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How My Mind Has Changed in This Decade: Part Two

 



If I now attempt to judge how far I have actually changed in these last ten years with regard to my work, then it seems possible to put the case in a formula: I have been occupied approximately equally with the deepening and the application of that knowledge which, in its main channels, I had gained before. Both these developments have, of course, gone forward at the same time.

The deepening consisted in this: in these years I have had to rid myself of the last remnants of a philosophical. i.e. anthropological (in America one says “humanistic” or “naturalistic”), foundation and exposition of Christian doctrine. The real document of this farewell is, in truth, not the much-read brochure Nein!, directed against Brunner in 1934, but rather the book about the evidence for God of Anselm of Canterbury which appeared in 1931. Among all my books I regard this as the one written with the greatest satisfaction. And yet in America it is doubtless not read at all and in Europe it certainly is the least read of any of my works.

The positive factor in the new development was this: in these years I had to learn that Christian doctrine, if it is to merit its name and if it is to build up the Christian church in the world as she must needs be built up. has to be exclusively and conclusively the doctrine of Jesus Christ -- of Jesus Christ as the living Word of God spoken to us men. If I look back from this point on my earlier studies, I may well ask myself how it ever came about that I did not learn this much sooner and accordingly speak it out. How slow is man, above all when the most important things are at stake!

In order to see and understand the meaning and bearing of the change which therewith entered my work the first two volumes of my Church Dogmatics, which appeared in 1932 and 1938, will have to be studied to some extent. (You don’t want to read so much? To be sure. I exact it of no one. But at the same time I cannot say that I consider it “cricket’’ when people talk about something without having properly studied it.) My new task was to take all that has been said before and to think it through once more and freshly and to articulate it anew as a theology of the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

I cannot pass over in silence the fact that In working at this task -- I should like to call it a christological concentration -- I have been led to a critical (in a better sense of the word) discussion of church tradition, and as well of the Reformers, and especially of Calvin. I have discovered that in this concentration I can say everything, far more clearly, unambiguously, simply and more in the way of a confession, and at the same time also much more freely, openly and comprehensively, than I could ever say it before. For before, I had been at least partly hampered, not so much by the church tradition, as by the egg-shells of philosophical systematics. I am well aware that this change did not by any means please a good many. I have been reproached with having completely withdrawn behind a “Chinese Wall” and consequently having become “extremely uninteresting.” This latter judgment came out of America! To such a statement there is scarcely anything for me to answer. But I cannot help saying that if viewed from my side the affair of the Chinese wall is “extremely enigmatical.” For, strangely enough, it has been precisely in this decade, and thus in the course of this change, that I have found time and disposition for things which quite patently have nothing to do with withdrawing behind Chinese walls. I have found time and disposition, for example, to occupy myself much more than formerly with universal Geistesgeschichte; on two journeys to Italy to let classical antiquity speak to me as it had never done before; to gain a new relationship with Goethe, among others; to read countless novels, a good many of them from those first-rate producers of the English detective novel: to become a very bad but very passionate horseman, and soon. I do not think that I have ever lived more gaily, in the everyday world, than precisely in this period, which brought with it for my theology what appeared to many to be a monkish concentration.

 . . . The fact is that the danger of falling into an abstract negation of the world -- into which some have apparently already seen me fall -- has never worried me less than today. I must rather set it down as fact that during these last ten years I have become, simultaneously, very much more churchly and very much more worldly.



The application I had to make was intimately connected with Hitler. Just about this same time of the year in 1928, I sat at this same desk in a small house of my own in Münster in Westphalia -- a Prussian professor and, after seven years spent in Germany, nearly on the point of becoming something like a “good German.” But seven years later, in 1935, during which time I had moved from Münster to Bonn, I had been discharged from my excellent teaching work there, and today I find myself, like a mariner temporarily rescued from the gale, here in my native city, Basel. A decade ago I should never have dreamed that such a thing could happen to me. Doubtless between that time and today a considerable change in my position and line of action has taken place, not with regard to the meaning and direction of my accumulated knowledge but rather with regard to its application. For this change I am indebted to the Führer!

What happened? First of all this happened -- and this one must keep clearly in mind while seeing the whole -- there was given me a gigantic revelation of human lying and brutality on the one hand, and of human stupidity and fear on the other. And then this happened: in the summer of 1933, the German church, to which I belonged as a member and a teacher, found itself in the greatest danger concerning its doctrine and order. It threatened to become involved in a new heresy strangely blended of Christianity and Germanism, and to come under the domination of the so-called “German Christians” -- a danger prompted by the successes of National Socialism and the suggestive power of its ideas. And it happened further that the representatives of the other theological schools and tendencies in Germany -- Liberal, Pietist, Confessional, Biblicist -- who had previously. in opposition to me, put so much weight on ethics, sanctification, Christian life, practical decision, and the like, now in part openly affirmed that heresy and in part took up a strangely neutral and tolerant attitude toward it. And it happened further that, when so many fell into line and no one seriously protested, I myself could not very well keep silent but had to undertake to proclaim to the imperiled church what it must do to be saved. . . . In that first series of pamphlets.

Theologische Existenz heute, published in June 1933, I still had nothing essentially new to say. At that time I said rather just what I had always tried to say, namely, that beside God we can have no other gods, that the Holy Spirit of the Scriptures is enough to guide the church in all truth, and that the grace of Jesus Christ is all-sufficient for the forgiveness of our sins and the ordering of our lives. But now, suddenly, I had to say the same thing in a situation where it could no longer have the slightest vestige of an academic theory. Without my wanting it, or doing anything to facilitate it, this had of necessity to take on the character of a summons, a challenge, a battlecry, a confession.



The thing that has changed, therefore, has not been me, but the situation in which I have spoken and the resonance with which I have had to speak. That has changed tremendously. Accordingly, the ensuing repetition of my doctrine and teaching became -- of its own accord and paralleling its deepening because of this new situation --  practice, decision, action. And so one day, to my own surprise most of all, I found myself standing in the very midst of church politics, engaged in collaboration in the deliberations and decisions of the Confessional Church which had been assembling since 1934. . . .

What was and what is at stake? Simply this, to hold fast to and in a completely new way to understand and practice the truth that God stands above all gods, and that the church in Volk and society has, under all circumstances, and over against the state, her own task, proclamation and order, determined for her in the Holy Scriptures. Despite the fact that even today many in the Confessional Church will not see and admit it, there could have been no other outcome than that this truth of the freedom of the church, despite the claims of National Socialism, should come to signify not only a “religious” decision, not only a decision of church policy, but also and ipso facto a political decision. A political decision, namely, against a state which as a totalitarian state cannot recognize any task, proclamation and order other than its own, nor acknowledge any other God than itself, and which therefore in proportion to its development had of necessity to undertake the oppression of the Christian church and the suppression of all human right and freedom.

Behind this heresy, which I saw penetrating into the church, there stood from the very beginning the one who soon stepped out as the far more dangerous adversary, the one hailed at the beginning -- and not least by many Christians -- as deliverer and savior: Hitler, himself the personification of National Socialism. The church-theological conflict contained within itself the political conflict, and it was no fortuitous happening that it revealed itself more and more as a political conflict. Because I could not hide this fact from myself and others, because I could not very well begin my lectures in Bonn with the salutation to Hitler, and because I could not very well swear an unconditioned oath of allegiance to the Führer, as I should have to do as the holder of a state office, I lost my position in the service of this state and was forced to quit Germany.

Meanwhile the anti-Christian and therefore antihuman essence of National Socialism revealed itself more and more distinctly. At the same time its influence over the remainder of Europe alarmingly increased in proportion. The lies and brutality, as well as the stupidity and fear, grew and have long since grown far beyond the frontiers of Germany. And Europe does not understand the danger in which it stands. Why not? Because it does not understand the First Commandment. Because it does not see that National Socialism means the conscious, radical and systematic transgression of this First Commandment. Because it does not see that this transgression, because it is sin against God, drags the corruption of the nations in its wake.

So it came about that despite my desires I had to persevere in my opposition to National Socialism even after I had returned to Switzerland, for the sake of the preservation of the true church and the just state. On that account I am labeled a sort of “public enemy number one” in Germany, and must see all my writings put on the index of forbidden books. During the Czechoslovakian crisis I sent a letter to Professor Josef Hromádka in Prague, in which I wrote that at the Bohemian frontier not only the freedom of Europe but also that of the Christian church was to be defended. This letter has brought down upon me manifestations of wrath, or of anxious “discretion,’ from many countries, and especially of course from Germany. I hope that we will not wake up too late and too painfully from this sleep in which, in company with many others. Christian circles in the countries of Europe still think they are allowed to indulge themselves.

People have been very much astonished about the “change” in my stand, and not least in so far as the “change” has been of this latter sort. They were astonished, first, when I began to become what they called ‘church-political,’ and later they were more astonished when I began to become out-and-out “political.” But I should like to be allowed to say that anyone who really knew me before should not now be so very much astonished. In particular I have never been ready to call good that ominous Lutheran doctrine according to which there belongs to the state a ‘‘right of self-determination” (Eigengesetzlichkeit) independent of the proclamation of the gospel and not to be touched by it.

