the dictators need not respect the “will of majorities” they were or are almost all ideologically bound amateurs, which makes them disregard facts) The only exception is the non-ideologic military dictatorship (as in Spain, for instance) which, due to its already basically bureaucratic nature, can enter into a symbiosis with the civil service. What threatens us now in the free world is the premature fading out of our parliaments which frequently resemble low-level debating clubs, the discrepancy between microscopic scita and unassimilated scienda. Power as well as authority is shifted more and more to the ministries—and, of course, also to the trade unions. For the latter the disharmonies between the scita and scienda are not of vital importance. They make things easy for themselves: they are not genuine stewards, they merely claim to represent certain interests; they do not administrate (except if they themselves conduct enterprises); and if they feel no responsibilities toward the common good (which happens), they merely postulate and engage in blackmail.
l When once a student remarked to Hegel, the father of modern ideologies: “But Herr Professor, the facts contradict your theories,” the old gentleman looked down on him through his spectacles. “All the worse for the facts!” was his severe reply.
This growing discrepancy can become—directly or dialectically—a true threat to freedom. The masses might one day lose their self-confidence and their enthusiasm for their amateurish leaders. And the outlook is not much rosier in the case of experts who begin to feel the dormant possibilities for their power and wrangle for positions. Behind the political stages and the still party-oriented cabinets the various braintrusts make themselves more and more felt.
Governments consisting purely of experts would be exceedingly brittle, narrow and merciless. They could rule with ice-cold objectiveness in the name of reason and knowledge. We would thus be ruled “from above” without the patriarchal element and the father-image which characterized the monarchies of old. Against this concept liberal democracy promotes a fatherless “fraternity” and consequently, we only too often get the tyranny of Big Brother. The oligarchy of experts without controls might assume the character of a dictatorship of professors or, at least, of a government of governesses. But eventually it would go to the way of all flesh because of its inability to cope with the abyss between scita and scienda among its own members. Without an effective coordinating center which, I am sure, only a dynasty can provide, it would fall apart into nagging, fighting factions. Only an optimist can manage to regard our political and cultural future with equanimity.
The way to avoid a development which spells catastrophe for our freedom lies in the creation of sacrosanct domains beyond the grasp of power-hungry centralist forces, areas where the individual or limited groups can act freely, because there scita and scienda are still correlated—in the family, the small enterprise, the village, the borough, the county. Yet as far as the big central governments are concerned, we have coldly to face the realities of our technological society, which means an unavoidable increase of the technocratic element and of expertise. Nobody doubts that technocrats must have a high degree of knowledge, experience and even wisdom (which is more than cleverness). It is less realized that they also must have a high degree of character, that they must have virtue, that they have to be good men, which means men capable of love, magnanimity, tolerance, filled with humility in spite of their importance and responsibility. If this is not the case everything will be lost and the most ingenious political design come to naught.
Our freedom, after all, is menaced far more by the totalitarian than by the authoritarian principles. The latter came into being with our first parents, the former was born by the French Revolution. What we must avoid is turning humanity into an ant-heap; instead we ought to create small, individual “kingdoms” which can be governed with reason, understanding and, at least, a modicum of affection. “Where there is no love there is no law.” The tiniest of these kingdoms lies within the four walls of each home. And the thickness of these walls, as Ortega y Gasset has already pointed out, is the measure of our freedom.
This article appears through the kind courtesy of Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.
Featured: Atelierwand (Studio Wall), by Adolph von Menzel; painted in 1852.
“The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) has just published (December 18, 2023), with the approval of Pope Francis, the Declaration Fiducia Supplicans, On the Pastoral Meaning of Blessings.
Hailed as a victory by the secular world, and in particular by LGBT lobbies who see in it at last a recognition by the Church of homosexual relationships, despite the many restrictions recalled by this Roman document, it is the subject of unprecedented public disapproval from entire bishops’ conferences, particularly from Africa and Eastern Europe, as well as bishops from every continent. In addition, many of the faithful, including those renewing their faith, and many priests, who face complex pastoral situations in a society losing its bearings, demonstrating as much fidelity to the teaching of the Magisterium as pastoral charity, are all expressing their confusion and incomprehension.
