Pius XII, Independent Ends, and the Inseparability Principle

Recently, a person on social media, after erroneously attributing to me the idea, written in this article, that traditional Catholic morality represents a “discounted, fearful teaching that has no bearing or relevance for the faithful,” told me that in any case “the inseparability principle is demonstrated to be false.” The context of our exchange was obviously Catholic sexual ethics, and he referred to the principle (used in Humanae Vitae) according to which the two meanings of the sexual act (procreative and unitive) cannot be separated. My discussion with him proved to be revealing of some common misinterpretations regarding this topic and is therefore useful to report.

I must say that I was puzzled by his sharp statement as I had never heard of such an allegedly obvious truth about a principle I myself explained many times in classes and writings. So, I just replied that the inseparability principle is one of the most beautiful and solid cornerstones of magisterial teaching, and that I have never read any credible arguments that would deny it.

Does “Independent Meaning” Equal “Separable Meaning?”

I thought this was enough for our friendly exchange on the social network, but he soon came back to me strongly claiming that the principle was old stuff, that,

The primary purpose of marriage (procreation) is independent of the secondary, and therefore is “separable,” because it does not depend on the secondary to exist.

I’m not that comfortable with this use of the term “independence” to indicate the potential relationship between marriage’s ends but I don’t mind following the reasoning and language of my interlocutors, at least initially. Having said that, the first thing that caught my eye in this sentence was the logical confusion of necessarily linking “being independent” with “being separable,” as if the inseparability principle could imply the impossibility of one of the meanings to exist without the other. I wasn’t totally sure if this was his actual problem, but I thought it was relevant, so I replied,

You’re making a typical logical error in ethics. Every moral norm or principle implies the factual possibility of breaking it. For example, the fact that it is possible to give birth or raise a child without love does not mean that it is morally licit to do so. When we use the term “impossible” in morality we express an ought, not a factual impossibility. The principle of inseparability of the procreative and unitive meanings must obviously be understood in a moral sense. The factual possibility of separating the meanings is not an objection, it is a logical premise of the moral principle. If they couldn’t be separated de facto, there would be no need to formulate the ethical principle.

Does “Independent” Equal “Primary,” Equal “Essential?”

I thought this would settle the matter, but I was wrong because he, in addition to confusing independence with inseparability, also confused “primary” with “essential” and thought that the principle of inseparability implied affirming the existence of two primary ends. For reasons unknown, he attributed to me this eccentric idea that there were two primary ends,

The primary is independent. The secondary is dependent. There is only one primary (essential) purpose to marriage. You are saying there are two primary purposes. The # must be correct before liceity of any marriage-related issue can be identified.

Of course, he had to admit that I had never said such a thing, but he added,

It’s not your quote, however “two primary purposes” is the necessary result of “inseparability.” How many, do you say, of the purposes of marriage are essential to it?

Not without some patience and good humor, I had to remind him that the classical view has nothing to do with the idea of two primary ends,

Well, the traditional view, which is my own too, is that there are two ends, one primary and one secondary.

But he immediately insisted on going back to the alleged intrinsic connection between the concepts of “primary” and of “essential,”

Okay, of the two ends, how many are essential to marriage?

My answer, of course, was “Both.” So, he insisted again,

If both are essential, then neither is independent of the other. However, the Church teaches that the primary purpose of marriage does not depend on the secondary in its essential perfection. How is this contradiction remedied?

This reply revealed some deeper metaphysical shortcoming. I therefore decided to provoke my interlocutor with a metaphysical analogy which highlighted other types of essential elements of which one was primary and one secondary and which did not imply inseparability. I also asked for specific quotes from the Magisterium so to better understand from where his doubts were coming:

Are being animal and being rational both essential to the human being? Which one is primary? Are they dependent on each other? How is death possible? Where exactly is the Church teaching what you say? Please provide exact quotes for what you claim.

Pius XII

At my solicitation, he revealed the magisterial source of his conviction. It was Pius XII:

An essential “purpose” can exist independent of its secondary purpose. But the secondary purpose cannot exist without the primary. This is why the legal object of marriage consent is the primary purpose only, and not the secondary. Here is Pius XII condemning “dependent primary.

This line still reveals the confusion between “essential” and “primary,” but at least he added a reference to a document which, although drafted by Pius XII, was issued by the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office (Decree on the Ends of Matrimony, April 1, 1944). My interlocutor strangely missed that the whole point Pius XII wanted to make was to reaffirm the doctrine according to which there are certain “goods” or “essential properties” of marriage (Pius PP. XI, Casti Connubii, 1930) of which one is primary (procreation) and other secondary, and that secondary goods cannot be interpreted as independent.

This is how the Decree from 1944 (quoted by my online friend) put it:

A novel manner of thinking and speaking was born hither unto fomenting errors and uncertainties; seeking to avert these things, the most Eminent and Reverend Fathers of this Supreme Sacred Congregation, charged with safeguarding matters of faith and morals, in the plenary session of Feria IV, held on the day of March 29, 1944, to the dubium put before them: “Whether the opinion of certain modern [authors] may be admitted, who either deny that the primary end of matrimony is the generation and raising of offspring or teach that the secondary ends are not essentially subordinate to the primary end but are equally paramount and independent?”; they have decreed the response: Negative” (Decree on the Ends of Matrimony, April 1, 1944).

And this is how Pius XII himself summarized what happened with the dubium and the Decree:

Now the truth is that marriage, as a natural institution, by virtue of the Creator’s will does not have as its primary and intimate purpose the personal improvement of the spouses, but the procreation and education of new life. The other ends, although they too are intended by nature, are not in the same degree as the first, and even less are they superior to it, but are essentially subordinate to it. This applies to every marriage, even if it is infertile… Precisely to cut short all the uncertainties and deviations, which threatened to spread errors about the scale of the ends of marriage and their mutual relations, We Ourselves drew up a few years ago (March 10, 1944) a declaration on the order of those ends, indicating what the same internal structure of the natural disposition reveals, what is the patrimony of the Christian tradition, what the Supreme Pontiffs have repeatedly taught, what was then established in the due forms by the Code of Canon Law. Indeed, shortly afterwards, to correct the contrasting opinions, the Holy See with a public decree pronounced that the sentence of some recent authors could not be accepted, who deny that the primary purpose of marriage is the procreation and education of offspring, or who teach that secondary ends are not essentially subordinate to the primary end, but equivalent to and independent of it (S. C. S. Officii, April 1, 1944—Acta Ap. Sedis, vol. 36, a. 1944. 103). (Pius XII, Speech of His Holiness PIO PP. XII to the participants in the congress of the Italian Catholic Union of Obstetricians, Monday, October, 29 1951).

And again,

Two tendencies are to be avoided: the one which, in examining the constituent elements of the act of generation, gives weight solely to the primary purpose of marriage, as if the secondary purpose did not exist or at least were not finis operis established by the Orderer of nature himself; and that which considers the secondary end as equally principal, freeing it from its essential subordination to the primary end (Pius XII, Speech to the Tribunal of the Sacred Roman Rota, Friday, October 3, 1941).

Thus, this is how I replied to my interlocutor’s quote:

This document does not say that unity is not essential to marriage but that it is subordinate to the primary (essential) end, which is exactly what I’ve been saying all along. You keep confusing the concepts of “essential/not essential” with those of “primary/secondary.” The secondary meaning of marriage is essential to marriage too even if it is essentially subordinate to the primary end. I don’t see any logical problem here.

Yet, he had done more than confuse those meanings. Surprisingly, he had claimed that “the legal object of marriage consent is the primary purpose only, and not the secondary.” Thus, I politely reminded him what the Code of Canon Law actually states,

You may like to consider canon 1096, which clarifies, in terms of validity, what is essential to the existence of the marital consent: “Can. 1096 §1. For matrimonial consent to exist, the contracting parties must be at least not ignorant that marriage is a permanent partnership between a man and a woman ordered to the procreation of offspring by means of some sexual cooperation.” The concept of “permanent partnership” includes a reference to unity (secondary end), which is as essential to the contract as the primary end (“ordered to the procreation”) is.

Matrimonial Consent and the Conjugal Act

He insisted,

When legally defining marriage, “unity” refers only to exclusivity AKA faithfulness AKA fidelity. If “inseparability” is true, then no purpose of marriage is independent, correct?

I interpreted this further response as a difficulty in connecting the unitive meaning to love, also generating an eccentric contrast between love, on the one hand, and the legal concepts of exclusivity, faithfulness, and fidelity, on the other. After all, he had just claimed that “the legal object of marriage consent is the primary purpose only” (i.e., he thought that unity was not part of the essence of the contract). He was clearly trying now (after I recalled Canon 1096 about “permanent partnership”) to legally interpret “unity” in a different way than that expressed by the inseparability principle. Thus, in my reply I focused on the important consistency that must exist between legal definitions and the substance of things.

The legal definition of the existence requirements must correspond to the substance because it indicates what is essential to the real existence of marriage, in this case with respect to the purity of the will. If the will does not include the essential, the marriage does not come into existence. If the will does not include some important but accidental elements, marriage comes into existence but could be vitiated (annulment). In all the explanations I know (including Aquinas’) indissolubility is linked to the purity of spousal love (unity) and not to procreation because procreation per se, conceptually, does not require indissolubility (but at most a certain stability for enough years: cf., Summa Contra Gentiles, III, 122). Still, procreation is the primary meaning of marriage. Obviously, the inseparability of the meanings of marriage does not imply inseparability with respect to all acts internal to marriage, except in the case of the conjugal act. A nice outing with the wife and a hug when she is frightened need love in themselves but not procreation. The conjugal act needs both because outing and conjugal act are very different things, even within marriage. Logically, it’s very different to refer inseparability to the marriage as a whole or to the individual acts that the spouses continuously perform within the marriage. There is only one act within marriage which is so defining of it that it necessarily includes both meanings, and coincidentally this act (the conjugal act) is also necessary for the actual conclusion of the marriage, which makes it indissoluble.

Analogical Predications

My interlocutor has never allowed himself to be involved in my conceptual solicitations. His only problem was maintaining the logical objection that the principle of inseparability is denied by the claim that the primary end is independent of the secondary ones and, therefore, separable:

“Inseparable” purposes of marriage = no purpose can exist independently of the other. Pius XII says the primary purpose of marriage is “independent” of the secondary purpose. Was he wrong?

Philosophers always feel the primary need to clarify the meanings of terms, especially when there are various analogical meanings involved. I sensed that this was a case where this need had to be satisfied. So, I wrote the following,

You cannot reduce analogical meanings to univocal meanings. Both “inseparability” and “independence” can refer, for example: (a) to the marriage contract; (b) to a marriage in fieri as a partnership; (c) to the object of each single action; (d) to the intention of the agent. There is no contradiction, e.g., in saying that the two meanings are inseparable compared to “(a)” and not compared to “(c)” or “(d).” Humanae Vitae says that they are inseparable compared to “(c)” in the specific context of the conjugal act.

The point is that the doctrine of the inseparability of the two meanings has been used in Humanae Vitae to explain the immorality of contraception compared to its object. It was not used to explain the morality of every possible action performed by the spouses as a married couple. This doctrine or principle does not mean that even in the act of choosing movie night at home those two meanings must be present and inseparable. Clearly, marriage as a whole—the life together of the spouses—essentially requires both meanings, but as to specific acts of married life, there is only one act capable of encompassing the very essence of marriage, the conjugal act.

Again, the analysis of the human act can be done with respect to the object, the end, and the circumstances. In the case of intrinsically evil acts, the analysis of the objectivity of the act precedes and renders superfluous (at least in this respect) that of the end and of the other circumstances. This means that Humanae Vitae, even with respect to the conjugal act, did not need to refer the inseparability principle to the spouses’ intentions and/or to their entire marital life. Humanae Vitae focuses on the order of objective morality of the conjugal act.

Conclusion

The online discussion with my friend didn’t end here and maybe it will never end, but this is enough to clarify at least some important points regarding this topic. At the end of the day, his doubt was about the possible contradiction between the inseparability principle and the alleged independence of the primary end. How should we handle this doubt? One answer is that Pius XII and the Magisterium only used the concept of “independence” to deny erroneous theses which sought to make the secondary purpose independent. A more logical answer, which tries to save a possible correct use of the term, lies in the analogical predication and the logical distinctions I mentioned.

Essential, defining features cannot be independent in the sense that if one is missing the relevant thing is not there. Being animal and being rational are both essential to the human being. If one is missing, there is no human being. From this point of view, it does not matter if one feature is primary (being rational) and one secondary (being animal). This, however, does not mean that everything pertaining to the human being needs to have both defining features. For example, digestion, cellular mitosis, or sleeping do not need to be defined in terms of both animal and rational activities. There is one sense in which they all pertain to the human being and another sense in which they are not rational per se. Other crucial acts, on the other hand, essentially include the definition of the human being: e.g., (moral) choice.

Similarly, marriage is essentially defined in terms of both procreation and (loving) unity, but this does not mean that every act in married life includes both elements as defining features. In many ordinary acts that characterize married life (cooking a nice dinner, embracing after a fright, or defending one’s child from a stranger) the two meanings can be described as separable and independent (or, to use a better term, “distinct”).

Separability and independence can also be predicated in many cases of the order of intention compared to the objective moral order (without underestimating the difference between the habitual end and the intention of the proximate end). Spouses do not need to constantly think about procreation in every act of their life. They just ought to act in a context in which the purpose of procreation is objectively respected.

One final note on love and procreation. Many don’t understand why love in marriage, while more important per se, is secondary. Love is the highest meaning (inseparable from any other, at least as a habitual end) in any human reality because it is the first commandment of the law and the reason of our entire existence. Yet, love can exist without sex (think of angels, or love for children). The only reason for the existence of sex is procreation, but procreation must occur in the human reality, which is informed by the precept of love. In the same way, we can say that the primary meaning of the hammer is to drive nails even if we use the hammer to build our house. In this case, the house is a higher meaning of the hammer but not its primary meaning. Sexual life is primarily ordered to procreation but is also essentially ordered (as everything else in our existence) to love God and our neighbor. In the loving order of creation, procreation too—and the diachronic existence of the human race in history—is ordered to the love of God.

Fulvio Di Blasi, Ph.D., Esq., is an expert in moral philosophy and author of God and the Natural Law: A Rereading of Thomas Aquinas, From Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas: Natural Law, Practical Knowledge, and the Person, and Vaccination as an Act of Love? The Epistemology of Ethical Choice in Times of Pandemic.

Featured: The Marriage at Cana, by the Master of the Retable of the Reyes Catolicos; painted ca. 1495-1497.