Since, as well as before my change, my theological thinking centers and has centered in its emphasis upon the majesty of God, the eschatological character of the whole Christian message, and the preaching of the gospel in its purity as the sole task of the Christian church. The abstract, transcendent God, who does not take care of the real man (“God is all, man is nothing!”), the abstract eschatological awaiting, without significance for the present, and the just as abstract church, occupied only with this transcendent God and separated from state and society by an abyss -- all that existed, not in my head, but only in the heads of many of my readers and especially in the heads of those who have written reviews and even whole books about me. That I have not always succeeded, in former times and also today, in expressing myself in a manner comprehensible to all is a part of the guilt which I certainly impute to myself when I see myself surrounded by so much anger and confusion.

Does the change in me represent anything more than this: that the practical relevance, the struggle and the confessional character of my theological teaching have become visible to many, and now for the first time to most, against the background of a time which has taken shape at the hands of National Socialism?.

Sometime or other in the future (perhaps even soon) Hitler will no longer be with us. Then also my attitude and function will no longer need such a luridly contradictory and opposing character as it needs must have today. And will I then have to prepare some sort of new surprise for my friendly and unfriendly judges? Or shall it then be possible for me belatedly to make clearer to them what to them seems so full of contradictions in what I did yesterday and am doing today’? I do not know. This way or that, I hope that it may still be given to me tomorrow, under perhaps once more very changed circumstances, to be immovable but also movable, movable but also immovable. . . .

Nazism and Communism

You think it would be advisable if I stated expressly why I do not want the logic of my letter to Hromadka applied to the present East-West conflict, why I do not find the present situation analogous to that of 1938. One could put the question even more clearly: Why do I not write to my West-German friends today what now would apply to the Russians in the same way that my letter then applied to the Nazis? I shall try to give you my answer:

(1) The Hromadka letter in 1938 was written in the days of the Munich settlement. It was sent to Prague where the decision was being reached, as to whether the world outside of Germany would tolerate German aggression. On the 30th of September in that year I wrote in my diary: "Catastrophe of European liberty in Munich." I stood alone with this interpretation. "Realism" meant in those days the acceptance of the situation created by Hitler. Thanksgiving services were held in all the churches, including those here in Switzerland, for the preservation of peace. Six months later Hitler had violated this infamous accord of Munich. A year later he was in Poland—and the other consequences followed. If the "Czech soldier" [of whom Barth spoke in the Hromadka letter] had stood and had not been betrayed by the West, the Russians would not now be standing at the Elbe. That is when the die was cast. That is when the East-West problem arose. And that is when Europe and Christendom slept.¼

I do not know when and how and to whom I would now direct a similar letter. A situation in which everything depended upon a yes or no decision has not subsequently developed. The determination, whether rightly or wrongly motivated, to resist Stalinist Communist aggression is the common policy of the West. Its intensification through a Christian word is superfluous. On the question no one sleeps today. On the contrary, one notes rather a nervousness, hysteria and fear which is not conducive to the highest form of determination. The Christian word today would have to be that we ought not be afraid. But such a word ought not be shouted. It can best be expressed in the way one lives and remains silent, particularly since so much is being said, both helpful and foolish. ...

(2) In the Hromadka letter I called, in the name of the Christian faith, for resistance to the armed threat and aggression of Hitler. I am no pacifist and would do the same today. The foe of Czech and European freedom proved in those days again and again that his force would have to be met by force. . . . The peace at any price which the world, and also the churches, sought at that time was neither human nor Christian. That is why I "shouted" at that time.¼

The present Russia is not the peace loving nation it professes to be. It claims to be menaced, particularly by the Anglo-Saxon powers. I cannot understand the reasons for this fear though I have tried to remain receptive to its arguments. It is obvious that Russia assumed a threatening attitude immediately after the conclusion of the war.

I must admit that if I were an American or British statesman I would not neglect preparations for a possible military defense. . . . But all this is being done in the West today without any specific Christian word or warning being necessary. . . . Today the Christian duty lies in another direction. Today we must continue to insist that war is identical with death in the sense that it is inevitable only when it has happened. In 1938 war was an actuality, but it could have been nipped in the bud with the right kind of determination. Russia has not created a similar situation today. It has not presented anyone with an ultimatum or committed aggression. (I do not hold it responsible for Korea.) There is no evidence for, and much evidence against the idea that it wants war. There are still means of avoiding war. Until they are exhausted (as they were exhausted in 1938) no one in the West has the right to believe in the inevitability or the desirability of war or to meet Russia as Hitler had to be faced. We do not face the glorification of war and we must, therefore, express our resolution to oppose communism without falling into fear and hatred or into war-like talk and action. A war which is not forced upon one, a war which is any other category but the ultima ratio of the political order, war as such is murder. . . . Every premature acceptance of war, all words, deeds and thoughts which assume that it is already present, help to produce it. For this reason it is important that there be people in all nations who refuse to participate in a holy crusade against Russia and communism, however much they may be criticized for their stand.

Finally we cannot emphasize too strongly that the most important defense against communism consists in extension of justice for all classes. In the event of war we must be prepared to face an army of millions of well equipped soldiers who will be convinced (from our standpoint, wrongly) of the righteousness of their cause and who will be prepared to give everything in the battle against the "criminals" (they mean us). Could one say as much for the armies of the so-called free world? Mere hatred of communism and Russia will not suffice us. The masses of our people must have experienced the value of our freedom in such a way that they would be willing to give their life for it. . . . Of course communism might triumph without war if its worse values appeared better to the masses of the Western world than what we offer in the name of democracy. In France this seems to be the case. Whoever does not want communism (and none of us do) had better seek for social justice than merely oppose it.

(3) On the question which you put to me on the remilitarization of Germany: One must not confuse this question with the general problem of pacifism, nor with the general question of the defense of the West. It is not logically correct to demand that anyone who disavows pacifism and believes in the defense of the West should also favor German remilitarization. I will give you a few reasons why I regard this as a unique problem.¼

In the first place, I do not have the temerity to ask the German people, who have been bled white in two wars, to make this sacrifice again. A normal survival impulse must persuade the German people to refrain from this sacrifice.

In the second place, I regard it as impossible to expect of the German people that they arm for a war that is bound to be a civil war for them, in which Germans will be arrayed against Germans.

Thirdly, it does not seem to me to be morally defensible to tell a nation that one has sought to demilitarize to the point of denying it the use of tin soldiers as children’s toys, that its salvation now depends upon preparation for another war.

Fourthly, it seems clear to me that the remilitarization of Western Germany might be the spark in the powder barrel with which the West, and Germany in particular, ought not to play.

In the fifth place, it is not at all clear to me how the western strategists propose to defend Germany between the Elbe and the Rhine, which might mean that a German army is expected to sacrifice itself at the Pyrenees after leaving their families in Germany.

In the sixth place, I believe that the positive defense against communism has a special significance for Germany. Has enough been done for the exiles, for the unemployed and the homeless, and for the return of war prisoners that communism might not be drawn into Germany as a sponge draws in water, despite the present rejection of it in Western Germany ?—As a German I would be inclined to say, we cannot do this for we are otherwise engaged.

Finally, I ask a question hesitantly because I will risk the ill-will of Germans: Would it not be bad policy to have a German army, with all that goes with a German army in the European situation? History has proved that if an Englishman or a Swiss puts on a uniform that is not the same as when a German puts one on. The German becomes a total soldier too easily and too quickly. In common with many Europeans I would rather not see the re-emergence of the German soldier. And even if I were a German, and perhaps particularly if I were a German, I would rather not have his re-emergence, not even when the peril from the East is considered.

The Intellectual and Moral Dilemma of History

It is a great paradox that nature is much more unambiguously susceptible to human understanding than is society past and present. That which man has not created and which it is beyond his power to create—the macrocosm of the stars and the microcosm of the cells and atoms—man can understand with an adequacy that points to the common source of both. How else explain the affinity between the cognitive qualities of the human mind and the laws by which the universe moves? Not only is man able to retrace and project into the future the movements of the natural bodies, but by virtue of that ability he is capable of recreating the forces of nature and harnessing them to his will. Nowhere, except in the contemplation of his suffering and hope, is man more triumphantly aware of his kinship with the Creator than in his cognitive and manipulative relations with nature.

In the world of nature, which he faces ready-made and which he leaves as he finds it, man proves himself a master of understanding, imitation and control. How different, how frustrating and humiliating is the role he plays in understanding and controlling the social world, a world that is properly his own, which would not exist if he had not created it, and which exists the way it does only because he has given it the imprint of his nature. Of this social world man can at best have but a partial and corrupted understanding and but a partial and ultimately illusory control. For the social world being but a projection of human nature onto the collective plane, being but man writ large, man can understand and maintain control of society no more than he can of himself. Thus the very intimacy of his involvement impedes both understanding and control.

The awareness of this paradox is, if I understand its intent correctly, the moving force of Reinhold Niebuhr’s new book, The Structure of Nations and Empires. It is the mega thaumazein, the "great wonderment," the shock of incongruity, that according to Aristotle is at the beginning of all philosophy. That shock feeds on two basic experiences— one intellectual, the other moral—and both cast doubt on man’s ability to find the truth about society. The intellectual experience is doubt about the meaning of history. What is unique and ephemeral in history and what is constantly revealing a repetitive pattern that lends itself to generalization about the past and future?

...is there any consistency, any perennial pattern or permanent force in man’s search for community? Is there a permanent pattern in the anatomy of community which may be discerned in such diverse communities as the tribe, the city-state, or the ancient or modern empire?