In response to these reactions, and having taken the time to reflect, I would like to address a note to the priests and faithful of my diocese, as a bishop, to help them welcome this declaration in a spirit of communion with the Holy Apostolic See, by providing some keys to understanding, while respectfully questioning certain points of the declaration that may need clarification. Finally, I would like to invite the priests of my diocese to exercise prudence, the virtue par excellence of discernment. I am aware that this note is dense, but it seems important to me to treat the question with sufficient theological and pastoral depth.
Unchanged Doctrine on Marriage
Fiducia supplicans begins by recalling that the Church’s teaching on marriage as a stable, exclusive and indissoluble union between a man and a woman, naturally open to the generation of new life, remains firm and unchanged (no. 4). This is why, the text insists, it is impossible to give a liturgical or ritual blessing to couples in an irregular situation or of the same sex, which would risk leading to serious confusion between marriage and de facto unions (no. 5). This is the reason why the former Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in an ad dubium response on February 22, 2021, concluded that it was impossible to give a blessing to same-sex “couples.”
Distinction Between Liturgical and Pastoral Blessings
A whole biblical journey is then proposed as a basis for the distinction between liturgical blessings (no. 10) and what we might call pastoral blessings, with a view to clarifying the possibility of a blessing being granted to a person who, whatever his or her sinful condition, may ask a priest, outside the liturgical or ritual context, to express his or her trust in God and request for help to “live better” and better adjust his or her life to God’s will (no. 20). This is, moreover, part of the Church’s elementary and two-thousand-year-old pastoral practice, particularly in the context of popular devotion (no. 23-24), where it is never a question of exercising control over God’s unconditional love for all, nor of demanding a certificate of morality, it being understood that we are dealing here with a sacramental, which does not act as a sacrament ex opere operato, but whose efficacy of grace depends on the good dispositions of the one who asks for and receives it. Thus far, the text adds nothing new to the Church’s ordinary teaching on these matters.
A Pastoral Blessing Extended to Same-Sex Couples
From the centuries-old practice of spontaneous, informal blessings, which have never been ritualized by ecclesial authority, we move on to what was presented in the document’s introduction as its proper object: “It is precisely in this context [ that of Pope Francis’s “pastoral vision ] it is precisely in this context that one can understand the possibility of blessing couples in irregular situations and same-sex couples without officially validating their status or changing in any way the Church’s perennial teaching on marriage” (Presentation). It is even specified that “a pastor’s simple blessing, which does not claim to sanction or legitimize anything” (no. 34).
Thus, in the third part of the declaration, there is a surreptitious shift from the possibility of blessing a person, whatever their situation, to a blessing granted to an irregular or same-sex “couple.”
Despite all the clarification of the non-liturgical nature of these blessings and the laudable intention “to entrust themselves to the Lord and his mercy, to invoke his help, and to be guided to a greater understanding of his plan of love and of truth” (no. 30), we are obliged to note that this has been received, almost unanimously by pro and contra alike, as a “recognition by the Church of homosexual relationships” themselves. Unfortunately, this is often how the practice—already in use in some local churches—of blessing same-sex “couples” is understood, particularly in Germany and Belgium, and in a very public way. It is to be feared that they will feel encouraged to do so, as a number of them have already testified.
Questions Requiring Clarification
We understand the Holy Father’s legitimate desire to demonstrate the Church’s closeness and compassion towards all situations, even the most marginal—is this not the attitude of Christ in the Gospel, “who welcomed publicans and sinners” (cf. Mt 9:11), and which constitutes a large part of our ordinary ministry? There are, however, a number of unanswered questions that need to be clarified, both doctrinally and pastorally.
Would not these blessings be in contradiction with the notion of “sacramental” that all blessings assume?