The Four Reformers

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), the famed Scottish writer, in his leisure hours also turned out some remarkablle fables. One of them, The Four Reformers, speaks to our own era rather precisely. It is difficult to say when it was written, but likely before 1888. His fables were collected and published postumously, in 1896.

IX. The Four Reformers

Four reformers met under a bramble bush. They were all agreed the world must be changed. “We must abolish property,” said one.

“We must abolish marriage,” said the second.

“We must abolish God,” said the third.

“I wish we could abolish work,” said the fourth.

“Do not let us get beyond practical politics,” said the first. “The first thing is to reduce men to a common level.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to give freedom to the sexes.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to find out how to do it.”

“The first step,” said the first, “is to abolish the Bible.”

“The first thing,” said the second, “is to abolish the laws.”

“The first thing,” said the third, “is to abolish mankind.”

Featured: Four Men at a Cafe, by Yiannis Tsaroychis; painted in 1927.

The Way, The Truth, The Life

Christ’s famous phrase, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life” (Jn 14:6) provides Christians with an invaluable route to conversion. Here are some explanations.

I. “I am the Way”

First of all, whatever our vocation—our path is called Jesus. It’s all about following Jesus. He chooses the way, and I walk behind. Sometimes we’re tempted to organize our lives as we see fit, and once we’ve got everything organized, we pray to Jesus to make our plans a success. In other words, we say to Jesus: come and follow me! It seems to me, however, that in the Gospel it’s the other way around: it’s Jesus who tells us—come and follow me!

You can’t choose your path! “I would never have chosen to have a fourth child right away,” says one mother. We don’t choose our path; we accept it as a mystery.

However, we do choose how to move forward along that path—by dragging a ball and chain, or by saying a big “yes” to this path offered by providence. To say yes to the path is to say yes to Jesus; “I am the way” says Jesus!

So, I have to love my real situation today, however imperfect it may be. Of course, I can and must hope that this path will become smoother and clearer—I must hope to get married, have a child, find work, heal from a health problem or a wound of the heart—but in the meantime, I must love this path as it is, because it’s the one Jesus wants me to follow.

Let’s listen to the words of Wanda Poltawska, the spiritual little sister of Saint John Paul II, a Polish mother in great pain: “Loving God also means loving the path he has laid out for us. Very often, in fact, we sincerely want to love God… but we hate the path he leads us along!”

We need the strength of Grace to love the path God has laid out for me, to fully consent to what providence is giving me to live today. Let’s be gentle and patient with ourselves—sometimes we have to wrestle with God like Jacob, bumping up against His will, going through stages of inner anger or discouragement, before we can say a total, “Yes.” Yet however far we may be from true inner peace and authentic holiness, Jesus is with each and every one of us today; right where we are. Jesus did not say: “I am the end of the road”—but: “I am the way.”

II. “I am the Truth”

Jesus goes on to say, and here we hear something quite unexpected—truth is not a theory, nor a set of dogmas, however beautiful they may be. Truth is first and foremost—someone: “I am the Truth,” says Jesus. He is the Word in Whom God says everything, without the slightest lie.

Whereas for us, in our hearts and in our actions, truth and lies are inextricably intertwined. To say that someone is false does not inspire confidence! Only Jesus is “true”: “He was not yes and no,” writes Saint Paul, “but yes in him” (2 Cor 1:19).

So, it’s not just a question of adhering to a doctrine, but to someone, to Jesus. To know the truth is to know Jesus in an ever more personal way, to become a friend of Jesus, to live with Him, to stand close to Him, to listen to Him and talk to Him.

Isn’t my faith too cerebral, in the sense that it consists solely of my mind adhering to truths about God? Pope Francis often warns us against the danger of intellectualism. We need the Holy Spirit to bring our faith down from our heads into our hearts, to teach us to truly encounter Jesus, to let Him set His eyes on our souls, on our miseries, on our sins, not to shy away from the light of His gaze in order to get to the truth about ourselves.

III. “I am Life”

…says Jesus. Don’t we sometimes look at the banality of our daily lives and exclaim: “This is no life. I don’t want to go on like this! I want to live life to the full! We’re all waiting, more or less consciously, for something better, for fulfillment, for success, for liberation. Yet the years go by, life moves on, and nothing happens! Life remains the same, the daily dullness returns every morning!

But let’s make no mistake—the novelty we’re hoping for won’t come from external events, in a life that’s finally become exciting. The only novelty that can free us from routine lies within us. This inner source has a name and a face. It is not light or energy. It is Someone—the Holy Spirit. We sing in the Creed that He gives life: vivificantem. For Saint John Paul II, this was the most beautiful and important word in the Creed. This true life is expressed by St. Paul: “I live, but it is no longer I; it is Christ who lives in me. (Gal 2:20) This is the real liberation we’ve been waiting for! I live, but it’s no longer me. It’s no longer an existence confined solely to my ego—my health, my reputation, my plans, my fulfillment… We suffocate when we remain centered on ourselves! True life is the one that frees me from my ego, my isolation and my narrowness, and transforms the little things of each day into permanent praise.

So, in the words of Saint Elisabeth de La Trinité, “One is never banal! Oh,” she continues, “how empty is everything that has not been done for God and with God! Please, mark everything with the seal of love! If I were to start my life all over again, how I’d never waste another moment! It’s so serious, so serious, I’d like to live every minute full!”

Let’s ask the Holy Spirit to help us live in truth on the Paschal path traced out by Jesus. It is Jesus who gives the Holy Spirit, but it is Mary who draws Him!

Father Louis (Père Louis) is Prior of the Abbey of Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux, France. This article appears through the kind courtesy of La Nef

Featured: Christ Pantocrator and the Last Judgment, mosaic in the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence, by the Florentine master, ca. 1300.

Open Up to Wonder

Blanche Streb is a mother, essayist and columnist, who holds a doctorate in pharmacy. She has just written a remarkable book, Grâce à l’émerveillement (Because of Wonder) which invites us to rediscover our sense of wonder that can allow us to embrace life with enthusiasm, as we marvel at the mystery of being. Through the kind courtesy of La Nef, we are happy to bring you an excerpt.

The times we live in are fascinating and worrying. More and more technology, more and more speed, more and more so-called rights, more and more material goods. And yet… ever less time, ever less meaning, ever less hope. So much so that all around us, and within us, temptations to flee the present are multiplying—by becoming dizzy in the hustle and bustle or in front of our screens, by taking pride in our illusions of mastery and possession, by hardening ourselves in jadedness, by dozing off in the drone of what’s the point.

And then, one day, we come to realize that the misdeeds we deplore are first and foremost causes to be combated, rather than effects to be lamented. And we feel an inner act of resistance emerging. No! cries out our whole being. I don’t want to sink into indifference. I don’t want to miss out on my life. I don’t want to give in to swan-songs or those of sirens, I don’t want this ordeal to take everything with it. I’m here, alive. And I want to live fully, here and now.

In this world thirsting for meaning and hope, there is an eternal science of life to be (re)discovered today, a sovereign antidote to the disenchantment and cynicism that plague our times—Grace and the power of wonder. This intuition that precedes us, we all have already perceived its presence and active force in the corners of our lives. For this is a science reserved neither for the wise nor the learned, neither for children, nor for the spoiled-of-life. On the contrary, it is the inspiration of inspirations that wishes to pass through each and every one of us, whatever our gifts or what we do, in the brightness as well as in the discretion, in the small things and small nothings of everyday love.

Wonder is an innate disposition of the human heart. Some are richly endowed. Others are meagerly endowed. Some people, because they have lived through a profoundly “transforming” experience or even come close to the end, rediscover this science of life. It’s as if the nearness of death gives rise to an urgency to live. As if consenting to the end were in fact consenting to everything that needs to be lived.

Wonder seizes us, in the banality as in the extraordinary of our lives, and plants a seed of enthusiasm that delicately deflects our trajectory, breathing new life into us, giving a different consistency, substance and depth to what surrounds us, lives within us and around us. Wonder is not a simple, silly or childish emotion. It’s not an escape from the real world, but a doorway to the essential. It is lived in a sharpened awareness, capable of seeing beauty where it is, but also the goodness of acts and people, courage, fortitude. It doesn’t erase hardship or make the ordinary wonderful, but allows us to see the marvelous in the ordinary, the new in the familiar, the possible in the existing. It keeps our eyes from losing the grace to open up to the world each time as if for the first time. This gift of wonder enables us to see beyond what we see, beyond nature and its laws, to glimpse that the world is not limited to the visible, and that reality is vaster than we think. Through it, we gain access to another kind of Knowledge, far higher than the one lurking in our wherewithal—and to an encounter with the Other. This gift of wonder can be summed up in four words—do not be indifferent. And more than anything else, it’s up to us to open the door to it, to choose to live it, to cultivate it.

At the end of this month, the Church celebrates Pentecost. The coming of the One promised to us from all eternity. The One who strengthens and comforts us. He nurtures in us the spiritual flair that clears our path and helps us discern between what to seek and what to flee, what to love and what to hate. Where we must think big—for nothing is impossible for God—and where we must remain small—for we are neither perfect nor all-powerful. I deeply believe that many of the evils of our time would vanish if only our disposition served His gifts. In them lies what can heal so many wounds and think of ways to guard against them. These are not easy times. The moral and spiritual crisis we are going through is real and profound. It leads to so many lies, illusions, irresponsibility and absurdities. “This era demands of us a spiritual conflagration,” wrote Solzhenitsyn in 1978 in his famous Harvard speech.

Nothing counts more than human faculties and virtues, to steer our soul. Wonder is one of them. A powerful faculty. It gets us off the couch, out of our egos. We don’t marvel at ourselves, or only through a Grace we feel has passed through us, but for which we know we were neither the source nor the completion. Yes, let us dare to say to Grace—Come, enter my home! It’s at work, it’s (working) on us. These small steps of God in our lives can only make us more confident and “hopeful,”

There are so many aspirations that seek their way into the depths of our clogged souls—the desire for the good, the beautiful, the worthy; to be more, better, happier; to serve, to progress. Let’s set them aglow. Let’s turn them over to God. It’s going to be contagious.

Featured: Morgen im Riesengebirge (Morning in the Riesengebirge), by Caspar David Friedrich; painted ca. 1810-1811.

The Defense of Humanae Vitae is Not a Partisan Issue

Michael G. Lawler and Todd A. Salzman recently published an article in the National Catholic Reporter entitled, “Conservative defense of Humanae Vitae is not just about contraception” (L&T). The authors focused on the debate generated by a recent international conference organized in response to some controversial claims on sexual morality contained in a volume published by the Pontifical Academy for Life. They report some of my statements out of context and without ever going into the merits of my arguments. Thus, when they ask why people like me defend Humanae Vitae (HV), they do so solely from the perspective of those who, like them, intend to criticize it. This is already a methodological error.

Another mistake is to give the impression, as they do throughout their discussion, that the defense of an encyclical such as HV is a matter of partisanship. Yet, encyclicals are not like legislative acts that a political party, after a victorious election, can simply overturn. This is not the way of the Church. The debate on how best to defend revealed truth cannot be reduced to a dispute between opposing factions, labeling those who defend a certain magisterial teaching “traditionalist”, “conservative”, “legalistic,” and the like. This attitude pervades the entire article by Lawler and Salzman, giving it a negative and non-ecclesial tone. For my part, I would never label myself in those ways, and I claim that my thinking is centered on the true meaning of Christian love.

Paul VI’s Advisory Commissions and Ordinary and Universal Magisterium

Lawler and Salzman’s article contains several errors which are revealing of this way of conducting the debate in a biased way, without sincere respect for the others, including Popes.

For example, they use the work of the commission set up by Pope John XXIII to support the idea that the teaching of HV is not in line with the ordinary and universal Magisterium and is therefore not irreformable. Indeed, they reduce the meaning of the encyclical to a mere activity of approving or certifying the works of the commission, or of choosing between what they call the majority or minority reports, as if that commission was supposed to be a sort of official voice of the Church or as if it had some sort of proper theological meaning as an expression of the ordinary and universal Magisterium. This is how they put it,

“Nine bishops also voted in agreement with the commission’s majority report… Given the votes of the commission’s bishops, it is an incredible stretch of the imagination and dishonors the consciences of the bishops to claim that the ordinary universal magisterium declares this teaching irreformable… Paul VI… approved the minority report in his encyclical letter Humanae Vitae” (L&T).

This way of arguing and speaking, in addition to being erroneous, is highly disrespectful to Paul VI, who declared in the very encyclical that he had to put aside the work of that mere consultative commission:

“especially because certain approaches and criteria for a solution to this question had emerged which were at variance with the moral doctrine on marriage constantly taught by the magisterium of the Church” (HV, 6).

It is Paul VI himself who declared the opinion of the commission not in line with the ordinary and universal Magisterium. To use Lawler and Salzman’s language (and a fair principle of equality), aren’t they “incredibly stretching their imagination and dishonoring the conscience of Paul VI”? Who is a better voice of the ordinary and universal Magisterium, the opinion of nine bishops in a consultative commission or the official statement by Paul VI in HV? Who deserves more deference in the Church by loyal faithful?

Procreative Model vs. New Interpersonal Union Model?

Another example of a biased approach is the fictitious opposition between two alleged models of marriage, the ugly (procreative) one chosen by Paul VI, and the new and beautiful one based on interpersonal union, on the “total meaning of marriage and of sexual intercourse within the marriage relationship” (L&T).

I don’t know of any serious author who interprets marriage outside a context of deep love for God and the human person. Certainly, Paul VI did not, who begins his explanation addressing “God’s Loving Design” and “Married Love”:

“Married love particularly reveals its true nature and nobility when we realize that it takes its origin from God, who “is love” …As a consequence, husband and wife, through that mutual gift of themselves, which is specific and exclusive to them alone, develop that union of two persons in which they perfect one another, cooperating with God in the generation and rearing of new lives… This love is above all fully human… it is meant not only to survive the joys and sorrows of daily life, but also to grow, so that husband and wife become in a way one heart and one soul, and together attain their human fulfillment. It is a love which is total—that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything…” (HV 8-9).

Intellectual honesty and due respect for the Church must lead to correctly portraying the opinions and moral attitudes of others. Whenever the debate over contraception, or sexual morality in general, is presented as a dispute between legalists, on the one hand, and lovers of love, on the other, something is wrong. Anyone who thinks that there are moral truths that must always be respected, limits that must not be crossed, is generally a person who truly loves (God, the truth, other human beings). Is a mother who refuses an abortion at the cost of her life a legalist? Is a saint willing to martyrdom a legalist?