The moral experience is doubt about man’s ability to grasp what meaning there is in history, given the involvement of his pride and aspirations in the historic process.

The intellectual difficulty that stands in the way of a theoretical inquiry into the meaning of history results from the ambiguity of the material with which the observer has to deal. The events he must try to understand are, on the one hand, unique occurrences. They happened in this way only once and never before or since. On the other hand they are similar, for they are manifestations of social forces. Social forces are the product of human nature in action. Therefore, under similar conditions, they will manifest themselves in a similar manner. But where is the line to be drawn between the similar and the unique?

This ambiguity of the events to be understood by a theory of history—it may be pointed out in passing—is but a special instance of a general impediment of human understanding.

"As no event and no shape," observes Montaigne, "is entirely like another, so also is there none entirely different from another: an ingenious mixture on the part of Nature. If there were no similarity in our faces, we could not distinguish man from beast; if there were no dissimilarity, we could not distinguish one man from another. All things hold together by some similarity; every example is halting, and the comparison that is derived from experience is always defective and imperfect. And yet one links up the comparisons at some corner. And so do laws become serviceable and adapt themselves to every one of our affairs by some wrested, forced, and biased interpretation."

It is against such "wrested, forced and biased interpretation" of historic events that a theory of history must be continuously on guard.

Nor are the untoward results of this dilemma of having to distinguish between what is typical and perennial and what is unique and ephemeral in history limited to the interpretation of past events. That dilemma affects gravely, and sometimes absurdly, forecasts of and planning for the future. In 1776, Washington declared that "the Fate of our Country depends in all human probability, on the Exertion of a Few Weeks." Yet it was not until seven years later that the War of Independence came to an end.

In February 1792, British Prime Minister Pitt justified the reduction of military expenditures and held out hope for more reductions to come by declaring: "Unquestionably there never was a time in the history of this country when from the situation of Europe we might more reasonably expect fifteen years of peace than at the present moment. Only two months later the continent of Europe was engulfed in war. Less than a year later Great Britain was involved. Thus was initiated a period of almost continuous warfare that lasted nearly a quarter of a century.

When Lord Granville became British Foreign Secretary in 1870, he was informed by the Permanent Undersecretary that "he had never, during his long experience, known so great a lull in foreign affairs, and that he was not aware of any important question that he (Lord Granville) should have to deal with." On that same day Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen accepted the Crown of Spain, an event that three weeks later led to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.

The day before World War I broke out, the British Ambassador to Germany disparaged the possibility of war in a report to his Government. Franklin D. Roosevelt thought toward the end of his life that the great political issue with which the postwar world would have to deal would be Anglo-Russian rivalry, with the United States playing the role of mediator.

These difficulties, inherent in the nature of things, have been magnified since the eighteenth century by a philosophic tendency to identify a particular historic phenomenon with a particular social situation and to draw from this identification the conclusion that by doing away with the social situation one could eliminate an undesirable historic phenomenon. Conversely, by generalizing the social situation one could generalize a desirable historic phenomenon as well. Thus the conviction arose that war was a by-product of either the autocratic or the capitalistic organization of society. Therefore the destruction of autocracy or capitalism would of necessity usher in the abolition of war; conversely, the universal triumph of democracy or of communism would usher in universal peace.

Similarly and more particularly, imperialism has been identified, and by no means only by Marxists, with capitalism, from which identification the logical conclusion was drawn, that the end of capitalism would signify the end of imperialism as well. The very existence of power relations, the inequality of the strong and the weak, the mastery of the former over the latter, the differentiation between ruler and ruled was attributed by nineteenth century liberals to autocratic government and is attributed by contemporary Marxists to the class structure of society.

All these identifications have one fallacy in common: The confusion between the perennial and the ephemeral, the typical and the unique in history. Our society in particular, with its underdeveloped sense of historic continuity and its penchant for social innovation, finds it hard to accept the underlying regularity and typicality of the historic process. If you accept these qualities of history, you must submit to its laws and try to learn from them; you are foreclosed from treating each new historic situation de novo, as a unique occurrence to be disposed of by one radical action similarly unique. On the other hand, if you do not accept these qualities of history and are free to transcend the limitations of tradition and disregard the counsels of ancient wisdom, your social inventiveness is limited, if it is limited at all, by nothing but elemental common sense and common prudence.

Philosophy, tradition and individual experience have predisposed us for the latter attitude. The great problems of history with which we must come to terms tend to appear to us not as members of a chain organically tied to the past and growing into the future, but as cataclysmic interruptions of the normalcy of peace and harmony, occasioned by evil men and evil institutions. Let us do away with those men and institutions, and we will have solved not only this particular historic problem but the problem of history itself. We are, as it were, in flight from history, and whenever history catches up with us, as it did intermittently before World War II and has done continuously since, we endeavor to gain our freedom from it by obliterating in one great effort the issue that blocks our way.

The vanity of these endeavors is attested to by their consistent failures. It is one of the great contributions of Professor Niebuhr’s book to demonstrate through the analysis of historic phenomena the fallacy of this approach to historic understanding and political action. The demonstration is made by fitting the imperialism, universalism and utopianism of communism—the overriding historic phenomenon of the age—into a pattern of empire that was not established by communism but of which communism is but the latest manifestation.

The roots of that pattern reach back to ancient Persia and Babylon. The pattern is clearly visible in the character and claims of the Roman and Chinese empires and fully developed in the two Christian and the Islamic empires of the Middle Ages. The articulation of both the similarities and dissimilarities—but particularly the former—between the great empires of the past and the imperial structure and claims of communism illuminates both. the historic and contemporary scene.

The tendency to disparage the perennial and typical in history and to dissolve the historic process into a series of disconnected disturbances, unique and ephemeral, disarms contemporary man in the face of a phenomenon that is truly unique: The ability for universal destruction that man has received from nuclear power. This ability has introduced into the relations among nations a radically novel factor. Qualitatively speaking, it is the only structural change that has occurred in international relations since the beginning of history. For nuclear power has radically altered the relations that have existed since the beginning of history between the ends of foreign policy and violence as a means to these ends.

These relations have traditionally been by and large of a rational nature. That is to say: The risks run and the liabilities incurred through the use of violent means were generally not out of proportion to the ends sought. A nation calculating these risks and liabilities could rationally conclude that even if it should lose, its losses would be tolerable in view of the ends sought. A nation acted very much like a gambler who could afford to risk a certain portion of his assets and was willing to risk them in view of the chances for gain provided by taking the risk.

This rational relationship between the means of violence and the ends of foreign policy has been destroyed by the availability of nuclear power as a means to these ends. For the possibility of universal destruction obliterates the means-end relationship itself by threatening the nations and their ends with total destruction. No such radical qualitative transformation of the structure of international relations has ever occurred in history, and the radical nature of the transformation calls for correspondingly radical innovations in the sphere of policy.

Yet, paradoxically enough, a civilization that likes to see novelty in history where there is none, by dint of its distorted historic perspective seems to perceive but dimly the genuine novelty with which nuclear power confronts it. A society that is almost enamored by social innovation for innovation’s sake faces in virtual helplessness a situation that requires—not for the sake of a traditional national interest but for the survival of civilization, if not of mankind itself—an extreme effort of bold, innovating imagination. Thus history threatens to avenge itself for having been misunderstood in thought and abused in action.

Faced with this mortal threat to their survival, both the United States and the Soviet Union have fallen back upon a time-honored yet thus far ineffectual remedy: Disarmament. Are the chances for disarmament better now than they were in the past? The answer to that question depends again upon what one considers the perennial and ephemeral factors in history to be.

One school of thought holds that the possibility of disarmament is predicated upon the preceding or at least simultaneous settlement of outstanding political issues that have given rise to the armaments race in the first place, and that the threat of nuclear war has not materially affected this perennial functional dependence of disarmament upon a political settlement. Another school of thought assumes that the threat of nuclear war has radically altered this traditional relationship, which was perennial only in appearance but was in fact dependent upon certain ephemeral factors no longer present today. It also assumes that the desire to avoid nuclear destruction provides today an incentive for disarmament that invalidates the conditions upon which disarmament was predicated in the past. The question whether or not the novelty of the nuclear threat has actually reduced what seemed to be a perennial principle of statecraft to an ephemeral configuration poses again the dilemma that casts doubt upon our understanding of history and renders hazardous our political action.

The other great dilemma upon which Professor Niebuhr’s book centers is the moral dilemma in which history involves man. That moral dilemma results from the ineradicable tendency of man to claim for his position in history more in terms of moral dignity than he is entitled to and to grant his fellows less than is their due. Hamlet implores the Queen in vain:

¼ Mother, for love of grace,

Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,

That not your trespass, but my madness

speaks.

For the position of the actor on the political scene is of necessity morally ambivalent, and that ambivalence, in conjunction with the logic inherent in the political act, inevitably corrupts his moral judgment.

The political actor seeks power, that is to say, he seeks to reduce his fellow man to a means for his ends. By doing so, he violates a basic tenet of Western morality: To respect man as an end in himself and not to use him as a means to an end. Both the contradiction between the political act and morality and the logic of the power relation itself compel the political actor to make it appear as though his striving for power and the exercise of it, far from violating morality, were actually its consummation. That appearance is achieved by clothing him and his act with a moral dignity they do not deserve and by depriving the object of the political act of at least some of the moral dignity he deserves.