It is worth pointing out that the reason put forward by the Responsum ad dubium of 2021 placed less emphasis on the liturgical context of the blessing than on its nature as a “sacramental” which remains, no matter the context: “Consequently, in order to conform with the nature of sacramentals, when a blessing is invoked on particular human relationships, in addition to the right intention of those who participate, it is necessary that what is blessed be objectively and positively ordered to receive and express grace, according to the designs of God inscribed in creation, and fully revealed by Christ the Lord. Therefore, only those realities which are in themselves ordered to serve those ends are congruent with the essence of the blessing imparted by the Church” (Responsum Explanatory Note). This is why the former Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith declared illicit “every form of blessing” with regard to relationships that involve sexual practice outside marriage, as is the case with same-sex unions. While we must recognize and value the positive elements of these types of relationships, they are put at the service of a union that is not ordered to the Creator’s Purpose.
Is There Not a Distinction to be Made between Blessing a Person and Blessing a “Couple?”
The Church has always held that “such blessings are meant for everyone; no one is to be excluded from them” (no. 28). However, if we refer to the Book of Blessings and the Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy, we see that they are essentially, if not exclusively, for individuals, even when gathered in groups, such as the elderly or catechists. But in these cases, the object of the blessing is not the relationship that unites them, which is merely extrinsic, but the person.
Here we come to the novelty of the Fiducia supplicans declaration, which lies not in the possibility of blessing one person in an irregular or homosexual situation, but of blessing two who present themselves as a “couple.” It is therefore the “couple” entity that invokes the blessing upon itself. However, while the text is careful not to use the terms “union,” “partnership,” or “relationship”—used by the former Congregation for its prohibition—it does not provide a definition of the notion of “couple,” which has here become a new object of blessing.
This raises a semantic question that remains unresolved: can the term “couple” reasonably be applied to the relationship between two people of the same sex? Have we not hastily integrated the semantics that the world imposes on us, but which confuse the reality of the couple? In his apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in Europa (2003), John Paul II wrote: “attempts are made to accept a definition of the couple in which difference of sex is not considered essential” (no. 90). In other words: is not sexual difference essential to the very constitution of a couple? This is an anthropological question that needs to be clarified to avoid confusion and ambiguity, for if the world has extended this notion to realities that do not enter into the Creator’s Design, should not the magisterial word assume a certain rigor in its terminology to correspond as closely as possible to revealed truth, anthropological and theological?
What about Homosexual Relationships?
Granting a blessing to a homosexual “couple,” rather than just to two individuals, seems to endorse the homosexual activity that links them, even if, once again, it is made clear that this union cannot be equated with marriage. This raises the question of the moral status of homosexual relationships, which is not addressed in this declaration. The Church’s teaching, in line with Sacred Scripture and the constant teaching of the Magisterium, holds such relationships to be “intrinsically disordered” (Catechism of the Catholic Church no. 2357): if God is not averse to blessing the sinner, can He speak well of that which is not concretely in conformity with His Purpose? Would this not contradict God’s original blessing when He created man in His own image: “Male and female he created them. God blessed them and said to them: ‘Be fruitful and multiply'” (Gn 1:28)?
Are There Not Acts which are Intrinsically Evil?
To put an end to the controversies that had agitated Catholic moralists since the 1970s, on the fundamental option and morality of human acts, Pope John Paul II published a magisterial encyclical, Veritatis splendor (1993), on some fundamental questions of the Church’s moral teaching, whose 30th anniversary we celebrated in 2023. This encyclical, which confirms the Moral Part of the CCC and develops certain aspects of it, recalled in particular the Magisterium’s constant teaching on the existence of intrinsically evil acts (no. 79-83) which remain forbidden semper et pro semper, i.e., in all circumstances. This teaching is far from optional, and provides a key to discerning the situations we face in pastoral ministry. No doubt behavior that is objectively at odds with God’s plan is not necessarily subjectively imputable—indeed, “who am I to judge?” to use Pope Francis’s famous expression—but this does not make it morally good. The declaration Fiducia supplicans often refers to the sinner who asks for a blessing—”who acknowledge themselves humbly as sinners, like everyone else” (no. 32)—but is silent on the particular sin that characterizes these situations. Moreover, experience shows that the possibility of an “unconditional” blessing is not necessarily an aid to conversion.