In married life, we abstain from sex for many reasons, because the other is not feeling well, because we are unable to isolate ourselves from the kids (as in the recent lockdowns), because there are too many urgent and important things to do or to think about, etc. In a happy marriage, these abstentions breed love. When abstention creates marital problems, it generally means that sex is experienced in a selfish way, as a search for oneself rather than as a gift to the other. I can’t remember a single case in which our abstention didn’t become a reason for happy laughter, and I can’t imagine the opposite in any loving marriage. Honestly, even if there are sometimes valid reasons to delay pregnancies, I have never even discussed them with my wife. I wonder if the very legitimate debate about natural family planning isn’t today marred by a world that no longer loves God and children. Just as the pervasiveness of divorce ruins the purity of marriage will for many today, so the contraceptive mentality ruins the approach to NFP. It is too easy today to be afraid of a child, but the Gospel tells us not to be afraid. For me and my wife, it’d really take an apocalyptic reason, so to speak, to put aside, even momentarily, our passion to co-create with God the world of the future and to embrace a new child—the most beautiful thing I can imagine. We are never afraid, and that debunks and eliminates false problems, and constantly reignite our love for God, ourselves, and our kids.

The whole debate about contraception is surreal to me, not because of some kind of legalism, but because I don’t understand how sometimes having to abstain from sex can be a problem for those you truly love. I can respect different opinions and I’m happy to discuss with those who hold opposing views, but I cannot accept being portrayed as one who does not put love at the center of his life and ideas. I cannot accept portraying people like Paul VI or John Paul II as Popes who didn’t understand love. Procreation is not opposed to love, but sex often is. One must ask oneself whether it is not the excessive attention to sex and the little love for children today that damage the correct understanding of conjugal love.

What Happened to Veritatis Splendor?

Surprisingly enough, Lawler and Salzman don’t even mention Veritatis Splendor (VS). Yet, this is an encyclical written by a Pope other than Paul VI, devoted entirely to defending the doctrine of intrinsically evil acts, and which explicitly uses contraception as a prime example of an intrinsically evil act (VS 80). Again, whatever one’s opinion, two encyclicals by two Popes should be better evidence of the ordinary and universal Magisterium than the opinion of nine bishops in a consultative commission. A respectful approach to the Church should at least recognize this fact.

Lawler and Salzman, to defend their alleged non-legalistic and HV-reformable view, refer to Amoris Laetitia’s pastoral approach. Yet, HV and VS are doctrinal documents while AL is a pastoral one. The Catholic hermeneutical criterion should first presuppose harmony between papal documents and, secondly, interpret the pastoral care as an affirmation of doctrine, not as a denial of it. A respectful method should also recognize that VS itself warned us against the use of pastoral approaches to deny doctrine:

“some authors have proposed a kind of double status of moral truth. Beyond the doctrinal and abstract level, one would have to acknowledge the priority of a certain more concrete existential consideration. The latter, by taking account of circumstances and the situation, could legitimately be the basis of certain exceptions to the general rule and thus permit one to do in practice and in good conscience what is qualified as intrinsically evil by the moral law. A separation, or even an opposition, is thus established in some cases between the teaching of the precept, which is valid in general, and the norm of the individual conscience, which would in fact make the final decision about what is good and what is evil. On this basis, an attempt is made to legitimize so-called “pastoral” solutions contrary to the teaching of the Magisterium, and to justify a “creative” hermeneutic according to which the moral conscience is in no way obliged, in every case, by a particular negative precept” (VS 56).

Thomas Aquinas to the Rescue?

Shouldn’t Aquinas also receive the same honor and respect as those nine bishops? Indeed, Lawler and Salzman enthusiastically recall a passage quoted by AL in which Aquinas affirms that the practical truth, unlike the theoretical one, is not the same for everyone and, the closer one gets to concrete action, the more the truth is indeterminate (ST, I-II, q. 94 a. 4). Yet, this is obvious to anyone who has studied the concept of practical science in Aristotle and Aquinas—a concept that has never stopped either from asserting the existence of intrinsically evil acts.

Here too, a correct interpretative criterion should be that of not reading Aquinas or Aristotle as if they had stupidly contradicted themselves. Practical truth includes all the richness of human action. This is why laws are enough for us to guide action, but trials and verdicts are needed to evaluate and decide the concrete cases. Yet, negative precepts block the other elements of the concrete case. The concept is simple. There is no universal practical truth about what kind of home is ideal for my family, but there is a definite practical truth that whatever home I want for my family, I can’t build it with peanut butter. There are things that cannot be done whatever the other elements of the concrete case are. This is why Aquinas explained that the negative precepts oblige “semper et ad semper,” in each specific case (Super Rom. 13, l. 2), which is the same concept used by VS.

Aristotle and Aquinas address the need to correct the universality of the law, to dispense from it, through the concept of epikeia, the superior justice of the concrete case. But the justice of epikeia depends on understanding the true intention of the legislator, as when we violate a traffic law to let an ambulance pass. So, Aquinas clarifies that the precepts of the Decalogue “admit of no dispensation whatever” because they “contain the very intention of the lawgiver, who is God” (ST, I-II, q. 100 a. 8). Fully understanding the concepts of practical science, epikeia, or lawgiver’s intention can be difficult, but confusing the functioning of positive and negative precepts is a serious mistake in moral theory.

Magisterium or New Morality?

For me, one of the most striking aspects of Lawler and Salzman’s biased approach lies in the contradiction of presenting themselves as both defenders and demolishers of Church teaching. They maintain that HV does not correspond to the ordinary and universal Magisterium. In criticizing it, therefore, they position themselves as defenders of the universal and traditional truth of the Church (represented by the nine bishops). In the end, however, they state that if “the church recognizes the flaws in Humanae Vitae’s foundational principle, the entire edifice of official Catholic sexual teaching crumbles,” and they even welcome a change of doctrine with respect to homosexual acts.

This is something we can agree on, that they intend to demolish the entire traditional teaching of the Church. Their strategy rests on the critique of the principle of inseparability of procreative and unitive meanings, and their best argument is based on the alleged lack of difference between natural family planning and contraception.

“The claim that there is a moral distinction between the intentions of the approved rhythm method or natural family planning and banned artificial contraception, both of which intend to prevent pregnancy, is disingenuous, counterintuitive and morally unjustifiable” (L&T).

Here too, their dogmatism and inability to grasp differing viewpoints is striking. For me, for example, it’s impossible not to see the difference between wanting to have sex at all costs and deciding not to have sex when the order of nature may not match one’s family planning. It’s impossible not to see the difference between being obsessed with sex and calmly abstaining when it’s time to do so. They claim that this issue “has been settled by the practical judgment of the vast majority of” Catholics, which, in addition to being an unfounded apodictic judgment, is equivalent to saying that there is no sin because the righteous man falls seven times a day. They confuse morality with sociology.

To me the matter is simple. There are two meanings that pertain to the objective reality of sexuality, but which do not imply in nature that every sexual act corresponds to a pregnancy. The agent must not try to alter the objective meaning but does not need to aim at pregnancy in every sexual act, precisely because sex’s meaning is not only procreative. The truth of the sexual act is that it is beautiful, pleasant, unitive, procreative, and that if one does not try to manipulate its objectivity, one can enjoy it with serenity—in the same way as one can eat ice cream without thinking about the nutritional significance of food. Socrates teaches that morality lies in acting according to the truth, and some of us continue to take this seriously. Again, I can accept different viewpoints and constructive discussion, but not the dogmatism of someone who is unwilling to listen to others.

The most striking aspect of Lawler and Salzman’s biased approach is trying to defend the honor of nine bishops on the alleged assumption that they represent the ordinary universal Magisterium, but not the honor of US bishops all together. Indeed, a few years ago the US Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned Lawler and Salzman’s book on sexual morality because it contained “erroneous conclusions on a whole range of issues, including the morality of pre-marital sex, contraception, and artificial insemination,” and because “the authors insist that the moral theology of the Catholic tradition dealing with sexual matters is now as a whole obsolete and inadequate and that it must be re-founded on a different basis.”

This is something that the reader should know in advance. I mean, not so much the fact of this condemnation, but the fact that Lawler and Salzman know that HV expresses the traditional teaching of the Church which they intend to criticize and overcome. This is the thing I liked least about their article, the fact that instead of clearly expressing their position they pretended to stand up as defenders of the true teaching of the ordinary and universal Magisterium. We can discuss and argue about anything (with mutual respect and understanding), but always truthfully and without ambiguity.

Fulvio Di Blasi, Ph.D., Esq., is an expert in moral philosophy and author of God and the Natural Law: A Rereading of Thomas Aquinas, From Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas: Natural Law, Practical Knowledge, and the Person, and Vaccination as an Act of Love? The Epistemology of Ethical Choice in Times of Pandemic.

Featured: Couple in Landscape, by Ludwig Julius Christian Dettmann; painted in 1910.

War, Euthanasia, Abortion: A Trinary Nexus

I. Deterrence, Moral Disarmament, Total War and Euthanasia

Total war, therefore nuclear war, is once again in the realm of the thinkable, the possible. And on the other hand, in the West, we are discussing the legalization of euthanasia. One does not see a priori a connection between these two facts. However, the conjunction of the two phenomena is extremely worrying. Why is it so? Because the possible legalization of euthanasic suicide would lead to the dynamic tendency of replacing the balance of terror by what Thérèse Delpech calls the “imbalance of terror.”

To wage atomic war is to commit suicide by killing one’s opponent. This is why the more suicide is contrary to the logic of a culture, the more credible is the classical deterrence (renunciation of killing for fear of dying) on the part of a state structured by this culture. It is thus understandable that, if suicide enters in a quasi-normal way into the logic of a culture, the economy of deterrence is profoundly disturbed.

If, in a nuclear power state, suicide becomes the normal way for the individual to leave life, its opponents have reason to be alarmed. Indeed, the reasoning that “no one wants to commit suicide” loses much of its force. Such a state becomes much more unpredictable because of an inevitable contamination of its political culture by the logic of the ethics that now govern private life. A heavily armed state that then turns suicidal is even more frightening than before, although it is not the same kind of fear at all. The relative security one feels when faced with an opponent who is not afraid to die, but who one is certain also prefers life, is replaced by a painful uncertainty when faced with an opponent for whom the idea of committing suicide seems to be a normal prospect.

But that is not all, because this preference for life, which makes deterrence not only credible but also stably pacifying, is itself suspended on the conviction that life has meaning. Now, euthanasic suicide participates in the idea that life has no other meaning than that of preserving it as long as it is interesting, or not too unpleasant. Overall, this normalized suicide is part of a system, where the absence of a somewhat transcendent meaning logically implies an irredeemable existential despair. Such despair is self-destructive. Having become habitual and culturally shared, it will gradually make collective as well as individual suicide thinkable, acceptable, desirable. For if suicide is the normal death for any individual, it will be the same, sooner or later, for a society where such individuals are aggregated.

Let me explain precisely the most dangerous consequences:

  1. Loss of credibility for a suicidal person but fortuitous deterrent when facing non-suicidal and more robust adversaries—the latter no longer respect him, because they know, or think they know, that the suicidal person only seeks to survive in a pleasant way and has no more reason why he would prefer to die rather than capitulate, provided that his victor assures him a small comfortable life;
  2. Loss of security of nuclear partners facing a suicidal deterrent, whose emotional stability, psychic balance and capacity for rational objectivity they begin to suspect, as with any suicidal person;
  3. The temptation, for these adversaries, to resort preventively, before it is too late in their eyes, to any adequate means to neutralize a dangerous suicidal person, a madman who could well end up seeing in war, one day, the most honorable way to commit suicide.

Deterrence is not a matter of a simple formal theory of games, because if it is a game, and a very dangerous one, it only functions by certain principles in culture. The legalization of euthanasia is a powerful marker for a state. It signs with certainty the tipping of this state into a non-functional culture, especially if this state is a nuclear power. It deprives this state of its character as a reassuring, credible, rational and predictable actor. Under these conditions, total war becomes not only possible in the medium term, but practically certain.

II. Euthanasia: From the Right to Die to Obliged to Die

We are debating the right to die. Many people seem to agree with establishing this right, out of respect for freedom or out of compassion for suffering. They would no longer be in agreement if they realized the price of the obligations it entails. To acquire a certain right to die is indeed to renounce a certain right to live.

If the law establishes a right, whatever it may be, it also establishes three obligations, without which this right would be empty and non-existent:

  1. Not to oppose the exercise of this right;
  2. To provide the means without which the right would remain completely theoretical;
  3. To accept to suffer the effects resulting from its exercise.

Application: The right of X to kill himself implies three obligations for others, taken collectively: the first is not to prevent X from killing himself. The second is to help him to do so, if he does not have the means to do so alone. These first two are obvious. But what is the third? The obligation to kill oneself, in certain circumstances. Nothing less. And this can be demonstrated.

For the law to grant a right, and impose corresponding obligations, it is necessary that the state, or the elites, or the people as a whole, judge that the object of the right, the subject of the authorized action (in this case, killing oneself), is not immoral. One does not imagine that the state could ever establish a right to evade taxes, to set fires, or to collect inheritances. One can conclude, at worst, that the object of the right is not good, but excusable and tolerable, at best, that there is nothing wrong with it and it must be held to be perfectly moral. Some people will undoubtedly be granted the right to think the contrary, and to say so, but not to disturb the enjoyment of the right. In other words: by establishing a right, the state does not simply give an order—it validates in the name of all, despite the dissent of many, a value judgment of a moral nature. As Blaise Pascal says, the people are not mistaken. If they share the judgment that affirms, or concedes, the morality of euthanasia, then they will support the legislator’s action. And in general, the legalization of a practice contributes to the progressive generalization of the belief in its relative or complete morality.

This is where the difficulty arises. For if a type of act is judged to be moral, at least in certain circumstances, not only may we be entitled to it, but there is nothing to prevent it from becoming our duty in other circumstances. If there is a single counter-example, I will renounce this last statement. It will be asked: would this not be the case for the right to die? Well, no.

Experience clearly says the opposite. Among the Inuit, in the past, the elder, when he considered his mouth too useless, went out of the igloo to die slowly in the cold. He probably thought that such was his duty. In the Polynesian tropics, other elders, or even young supernumeraries, would voluntarily leave in a pirogue and never return. They did so because they believed that killing themselves was not immoral and therefore could be a duty. Otherwise, they would have acted differently.

Now, when a person has (by hypothesis) the duty to kill himself, what will the group do, what will society do, if this person refuses to do his duty, when “public necessity, legally established, obviously requires it?” The answer is sadly obvious. He will be forced to do so. If, therefore, we establish a right to commit suicide, we admit the possibility of an obligation to commit suicide, under certain other conditions. The assistance required to fulfill this obligation by the recalcitrant citizen may take the form of those constraints by which, as Rousseau said, “one will force him to be free.” Let’s not mince words. We can only acquire the right to give ourselves death by recognizing the right of the state to give it to us.