Politics and morality are reconciled by the latter being bent to the requirements of the former. The political actor now can proceed with a good conscience, being assured of his moral superiority and the moral inferiority of the object of his power. He can also proceed with a determination maximizing his chances for political success; for he will find it hard to convince himself that, in view of the difference in moral qualities between himself and the object of his power, he has not only a moral right but also a moral duty to rule. As Tolstoy put it in the epilogue to War and Peace:

When a man acts alone, he always carries within him a certain series of considerations that have, as he supposes, directed his past conduct and serve to justify to him his present action and to lead him to make projects for his future activity.

Assemblies of men act in the same way, only leaving to those who do not take direct part in the action to invent consideration, justifications and projects concerning their combined activity.

For causes, known or unknown to us, the French begin to chop and hack at each other. And to match the event, it is accompanied by its justification in the expressed wills of certain men who declare it essential for the good of France, for the cause of freedom, of equality. Men cease slaughtering one another, and that event is accompanied by the justification of the necessity of centralization of power, of resistance to Europe, and so on. Men march from west to east, killing their fellow-creatures, and this event is accomplished by phrases about the glory of France, the baseness of England, and so on. History teaches us that those justifications for the event are devoid of all common sense, that they are inconsistent with one another, as, for instance, the murder of a man as a result of the declaration of his rights, and the murder of millions in Russia for the abasement of England. But those justifications have an incontestable value in their own day.

They remove moral responsibility from those men who produce the events. At the time they do the work of brooms, that go in front to clear the rails for the train: they clear the path of men’s moral responsibility. Apart from those justifications, no solution could be found for the most obvious question that occurs to one at once on examining any historical event; that is, How did millions of men combine to commit crimes, murders, wars, and so on?

Professor Niebuhr lays bare the mechanism by which morality clothes politics with undeserved dignity and politics transforms morality into an instrument of political domination. It is particularly fascinating to observe how this mechanism operates in the relations between the great imperial and religious structures. The religious structures become imperial in performance and the imperial structures become religious in pretense. Typically, it is politics and imperium as its more dynamic manifestation that transform and corrupt morality and religion, and it is much rarer for morality and religion to reform and spiritualize politics and imperium.

The moral dilemma of history, like its intellectual counterpart, is existential. They can be mitigated but not resolved. Both grow out of the nature of man and of history as man’s creation. In history man meets himself, and in his encounter with history he encounters again, magnified into superhuman proportions, the fallibility of his intellectual understanding and moral judgment that prevents him from completely understanding and adequately judging both history and himself.

Artist and Believer

The life of the artist offers many analogies to the life of faith. The strictness of his way of life, the combination of ascesis and joy, the law of incarnation which limits all false spirituality: such features of the artist's calling carry both rebuke and instruction for the Christian, especially in a time when indulgence and unreality have infected the practice of religion. In today's cultural disarray, moreover, the modern artist in particular has much to teach us bearing on the rediscovery of meaning, the sifting of traditions, the discernment of spirits, and the renewal of the word. The problem of communication for the church today is no less urgent than for the artist. Our elaboration of a new grammar and rhetoric of faith and apologetic can learn much from the new discourse of the poets.

Consider the following passage from Rilke's Les Cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge,' which may be taken as a parable of the religious life and of the fruit it may bear, of how greatness comes to birth.

The young Brigge has written some poetry. Yet, he comments, how little poetry amounts to when written in youth. After a long life, yes, at its very end, after all the buffeting and the myriad and cumulative situations and confrontations -- then perhaps one could write ten lines of good verse. For poetry is not constituted by sentiments (those, indeed, come early enough) but by life experiences.

To write a single line one must have seen many cities, men and things....One must have had the memory of the groans of child-birth, and of the pale and sleeping forms of those who have given birth, their bodies now disburdened. One must also have been with the dying, have watched by the dead with the window open to the sounds of the world's stir outside. And it is not enough to have memories.

It is only when within us they have become blood, outlook, gesture, when they no longer have any name and are indistinguishable from ourselves, it is only then in some rare unexpected moment, out of all this, that the first word of a poem may arise.

This testimony of a great poet offers its clues for the believer, for neither is religion constituted of sentiments. Life is full of sentiments -- lavish, potent, and exquisite -- but they are not the important thing. Many no doubt confuse them with true spirituality. 

Indeed, because they are rebuffed in seeking them in the Christian religion they take umbrage and avoid those churches where something more austere is demanded and offered. Or they form their own cenacles and elaborate their own cults where trite poetizings or unashamed heart throbs or tenuously masked passion itself may with some success pretend to fulfill the role of faith and its utter venture as it wrestles with God.

We need to be aware of the high price of religious faith, and not confuse it with the various aspects and talents of the inner life available to all corners. The analogy of poetry warns us that sentiments, emotions, memories, are but raw ingredients. Sentiments must be proved in life, "experiences" must be digested, emotions and memories must fade and again come to life in character. Then, perhaps, by an unrecognized gestation, a richer and deeper self having taken form, a true prayer may voice itself within us. Under favoring conditions a veil may suddenly be torn aside disclosing the true nature of our human situation and an impulse toward the love of our fellow creatures arise too majestic to dissipate, as do our common benevolences, under the tests of life. Unless some such maturing has taken place, some such price be paid, we are not in a position to recognize the signs and works and wonders of grace or to read with understanding the special rhetoric of faith as we find it in the Scriptures.

All this means selection, rejection, isolation, conflict for the believer as for the artist. The most elementary of all rules here -- peculiarly offensive to the standing mores of our democratic outlook, where the truth that one man is as good as another is extended to condone mediocrity and to isolate and handicap excellence -- this most elementary of all rules is that "a man must break with the existing order of the world and with its interests and values." This demand, which is a truism for the genuine artist, only echoes with varying depths of context the peremptory summons of Jesus to his disciples that found such frequent utterance: "Go, sell whatsoever thou hast. . . ," "Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness." And the new sphere, not of indemnification but rather of surpassingly lavish surpluses of discovery and satisfaction opened up, here and now in this age, is similarly indicated in the special symbols of the time:

There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or fathers, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and for the gospel's, but he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions.2

The analogy of the artist suggests, indeed, both the cost and the rewards of real devotion. For though, on the one hand, he makes himself as it were an Ishmaelite and a eunuch among men through the single-mindedness and intensity with which he pursues a special province among life's many offerings; on the other hand, he achieves a sensibility and a wealth and mastery in that province incommensurate with the common experience. He slowly builds up an unseen edifice of sensibility, a coral reef in the soul of significances and relationships, a house not made with hands of images and imaginings -- an edifice wrought, indeed, out of the common realities, but set in new relations, bathed in the light of the imagination, transfigured not into a false unreality but into their true significance. Thus what began with the daily dust of life and the precisely observed fact of time and sense is now recognized to be a city let down from heaven.

If such a harvest after such a sowing -- whether of the artist or the Christian -- appears strange, difficult, profitless to the man who has taken few steps outside the beaten path, or who has denied himself little, it is not a matter for surprise. These compensations are for the resolute and the reckless. There are those who sally forth toward discovery and achievement, but who, nevertheless, are careful to keep their communications with their base. Their life as men or artists is made up of a shuttling back and forth between the secure and the hazardous. They are commuters between the old and the new, between the sown land and the frontier. The new perspectives are not firmly grasped. But to enter into the new horizons calls for a decisiveness of repudiation and relinquishment, for a certain strain of grimness. Yet out of the grimness arises a greater joy, as "out of the strong came forth sweetness."

A modern poet has well stated the fateful hesitation, the clinging to wonted images, which prevent us from taking the dive into a more significant life. The parable is specially apt for a time of cultural crisis like our own where old securities, whether of faith or "way of life," are undermined. We may prefix to the poem the remark of Rilke: " They would so love to dwell among the signs and meanings that have become precious to them." C. Day Lewis, in the poem, "Questions," shows us how easily we let ourselves be "immobilized" by present seductions which we nevertheless recognize for what they are.

How long will you keep this pose of self-confessed

And aspen hesitation

Dithering on the brink, obsessed

Immobilized by the feminine fascination

Of an image all your own,

Or doubting which is shadow, which is bone?

Will you wait womanish, while the flattering stream

Glosses your faults away?

Or would you find within that dream

Courage to break the dream, wisdom to say

That wisdom is not there?

Or is it simply the first shock you fear?

Do you need the horn in your ear, the hounds at your heel,

Gadflies to sting you sore,

The lightning's angry feint, and all

The horizon clouds boiling like lead, before

You'll risk your javelin dive

And pierce reflection's heart, and come alive?3

There is one further analogy in the work of the artist, particularly of the modern artist, that is worthy of attention here. We may illustrate by the foregoing poem. Reality, we have intimated, whether via art or faith is not easy of attainment; it is difficult. This difficulty inheres also inevitably in the language of genuine art and faith. It is always difficult for us to come alive to that which is beyond us, because it involves death in some measure. The language and symbols of that which is beyond us or new to us are strange until we have lived the new experience, the new relations. If we find the words of Shakespeare or the Bible clear, it is often because we short-cut and shortchange the sense; though to the degree that we have lived the experience and outlook in question we have insight.