Can the Exercise of Pastoral Charity be Disconnected from the Prophetic Mission of Reaching?
It is fortunate that this statement refers to the ministry of the priest, and we must give thanks to the Holy Father for creating all kinds of opportunities to enable people, far removed from the Church and its discipline, to meet a priest, as he expresses the wish in his apostolic exhortation Amoris laetitia (2016), to experience the closeness of a “tender and merciful God, slow to anger and full of love” (Ps 144:8). But then, there can be no question of two people of the same sex engaged in homosexual activity and presenting themselves as such, or of couples in an irregular situation, resorting to a blessing granted, even informally, without a pastoral dialogue to which Pope Francis precisely often encourages pastors.
In this sense, the exercise of pastoral charity cannot be separated from the priest’s prophetic mission of teaching. And the heart of Jesus’ preaching remains the call to conversion, which we regret is not mentioned in this statement. When Jesus shows compassion for the sinner, He always exhorts him to change his life, as we see, among other examples, in the story of the adulteress: “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more” (Jn 8:11). What would pastoral care be if it did not invite the faithful, without judging or condemning anyone, to evaluate their life and behavior in relation to the words of the Covenant and the Gospel? These words speak of God’s benevolent plan for mankind, with a view to conforming their lives to it, with God’s grace, and according to a path of growth, called by John Paul II: “’the law of gradualness’ or step-by-step advance” (cf. Familiaris Consortio n. 34). Would not blessing two people in a homosexual relationship, or a couple in an irregular situation, lead them to believe that their union is a legitimate step in their journey? However, John Paul II was careful to point out: “And so what is known as ‘the law of gradualness’ or step-by-step advance cannot be identified with ‘gradualness of the law,’ as if there were different degrees or forms of precept in God’s law for different individuals and situations. In God’s plan, all husbands and wives are called in marriage to holiness, and this lofty vocation is fulfilled to the extent that the human person is able to respond to God’s command with serene confidence in God’s grace and in his or her own will” (Ibid.).
Can We Set Pastoral Care Against Doctrine?
Furthermore, can we oppose pastoral care against doctrinal teaching, as if intransigence were on the side of doctrine and principles, to the detriment of the compassion and tenderness we owe pastorally to sinners? Faced with the Pharisees who put Him to the test on the subject of divorce and the act of repudiation consented to by Moses, Jesus refers uncompromisingly to the “Truth of the beginning” (cf. Gen 1 and 2), asserting that if Moses consented to their weakness, it was because of “the hardness of their hearts” (cf. Mt 19:3-9). Jesus is even the most intransigent. It has to be said that the old law did not make us righteous: but with Jesus, we are now under the regime of the New Law, which St Thomas Aquinas defined, drawing inspiration from St Paul, as “the grace of the Holy Spirit given to those who believe in Christ” (Summa Theologica I-II 106, 1). Every act of ministry, including blessings, should therefore be placed under the regime of the new law, in which we are all called to holiness, whatever our sinful condition.
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, stated in a letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on pastoral care for homosexuals (1986): “But we wish to make it clear that departure from the Church’s teaching, or silence about it, in an effort to provide pastoral care is neither caring nor pastoral. Only what is true can ultimately be pastoral. The neglect of the Church’s position prevents homosexual men and women from receiving the care they need and deserve” (no. 15).
As Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, stated in a letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on pastoral care for homosexuals (1986): “But we wish to make it clear that departure from the Church’s teaching, or silence about it, in an effort to provide pastoral care is neither caring nor pastoral. Only what is true can ultimately be pastoral. The neglect of the Church’s position prevents homosexual men and women from receiving the care they need and deserve” (no. 15).