III. Two Logical Implications of a Constitutionalization of Abortion

Legislators have an obligation not to legislate in a hurry, but to consider carefully the logical consequences of their decisions. The constitutionalization of abortion would have two rigorous implications in this respect, undoubtedly unnoticed by its short-sighted promoters, but each of which would amount to nothing less than the breaking of the social pact.

First, it aims to reinforce, legally and symbolically, a woman’s right to freely perform an abortion.

Unfortunately, this decision goes much further. It also gives the state the right to implement a demographic policy, which would include, if necessary, the obligation for mothers to have an abortion, as was the case in China.

Indeed, what is the object of a fundamental right can also become, in certain circumstances, the object of an essential duty and, consequently, of a legal obligation. By constitutionalizing a right, the state does not simply give the most imperative order, it solemnly validates, in the name of all, and despite the dissent of many, a moral and very absolute value judgment.

The state proclaims and declares that abortion causes no real harm to anyone, is neither an evil nor a lesser evil. It becomes a pure and unmistakable good. I do not argue with this moral judgment. I am only drawing attention to the fact that, if our state affirms in this way, as strongly as possible, the unqualified morality of this type of act (this would be true for any other), not only do the citizens have the right to it, but absolutely nothing prevents this act from becoming for them (in this case, for women), in certain circumstances, a categorically imposed duty.

If, therefore, one recognizes a fundamental right of the individual to abortion, then one automatically gives the state the right to do an abortion, insofar as public necessity would require it. The short-sighted do not see what a nightmare they are preparing. For the fight against the more than predictable fraud of compulsory abortion, and the securing of the state’s right to do so, could go so far as to prohibit in utero gestation and to make artificial gestation compulsory. And because of the constitutionalization of abortion, it would be legally impossible to escape all these consequences. The constitutionalization of abortion would legally open the way to a totalitarian biocracy with all power over bodies.

Secondly, this constitutionalization would legally open the way to totalitarianism over minds.

No conscientious objection could hold under these conditions. But beyond the problems of the medical profession, as important as it is, what is at stake, universally, is nothing less than the future of enlightenment.

The theoretical and practical debate on abortion centers on the notion of the person. From the theoretical point of view, the question is—is the embryo a person or not, legally, anthropologically, metaphysically? That is the whole question. From a practical point of view, assuming that we cannot get out of doubt, should we apply the adage “when in doubt, we are free” or the adage “when in doubt, we abstain?” That is the question. The current decriminalization remains consistent with doubt and chooses to apply the first adage, “when in doubt, freedom.” Now, in good faith, is this not a theoretical question on which there is legitimate discussion, uncertainty and doubt? And a practical question that does not have an immediately obvious answer either?

If we therefore constitutionalize abortion, we outlaw in the Republic, by an untimely dogmatization, the free discussion of a question, about which any rational and thoughtful person knows with what obscurities it is surrounded. If such an abuse is allowed on such an important and difficult question, where are the limits? A person respectful of the Constitution will feel obliged, before thinking, to ask the authorization of the Republic, which will thus have become despotic. On the grounds of defending this fundamental right (and soon, which others?), one thing leading to another, the list of unconstitutional opinions will be extended ad infinitum, rightly or wrongly, and no doubt in spite of common sense, until there is nothing left, not only of freedom of conscience and expression, but also of the audacity to reason and to communicate the fruit of one’s reasoning—and finally nothing left of reason at all. The Senate will have to say whether, in its opinion, the audacity to think is legally inferior or superior to the Constitution, and whether, without the audacity to think, there can still be a Republican Constitution.

Conclusion? For these two reasons, and some others, it is to be hoped that the Senate, acting with reason and gravity, will conclude to reject an uncultured and inconsiderate proposal, by which the social pact would be broken and despotism substituted for the Republic.

Henri Hude is the former director of the Ethics and Law Department at the Research Center of the Saint-Cyr Military Academy. He is the author of several important works of philosophy, among them, most recently, Philosophie de la guerre (Philosophy of War). These three articles appear through the kind courtesy of Pierre-Yves Rougeyron and Le cercle Aristote.

Featured: Brennende Stadt (Burning city with Lot and the Angel and his Daughters), attributed to Daniel van Heil; painted ca. 17th century.

The Indictment of the Good Guys of the West

Part 1: The Leadership of the Good Guys in the West. Three Decades of Achievement. The Law of the Strongest

In all the conflicts that have shaken history, there have always been the good guys against absolute evil. At least, this is what emerges from the great political declarations and from the media, with its therapy via sledgehammer, when it comes to the two opposing camps. At the end of a conflict, history is written by the winner. The victor often brings his opponents before a court to condemn and execute the leaders of the losing side. Good and evil are then perfectly identified in the eyes of history.

The war in Ukraine is no exception to this universal rule. If one believes the Western politicians and media, expressing themselves in perfect connivance, the good guys are on our side, that is, USA-EU-NATO-G7, while the bad guys are those opposing us, whoever they might be.

As far as I am concerned, the political and media diet of dubious narratives is far from sufficient for me to form an opinion as to which is the good side. I prefer to refer to the achievements of the good side over a few decades and to verify that this side is, in fact, led by commendable people, before giving my opinion.

It is this analysis, carried out since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that I propose to share with you, below.

The alleged good guys are today led by an elite with political and moral practices that are questionable, to say the least.

None of my readers will dispute that the so-called “good guys” are today led by the United States of America. The governance of the “good guys” is thus ensured today by a small American elite, which it is up to us to evaluate.

In three very short videos, let’s get to know some very characteristic specimens of the leadership of these “good guys” of ours.

1. During a conference in San Francisco in 2007, well before Maïdan and the crisis that followed, the US General Wesley Clark, former commander-in-chief of NATO, introduces us, in five minutes, to the “nice neoconservatives” of the United States and their “Project for a New Century of American Hegemony.” This project is a very aggressive one which promises regime changes, wars, chaos in several countries, in order to place these countries in the US orbit. The Russophobic side of the project does not easily escape a listener of good faith, even though Russia was not in a position to pose any problem at the time:

Is this the leadership of the good guys?

2. In 22 seconds, Madeleine Albright, a kindly neo-conservative US Secretary of State at the time, assumed the death of 500,000 Iraqi children on American television, saying: “It was a difficult choice but it was worth it.” Realizing with hindsight that she had just said an enormous thing, she apologized a few hours later, but her true nature had been expressed without shame and without compunction in front of the camera:

It is necessary to remind the uninitiated that during the First Gulf War in 1991, a war conducted with the approval of the UN, but in fact under a false pretext, proven today, (the affair of the incubators in Kuwait), the American-British forces dropped depleted uranium on Iraq, resulting in the death of tens of thousands of Iraqis subjected to the embargo on medicines:

Is this the leadership of the good guys?

Sure, Madeleine Albright has gone to join her master Lucifer in hell and is therefore no longer in a position to harm humanity, but her spiritual daughter, the gentle neoconservative Victoria Nuland, made famous by her heartfelt cry of “F*** the EU,” and by her magnificent 2014 Maidan Coup in Ukraine, for a mere $5 billion, has risen to replace her at US Foreign Affairs:

Is this the leadership of the good guys?

3. On April 15, 2019, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made a startling statement to students at Texas A&M University. “I was director of the CIA and we lied, cheated, stole. It was like we had entire training courses to learn how to do it. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment”:

Is this the leadership of the good guys? Very free and easy, in any case.

The political and moral perversity of the small neo-conservative elite in the United States, which holds the real power in the USA and therefore leads the “US-EU-NATO-G7” good guys, has no limits.

But let’s now take a quick look at the main achievements of these “good guys” over the last three decades.

Since the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the main achievements of the so-called “Good Guys” have been calamitous and bloody for the planet.

We will limit ourselves to five episodes that the reader should remember.

I. The Fake Graves in Timisoara

In April 1989, the fake mass grave in Timisoara served as a catalyst for the Romanian revolution. A false narrative, repeated for six weeks by the Western media dog-pack, succeeded in bringing down the last communist regime in Eastern Europe. The media then apologized for “their mistake,” but the coup was a winner. This type of deceptive narrative, aimed at winning the decision, soon became the rule in the Western media landscape.

The concerted and “dog-pack” action of the mainstream media was thereafter facilitated by an ever-increasing concentration of said media in the hands of a few billionaires of neo-conservative and globalist persuasion. Those who control opinion through manipulation and emotion will end up controlling the world:

Of course, this revolution in Romania was not terrible in terms of loss of life (1,100 dead and 3,300 wounded), but what was calamitous was this evolution of the Western media landscape towards more and more lies, manipulations, and its concentration in the hands of a few, with the aim of taking and keeping control of the populations by making them swallow anything.

It is a sad evolution which has more than ever put wind in the sails of the good guys, to the great satisfaction of the politicians in power.

II. The First Iraq War of 1990-1991

This was begun under the false pretext of the “Kuwait incubators,” conceived and implemented by the CIA, and under the real pretext of the invasion of Kuwait

On July 25, 1990, Saddam Hussein met with the American ambassador to Baghdad, April Glaspie. Duplicity or not, she was well aware of what was being prepared (“we see that you have amassed a large number of troops on the border”) and suggested that the United States would not intervene in a conflict between two Arab countries. Saddam Hussein interpreted the US ambassador’s words as a green light. Had he been taken in by his American ally who used him to wage war against Iran from 1980 to 1988? In any case, it was the CIA that concocted the false pretext of the incubators.

As in the case of Timisoara, the Western media repeated the false pretext and lied wholesale to get the war launched.

The truth finally came out, once these lies had achieved their goals, namely, the vote of a resolution at the UN and the entry into war of the “good guys” who had deceived popular opinion.

If we add the deaths that occurred during military operations, a little more than 100,000, and the indirect deaths, linked to the aftermath of the war and the consequences of the use of depleted uranium and the embargoes on medicines, the death toll oscillates between 500,000 and 1 million, depending on the source.

This depleted uranium, a “dirty” weapon used without moderation and without real necessity by the Anglo-Saxons on the Iraqi population, has had long-term consequences on these populations, but also a boomerang effect on the unwary soldiers of the coalition of the good guys.

In addition to depleted uranium, economic sanctions and embargoes, including on medicines, have become the preferred weapons of war of the good guys, because they kill far more than any bombing, and discreetly, because the losses are spread out over time, well after the military operations.

Another great achievement of the good guys, based on duplicity and lies.

III. The Dismemberment of the Former Yugoslavia

The ins and outs of this conflict, which lasted 9 years, are not well known by those who claim to be experts on the subject and who rewrite history to the glory of the “good guys.”

On November 5, 1990, when the countries of Eastern Europe were in a state of near-bankruptcy, the U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Operations Appropriations Law 101-513, deciding that all financial support to Yugoslavia would be suspended within six months, with no possibility of borrowing or credit.

This deliberate procedure was obviously so dangerous that, as early as November 27, 1990, the New York Times quoted a CIA report that accurately predicted that a bloody civil war would break out in Yugoslavia.

It was this law and the economic and financial pressure of the United States that were the source of the division in ex-Yugoslavia, and the civil war and the dismemberment of the country that followed and which ended with the bombing of Belgrade by NATO, without UN approval, in the spring of 1999.

The real human toll of this dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia, masterfully planned and carried out by the U.S. leader of the “good guys,” varies, depending on the sources and what is counted. It is between 200,000 and 250,000 dead.

Before 1990, a non-aligned federal republic After 1999, a mosaic of small states of 23.5 million inhabitants, under the control of the “good guys.”

After 250,000 to 1 million dead, the break-up of Yugoslavia. Source: Vivid Maps.

Lessons to be learned from this magnificent case study:

The Economic and Financial Weapon was the first to be used in 1990 and proved to be decisive in the execution of the dismemberment plan. “We caused the collapse of the Yugoslav economy.”

The plan could only be completed by getting recalcitrant Serbia to submit via 78 days of bombing, in the spring of 1999, according to the Five Rings strategy, with emphasis on civilian infrastructure. These bombings were justified by a false pretext: the fake Račak massacre. They did not have the approval of the UN, but NATO was already trying to substitute itself for the UN by acting as the sheriff of the planet. NATO’s overwhelming air superiority and its fear of engaging in ground combat in the Kosovar theater must be noted in this case.

The right moment for the good guys to carry out this plan of dismemberment of Yugoslavia came in the 1990-1999, that is to say when both Russia and China were weak and could not react.

This dismemberment operation brought an awareness by Russia and China, humiliated by the bombing of Belgrade, of what could happen to them one day. They therefore created alliances, SCO (2001) and BRICS (2006), which are very effective today in supporting Russia.

Moreover, Putin, who has followed these events at the highest level since 1999, quickly understood that what had happened to the former Yugoslavia would one day be applied to Russia. For more than twenty years, he prepared his country for a confrontation that he knew was inevitable, while the self-proclaimed “good guys,” arrogant, dominating and overconfident, were disarming at every turn and their US pack leader was extending his control eastwards, advancing his rockets and military bases towards the Russian borders.

Plan for the Dismemberment of Russia by the “Good Guys”

Before dismemberment: a Federation rich in resources of all kinds but difficult to control by the “good guys,” and especially standing in the way of world domination.

And just a few hundred thousand or millions of deaths later (on both sides):

After dismemberment, a new projected configuration of Russian territories: a mosaic of smaller, less populated states and easier to control, exploit and dominate by the good guys.

IV. The Second Iraq War (March 2003—December 2011)

We will not dwell on the Second Iraq War, which was also based on a false pretext: Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, that did not exist.

Everyone remembers the comedy played by Colin Powell in front of the UN Security Council, shamelessly lying to the whole world with his magic powder.

From 2003 to 2011, anywhere from 150,000 to 1 million direct or indirect victims of this Second Iraq War have been counted, depending on the source, of which 75% to 80% were civilians.

The US leader of the good guys implemented new, more discreet methods to kill, indirectly of course, the civilian population of the opponent, in order to force the leader of the opposite camp to submit.

Examples? Bombings according to the Five Rings theory which target, among other things, the infrastructures necessary for the survival of the population. This is a theory invented in the USA, morally questionable, and which the Americans find difficult to accept that it can be applied by anyone other than themselves in theaters of conflict. This strategy was already used in the bombings against Serbia.

Economic sanctions and embargoes, including on medicines, which become weapons of war because they kill much more than any bombing, and discreetly, since the losses are spread out over time, well after the military operations.