The modern arts are difficult because they proceed out of the changed sensibility and experience of our time. The special images, subtleties, and concern of a modern poem like the one quoted above belong to the modern consciousness, and the significance of the poem is open only to those who have known something of the costs involved in the changing moral and psychological patterns of our day. The difficulty of the best modern art is the difficulty of the observer not of the artist. If the observer or reader has not evaded the modern spiritual situation, or lived on its margin, if he has been responsibly concerned with the deeper dilemmas and anguish, public and intimate, of our century and has had some interest in and understanding of the nature of art, he will find that the modern poet or artist speaks to him.

But here we have an analogy of the far richer complex of the Christian consciousness and its grammar and thesaurus. Faith has its own rhetoric, and spiritual things are not only spiritually discerned but are reported in a spiritual tongue. This is not to draw a fixed line between spirit and flesh, or between supernatural and natural. For all that is spiritual is first and indeed always in a sense natural. The language of faith may, however, be difficult and strange because we have not lived through the costs that illuminate it. It is a question of where we live and of our standpoint. The artist has paid his price and offers his vision of the world to those who have to some degree followed him. The modern artist of our world under judgment has exposed his nerves and heart to the fury and desolation of these decades, and can provide meaning for those who have the same initiation. To those who come to the gospel and the Scriptures, not with a wealth of sentiments or a success story of immunities achieved but with a heart exercised in responsibilities, the veiled symbols of vocation and promise will be as their native tongue.

 

FOOTNOTES

1. Paris: Editions Emile-Paul Frères, 1926, pp. 25-26.

2. Mark 10:30.

3. "Questions" from Short Is the Time by C. Day Lewis. Copyright 1940, 1943 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

The Church’s New Concern with the Arts

Evidence of a new interest in the arts on the part of the churches appears on all sides today. At the level of the local church we note exhibits of religious painting and sculpture, productions of modern plays like those of Eliot and Christopher Fry, as well as initiatives with respect to the dance and the pageant. The Riverside Church in New York City has now for two years sponsored an annual anthology of poetry by college writers, judges of which have included Marianne Moore, Richard Eberhart, and Mark Van Doren. Church bodies, local or regional, have also organized series of lectures or institutes bearing on the modern arts. A recent seminar in Religion, Drama and Literature at Drew University, held with the help of the Danforth Foundation under the auspices of the Commission on Literature of the National Council of Churches, attracted a good number of teachers of English. The lecturers included both theologians and distinguished artists. A significant venture last year was that of the New Hampshire Congregational-Christian Conference in association with Dartmouth College in providing a monthly series of lectures for pastors on such writers as Eliot, Kafka, Faulkner, and Camus. In many ways the churches are making amends for their shortcomings in this field.

It is certainly possible to be overly optimistic about such signs of interest in the arts on the part of Christians. It may well be that most of this interest is confined to relatively small groups. Matters like taste are hard to change. The re-education of the emotions is no doubt more difficult than that of the reason, if the two can be separated. The re-education of the imagination is still more difficult. Here, indeed, what is required is no less than a conversion. In his discussion of Catholic art in France, in L’Art Sacré, Père Régamey well documents the resistances to the significant new initiatives in ecclesiastical architecture and art, not only among the masses of believers but among Catholic intellectuals. He confesses quite desperately that the situation is all but hopeless, though the witness must still be borne. He cites encouraging examples of the reconciliation of those who were first scandalized, once they had actually become familiar with such new departures as the church at Assy or the chapel at Vence— familiar, that is, not by observation but by worship itself in these buildings.

Our hope for significant changes of attitude in this whole area must rest finally not so much on aesthetic instruction and "propaganda" in the good sense, but on the combination of this with profound cultural impulses today which affect the attitudes of men to faith and its forms. Revolutionary changes in life as a whole empty older symbols of their meaning, and men are ready then to respond to new symbols or new forms of old symbols that speak to the new situation.

More significant today than the church’s activity in connection with the ecclesiastical arts is the deeper motivation which is revolutionizing the church’s whole attitude to symbolic expression. Even those churches which we call liturgical, and which have maintained a positive attitude toward the arts, have recognized a new dimension in this area. The historical study of Christian art has quickened, and been quickened by, the new recognition of the importance of the symbolic element in religion and life. The historian of religion, generally, has learned to assign more significance to myth, ritual and art in the understanding of the world’s faith. Psychology and anthropology have contributed their insights to the matter.

Thus the perceptive theologian today sees the arts not merely as servants of the church in the sense of embellishments of worship or strategies for religious propaganda. Nor is he satisfied to set the arts, as an inspirational resource, over against daily life, and to say that religion must use the sources of the Spirit—meaning Beauty, Poetry and Imagination— over against the prosaic and utilitarian world in which modern men live. Here we have the idealistic fallacy. Such a dichotomy of prose and poetry, of actuality and dreams, or of realism and imagination, is really an escape philosophy. It disparages art and worship as mere consolations, and surrenders over the actual life of men as, in effect, unredeemable. It capitulates to the banishment of the arts and worship from a materialistic world, from a rational-technological age.

The critics and lovers of art who everlastingly appeal to Beauty and to the Spirit are always the first ones to reject a T. S. Eliot or a Faulkner, a Picasso or a Stravinsky; only much later, under the force of overwhelming evidence, to give them a grudging approval.

The theologian today recognizes that even the materialist lives not by creature comforts, prosperity and success, but by his own symbols and images, his own myths and rituals. He recognizes that the conflict today is not between matter and spirit, but between two kinds of spirit; not between prose and imagination, but between a true and false imagination; not even, finally, between ugliness and beauty, because what some would call beauty and ideality cannot save.

What finally is important is the symbol and the kind of symbol, the imagery and the kind of imagery, the myth and the kind of myth. For symbols convey truth or error. They mediate illusion or reality. Sentimental symbols of aspiration, dreams and ideality may effect temporary reflexes of beatitude or induce charmed states of euphoria, but this is escapism. This is religious romanticism, and not true religion, much less Christianity. At one time, it is true, Christian transcendentalism, like Christian Platonism, incorporated a substantial core of the Christian view of man and evil, so as to constitute a valid version of Christian theology. But these strains of Christian idealism have been attenuated and washed out in a great flood of religious and secular sentimentalism.

The best theology today, in its repudiation of a rhetorical religious idealism, finds itself in agreement with a recurrent note in contemporary poetry. Hebraic concreteness is more at home with modern verse than is Greek Platonism. T. S. Eliot said of Henry James that he had a "mind so fine, no idea [we add: no ideal] could violate it." The poets at least ask, with Marianne Moore, for "real toads in imaginary gardens." The theme which runs through the glorious celebration of the imagination in Wallace Stevens is the same:

We keep coming back and coming back

To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns

That fall upon it out of the wind We seek

Nothing beyond reality. Within it

Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana . . .

( From "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.)

Not grim

Reality, but reality grimly seen. (Ibid)

These things are said everywhere in Stevens. The "festival sphere" of the imagination, he says, begins from the "crude collops."

The poet Richard Wilbur recurs to a similar theme. Take, for example, his poem, "A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness." The poem describes the alluring but accursed mirages of the goal of the mystic and the idealist. The poet is advised to turn back from the "long empty oven of the desert to the real world and its homely objects: here is

¼ The spirit’s right

Oasis, light incarnate.

(From Ceremony and Other Poems, Copyright 1948, 1949, 1950 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace. Inc).

A sound theological critique of the insipid idealism which prevails so widely still in Christian circles receives a notable reinforcement in the extraordinary book, Mimesis, by Erich Auerbach. This study of the contribution of Hebraic and early Christian realism to world literature in effect draws out the corollaries of the Incarnation for the aesthetic order. It constitutes a radical challenge to classical and humanistic axioms with regard to beauty and art, not in the form of an apologetic diatribe but rather of a masterly study in comparative literature. It becomes evident that the Hebraic-Christian concern with all humble and lowly and earthy reality in man and the world opens the way to the most significant life of the imagination. Here a Christian approach to art and symbol will rejoin much of the most influential artistic criticism of the last decade or two.

One may illustrate the new maturity in religious attitudes to the arts by noticing what has gone on in the theological seminaries in recent years. In times past, theological training was concerned, as indeed it always should be, with the professional and ecclesiastical aspects of the arts. The future minister was given, so far as possible, some introduction to his later responsibilities as one concerned with church music and hymnody, though even here he was often later at the mercy of his director of music. Some real effort was made in many seminaries to further his acquaintance with literature. There was here a dim carry-over of the ancient claims of rhetoric on the preacher. And indeed, the preacher should be, in the ancient sense, a grammarian, at home in letters, languages, eloquence and the classics. Both for his own spiritual culture and for the enrichment of preaching, courses were and are offered in English poetry as in the world’s classics of devotion.

The new interest in the arts in the seminaries and among theologians contrasts sharply to the approaches mentioned. It is no longer only a question of the Sacred Lyre and the cultural and professional formation of the clergy. More urgent today is the whole question of imaginative vehicles, of symbolization, in religion. The semantic question in religious discourse is raised, and the whole problem of communication. Almost every department of theological study is involved at this level, and this means not only attention to the symbols and images of the Christian faith; it also means attention to the symbols and images and art forms of the contemporary world, as they are encountered in literature and the fine arts, but also in popular expressions, community rituals, social ideologies, and not least in the mass media of the time.