And St. John Paul II warns: “The Church’s teaching, and in particular her firmness in defending the universal and permanent validity of the precepts prohibiting intrinsically evil acts, is not infrequently seen as the sign of an intolerable intransigence, particularly with regard to the enormously complex and conflict-filled situations present in the moral life of individuals and of society today; this intransigence is said to be in contrast with the Church’s motherhood. The Church, one hears, is lacking in understanding and compassion. But the Church’s motherhood can never in fact be separated from her teaching mission, which she must always carry out as the faithful Bride of Christ, who is the Truth in person… In fact, genuine understanding and compassion must mean love for the person, for his true good, for his authentic freedom. And this does not result, certainly, from concealing or weakening moral truth, but rather from proposing it in its most profound meaning as an outpouring of God’s eternal Wisdom, which we have received in Christ, and as a service to man, to the growth of his freedom and to the attainment of his happiness” (Veritatis splendor, no. 95). At the same time, the clear and vigorous presentation of moral truth can never disregard the deep and sincere respect, inspired by patient and trusting love, that man always needs on his moral journey, often made painful by difficulties, weaknesses and painful situations. The Church, which can never renounce the principle of “truth and consistency, whereby the church does not agree to call good evil and evil good” (Reconciliatio et paenitentia, no. 34), must always be careful not to break the bruised reed or quench the dimly burning wick (cf. Is 42:3). Paul VI wrote: ” Now it is an outstanding manifestation of charity toward souls to omit nothing from the saving doctrine of Christ; but this must always be joined with tolerance and charity, as Christ Himself showed in His conversations and dealings with men. For when He came, not to judge, but to save the world, (cf. Jn 3:17) was He not bitterly severe toward sin, but patient and abounding in mercy toward sinners?” (Humanae vitae, no. 29),” (Veritatis splendor, no. 95).
“Do Not Be Conformed to this World”
I am well aware that this is a delicate issue, and I fully endorse the Holy Father’s insistence on the pastoral charity of the priest, called to bring God’s unconditional love close to every human being, even to the existential peripheries of today’s wounded humanity. But I am thinking of the luminous words of the Apostle Paul to Titus, which we hear proclaimed in the Christmas Eve liturgy, and which sum up the whole Economy of Salvation: ” For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly… He it is who gave himself for us that he might redeem us from all iniquity and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds” (Titus 2:11-12, 14).
The pastoral charity that urges us—”Caritas Christi urget nos” (2 Cor 5:14)—to reach out to all people to show them how much they are loved by God—the proof of which is that Christ died and rose for all—also urges us, inseparably, to proclaim to them the Truth of the Gospel of Salvation. And the Truth is stated by Jesus to all those who wish to become his disciples: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Mt 16:24-25). Saint Luke makes it clear that he was saying this “to all” (Lk 9:23), and not just to an elite.
The words of St. Paul still resonate within me to illuminate our pastoral attitude: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect” (Rom 12:2). All people, including irregular or same-sex couples, aspire to the best, because the inclination to the good, the true and the beautiful is inscribed by God in the heart of every human being—to recognize this is to respect their dignity and fundamental freedom. And it is worth “sticking your neck out” to help everyone, whatever their situation of sin or contradiction with God’s plan, as revealed in the Decalogue and the Gospel, to discover it and, through processes of growth and the help of God’s grace, to move towards it. And this cannot be done without the Cross.
Practical Pastoral Approaches
Thus, in conclusion, and given the context of a secularized society in which we are experiencing an unprecedented anthropological crisis, which inevitably leads to stubborn ambiguities:
I invite the priests of the diocese, when dealing with couples in an irregular situation or with people involved in a homosexual relationship, to demonstrate a welcome full of benevolence: people must not feel judged, but welcomed by a look and a listening ear that speak of God’s love for them.