This was yet another achievement of the “the good guys,” without UN endorsement, on the basis of a lie, to which for once France, Germany and Canada refused to associate themselves, which was to their credit. At that time, some NATO countries still had some honor and sovereignty.

V. The Syrian War (2011-2023)

Launched in March 2011, according to now proven techniques, this umpteenth colored revolution, also concocted by US neoconservatives, according to the words of the former NATO commander-in-chief, US General Westley Clark (see video above), was conducted, like the two Iraq wars, for the benefit of Israel, whose very influential supporters direct US and European foreign policies.

Provisional death toll: 500,000 to date.

We could add to the above examples Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, all sovereign states attacked by the good guys and/or their allies, on the sole pretext that their leaders and their policies did not serve the interests of the good guys.

Further, over the last three decades, there are the countless US interferences in the internal affairs of dozens of countries, all attempts at colored revolutions, electoral interferences, economic pressures, with the aim of forcing this or that country to submit to the will of a nation that has gone rogue, because it is directed by a mafia-like deep state that calls the shots in US and European elections.

Beyond these various and often bloody achievements of the good guys, it is necessary to look at the methods used by these good guys, US-NATO-EU-G7, and the means at their disposal.

For the good guys, the end justifies the means. International legality does not matter. It is the law of the strongest and “the rules” that the strongest unilaterally sets that must be applied.

To impose its “rules” on the whole world, the United States, leader of the “good guys,” uses two formidable weapons: the dollar and the self-proclaimed extraterritoriality of its laws. They do not hesitate to punish their adversaries and also their allies who do not strictly apply the “rules” that only the US can set. Some French banks, for example, have had to pay fines of several billion dollars to the US Treasury for daring to circumvent US economic sanctions against Iran and several other embargoed countries.

The USA and its good-guy allies do not hesitate to steal the assets of their adversaries when these (Iran, Afghanistan, Russia) got the unfortunate idea of depositing them in US banks, or in those of NATO member states. “We lied, we cheated, we stole…”

The US does not hesitate to seize the industrial flagships of its most servile allies, going so far as to throw into high-security prisons, under false pretense, the executives of companies, in order to blackmail the management (Alstom affair, Frederic Pierucci). They go so far as to corrupt politicians and company directors (MaKron) to achieve their ends.

They even go so far as to torpedo the international commercial contracts of their most loyal allies in order to take them over and award them to their companies. ($35 billion contract for US Air Force tankers, won by Airbus in 2008 and reallocated to Boeing; $56 billion contract for Australian submarines cancelled in September 2021 to be reallocated to US companies).

They maintain a system of telephone tapping by the NSA, revealed by Snowden, to spy on the leaders of the major allied countries, to discover their weaknesses, even their misconducts, to establish files on them and to blackmail them as much as necessary, in order to better subjugate them; and this, without the interested parties even being offended by it. In fact, the opposite is true. The more the leaders of the EU are deceived, cuckolded and sodomized by those of the USA, the more they seem to be satisfied with the situation.

This is what makes the partnership and cohesion among the “good guys” so excellent.

As a hyper-power confined in its egocentrism, the United States, leader of the dog-pack of good guys, uses and abuses its strength and its monopolies. In French, we call this “abus de position dominante” (“abuse of a dominant position”). For the average American, unaccustomed to even the simplest legal terms, this translates into: “Why bother?”

This is how they remain one of the few countries in the world not to have signed and especially ratified the 1997 Ottawa Convention on the prohibition of antipersonnel mines.

They are still violating the 1992 Geneva Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, which they signed and ratified in 1997, by allowing the Ukrainian ally, a signatory of the convention, to use this type of weapon on the Donbass front.

They are violating the Convention on the Prohibition of Biological Weapons, which they signed in 1975. And, to do it more discreetly, they relocate their laboratories in allied countries with little regard for the situation (Ukraine), while keeping some ultra-secret research laboratories on their territory (Fort Detrick).

To top it all off, the USA, the undisputed leader of the good guys, is the only country in the world that has not ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Such is undoubtedly the beauty and the greatness of the neo-conservative and globalist model, to which the EU governance now adheres without reserve, even with enthusiasm.

Such is the leadership of the U.S. dog-pack to which our leaders have freely (?) chosen to rally and which we are supposed to follow in its Russophobic crusade in Ukraine, to hang on to world hegemony for the good guys.

But we are still far from the end of the analysis of the good guys who know how much further to go in horror, while giving lessons on morality and good governance to the rest of the planet.

There are of course the unacceptable acts of torture, murder and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners of war incarcerated in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo, all perpetrated by nice American GIs who, without shame and without compunction, posted the images of their crimes on Facebook and on the Internet for the whole world to view. But the Internet has now been “cleaned” of most of the most sordid videos that might harm the honor of the “good guys,” and only a few, less horrible ones remain.

One could have imagined that these were just blunders that would be severely sanctioned by the Good Guys. Actually, no. One of the main US torturers, Lynndie England, an evocative and proudly worn name, was sentenced to 3 years in prison, but only served one. However, she executed some prisoners herself and was photographed in front of the corpses. It is true that in the article published in The New Yorker, the US investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winner, revealed the existence of “Copper Green,” a torture program used in Afghanistan, then in Iraq and approved by the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld himself (a nice neo-conservative globalist, quoted by General Clark in the first video).

Are these the good guys who give lessons in morality and governance to the whole world and who often scream “war crime,” in more and more delirious accusatory inversions?

Twisted enough to institutionalize torture, stupid enough to brag on the Internet and get caught with their fingers in the jam. These are the good guys.

It is true that until recently, the US military authorities were rather discreet in relocating torture (like their biological laboratories) to countries with little regard for the environment, including NATO countries (Poland, Romania, Lithuania) and sending their torturers to “operate” on site.

We have already mentioned economic sanctions and embargoes which, in the long term, can be much more deadly than bombing for the most fragile civilian populations, particularly children and the elderly. This is the case of the US embargo on medicines still in force for Syria, even though this civilian population has just experienced an earthquake which caused significant losses and many injuries. Everyone can see in these rabid, stupid and counter-productive “good guys” the level of its human and moral qualities, and understand why these good guys arouss disgust, rejection and hatred in most of the planet.

Since 1990, the call by the US, leader of the good guys, for Private Military Companies (PMCs) has exploded in all theaters of operation. This system has nothing to do with mercenarism, in which individuals are recruited directly by states. In PMCs, they sign contracts with companies that have a legal status and these companies deal with the states.

A simple observation of the facts shows, for example, that the USA signed some 3000 contracts with PMCs between 1994 and 2004. The most infamous of these numerous Private Military Companies operating for the good guys is the US Blackwater Company, founded in 1997 [now Xe, trans.], and known for its countless exactions and massacres committed in Afghanistan and Iraq. But of course, the impunity is total, as it is for the military of the “good guys.”

This PMC system is particularly effective and limits the political risks of the state that uses it. Of course, the good guys would like to keep the exclusivity and tend to consider as “terrorist organization” any PMC that would compete with those of the good guys.

It is interesting to note that the Wagner Group, the first Russian PMC, was only founded on May 1, 2014, perhaps as a reaction to the Maidan coup d’état, led by the “good guys,” in which some US PMCs had played, in the shadows, the leading roles. Founded 17 years after Blackwater, Wagner is therefore 17 years behind Blackwater in what could be described as exactions, by the always presumed “honest” narratives of the media of the good guys, alas too often caught with their fingers in the cookie-jar of lies.

What everyone should understand is that the USA and its allies (the good guys) cannot stand the fact that Wagner, a young Russian private military company, less than nine years old, can distinguish itself by a military efficiency and ethics far superior to any PMC of the good guys, including Blackwater, 17 years older. This is why they denounce this competition [Wagner] as unfair.

It is therefore hilarious to see the USA classify Wagner as a terrorist organization, while the US PMC Blackwater has really been a terrorist organization for 26 years, while benefiting from the immunity linked to its work for the good guys. This is the traditional double standard. Nothing surprising from the good guys.

The first part of this “apology” of the good guys, which some will not hesitate to call an indictment, being already heavy to bear and very long, it is good to end it with the interesting question of extrajudicial executions.

In 2014, shortly after the Maidan coup and the subsequent annexation of Crimea by Russia, an adviser to the Ukrainian Minister of the Interior (Anton Guerachenko) under the influence of the major intelligence services of the good guys (CIA, Mossad, MI6) created an online collaborative platform to establish the list of people to be physically eliminated because they oppose the interests of Ukraine, but especially the neoconservative and globalist project that proceeds via the dismemberment of Russia.

In fact this project is 100% American and lists some 289 000 people worldwide. This is what emerges from the well-documented article by Bellincioni Berti.

The originality of this project of a terrorist nature, since its purpose is to spread terror among all those who would oppose the narratives of the good guys on Ukraine, is that it is openly supported by the USA, but also by a silence, obviously complicit, of the current leaders of the EU who let it happen. Thus, academics, journalists, former military or diplomats, elected officials, are threatened with death because they openly refuse to submit to the diktats of the globalist neocons. It does not matter if they are themselves belong to “the good guys.”

Some executions have already been carried out as an example, including that of Daria Dugin, assassinated on August 20, 2022 in Russia.

This shows, if it were still necessary, the true nature of the member countries of the good guys, whose political discourse is no longer in line with their actions since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the emergence, in the upper echelons of American power, of a neo-conservative and globalist spawn that has largely swarmed the governments of the major European countries.

There is no need to mention, in order to add to the balance sheet, the instrumentalization of Daesh and Al Qaida terrorism by the good guys, with the sole aim of toppling Bashar al-Assad, a secular head of state recognized by the United Nations whose only defect is that he displeases Israel, one of the influential champions of the good guys.

There is no need to mention the illegal and provocative execution of Iranian General Soleimani by the United States, which will stop at nothing to sow chaos and death on the planet.

What cries of orphans would we not have heard in the media of the “good guys,” if one of our generals had been executed in this way by an Iranian drone?

And, yes, these are the good guys.

At this stage of the analysis, it is good to take a break to digest this first avalanche of information and undeniable facts which will be followed by a 2nd wave, then by the analysis of the “evil camp”: the one which opposes ours.

As a provisional conclusion, I can only say that I cannot belong to such good guys, as they appear up to now. I do not understand by what ethical, moral and intellectual perversion some of my brothers-in-arms have been able to offer their unconditional allegiance to good guys whose leaders have lied, cheated, stolen, killed, tortured, violated international laws, harmed the interests of our country, for the sole interests of their leader (the US), a leader who has no use for international legality and for whom the rules he himself has set must be imposed on all.

I will be told that our leaders were elected (even if they were badly elected) and that the military is subordinate to politics. But it is because of this type of thoughtless discipline that Hitler, better elected at the time than our leaders today, was followed to the end of his murderous madness by his army and by his people. Hitler’s “good, brave and disciplined” generals were justly punished at Nuremberg after the war. They should have looked at their conscience earlier and not obeyed stupidly.

There are moments in history when French soldiers have had to choose sides. General de Gaulle did so without hesitation in 1940 and I doubt that, from where he stood, he would approve of France’s slavish allegiance to what has become, over time, the empire of duplicity and lies.

I also doubt that François Mitterand, from where he is, would approve our unfortunate, slavish allegiance after having declared:

“France does not know it, but we are at war with America. Yes, a permanent war, a vital war, an economic war, a war without death, apparently. Yes, the Americans are very tough; they are voracious; they want undivided power over the world. It is an unknown war and yet a war to the death.”

It’s all there. Everyone will have to choose sides in this war to the death at one time or another. This side will not necessarily be the side that badly elected rulers, supported by the media, have chosen for us. (to be continued).

Dominic Delawarde is a General (retired) of the French army. He was educated at Prytanée militaire de La Flèche, Saint Cyr, and Ecole Supérieure de Guerre.

Featured: The Torment of Saint Anthony, by Michelangelo; painted ca. 1487-1488.

Socrates on the Radio

It’s eleven o’clock on Tendencies Radio. It’s time to hand it over to George Waddle for his program “Open Mind.” Hello George.

Hello, Armanda. Hello all. Welcome to this new edition of “Open Mind,” along with Claudine Idiotintown. Good morning, Claudine. How are you this morning?

Good morning, George. That’s a beautiful shirt you’re wearing!

Isn’t it? Today we welcome the philosopher, Socrates. Good morning, Socrates.

Socrates greets kindly.

“He’s really ugly.” Claudine whispers in the host’s ear. “Thank God we’re not on TV.”

Hello, Socrates. Hello…!

Why doesn’t the clown answer? thinks Waddle. But like the good professional he is, he continues.

So, Socrates, you are a famous philosopher. You have written a lot.

No, by Zeus, I have not written anything.

You haven’t written anything?

Not one line.

But, but, OK. Well, I really want to ask you your opinion on something that concerns us all. Yesterday, as you certainly know, the prestigious site Manip-Media published a damning report about the minister, Constant Waffler. Let’s recall what happened. The young Waffler stole three or maybe it was four marbles from Stephanie Gasbag when both were in kindergarten and, when latter complained, Waffler replied, “Girls don’t know how to play marbles!” The association Stop Girlphobia immediately denounced this slip of the tongue and demanded the head of the minister, and the leader of the opposition followed suit. In short, here we are in the middle of Wafflergate. What do you think, Socrates?

I don’t know. I am not able to answer that question.

But come on, Socrates, such a violation of equality, of justice!

What justice are you talking about?

Well, justice, you know, justice!

But isn’t justice a difficult question?

Yes… no…. And you Socrates, what is your definition of justice?

I don’t know. Justice is lived rather than defined. I talked about it with Thrasymachus and we agreed that injustice is a vice and justice a virtue.

Thrasymachus, Thrasymachus, who is this weirdo? But then Waddle said to himself that he had found a good angle of attack and continued.

A vice, a virtue. Those words sound a lot like what a reactionary would say. You wouldn’t be a reactionary, would you, Socrates?

I don’t know. What do you mean by reactionary?

You know, those narrow-minded people, those backward-looking people, those populists.

You know, the only thing I know is that I know nothing. I wouldn’t be able to answer that.

Well, then would you be on the side of the populists?

I don’t know. What do you mean by populist?

This guy’s impossible, thought Waddle. But bravely he continued

You know, Socrates, these people who criticize the elites, these narrow-minded, these reactionaries.

No, I don’t know.

Well, finally, to which side do you belong?

Which sides are you talking about?

But Socrates, did you just crawl out under a rock? I’m talking about the opposition between people of progress, the people of the Enlightenment and the conservatives, the retrogrades. And Socrates, will you stop answering my questions with questions?