We realize better today that society lives by its myths, its favorable symbols; these are not idle or interchangeable. The Cross is not interchangeable with the Crescent or Lotus. The Cross is one thing, and the Swastika is another. The Sheaf of Wheat is one thing, and the Fascis is another. The "Battle Hymn of the Republic" is one thing, and the "Internationale" is another. The Lincoln Memorial is one thing, and the Tomb of Lenin is another.

Society lives by its symbols, and society represents a battleground of competing symbols. Sometimes they battle to the death. They signify sometimes a devitalizing stalemate within a family or nation of incompatible loyalties and banners: In France, the French Revolution and Catholic order; in our Southern states, ancient nostalgias and a genuine agrarian humanism—each with their evocative emblems.

Social responsibility and discernment require a clear perception of such rival myths and their power, recognition of such competing visions and rituals, ability to exorcize those that are malign, and to reconcile those that are benign. Society lives by its images, but its life is often stagnant and moribund where the living images fail. In either case, the church must recognize the situation. It is important to discern the real, activating myths of civilization from the formal clichés of political orators. A democratic society may proclaim its democratic dogmas, but the same society may be governed by undemocratic nostalgias and passions fed by obsolete dreams. The church itself may proclaim its Christian principles, but Christians may be ruled by sub-Christian imaginations.

Archibald MacLeish well states the importance of the myths of an age, what happens when they fail, and the responsibility of the poet, and, we may add, the believer, in renewing them.

A world ends when its metaphor has died.

An age becomes an age, all else beside,

When sensuous poets in their pride invent

Emblems for the soul’s consent

That speak the meanings men will never know

But man-imagined images can show:

It perishes when those images, though seen,

No longer mean . .( From "Hypocrit Auteur" in Collected Poems: 1917—1952. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Muffin Company.)

The main point is that when we say Art, we say Image; and when we say Image or Symbol, we say Meaning, we say Communication. The arts, old and new, the fine arts, the practical arts and the popular arts, are peculiarly carriers of meaning and value in our society as in all societies. The church is learning that it cannot ignore such expressions of the society in which it lives. The encounter of the gospel with the world, whether in evangelism, religious education, apologetics, or theology, requires a deep appreciation of, and initiation into, the varied symbolic expressions of culture. It is in such manifestations at all levels that the moral and spiritual life of the age discloses itself.

The appreciation of the modern arts in certain church circles today is therefore one of the most important features of the whole situation. It is one aspect of the awakening of the churches generally to a better knowledge of the world about them. It is indispensable to the purification of the sacred arts. More important still, it will contribute to a new theological seriousness, a greater discrimination in the matter of Christian symbols. In some periods, Christians need to be awakened from their dogmatic slumbers; and this is still widely the case, for dogmatism destroys sensibility as the letter kills. But today it is widely true that the churches need to be awakened from their undogmatic slumber, in the sense that they have lost the sense of the fateful issues of good and evil, of salvation and damnation. This kind of salutory shock is provided by the modern arts, and not only by Christian but by agnostic artists and writers.

Dialogue at Christmas

One of the minim burst in on the Rabbi and exclaimed: "The Messiah has come!" The Rabbi went to the window and looked out, and demurred: "Nothing has changed."

"As of old,

seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, day and night;

a generation goes and a generation comes

but the earth remaineth the same

What is crooked is not made straight.

As of old,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace;

there is nothing new under the sun.

The king tarrieth.

What is wanting is not made up."

Nevertheless, the Kingdom has come;

Behind the scenes, a clandestine irruption;

A fission in the world’s grain,

A benign conflagration.

O Lord, open the eyes of thy servant:

Behold, the mountain full of horses and chariots of fire.

Nothing has changed? But listen:

Tellurian tremors,

Convulsions at the earth’s core,

The silent collapse of parapets.

Moorings have parted

And we are carried away into new latitudes.

The Kingdom cometh not with observation,

But it has overtaken us

Dispelling old obsessions.

Therefore this dancing through iron doors,

This singing our way through blind walls,

This mocking of old hierarchic dooms,

Levitation across impassable wastes.

Therefore these hilarities, against all reason

and charities welling up for no cause,

Righteousness appears from nowhere, like dew,

The earth opens and springs in the furrow

And the angels acclaim it from pole to pole.’

Christianity and the Status Quo



After World War I there emerged a form of international "idealism" which was gravely weakened by legalistic and pharisaical heresies. It involved a system which was very convenient for the French and the British: It outlawed any attack by external powers on existing empires; it vetoed even international action on issues which such empires might regard as internal; and at the same time it rendered illegitimate for all the future any attempt on the part of a new power to build up similar empires on parallel methods. The resort to violence was condemned without regard to the provocation that might have been given, but protection was assured for imperial systems which were held together only by the latent operation of force. This form of internationalism was bound to function in fact, therefore, as a gigantic machine for the freezing of the status quo. An enemy might say of the system that the most unscrupulous experimenter in Realpolitik could not have devised a cleverer way of maintaining an empire which lacked the material force for its defense in a competitive world. With their bags full of plunder, France and Britain declared: "There shall be no more competition; there shall be no more stealing now."

The supporters of this type of internationalism were more virtuous than would appear from this account of the system—an account rather from the point of view of those who were not interested in its maintenance. Such supporters were not so clearly conscious of the end which the system served, though they were aware that they were parties to forms of imperialism which could only survive under a regime of stabilization and peace. They were virtuous in a way, for in politics there is some virtue in a power that marries its private interests to a universal cause, an international good. But they were unimaginatively pharisaical, because their internationalism coincided with their vested interests and, therefore, it was comparatively easy for them to be virtuous and to act as lovers of peace. The real test of the virtue of Britain and France was bound to come when they found themselves in a position analogous to that of the Hapsburgs in 1914—when, as declining empires, they would be faced with the decision whether they would consent to go under without making a last desperate fight.

Under the legalistic kind of internationalism described above, it is not possible to prevent issues and problems from developing to the point of desperation. Nor is it possible to prevent occasions from arising which will provide plausible opportunities for violent action on the part of a state or a people that feels itself the victim of injustice. The kind of internationalism which implies the legalistic defense of the status quo is, in fact, more calculated to provoke a sudden act of violence than the system of diplomatic relations which existed before 1914 and which allowed for a greater degree of "give-and-take." In the latter case men do learn that it may be necessary to concede something in order to release the tension; they do not simply dig themselves in, relying on the whole international order to halt any attempt to change the status quo.

In the hands of men who evaded the real moral issues and who were narrower in their comprehension than so many of the statesmen of the nineteenth century, it is a question whether the established form in internationalism produced a single new idea of any significance between 1919 and 1939. It is a question, in fact, whether before 1914 there did not exist diplomatic methods for meeting crises which were lost or rendered inapplicable owing to legalistic prejudices in the after-period. Let it never be suggested in any case that between 1919 and 1939 a regime was established in Europe which made it more difficult for aggressors and dictators to arise—more difficult for men to resort to the politics of the coup d’etat or to take the world by surprise—than in the preceding generations.

The Franco-British adventure in the Suez has taken the mask away from the internationalism which seeks to "police" the status quo. But the leaders of the Suez enterprise have perhaps been too uncharitably condemned, for they merely brought the older system to its climax (which happens also to be its reductio ad absurdum )—they merely carried a stage further the kind of policy they had been pursuing all their lives. Precisely because it was one of the points of weakness in the older system, "colonialism" has become a primary issue, and three large sections of the globe—the Communists, the United States and the Afro-Asian bloc— have made their separate and varying attacks upon that order of things. And the fact that Britain feels that she has conceded much already, and that she has performed many acts of generosity, is no answer to those who insist that she had no right to what she possessed, no right to the things which she was pretending to give away. Colonies do not present the only issue, however, and Nasser’s own attack has been extended against very indirect forms of "colonialism"; nor is it clear that he would allow himself to be humoured or bribed into becoming a satellite of the West which after all is not so very different a matter. The point is that we are in the position of Metternich—and Time is bound to be against us— in the face of the new forces that have emerged in the world, we merely seek to hold the fort, to dam the flood, to cling to the existing status quo.

There are some who believe that time and custom, prescriptive right and continuity of possession are good grounds for retaining territory or economic privileges or various forms of property. The war of 1914—in its effects on the Hapsburg Empire or on Germany’s overseas possessions, for example—shook the very basis of such "legitimist" doctrine; and in a wider sense France and Britain should have the credit for the democratic ideas and the nationalist teaching which are working to their detriment at the present day.

We are still faced with the question: how can we have an international order that will not simply freeze the status quo by its legalistic insistence on the sanctity of the existing order? Even in the eighteenth century it was recognized that the internal development (perhaps the economic development) of one state or another might change the distribution of power in the world and change even the distribution of rights, so that treaties would need revision. Today the existence of an international order depends on our discovery of some method (other than war or revolution or similar acts of violence) for the changing of the status quo.

The Communists are bound to have the strategic advantage if they are promoting change, with the wind at their back, while the Western powers are desperately struggling merely to keep the barriers firm. Since public opinion, or world opinion, or the opinion of governments in general has become a powerful factor in the situation, and since the West must depend very much on capturing the opinion and the sympathy of what might be called the uncommitted powers, our future is going to depend on the kind of internationalism which does not attempt to freeze the existing situation in a legalistic manner but takes the lead in predicting and preparing the necessary changes in the status quo.