I then invite them to establish a pastoral dialogue and to have the courage, for the good of the people and with the appropriate delicacy, without judging them and involving themselves personally in the pastoral relationship, to tell them clearly the Truth that the Church teaches about their situation.
Finally, I invite them, if the people ask for it, to give them a blessing, provided it is to each person individually, calling them to conversion and inviting them to ask for the help of the grace that the Lord grants to all those who ask Him to conform their lives to God’s Will.
Msgr. Marc Aillet, Bishop of Bayonne, Lescar and Oloron
Bayonne, December 27, 2023 Feast of Saint John the Apostle
In all seriousness, liberal hegemony is still very strong in the country. The fact is that practically all the basic attitudes transmitted in education, humanities and culture since 1991 have been built on strictly liberal models. Everything in our country is liberal, starting with the Constitution. Even the very prohibition of ideology is a purely liberal ideological thesis. After all, liberals do not consider liberalism itself an ideology—for them it is the “truth in the final analysis;” and by “ideology” they mean everything that challenges this “liberal truth”—for example, socialism, communism, nationalism, or the political teachings of traditional society.
After the end of the USSR, liberal ideology became dominant in the Russian Federation. At the same time, it acquired a totalitarian character from the very beginning. Usually liberals themselves criticize totalitarianism, both right-wing (nationalist) and left-wing (socialist), and liberalism itself (without reason and hastily), identified with “democracy,” is opposed to any totalitarian regimes. However, the profound philosopher and student of Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, astutely noted that totalitarianism is a property of all political ideologies of the New Age, including liberal democracy. Liberalism is not an exception; it is also totalitarian in nature.
As in any totalitarianism, it is about a separate group of society (representing a known minority) announcing that it is supposedly the “bearer of universal truth,” i.e., knowledge about everything, about the universal. Hence totalitarianism—from Latin totalis, all, whole, complete. And further proceeding from the fanatical conviction in the infallibility of its ideology, it imposes its views on the whole society. Totalitarian “everything” is easily opposed to the opinion of the majority or various ideological groups actually existing in society. As a rule, the ruling totalitarian top justifies its “rightness” by the fact that it supposedly “possesses knowledge about the meaning of history;” “holds in its hands the keys to the future;” “acts in the name of the common good” (open only to it). Most often, the theory of progress, development, or the imperative of freedom, equality, etc., plays the role of such a “key to the future.” Nationalist totalitarian regimes appeal to nation or race, proclaiming the superiority of some (i.e., themselves) over others. Bolsheviks act in the name of “communism” which will come in the future, and the party top brass are seen as the bearers of awakened consciousness, the “new people.” Liberals believe that capitalism is the crown of development and act in the name of progress and globalization. Today they add gender politics and ecology to this. “We rule you because we are progressive, protecting minorities and the environment. Obey us!”
Minority Theory and the Critique of the Majority
Unlike the old (e.g., Hellenic) democracy, the majority and its opinion in totalitarian regimes, including totalitarian liberalism, is irrelevant. There is an argument for this: “Hitler was elected by the Germans by majority vote; so the majority is not an argument; it may not make the right choice.” And what is “right” only the “enlightened / awakened”(Woke) liberal minority knows. Moreover, the majority is suspect and should be kept under strict control. Progressive minorities must rule. And this is already a direct confession to totalitarianism.
The totalitarianism of the Bolsheviks or Nazis is unnecessary to prove; it is obvious. But after the victory over Germany in 1945 and after the collapse of the USSR in 1991, liberalism remained the only and main planetary ideology of the totalitarian type.
The Totalitarian Nature of the Rule of Liberal Reformers in the 1990s
Liberalism came to Russia in this form—as a hegemony of pro-Western liberal minorities, the “reformers.” They convinced Yeltsin, who had little understanding of the world around him, that their position was without an alternative. The ruling liberal top brass, consisting of oligarchs and a network of American agents of influence, as well as corrupt late-Soviet top officials, formed the backbone of the “family.”