Why? Is it forbidden to ask questions?

No, but the rule is that the journalist asks questions and the guest answers

Yes, but is that a good rule?

Oh, that’s not the point, Socrates.

I mean, why don’t journalists want to be asked questions?

Because that’s how an interview should be. But tell me, Socrates, aren’t you one of those people who scapegoat journalists, who constantly criticize them?

You know, I’m new in this country. I wouldn’t want to pass judgment. But why can’t we criticize journalists?

That’s a different question entirely! But the answer is easy—because journalists embody freedom of expression, because to criticize them is to undermine freedom, democracy.

What freedom are you talking about?

There you go again! Freedom of expression at all costs! This is obvious.

For example, does the freedom of expression of journalists include the freedom to say uncertain or erroneous things?

Uh, what are you talking about? No, of course not.

Does it include the freedom to say untrue things?

No, no, no. Look, I’m asking the questions!

Let me finish. I will be brief. So, you agree that the freedom of expression is based on something beyond it?

Maybe, maybe not. But, please, Socrates, let’s get back to the subject. Let’s go back to… I don’t know.

Let’s go on, if you don’t mind. What is freedom of expression for?

Now you’re getting annoying. But how should I know. They never talk about these things in journalism schools.

What freedom of expression is based on, wouldn’t that be the real thing?

Yes, maybe, if you like.

So, the freedom you claim is the freedom to tell the truth?

Yes, that’s it, that’s it.

So, if a journalist does not tell the truth, is it not reasonable to criticize him?

If you want to, yes, but that never happens.

Are you saying that journalists are infallible and that they abhor cheating?

Oh, that’s too much! Thank you, thank you, Socrates! This was Open Mind, a program by… by… Waffler George. Next week, …well…, you’ll see. A few ads up next.

As he left the studio, a gaggle of journalists were all over Socrates. He managed to escape, but one of them, the fastest, the youngest, caught up with him.

“Please, Socrates, please, a word. If I come back empty-handed, my editor will fire me. Besides, I know you. I’ve read your disciple, Plato.”

Socrates stopped.

“I work for Time,” said the young man with pride. And he quickly continued:

“Here, here is my question. I’m sure it will interest you. You say in the Phaedrus that the written word is inherently defective because one cannot know to whom one is speaking, whereas the spoken word allows one to tell each person what it is good for him to hear. So, why did you agree to speak on the radio? You will tell me that you spoke without a doubt, but radio has the defects of the written word—you could not know precisely to whom you were speaking.”

Yes, yes, I congratulate you. But can you say that I said many things on the radio?

“Yes, well, no. I mean you asked a lot of questions.”

That’s my usual way. But do you think we’ve gone too far?

“I suppose you’re going to blame the journalists again.”

I’m just asking if an ordinary radio interview lends itself to dialectic, I mean to a real dialogue.

“But it certainly does. The microphone was all yours.”

Isn’t it true that radio journalists usually stay on the surface of things?

“You are very severe!”

That they shy away from developments?

“But that’s the law of the genre!”

That they like to make a show of things and play the arbiter of elegance?

“Now, you’re exaggerating!”

And that the best thing to do is to make the journalist pass an examination that is useful to him and to those who listen?

“Ah, that’s it. You went to the radio to say bad things about the radio! Or rather, to show off. But, but I can’t write what you say. My editor would have a fit. Tell me something I can write. I don’t know, about… about… OK. What advice would you give to a young man?”

But, my young friend, I don’t know anything. I am only trying to give birth to the mind of the one I am talking to.

“Go ahead, go ahead, I am ready.”

I would be happy to, if it were possible, but time is too short. I have to be at the Champs Elysees this afternoon.

Philippe Bénéton is Professor emeritus of Rennes I and is the author of Le dérèglement moral de l’Occident, Les fers de l’opinion, Introduction à la politique, Le conservatisme. This interview appears courtesy of La Nef.

Joseph Ratzinger: Revelation and the Cross

Called back to God on December 31, 2022, Pope Benedict XVI built a singular theological work, confronting the intellectual issues of his time with a pastoral concern that thwarts any academic reduction. The Bavarian theologian who, as his spiritual testament made public on the day of his death testifies, worked until the end of his life for the emergence of “the reasonableness of faith,” has laid the groundwork, notably with his trilogy Jesus of Nazareth and his introduction to Christianity, The Faith and the Future, of a Christocentric theology, leaning on the great theological tradition and oriented towards the mystery of the cross, where divine revelation is completed and finalized.

The concern for pedagogy combined with the demand for coherence characterizes Joseph Ratzinger’s intellectual and spiritual approach in the three volumes of Jesus of Nazareth and offers the luxury of being able to reveal from the outset, without the risk of misunderstanding, the insight that animates the theologian throughout this article. This intuition, born of meditation on the Gospels and reading the Fathers of the Church, is expressed several times by Ratzinger and can be summarized as follows: Jesus Christ, before bringing a message, a kingdom or a long-awaited pax, brought God. “He brought the God whose face was slowly and progressively revealed from Abraham through Moses and the Prophets to sapiential literature—the God who had shown his face only in Israel and who had been honored in the world of the Gentiles under obscure avatars—it is this God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the true God, whom he brought to the peoples of the earth” (I, 63-64).

This thesis, as such, is explicitly repeated in the following volume of Jesus of Nazareth, this time with a significant emphasis on the universal dimension of Christ’s mission. “Even though Jesus consciously limits his work to Israel, he is still moved by the universalist tendency to open up Israel so that all can recognize in the God of this people the one God common to all the world” (II, 31). The answer to the decisive question “What does Christ bring?” naturally raises two other questions: to whom and how does Jesus bring God? This is the pole around which Ratzinger’s Christology is articulated, even though the expression, which he regrets in The Faith is so often opposed to “soteriology” or divided within it between “Christology from above” and “Christology from below” (155-156), only half suits him concerning his own work (cf. II, 10).

This Christology is thus elaborated in three stages. In the dialectic of the “new and definitive” on which Ratzinger, a reader of the Fathers, rightly insists in each mystery of Jesus that he contemplates, lies the key to the delicate articulation between Israel and the pagans. Both “light to enlighten the nations” and “the glory of [his] people Israel” (Lk 2:32), Christ is endowed with a mission whose very essence belongs to universality (III, 120). So much so that in the series of events in which God seems to disappear more and more—”land – Israel – Nazareth – Cross – Church” (176)—Jesus Christ presents himself as both the new Adam in whom “humanity begins anew” (III, 21) and the new Moses, the one who “brings to conclusion what began with Moses at the burning bush” (II, 113). The cross, for Ratzinger, is as much revelation as redemption. Now, what does this meeting of the vertical and the horizontal reveal, if not the identity of God and of man, in the person of the Son, a veiled response to the mysterious name given by God to Moses (Ex 3:14)? The cross, the only place where the divine “I am” can be known and understood (I, 377), consequently becomes the place where Christ reigns, His “throne,” “from which He draws the world to Himself” (II, 242). Christ’s being-open, with arms outstretched on the cross, goes hand-in-hand with Israel’s openness to the Gentiles: Ratzinger’s pro-existential Christology justifies Christian universalism.

“The Jew first, and the Gentile”

The great mission that Ratzinger sets himself at the beginning of Jesus of Nazareth, to represent the “Jesus of the Gospels” as a “historically sensible and coherent figure” (I, 17), amounts to rendering a reason for a “crucified Messiah” whom the Jews call “scandal” and the pagans “foolishness” (1Co 1, 23). Certainly, the passage from “do not go to the Gentiles” (Mt 10:5) to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19) in Christ’s teaching has found, from the earliest times of Christianity, a coherent interpretation in the Epistle to the Hebrews, in St. Paul and in the Church Fathers, based on “Israel according to the spirit,” “the time of the Gentiles,” etc. For all that, the fact that Henri de Lubac, in the previous century, saw fit to remind theologians, on the basis of scriptural and theological arguments, of the unity of the Ecclesia ex circumcision—the Church born of Israel—and of the Ecclesia ex gentibus—the Church of the Gentiles, (II, 255)—indicates how much the articulation between the Jewish and the “Greek element” (254) in the Christian mystery, although it is the foundation of all ecclesiology, still gives rise to a certain embarrassment. No doubt the “concern for universality”[3] of the Bible, brought up to date by the author of Catholicism, left its mark on the young Ratzinger. In an era still shaken by the discoveries of historical-critical exegesis, Henri de Lubac reaffirmed a fundamental exegetical principle proper to the Fathers: to learn to read historical realities spiritually and spiritual realities historically.

Strengthened by this spiritual hermeneutic and aware of the importance of the factum historicum as well as its limits, Ratzinger could respond to and overcome the apparent aporias of a historical-critical interpretation which, according to him, “has now given all that is essential to give” (II, 8). For someone familiar with St. Thomas Aquinas, this effort at theological synthesis is reminiscent of the method of the Summa Theologiae, whose Tertia pars, by his own admission, influenced Ratzinger’s work (II, 10). In Jesus of Nazareth, the questions are numerous and the theses, even those that the theologian refutes, are deployed to the end. For each mystery of the life of Christ, Ratzinger proceeds, as it were, by questions broken down into various articles within which, to the objections formulated—most often—by historical-critical exegesis, the theologian opposes a sed contra from an authority—Scripture or a Father—before proposing his own answer and solutions, arguing from theological, historical or scientific sources.

This issue of method tells us more about Ratzinger’s primary intention. Behind the demonstrative rigor, we can guess a will to make intelligible a mystery which, for many, appears scandalous or senseless. Intelligence of Scripture for the Jews, intelligence of faith for the pagans. Now the two, far from being opposed, communicate according to a precise hierarchy. The fact, in St. Augustine in particular, that the latter understands the former and exceeds it is justified, originally, in the person of Jesus Christ, who is both Jonah—”Καθὼς Ἰωνᾶς” (Lk 11:30)—and “much more than Jonah”—”πλεῖον Ἰωνᾶ” (Lk 11:32). Set in motion again by the Son of God, salvation history is also overtaken by Him. Here lies what Ratzinger considers “the central point of [his] reflection.” On the one hand, Christ is indeed a “new Adam” (I, 161), a “new Jacob” (I, 65), a new Samuel (III, 180), a new David (II, 17-18); “new Moses” above all, since the prophet spoke with God himself and received from him his mysterious name (I, 292-293). On the other hand, and at the same time, He is the “true Jacob” (I, 195), “true Solomon” (I, 106) and “true Moses” (I, 101): the Manna, the Divine Name and the Law, the three gifts given by God to Moses, have become one person: Jesus Christ. What God promises in the Old Covenant is fulfilled in the New Covenant: “by means of the new events… the Words acquire their full meaning; and, conversely, the events possess a permanent meaning, because they are born of the Word; they are Word fulfilled” (III, 39). From His ministry in Galilee to the ascent of Golgotha, Christ not only fulfills the Scriptures and keeps promises—by perfectly fulfilling the mission of the suffering Servant of God announced by the prophet Isaiah (Is 53), He goes beyond it and, by giving Himself up not only for the “lost sheep of Israel” (Mt 15:24) but also for the multitude, He gives it a “universalization that indicates a new breadth and depth” (II, 161).

This return to the first universality, the “new Adam” recapitulating the humanity wounded since the first Adam, was already announced in the existence of the particular people, chosen by God: Israel. According to the Augustinian tripartition, the regime of grace (sub gratia) which begins with Christ, although fulfilling the promises made by God under the regime of the Law (sub legem), gives humanity a new beginning and a universality unheard of since the time before the Law (ante legem). Now, with regard to the promises made to the Jewish people, Ratzinger recalls that in the Old Testament “Israel does not exist only for its own sake” but “to become the light of the nations” (I, 138): “its election being the way chosen by God to come to all” (I, 42). There is no lack of scriptural references to prove this, the most famous of which is found in the Song of the Servant in the book of Isaiah, where the figure of a man, familiar with the Lord and abused by his people, appears. “And he said: It is a small thing that thou shouldst be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to convert the dregs of Israel. Behold, I have given thee to be the light of the Gentiles, that thou mayst be my salvation even to the farthest part of the earth.” (Is 49:6). By carefully analyzing these passages (I, 360, II, 235-237, III, 120), following many exegetes, Ratzinger affirms that by fulfilling this prophecy of Isaiah, Christ fulfills the promise of universality made to Israel. As the new Moses, He is the master of “a renewed Israel, which neither excludes nor abolishes the old, but goes beyond it by opening it to the universal” (I, 87). In Jesus Christ, the particular has become universal (I, 103). ” For he is our peace, who hath made both one, and breaking down the middle wall of partition, the enmities in his flesh:” (Eph 2:14), writes Saint Paul. So much so that the first affirmation of Ratzinger’s Christology, that Christ brought God, finds its meaning and its definitive scope in the theme of the universality of Jesus, “the very center of his mission” (I, 42). Jesus Christ “brought the God of Israel to all peoples, so that now all peoples pray to him and recognize his word in the Scriptures of Israel, the word of the living God. He has given the gift of universality, which is a great promise, an outstanding promise for Israel and for the world” (I, 139).

The “Burning Bush of the Cross”

Halfway through Ratzinger’s reflection, a question emerges. While it is easy to understand how the hermeneutical rule that Ratzinger borrows from the Church Fathers—the dialectic of “true and definitive” applied to the Old Testament figures that announce Christ—makes Scripture a harmonious whole, one is entitled to wonder what fate Christianity, in Ratzinger, has in store for the Gentile. “The Jew (Ἰουδαίῳ) first, and the Greek (Ἕλληνι)” (Rom 1:16): the formula, recurrent in St. Paul, recalls the order of priorities. However, the Greek is already concerned by the universal history of Israel, and in particular by God’s revelation to Moses in the Burning Bush (Ex 3). At Mount Horeb, the pagans who until then had been worshipping a God without knowing him, the “unknown God” (Ἀγνώστῳ θεῷ) whose inscription St. Paul discovers at the Areopagus in Athens (Acts 17:23), are summoned. They are also summoned to Sinai, where another theophany takes place that leads to the gift of the Laws, and, a fortiori, to the “new Sinai”, “definitive Sinai” (I, 87), which Ratzinger identifies with the mountain where the discourse of the Beatitudes takes place (Mt 4, 12-25) and, with even more reason, with Mount Golgotha (I, 167).