On this view England and France were at fault in that, years ago, they did not foresee how precarious was their situation in the Suez. They ought to have placed the Canal on an international basis so clear and unobjectionable that Nasser would have had neither the motive nor the opportunity for behaving as he did in 1956.

One of the dangers presented by the Afro-Asian peoples—and indeed by all countries which are newly awakened—is that of excessive nationalism. Yet excessive nationalism is just one of those things which expand through any effort to repress them; it is quickened by any suggestion of "colonialism" and stimulated even by the memory of such a thing, and it resents paternalist treatment. There is poor hope for the world if the newly arisen peoples share the infatuations and make the mistakes which characterized the European states at the period when they were at the same stage of development—the same stage of political consciousness.

Yet while the Afro-Asian peoples are still in a sense unachieved— still not formidable as autonomous and well-constituted powers—there is always a danger that if the Western nations withdraw their interest from them, a vacuum will be formed, a vacuum which Soviet Russia will infallibly try to fill. If "colonialism" exists it provokes resentment; if it exists merely in economic forms that seem more appropriate to our age, it is still going to lead to difficulties, and danger is going to arise if the Western nations imagine that all problems can be solved by the power of money. It would be to our interests if the Arab nations were thoroughly modern states, completely independent and autonomous. In fact, their genuine transformation and development are things that cannot happen as quickly as we want them to happen. If they were free, strong, independent modern states, or if they formed a powerful autonomous bloc, the great Russian mass is so very much on the top of them and the danger of the Communist kind of "colonialism" is so real, that nothing could prevent their being on our side in the event of a conflict with communism. Nothing could prevent their being on our side except the suspicion that we retained designs of direct or indirect "colonialism," or the memory of humiliations suffered in the past.

The genius of Britain, discovered both in the internal relations of the home country and in the various parts of its actual Empire, is a curiously flexible method for the changing of the status quo—a method which prevented crises from reaching the desperation point, ensured the gradual development of liberty, and provided a model of the kind of change which is just in time to anticipate the resort to violence. It has never been easy to secure the extension of the same technique to the realm of international affairs; and in some respects it is possible that the traditional diplomatic methods (or a continuation of the development they were undergoing already) were more capable of the required flexibility than the legalistic methods which, tended to characterize the more recent types of internationalism. This would seem to be one of the things which the world requires at the present day. And a Christianity that disengages itself from the defense of the status quo is well fitted to carry on the required conflict—the fundamental moral conflict of our time—the conflict against legalistic and pharisaical notions of righteousness.

About Questions of Guilt



You are concerned with the question of guilt and about this I have much to say. First of all: I have never suggested that the German people as a whole are responsible for and guilty of the Nazi crimes, but again and again I have said that we have no right to throw all the guilt onto the shoulders of the bad Nazis and to pretend that we are innocent.

Again and again I have stressed: We are probably all murderers, thieves and sadists, but we have done little or nothing to stop the evil, and beyond all, we, that is the Church, have failed, for we knew the wrong and the right path, but we did not warn the people and allowed them to rush forward to their doom. I do not exclude myself from this guilt; on the contrary, I stress at every opportunity that I too have failed, for I too have been silent when I should have spoken!

It is just those who have done nothing and who have risked nothing and who have confessed nothing who now do not want to hear any guilt mentioned. However, I found among my co-prisoners much real repentance and know from my own bitter and spiritual experiences: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! And this I know in view of the crimes which our fellow Germans have committed against the members of their own nation and those of other nations. First of all we have to be conscious of the question of guilt. If we do not face this, and if we do not turn away to confess to ourselves and to God that we took the wrong path out of our fear and our disbelief, then we shall remain banned from the society of men and no prophet will arise to bring us the comfort of the word of God into our darkness. And if we now begin to talk of the sins of the others, after we have filled the world with torture, blood and corpses, with ruins and desolation, then I can only reply: All this is only an ounce compared with the terrible weight with which we have burdened our conscience. I say this after having been in Berlin for twelve days; in Berlin where there is hardly a woman who has not been dishonored and where death stalks as nowhere in the world, except not so long ago in Poland and Czechoslovakia and in Western Russia! How did it happen that there were only forty-five Protestant clergy in Dachau as compared with 450 Roman Catholic priests? Probably you have never seen the inside of a gas chamber; probably you have never stood outside the crematorium in Dachau in which a quarter million human beings have been burned: to see this means losing one’s senses.

No, the Church has not been victorious, she has betrayed her Lord and her Savior by saying again and again: I do not know this Man. She knew what was happening, but pretended that these victims did not concern her. How are we going to be able to hear the words of grace if we do not recognize our sin?

Everywhere I find people who justify themselves saying: I might have lost my life; perhaps I risked my position and occupation. There are still countless people today who ask: "Was it really as bad as the newspapers tell us ?" and I always answer them: "No, it was not as bad, it was infinitely worse!" There are many excuses which people can find, but they all follow the strain: "Am I my brother’s keeper ?" You should have seen that self-satisfied clergy at Treysa! "We led the people along the right path; the Church has not failed, we taught the pure doctrine and did not wander into the maze of Arian Christianity." (Arius, who lived in the fourth century, taught that our Lord was not God himself, but created by God.)

Please consider the matter in a new light. If one does this, one ceases to enquire about the sins of others. One becomes quite small and experiences the great revelation that the Son of God died to save men such as we. Then, a hidden abyss opens in front of us into which we throw ourselves—to fall into the arms of our Redeemer. But the self-satisfied who walk on the surface, who have ten times as much to eat as the poor people of Berlin and a hundred times as much as those thousands who wander along the roads in the East, who still close their eyes to the fact that the judgment has begun with the House of God, they will not experience this. The sweetest words of comfort will be lost, because when the truth appears, the earth opens itself to swallow up Korah and his company, who took it upon themselves to become priests without the call of God.

No, the Church has not been victorious, she has failed and is failing still because she assumes that the judgment that is passed around her applies to the world but not to herself. You must understand that this is my concern, which for the sake of the Church and for the sake of my people, I shall not abandon, that no one should lose the chance for forgiveness which still is being offered to us, perhaps for the last time in the history of our people. And yet the people talk of relief work and pacify their conscience when they have sprinkled another drop of water onto a hot stone; they talk of the only true doctrine of the Lutheran Church and of the necessity to hold oneself apart from the Calvinists, and other such blasphemies, and the knife of God is at their throat and they refuse to believe it. Look, I only preach of forgiveness and comfort, but comfort and forgiveness for the men who bend their head before God and his judgment, as the publican did in the parable, and as the Church should do it today. I know what joyful songs of praise the hungry and starving parishes in the East sing today; I have stood among them and my eyes have filled with tears, which does not happen easily. I want to return to these people who do not accuse anyone because they may suffer injustice, but to praise God that he has shown them his mercy in the midst of his judgment. No, we are not criminals, we have murdered no one, we have robbed no one, we have not lustfully and intentionally tortured; but also, we no longer think ourselves superior to those people who have done such things, because we know of our own guilt, and, in the midst of this guilt, we know of the one great wonder, the mercy of God in giving us his only-begotten Son.

This seems a strange letter and I do not know whether it has at all convinced you. He who has seen and experienced what I have seen and experienced no longer approaches these things with cold reasoning, he ceases to compare and weigh the sins of men, but he also no longer asks how his enemies may react. That counts no longer, or it counts only in so far as these very enemies will also one day be suddenly terrified, and many are so already. If God will listen to our prayers, then the eyes, ears and hearts of these enemies will be opened to receive the one redeeming message which can vanquish all the ghastly machinations of men and the devil on this earth. The Lord protect you, and believe me: I love my people as much as anyone, just now in its guilt I love it with the love with which Christ has loved me, and I will not owe him this love for one day of my life. Therefore I speak as I do.

Who Am I?

Who am I? They often tell me

I stepped from my cell’s confinement

Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,

Like a squire from his country-house.

Who am I? They often tell me

I used to speak to my warders

Freely and friendly and clearly,

As though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me

I bore the days of misfortune

Equably, smilingly, proudly,

Like one accustomed to win.

 

Am I then really all that which other men tell of?

Or am I only what I myself know of myself?

Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,

Struggling for breath, as though hands were

compressing my throat,

Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,

Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,

Tossing in expectation of great events,

Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,

Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,

Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

 

Who am I? This or the other?

Am I one person today and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,

And before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?

Or is something within me still like a beaten army,

Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, Thou knowest, 0 God, I am Thine!

 

March 4,1946

 

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On Anti-Semitism

I have already spoken of anti-Semitism many times. I never would have thought that I would have to do so in connection with anti-Semitic laws promulgated by a French government—which are a denial of the traditions and the spirit of my country. I am well aware that these decrees have been adopted under German pressure and through the machinations of Laval. I also know that the French people by and large are astounded at and disgusted with these laws. The fact remains, however, that the Vichy leaders have enforced anti-Semitic laws in a more and more strict and iniquitous fashion, depriving French Jews of every governmental and cultural position, imposing upon them all kinds of restrictions with regard to liberal and commercial professions, mercilessly striking many of them who were wounded for their country during the present war, and hypocritically trying to hide a bad conscience under a pseudonational pathos in which religious and racial considerations are shamefully mixed. A small part of the bourgeoisie and the country gentry, poisoned by filthy newspapers, is letting itself be permeated by racist baseness. Anti-Semitic German films are shown in movie-theaters even in the unoccupied part of France, and we have been told that a Catholic periodical was suspended for one month for having boldly protested against such an action. Despite innumerable private testimonies of help and solidarity given—often at great risk—to persecuted Jews, despite innumerable touching signs of friendship and fidelity that dismissed Jewish professors received from their students, no public protest has been made by any educational body; and some new corporative institutions, among the liberal professions, are willingly admitting a kind of numerus clausus.