From the very beginning they ruled with totalitarian methods. Thus in 1993 the democratic uprising of the House of Soviets was suppressed by force. The liberal West fully supported the shooting at the Parliament. After all, this was demanded by “progress” and “movement towards freedom.”
After the 1993 elections to the Duma, the right-wing opposition LDPR won; but it was equated with “marginalists” and “extremists.” The majority had no significance in the eyes of the “family.” Zhirinovsky was first declared “Hitler,” then reduced to the status of a clown helping to blow off steam (i.e., to rule solely and indiscriminately over a people who were completely dissatisfied with and disapproved of the basic liberal course).
In 1996, the elections were won by another (this time left-wing) opposition, the CPRF. Once again, the ruling liberal top brass, representing a minority, failed to notice. “The majority can be wrong,” this minority asserted, and continued to rule undividedly, based on liberal ideology, without paying any attention to anything.
Liberalism established its principles in politics, economics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, jurisprudence, ethnology, cultural studies, political science, etc. All humanities disciplines were completely taken over by liberals and supervised from the West through a system of rankings, scientific publications, citation indices and other criteria. Hence, not only the Bologna system and the introduction of the USE, but most importantly, the content of the scientific disciplines themselves.
Putin’s Realism versus Liberal Hegemony
Putin’s rise to power changed the situation only in that he has brought in the principle of sovereignty, i.e., political realism. This could not but affect the overall structure of liberalism in Russia, since liberal dogma denies sovereignty altogether and advocates that nation-states should be abolished and integrated into a supranational structure of World Government. Therefore, with Putin’s arrival, some of the most consistent and radical liberal minorities rose in opposition to him.
However, the majority of (systemic) liberals decided to adapt to Putin, take a formally loyal position, but continued to pursue the liberal course as if nothing had happened. Putin simply shared power with the liberals—he got realism, the military, and foreign policy, and they got everything else—the economy, science, culture, and education. This is not exactly liberal, but it is tolerable—after all, in the U.S. itself, power fluctuates between pure liberal globalists (Clinton, Obama, Biden) and realists (such as Trump and some Republicans).
Medvedev played the role of the Russian liberal from 2008-2012. And when Putin returned in 2012, it caused a storm of indignation among Russian liberals, who thought that the worst was over and Russia would again (without Putin) return to the 1990s—that is, to the era of pure and untainted liberal totalitarianism.
But even back in 2012, Putin—contrary to his program articles published during the 2012 election campaign—decided to leave the liberals alone, pushing back only another batch of the most odious ones.
In 2014, after reunification with Crimea, there was a further shift toward sovereignty and realism. And another wave of liberals, sensing that they were losing their former hegemonic position, drifted out of Russia. However, Putin was then stopped in his battle for the Russian World, and the ruling liberal top brass went back to their usual tactics of symbiosis—Putin gets sovereignty and the liberals get everything else.
The SMO: Final Break with the West
The Special Military Operation has changed a lot, as the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine has finally come into conflict with the liberal dogma: “democracies do not fight each other.” And if they do, someone else is not a democracy. And the West easily identified who. Russia, of course. And specifically Putin. So, the liberal West finally refused to consider us “liberals.”
But the impression is that we still want to prove at any cost: “No, we are real liberals. It is you who are not liberals. You are the ones who deviated from liberal democracy by supporting the Nazi regime in Kiev. And we are loyal to liberal dogmas. After all, they include anti-fascism. So, we are fighting Ukrainian fascism, as liberal ideology demands.”
I am not saying that everyone in the Russian government thinks this way, but certainly a lot of people do.
They are the ones who fiercely oppose patriotic reforms, throwing themselves into the firing line so that sovereignty does not affect the most important thing—ideology. Antonio Gramsci called “hegemony” the control of the liberal worldview over the superstructure—first and foremost, culture, knowledge, thought, philosophy. And this hegemony is still in the hands of liberals in Russia.