Historically, the sum of Ex 3:14 occurs in a context where the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob chooses a people and orchestrates their liberation from a pagan nation that held them in bondage. The particularity of the mode of revelation of the Divine Name does not, however, contradict the universal scope of its content. Anxious to interpret historical realities spiritually—and vice versa—Ratzinger proves this in various ways. First of all, through Scripture, he interprets the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt and the return to the Promised Land as a restart of the history of Israel, from its Mosaic origin (III, 159) to the Maccabean revolts. In His incarnation, the Word who was with God in the beginning comes into the world in Galilee, that is, “in a corner of the earth already considered half pagan” (I, 85) and receives Roman citizenship under the reign of Augustus, an emperor considered to be the son of God, if not God himself, and who has, without knowing it, contributed to the fulfillment of the promise by establishing political universality and peace in his Empire (III, 93-95).

From His native Galilee, the Messiah goes to Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it (Lk 13:34), the place where salvation is to come at the end of an ascent to which Saint Luke, in his Gospel, has given a geographical as well as a spiritual connotation. He who found more faith in the pagans, who opened his door to Him, than in most of the children of Israel (Mt 8:10) who did not receive Him, made Jerusalem the center of a revelation that began with the adoration of the pagan magi in Bethlehem and is fully accomplished in the proclamation of Christ’s death and resurrection to all nations. Thus, at the other end of the New Testament, Ratzinger is right to interpret St. Paul’s vision of a Macedonian calling the apostle of the Gentiles to his aid (Acts 16:6-10) as a justification for what has been called, more often than not to criticize, the Hellenization of Christianity. “It is not by chance that the Christian message, in its development, first penetrated the Greek world and became involved in the problem of intelligibility and truth” (35).

Where some, fearing the dissolution of Christian specificity in Greek culture and philosophy, advocate a “retreat into the purely religious” (82), Ratzinger firmly supports the “inalienable right of the Greek element in Christianity” (35). The ontological interpretation that the Fathers of the Church, and the medieval theologians after them, gave to the “I am” by which God calls himself in Ex 3:14, is the basis, a few centuries after the Greek kick-off, for what Ratzinger dares to call the “identification” of the “philosophical concept of God” with the biblical God (66), with several not inconsiderable transformations (84-85). Pascal is at liberty, in a formula which has made history – often for the wrong reasons – to oppose the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to that of the philosophers and scholars, without the choice of “primitive Christianity… for the God of the philosophers against the God of the philosophers”. ) for the God of the philosophers against the gods of the religions” (80), the “primacy of the logos” (91) inherent in the Christian faith would have been flouted and there would probably not be, to this day, philosophers and scholars to oppose to the Law and the prophets. In Ratzinger, we find what justifies the “metaphysics of the Exodus” that Stephen Gilson vigorously defended: the Christian God is the new and true Supreme Being of which Plato and Aristotle speak, once the “gap” that separates him from the biblical God has been reduced (66), once the “first immobile motor” has been transformed by contact with the God of faith (87-89). “In this sense, there is in faith the experience that the God of the philosophers is quite different from what they had imagined, without ceasing to be what they had found” (85).

If, at Mount Horeb, God reveals that He is the Being who subsists in Himself and gives all things their being, the revelation of the Divine Name does not entirely lift the veil on His essence. The sum qui sum, Ratzinger asks, is it not rather “a refusal than a declaration of identity?” (72) Opposing the gods that pass away with the God who is may resolve Moses’ immediate concern: the Divine Name allows the people to invoke God in their struggle and to guard against worshipping pagan idols. However, the immediate presence of God, “which constitutes the very heart of Moses’ mission as well as its intimate reason” (I, 292), is quickly “overshadowed.” The Lord’s answer to Moses’ prayer, “Let me behold your glory” (Ex 33:18), sets the limits of prophetic knowledge of God. The Old Covenant, in the end, “presents only the outline of the happiness to come, not the exact image of the realities” (Heb 10:1). The Old Testament prefigures and prepares (Rom 5:14) the one who will fully accomplish what began with Moses, but of which Moses is only a shadow (Col 2:17). In Israel, God accustoms people to His presence until the moment when, taking up the answer given to Moses on Sinai—”no one can see my face” (Ex 33:23)—he offers people, on His own initiative, to see and know Him in the person of Jesus Christ (Jn 1:18).

To say that “the last prophet, the new Moses, was given what the first Moses could not obtain” (1:25) is not only to emphasize the absolutely unique intimacy and covenant that is born with Christ, the Word of God, but also to consider His coming as the completion of the revelation made to Moses. If Ratzinger is concerned with noting, throughout the Gospels, and especially in Saint Matthew who insists particularly on the fulfillment of the Scriptures in Jesus, the way in which Christ is inscribed in the line of the great mediators of revelation, he does not fail to orient each correspondence towards the Christological summit which is the Cross. Ratzinger’s theology is clearly Christocentric, and his Christology is itself centered on the Cross. Theologia a Cruce, one could say, theology based on or leaning against the Cross, avoiding, with Father de Lubac, the equivocal expression, especially since Luther, of Theologia crucis. For Ratzinger, faithful to the patristic reading of Henri de Lubac, “it is the Cross that dissipates the cloud with which Truth was covered until then”[4]. This is true from the first announcements of the Passion to the “priestly prayer” of Christ reported by Saint John (Jn 17), which Ratzinger comments on in several places and in which he sees a “New Testament replica of the account of the Burning Bush” (76). “I have made known to them your name” (Jn 17:26), says the Son addressing the Father: “The name, which has remained incomplete since Sinai, so to speak, is pronounced to the end” (III, 51). Moreover, “the name is no longer just a word, but designates a person: Jesus himself” (77). Christ appears as the Burning Bush itself, from which the name of God is communicated to men.

In this respect, there is indeed a “metaphysics of the cross” in Ratzinger, which extends and completes the “metaphysics of the Exodus.” In other words, the mystery of the Cross cannot be reduced to the mystery of redemption. In the history of salvation, redemption always follows revelation: God saves by showing Himself, by revealing what He is. This is evidenced by Ratzinger’s distinction between the two types of confession of faith in the Gospel: ontologically oriented confession, based on nouns on the one hand—you are the Christ, the Son of the living God, etc.—and verbally oriented confession based on the other—you are the Son of the living God.

On the other hand, there is a verbal confession oriented towards salvation history—the proclamation of the paschal mystery of the Cross and resurrection, etc.—and a verbal confession of faith in the Gospel. In the light of this fundamental difference, he states that “the statement in strict terms of the history of salvation remains devoid of its ontological depth if it is not clearly stated that he who suffered, the Son of the living God, is like God” (I, 326). In this way, the universality of the mission of Christ is respected, who, on the cross, is not the “king of the Jews,” a typically “non-Hebrew” expression used by Pilate (III, 145), but the “king of Israel,” according to a new kingship, the “kingship of truth” (II, 223), and at the head of an Israel that has become universal. “Universality… is put into the light of the Cross: from the Cross, the one God becomes recognizable by the nations; in the Son they will know the Father and, in this way, the one God who revealed himself in the burning bush” (II, 33). God manifests himself to the Greeks on the Cross: “between the pagan world and the blessed Trinity, there is only one passage, which is the Cross of Christ” (204), Ratzinger writes, quoting Daniélou.

Christology and Ontology

It is clear that for Ratzinger “the Cross is revelation” (206). But what does it reveal? Not “some hitherto unknown propositions” (207). It reveals who God is and how man is. The Cross combines the Ecce homo (Jn 19:5) of Pilate and the “Behold the Lord God” (Is 40:10) of the prophet. Golgotha, the “true summit,” is the condition sine qua non for knowing God, for understanding the “I Am” (I, 377). ” When you shall have lifted up the Son of man, then shall you know, that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself, but as the Father hath taught me, these things I speak” (Jn 8:28), writes the evangelist. Does this mean that the ontological statement of the Burning Bush would finally receive, with Christ, the object left dangling after the verbal form, ἐγώ εἰμι in St. John? Faithful to St. Augustine, Ratzinger rather sees Christ as the one in whom the Divine Name is pronounced perfectly. Better: the one in whom the Divine Name is realized, becomes actual. Just as in the Psalms, according to St. Augustine, “it is always Christ who speaks, alternately as Head or as Body” (II, 172), so on the Cross Christ becomes the subject of the divine “I am.” The mystery of the Passion of Christ is thus “an event in which someone is what He does, and does what He is” (197).

Here lies the singularity of Ratzerian Christology, marked by Johannine ontology and fertilized by the Aristotelianism of the medieval theologians. The being of Christ, Ratzinger reminds us in The Faith, is identical to his act. Borrowing from the notion of actualitas divina and the idea, of Thomistic origin but which he traces back to Saint Augustine, of “the Existence which is pure Act” (110), the theologian insists on the identity, in Jesus Christ, “of the work and the being, of the action and the person, the total absorption of the person in his work, the coincidence of the doing with the person himself” (151). The fusion, in the phrase “Jesus Christ,” of the name with the title testifies well to this identification of the function and the person (133). Therefore, one cannot separate the “Jesus of history” from the “Christ of faith,” as historical-critical exegesis has done on a massive scale, any more than it is possible to oppose a theology of the incarnation to a theology of the Cross. Ratzinger reconciles the two, since Christ’s being is actuality and, reciprocally, His action, is His being, reached to the depths of His being (155).

The same is true of “phenomenology and existential analyses,” to which Ratzinger grants a certain usefulness, while judging them insufficient: “They do not go deep enough, because they do not touch the domain of true being” (154). In the formula dear to Christian phenomenology—God is such as He reveals Himself—the verb “to be” takes precedence: identity is not valid as a simple equivalence—God would be such as He reveals Himself, a simple act of donation, the mode becoming substance—but as a properly metaphysical statement pronounced from the divine esse. The first affirmation of theology, that of Ex 3:14, would rather be: God is “as he is” (1 Jn 3:2). But, having renounced “discovering being in itself” in order to limit itself to the “positive,” to what appears, phenomenology, in the same way as physics or historicism, remains on the threshold of mystery. Ratzinger regrets that in our day “ontology is becoming more and more impossible” and that “philosophy is largely reduced to phenomenology, to the simple question of what appears” (127). But being and appearing, in Christ, are one and the same.

This “pure actuality” of Christ is first verified in the ad intra works of the Trinity. Ratzinger recalls that Father and Son are concepts of relationship. Thus “the first person does not engender the Son in the sense that the act of generation would be added to the constituted person; on the contrary, it is the act of generation, the act of giving itself, of spreading itself” (117). The “solitary reign of the category substance” is broken: “one discovers the “relation” as an original form of the being, of the same rank as the substance.” Consequently, the Johannine formula already quoted according to which the Son can do nothing of Himself, informing us about the Christic doing, also informs us about His properly relational being. “The Son, as Son and insofar as He is Son, does not exist at all on His own and is therefore totally one with the Father” (118). So that the being of Jesus appears to us, in the light of St. John, as a “totally open being,” “coming from” and “ordained to.” In Jesus of Nazareth, Ratzinger takes up this theme of “being-for” (Sein-für), borrowed in particular from Heinz Schürmann (II, 203). The pro-existence of Jesus means that “His being is in a being for” (II, 158). “In the passion and in death, the life of the Son of Man becomes fully ‘being for,’ He becomes the liberator and savior for “the multitude,” not only for the scattered children of Israel, but more generally for the scattered children of God… for humanity” (I, 360). The universality of the salvation brought by Christ thus finds its origin in this being-for and the implications ad extra of this intra-trinitarian identity of the Son. As a “true fundamental law of Christian existence” (172), the “principle of the for” thus justifies Israel’s reconciliation with the Gentiles (Eph 2:13-16): having given His life for all, Christ becomes the principle of eternal salvation “for all those who obey him” (Heb 5:9).

Jesus Christ brought God to mankind: here we return, after a detour through the history of salvation, to the Christological source of this obvious but fundamental affirmation that Ratzinger has seen fit to recall. As “God who saves,” Jesus is God for men, God among men, “Emmanuel.” The immanence of God, given to Israel “in the dimension of the word and of liturgical fulfillment,” has become ontological: “In Jesus, God has become man. God has entered into our very being” (II, 114). According to Ratzinger, more than vicarious satisfaction, humanity receives its salvation from the identity, maintained in Jesus Christ, of the two natures; and with it, the identity between its being and its doing. On the Cross, the identity of God is perfectly realized in Christ, and thus visible to all: He is truly the one who gives Himself. Redemption is played out first in this perfect fulfillment of the “I am.” The identity of God, which is the subject of so many questions in the Old Testament as in Greek philosophy, is revealed on the Cross and is revealed precisely as an identity. God, in Christ, is truly what He is. On Calvary, “love and truth meet” (Ps 84:11), a theme that Benedict XVI will regularly expound during his pontificate.

Therefore, the divine being is open to the world and offers a previously unknown way to ensure the return of creation to God. Jesus Christ is this way, this “path” (Jn 14:6). The union achieved in Jesus of Nazareth “must extend to the whole of Adam and transform him into the Body of Christ” (182). The path taken by the Lord, in which Jews and Gentiles walk together, presents itself to humanity as an ascent to the Cross combined with a progressive renunciation of self.

Romano Guardini, whose influence on Ratzinger’s theology is well known, writes in this sense in The Lord that Christ’s life consists, after having lowered divinity towards humanity, in “[lifting] his humanity above itself into the divine ocean”[6]. In Guardini’s work, we can already see the literary and theological coincidence between the ascent to Jerusalem, where the King of Glory gradually understands that He will have to pass through the figure of the Suffering Servant, and the constitution of an economy of salvation, faithful to the promise that God’s salvation will reach all nations. The wider opening of salvation and hope has a condition: the deeper humiliation of Christ. What Christ gains in annihilation, humanity gains in elevation; and vice versa, since “the ascent to God happens when we accompany Him in this abasement” (I, 117). “Only with Christ, the man who is “one with the Father,” the man through whom man’s being has entered into the eternity of God, does man’s future appear definitively open” (254). This is the true lordship and authentic kingship that God exercises through Christ: The Master of the universe, fulfilling the ancient proskynesis, lowers himself to the extreme limit of self-emptying, becomes a servant. The “sons in the Son” will be recognized by the fact that they remain eternally in the house where their master (Jn 8:35), because they have asked for it (Jn 1:38), has brought them: the dwelling place of being which is that of love (Jn 15:9). Great mystery of a faith where one reigns in service (I, 360), since the dominus or κύριος, in order to be never again separated from His creation, united Himself to it, engulfed Himself in the “heart of the world” to such a depth that any fall in the future would be a fall in Him.

Augustin Talbourdel: cogito a Deo ergo sum. This article appears courtesy of PHILITT.

Anatomy of the Progressive Revolution

We are so very delighted to provide this excerpt from After Justice: Catholic Challenges to Progressive Culture, Politics, Economics and Education, the latest book by philosopher Thomas A. Michaud.