The psychic poisons are more active than the physical ones; it is unfortunately inevitable that, little by little, many souls should bow down. If the anti-Semitic regulations and propaganda are to endure for some years, we may imagine that many weak people will resign themselves to the worst. They will think that, after all, the concentration camps are more comfortable for their neighbors than the Jews say, and finally they will find themselves perfectly able to look at or contribute to the destruction of their friends, with the smile of a clear conscience (life must go on!). I have firm confidence in the natural virtues and the moral resistance of the common people of France. I know we must trust them; yet it is not only in thinking of the Jews, but in thinking of my country that I feel horrified by the anti-Semitic corruption of souls that is being furthered in France by a leadership that still dares speak of honor.

It is also for Christianity that I fear. Perhaps the danger is greater in countries that have not—not as yet—experienced Nazi terrorism. We have been told that in some countries of South America anti-Semitism is spreading among some sections of Catholic youth and Catholic intellectuals, despite the teachings of the Pope and the efforts of their own bishops. It is impossible to compromise with anti-Semitism; it carries in itself, as in a living germ, all the spiritual evil of Nazism. Anti-Semitism is the moral Fifth Column in the Christian conscience.

"Spiritually we are Semites," Pius XI said. "Anti-Semitism is unacceptable." I should like to emphasize in this paper the spiritual aspect of this question.

May I point out that the most impressive Christian formulas concerning the spiritual essence of anti-Semitism may be found in a book recently published by a Jewish writer who seems himself strangely unaware of their profoundly Christian meaning. I do not know whether Maurice Samuel shares even in Jewish piety; perhaps he is a God-seeking soul deprived of any definite dogmas, believing himself to be "freed" from any trust in divine revelation, of either the Old or the New Covenant. The testimony that he brings appears all the more significant because prophetic intuitions are all the more striking when they pass through slumbering or stubborn prophets who perceive only in an obscure way what they convey to us.

"We shall never understand," Mr. Samuel says, "the maniacal, world-wide seizure of anti-Semitism unless we transpose the terms. It is of Christ that the Nazi-Fascists are afraid; it is in his omnipotence that they believe; it is he that they are determined madly to obliterate. But the names of Christ and Christianity are too overwhelming, and the habit of submission to them is too deeply ingrained after centuries and centuries of teaching. Therefore they must, I repeat, make their assault on those who were responsible for the birth and spread of Christianity. They must spit on the Jews as the ‘Christ-killers’ because they long to spit on the Jews as the Christ-givers." (Maurice Samuel, The Great Hatred. New York, 1940)

The simple fact of feeling no sympathy for the Jews or being more sensitive to their faults than to their virtues is not anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is fear, scorn and hatred of the Jewish race or people, and a desire to subject them to discriminative measures. There are many forms and degrees of anti-Semitism. Not to speak of the demented forms we are facing at present, it can take the form of a supercilious nationalist and aristocratic bias of pride and prejudice; or a plain desire to rid oneself of competitors; or a routine of vanity fair; or even an innocent verbal mania. In reality no one is innocent. In each one the seed is hidden, more or less inert or active, of that spiritual disease which today throughout the world is bursting out into a homicidal, myth-making phobia, and the secret soul of which is resentment against the Gospel: "Christophobia."

Leon Bloy said that the "veil" to which Saint Paul refers and which covers the eyes of Israel is now passing "from the Jews to the Christians." This statement, which is harsh on the Gentiles and on the Christian distorters of Christianity, helps us understand something of the extensive and violent persecution of which the Jews today are victims, and of the spiritual upheaval that has been going on for years among many of them, denoting deep inward changes, particularly in respect to the person of Christ.

The growing solicitude in Israel’s heart for the Just Man crucified through the error of the high priests is a symptom of unquestionable importance. Today in America representative Jewish writers like Sholem Asch and Waldo Frank are trying to reintegrate the Gospel into the brotherhood of Israel. While not yet recognizing Jesus as the Messiah, they do recognize him as the most pure Jewish figure in human history. They themselves would be disturbed to be considered as leaning toward Christianity. Yet while remaining closer than ever to Judaism, they believe that the Gospel transcends the Old Testament and consider it a divine flower issuing from the stem of the Patriarchs and the Prophets. Never forgetful of the conflicts of history and of the harsh treatment received by their people, the authors of Salvation and of The New Discovery of America have long known and loved mediæval Christianity and Catholic spiritual life. They agree with Maurice Samuel that "Christophobia" is the spiritual essence of the demoniacal racism of our pagan world. Many other signs give evidence that Israel is beginning to open its eyes, whereas the eyes of many self-styled Christians are blinded, darkened by the exhalations of the old pagan blood suddenly, ferociously welling up once more among Gentiles.

"Jesus Christ is in agony until the end of the world," said Pascal. Christ suffers in every innocent man who is persecuted. His agony is heard in the cries of so many human beings humiliated and tortured, in the suffering of all those images and likenesses of God treated worse than beasts. He has taken all these things upon himself, he has suffered every wound. "Fear not, my child, I have already travelled that road. On each step of the abominable way I have left for you a drop of my blood and the print of my mercy."

But in the mystical body of the Church, the surplus humanity that Christ finds in each of the members of this his body is called upon, insofar as each is a part of the whole, to participate in the work of this body, which is the redemption continued throughout time. Through and in the passion of his mystical body, Christ continues actively to perform the task for which he came; he acts as the Savior and Redeemer of mankind.

Israel’s passion is not a co-redemptive passion, achieving for the eternal salvation of souls what is lacking (as concerns application, not merits) in the Savior’s sufferings. It is suffered for the goading on of the world’s temporal life. In itself, it is the passion of a being caught up in the temporal destiny of the world, which both irritates the world and seeks to emancipate it, and on which the world avenges itself for the pangs of its history. This does not mean that Christ is absent from the passion of Israel. Could he forget his people, who are still loved because of their fathers and to whom have been made promises without repentance? Jesus Christ suffers in the passion of Israel. In striking Israel, the anti-Semites strike him, insult him and spit on him. To persecute the house of Israel is to persecute Christ, not in his mystical body as when the Church is persecuted, but in his fleshly lineage and in his forgetful people whom he ceaselessly loves and calls. In the passion of Israel, Christ suffers and acts as the shepherd of Zion and the Messiah of Israel, in order gradually to conform his people to him. If there are any in the world today—but where are they ?—who give heed to the meaning of the great racist persecutions and who try to understand this meaning, they will see Israel as drawn along the road to Calvary, by reason of that very vocation which I have indicated, and because the slave merchants will not pardon Israel for the demands it and its Christ have implanted in the heart of the world’s temporal life, demands that will ever cry "no" to the tyranny of force. Despite itself Israel is climbing Calvary, side by side with Christians—whose vocation concerns the kingdom of God more than the temporal history of the world; and these strange companions are at times surprised to find each other mounting the same path. As in Marc Chagall’s beautiful painting, the poor Jews, without understanding it, are swept along in the great tempest of the Crucifixion, around Christ who is stretched

"Across the lost world¼

At the four corners of the horizon

Fire and Flames

Poor Jews from everywhere are walking

No one claims them

They have no place on the earth

To rest—not a stone

The wandering Jews¼

( Raïssa Maritain, Chagall (Lettre de Nuit).

The central fact, which has its deepest meaning for the philosophy of history and for human destiny—and which no one seems to take into account—is that the passion of Israel today is taking on more and more distinctly the form of the Cross.

Christ crucified extends his arms toward both Jews and Gentiles; he died, St. Paul says, in order to reconcile the two peoples, and to break down the dividing barrier of enmity between them. "For he is our peace, he that hath made both one, and hath broken down the dividing barrier of enmity. He hath brought to naught in his flesh the law of commandments framed in decrees, that in himself he might create of the two one new man, and make peace and reconcile both in one body to God through the cross, slaying by means thereof their enmity." (St. Paul, Ephesians 2:14-16)

If the Jewish people did not hear the call made to them by the dying Christ, yet do they remain ever summoned. If the Gentiles indeed heard the call, now racist paganism casts them away from it and from him who is our peace. Anti-Semitic hatred is a directly anti-Christic frenzy to make vain the blood of Jesus and to make void his death. Agony now is the way of achieving that reconciliation, that breaking down of the barrier of enmity—which the madness of men prevented love from accomplishing, and the frustration of which is the most refined torment in the sufferings of the Messiah—a universal agony in the likeness of that of the Savior, both the agony of the racked, abandoned Jews and of the racked, abandoned Christians who live by faith. More than ever, the mystical body of Christ needs the people of God. In the darkness of the present day, that moment seems invisibly to be in preparation, however remote it still may be, when their reintegration, as St. Thomas puts it, will "call back to life the Gentiles, that is to say the lukewarm faithful, when ‘on account of the progress of iniquity, the charity of a great number shall have waxed cold’ (Matthew I4:I2)."(St.Thomas Aquinas, in ep. ad Romanos, xi, lect. 2.)