We are still dealing with “sovereign liberalism;” that is, with a (contradictory and hopeless) attempt to combine the political sovereignty of the Russian Federation with global Western norms; that is, with liberal totalitarianism and the omnipotence of liberal Western elites who seized power in the country back in the 1990s.
And the plan of the Russian liberals is as follows: even during the SMO, to maintain their power over society, culture, science, economy, education, so that—when all this is over—they can again try to present Russia as a “Western civilized developed power,” in which they managed to preserve liberal democracy, i.e., totalitarian domination of liberals, even in the most difficult times of adversity. It would seem that Putin signed Decree 809 on traditional values (directly opposed to the liberal ideology); and the Constitution includes provisions on a normal family; and God as an immutable basis of Russian history is mentioned; and the LGBT movement is banned as extremist; and the list of foreign agents is constantly updated; and a new wave of the most radical liberals and oppositionists fled to the West; and the Russian people were declared a subject of history, and Russia a State-Civilization. And the liberal hegemony in Russia still persists. It has penetrated so deeply into our society that it began to reproduce itself in new generations of managers, officials, workers of science and education. And it is not surprising—for more than 30 years, in Russia, a group of totalitarian liberals remains in power, who have established a method of self-reproduction at the head of the state. And this is despite the sovereign course of President Putin.
Time for a Humanitarian SMERSH
We have now entered a new cycle of Putin’s re-election as the nation’s leader. There is no doubt about it—the public knowingly and unanimously chooses him. Consider him—already chosen. After all, he is our main and only hope for getting rid of the liberal yoke; the guarantee of victory in the war and the savior of Russia. But the bulk of Putin’s opponents are on this side of the barricades. The liberal totalitarian sect does not think of giving up its positions. It is ready to fight for them to the end. They are not afraid of any patriotic forces in politics; they are not afraid of the people (whom they have learned to keep under the table on pain of severe punishment); they are not afraid of God (they do not believe in Him, or believe in their own, fallen one); they are not afraid of rebellion (here some tried to show disobedience in the summer). The only thing holding them back is Putin, with whom they will not dare to have a head-on collision. On the contrary, systemic liberals are concentrated in his camp, if only because there is no other camp.
But the problem is very acute—it is impossible to justify Russia as a Civilization, as a pole of the multipolar world, with reliance on liberal ideology and preserving the hegemony of liberals in society, at the level of public consciousness, at the level of cultural code. We need something similar to SMERSH in the field of ideas and humanitarian paradigms; but there is clearly no determination, no personnel, no institutions, and no trained competent specialists for this purpose—after all, liberals have been in charge of education in Russia for 30 years. They have secured themselves, by blocking any attempt to go beyond the liberal dogma. And they succeeded in doing so, making the humanities either liberal or sterile.
The remnants of Soviet scholars and their methods, theories, and doctrines are not an alternative. Firstly, their approaches are outdated; secondly, they themselves have forgotten them because of their advanced age; and thirdly, they do not correspond to the new civilizational conditions at all.
And all this time, the totalitarian top liberals have been training only and exclusively their own cadres. Liberalism in its most toxic forms permeates the entire humanitaries sphere.
Many will say: right now, it is the SMO and elections; we will deal with liberals later. This is a mistake. We have already missed the deadline. The people are awakening; the country needs to focus on Victory. Everything is still very, very serious, and Putin never tires of talking about it. Why does he so often mention that everything is at stake and Russia is challenged to be or not to be? Because he sees it soberly and clearly—if there is no victory in Ukraine, there will be no Russia. But it is simply, theoretically impossible to defeat the West in Ukraine and preserve the totalitarian omnipotence of liberals inside the country. As long as they are here, even Victory will be Pyrrhic.
Therefore, it is now time to open another front—a front in the field of ideology, worldview, and public consciousness. The totalitarian domination of liberals in Russia—first of all in the field of knowledge, science, education, culture, determination of values of upbringing and development—must come to an end. Otherwise, we will not see the century-mark of Victory.
Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitica.