Over the years, Progressivism has emerged as the dominate ideology of the West. In this book, Professor Michaud traces how this domination came about, wherein anti-Modernism and authoritarian strains coalesced into the Woke mentality that employs social and mainstream media to transform the “people” into a conformist, hive-minded ruling mob, driven by moral righteousness. This is an insightful book. Please support Professor’s important work and purchase a copy and consult the fully annotated version of this excerpt.

A cultural infrastructure of shared morality is necessary for the success of market economics. Traditional views maintain that religion is the nurturing source of the morality, which grows in the culture. The Progressive revolution aims to overturn Traditional morality and impose its social justice morality on culture. This article dissects and critiques the multifaceted Progressive revolution in the USA, while contrasting it with the Traditional view. It argues that the ultimate aim of the revolution is to redefine the human person through identity politics as a collective entity, which essentially liquidates the individual, conforms the person to social justice morality, and establishes socialistic economics.

The degree to which market economies are grounded on moral norms that are affirmed as metaphysically objective and universal, is the degree to which the market economies can flourish. Without such normative grounds, moral turpitude can corrupt a market economy, ultimately resulting in the economy’s collapse. The actors in the economy lose trust in each other; there is no mutual respect and honesty among them. Without moral norms, market commerce degenerates into gang war types of vicious “combat zones” wherein success means eliminating the competition, both economically and literally.

Throughout history market morality has been due typically to the influence of religion on culture. The moral norms of religion establish a cultural infrastructure for trust, honesty, fair dealing and moral accountability among persons acting in the market.

There is also an historical non-religious source of market “morality.” This is not a morality that is based on principles of honesty and mutual respect for the value and dignity of others. It is the “morality” of the dictates of a government authority exercising a “command and control” economy, which, in current times in the United States, is manifest in Progressive collectivist economics of socialism. The authoritarian collectivist government aims to establish, regulate and enforce what is “right” for commerce. Morality, in such collectivism, does not grow organically through the influence of religion, but is imposed on culture according to the ideological aims of the governing authority. As history has shown, however, command and control collectivist economies are not as long-lived or beneficial to persons as market economies that grow organically within the religiously nurtured morality of their culture.

The first two sections of this article will describe and contrast the Traditional view of religion as the source of cultural morality that influences politics and economics with the Progressive revolutionary aims to transform culture by imposing their ideological “social justice” morality of a collectivist political economy. The vicissitudes of the Progressive revolutionary agenda will be analyzed and critiqued in detail. The third section will expose a worrisome, fundamental philosophical problem with the Progressive agenda, namely the Progressive De-Personalization. This article will then finish with some remarks regarding what is at stake for the future of market-based USA political economy.

The Traditional View

Along with many other Traditionals, the late politico Andrew Breitbart believed that politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from religion. To expand on Breitbart’s proposition, culture, especially morality, flows from religion, and politics and economics flow from culture.

Breitbart’s Traditional view of the relationship between religion, culture, politics and economics has a profound heritage including some of the United States’ founders. In his Farewell Address, George Washington, for example, stated,

“Of all the dispositions which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports these [are the] great pillars of human happiness. [Where] is the security for prosperity, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation deserts the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice?… [Let] us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of a peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle. It is substantially true that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free government.”

Washington could not be more explicit with his belief that morality flows from religion, and since morality is necessary for a free “popular,” democratic republic government, so too is religion necessary. His mentions of prosperity, property and happiness reveal his firm understanding that a free-market economy that allows for the pursuit of happiness does require a religiously based morality. His reference to religiously based oaths, such as swearing to “tell the truth, so help you God,” further reinforces the need for religious morality to maintain honesty and justice in, and the security of, a free nation.

Following Washington, John Adams recognized that the republic, freedom and prosperity depend on preserving a moral citizenry. Adams affirmed that, “It is religion and morality alone which can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.”

Like Breitbart, Washington and Adams, the late Richard John Neuhaus, a 21st century culture commentator, observed that, “Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality and at the heart of morality is religion.” To encapsulate these views, the traditional position can be represented as:

RELIGION spawns MORALITY which influences CULTURE which influences POLITICS and ECONOMICS

In the Traditional view, morality, norms/standards for what constitutes a good or bad action, flows from religion and grows organically in culture. It is ultimately from religion and morality that persons develop their beliefs as to virtue vs. vice, what is the good/happy life, the importance of the family, the sense of individual accountability, and the personal responsibility for earning and stewarding wealth. The interrelationship between politics and economics is influenced by the culture, which, for Traditionals, results in a political economy that values free enterprise, market commerce, individual achievement, a limited government and individual autonomy. Traditionals highly value citizens as free individual persons whose liberty to pursue happiness and personal flourishing should respect morally all other persons and should be protected, and unabridged by their democratic republic. This Traditional appreciation of the individual person is precisely a main Progressive target for fundamental change as will be explained in the following anatomy of the Progressive revolution

The Progressive View

The late U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan analyzed the difference between Traditionalism (conservatism) and Progressivism (liberalism) as such, “The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” Moynihan recognized that in the conservative, Traditional, view culture is the driver of social success. He also recognized that for liberals, politics rule so that a culture that is not driven by their Progressive politics is damned and must be reformed to save it from its own backwardness. His insight illumines a basic conviction of the Progressive revolutionary strategy that politics can change culture and make it conform to the ideological ideals for an enlightened, “woke” society. The full Progressive agenda can be represented with the following summation.

POLITICS spawns ECONOMICS. Both spawn CULTURE (MORALITY) which in turn influences EDUCATION, the JUSTICE SYSTEM, and the MEDIA

This summation can be best explicated by offering a series of points that describe briefly its facets and the relationships among them.

  • For Progressives, collectivist politics is the prime mover for gaining power and control over society with their revolutionary agenda. Progressives’ devotion to their ideology is a type of religious zeal. They are indeed zealots, uncompromising ideologues who are convinced that their position has all of the answers even before questions arise. And if their political answers, solutions, do fail or do not yield immediate results, they tend to blame it on the backward Traditionals, the unsophisticated and obstinate religious right, or some constructed “force” beyond their control like climate change or a pandemic.
  • Progressive politics and their agenda itself are devoid of religion. In the name of their supreme value of social justice, religion must be excluded. No influential moral force greater than their ideology can be admitted. The unenlightened morality of Traditional religions must be deconstructed and substituted with their politically constructed “woke” morality: a social justice morality that serves their vision of collective unity.
  • Progressive politics wages its revolution with the weapon of economics. Through socialist dirigisme, economic policies create antagonisms between classes, races, ethnicities and genders. Progressives’ favored groups are those who are oppressed victims by past economic inequalities and inequities. They are given or promised privileged status through various government policies and programs. These groups’ allegiance to the Progressive agenda is fortified by such privileges.
  • Progressive economics secures their politics and engenders the change in culture they seek. They contend that without the social justice morality they promise, the nation will be overwhelmed by the many crises it faces. Only their political economic ideology will ensure true social justice. Janet Yellen, White House Cabinet Secretary for the Dept. of Treasury has bluntly stated this alarming warning, “The country is also facing a climate crisis, a crisis of systemic racism, and an economic crisis that has been building for fifty years… I believe economic policy can be a potent tool to improve society. We can—and should—use it to address inequality, racism, and climate change.”
  • As indicated, it is social justice morality that Progressives strive to establish as a substitute for Traditional morality in economics and in culture at large. Their social justice morality emphasizes compensatory and distributive justice. Compensatory justice aims to correct the past and present injustices to oppressed groups. They promote government “compensations” such as, reparations—financial and otherwise, affirmative action programs, and selective applications of criminal justice in regard, for instance, to rioting, property destruction, and looting. Distributive justice aims to correct inequalities and inequities suffered by oppressed groups in regard to earning and accumulating wealth. Again, government managed and, if need be, enforced examples include free college tuition, guaranteed basic income, universal medical care, housing, food/meal programs, childcare, and “tax the rich” progressive income taxation.
  • Progressive politics implemented by their socialistic economics according to their social justice morality, and the interaction of these factors generates revolutionary changes in culture. These changes are spurred on and spread by facets of culture led by Progressive activists. Public education, and much of private education, adhere to and inject Progressive ideology into their curricula and organizational leadership. The revolutionaries want education at all levels, but especially higher education, to be “government education” which promotes the Progressive agenda. For them, education, happily, is indoctrination, since educators and educational contents that oppose “The Agenda” are summarily cancelled.
  • Progressives believe that the justice system has been systemically unjust and must be reformed and saved by their social justice morality. The system must be repopulated with Progressive ideologues in such positions as police leadership, government prosecutors, and judges, especially in the higher courts including the US Supreme Court. With the moral standards of social justice, the legal system must be used, when possible, to reform economic issues, as well as criminal law, while advocating for and ruling in favor of the oppressed.
  • Education, the Justice System and the Media interact to form a collective unity that strengthens and advances the Progressive agenda. Their unified collective efforts are indefatigable; they seize every opportunity Progressive politicians create for them in order to sustain a “permanent revolution” that simply does not retreat. The media are an integral factor in the unceasing propagation of the revolution. They spread the message of the Agenda, so that the facets of culture maintain a collective focus. “Media” in this context has a broad meaning. It includes print media, social media, mainstream TV news, and entertainment media, such as streaming TV services (e.g., Netflix, Hulu, Prime, Amazon, and HBO), sports shows (ESPN, CBSSN and FS1), and movie studios. TV series (comedies and dramas) and movies are filled with Progressive propaganda. In fact, if a series offers an alternative, more Traditional perspective, it risks cancellation. The Progressive scions of social media are uninhibited lords of their fiefdoms. “Un-woke” posts and individuals are cancelled if they communicate unenlightened views. The media’s collective prosecution of the “cancel culture” movement has indeed become a potent force in executing the permanent revolution.
  • The concept of “permanent revolution” is fundamental to the Progressive agenda. This Marxist notion was adopted and adapted by Leon Trotsky in the early 20c. Trotsky’s words, the underlined passages, can be paraphrased to express the Progressive aims: The Progressive permanent revolution accepts no compromise. The revolution can end only with the complete liquidation of Traditional culture. The permanent revolution is not a leap by the Progressives but the reconstruction of the nation under the dictatorship of the Progressives. Chairman Mao had similar ideas with his notion of Continuous Revolution, which was the guiding thrust of his Cultural Revolution. The Progressives’ revolution is not new to history. Collectivist/socialistic morality, economics and culture have happened before, but never have they entirely succeeded. They have not succeeded in the Soviet Union, not in Cuba, and not even in China, which is refashioning its communism in certain ways to expand its sphere of influence by engaging the global market economy.

The Progressive Depersonalization

The political is the personal and the personal is the political. This maxim was a slogan of the late 1960s feminist and student movements. It also expresses axiomatically the Progressives’ “identity politics” which is defined lexically by Merriam-Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary as, “Politics in which groups of people having a particular racial, ethnic, social, gender or cultural identity tend to promote their own specific interests or concerns…” Identity politics according to Jeffrey Escofier “is a kind of cultural politics. It relies on the development of a culture that is able to create new and affirmative conceptions of the self, to articulate collective identities, and to forge a sense of group loyalty. Identity politics requires the development of rigid definitions of the boundaries between those who have particular collective identities and those who do not.” To offer some additional traits, identity politics is a politic of cultural change. The identity groups develop tribal boundaries, which may intersect with other identity groups that have suffered injustice and oppression, but boundaries absolutely exclude any group of non-victims, the oppressors. The identities define the self within the cultural collective. To self-identify with a collective requires group loyalty, typically a loyalty that replaces any Traditional aspect of culture, such as religious loyalty or patriotic commitment to one’s nation.

The wicked irony of “the personal is the political” axiom is, however, that it is precisely the personal, the sense of oneself as an individual, which the Progressive revolution aims to cancel. A society’s culture without a strong sense of the individual as essential to the person is bereft of crucial values like individual/personal autonomy and moral responsibility, self-reliance, individual/personal achievement and reward, and individual/personal property and wealth. These values are of baseline importance to Traditional culture but erasing and substituting them with ideologically charged collective identities enables the cultural transformation that Progressives desire.

The individual is a locus of rights and responsibilities. Our personal identity is who and what we become as individual persons. We become persons insofar as we respect those rights for others and ourselves and fulfill those responsibilities. Individuals grow and mature to become persons. Persons retain their individuality while realizing their responsibilities to themselves, families, communities and nation. Our freedom, self-determination, liberty, ambitions and aspirations are most perfectly fulfilled in the process of becoming persons.

The Progressive personal identity effectively liquidates the individual. The individual is not something real, the core of our self, but merely an epiphenomenon of our collective group identity. The collective group is the locus of rights and responsibilities. Our right to self-determination is nothing more than acting with and for the social justice’s sake of the collective. Our prime responsibility is to oppose the social injustice that our group and all of the other groups with which we intersect have suffered and are suffering. With the cancellation of the individual person, the Progressive revolution is able to employ strategically its social justice morality to provide opportunity, cover for establishing its socialist economics, and fundamentally transform the culture of the USA to create a new nation that has disposed of its Traditional history. The Progressives’ permanent revolution can abide no other outcome.

Final Remarks

The advancement of the Progressive revolution hinges on redefining the human person. Just as successful market economies need Traditional morality rooted in their culture, Progressives plant their ideological social justice morality in culture and nurture it with identity politics. Identity politics excises the individual and reduces the person to a collective entity, which then can be more easily manipulated by social justice morality and directed by the Progressive state. Socialist economics is a means for Progressive politics to command and control the culture and generate total cultural change. Full transformation of the culture requires widespread acceptance of the Progressive collective view of human nature.

The Progressive revolution aims to change the way in which people understand themselves, understand their very humanity as collective beings. If their revolution ultimately succeeds, it will have ongoing permanence since it will have to correct continuously lingering cultural issues. For instance, criminal guilt must become understood as the fault of some sort of injustice suffered by the perpetrator’s collective. Any beliefs in and efforts to earn private wealth and property would have to be rectified by the state. Moreover, even eschatological beliefs in personal immortality, an individual afterlife, would have to be challenged, probably suppressed, by the state.

The Progressive revolution against Traditional society is fomenting a civil war in the USA, albeit a cold war, but a war, nonetheless. Effective resistance begins with understanding the revolution’s anatomy, recognizing and rejecting Progressive “woke” political strategies and leaders as abetted by educational institutions, the justice system and the media. Progressives will not abandon their permanent revolution, though resistance can weaken it, perhaps even to the extent that it becomes nothing more than an annoying facet of the cultural fringe.

Featured: “The Awakening,” a poster by Henry “Hy” Mayer, published in Puck Magazine, February 20, 1915.