THE fundamental fact that lies behind the present war is the disintegration of Western culture.
Not that civilisation is faced by the prospect of a new "dark age" in the same way that the Roman world was at the time of the barbarian invasions. It is rather a disintegration from within, such as Rome experienced centuries before the coming of the barbarians when her material power was at its height.
The problem of the Western world to-day arises from the difficulty of adapting the cultural ideals and the political institutions that had developed in this restricted field to the new world of large-scale mass States.
We see the tendency of culture to deteriorate in quality as it increases in quantity, and for the cruder and less highly developed political traditions to reassert themselves over the more delicate and civilised ones.
In the world to-day we see the decline of democracy and the revival of a new type of absolutism in Central and Western Europe.
The conclusion would seem to be that the cause of democracy is hopeless and that Western Europe is fated to become the prey of totalitarian autocracies which grow progressively bigger and worse.
The divisions in our civilisation, however exaggerated by racial and nationalist propaganda, are more superficial than at first appears. Beneath the ideological conflicts which divide the modern world there lie the old theological conflicts which were ignored during the last two centuries of material progress, but which nevertheless have left a profound trauma in the European soul.
The more we can bring to light these hidden sources of conflict, the more hope there will be of a spiritual reconciliation which is the only true foundation of international peace. There are three problems to be considered: the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom, the division between Catholic and Protestant Europe, and the internal divisions of Protestantism itself. The religious division between the East and the West coincides with a very clearly cut cultural division which separates Eastern and Western Europe. The Orthodox Christendom of Russia and the Balkans was for centuries a closed world to the Latin West. For the Orthodox Russian of the later Middle Ages the Christian West did not exist; and after the fall of Byzantium and the Turkish conquest of the Balkans nothing existed save Russia herself, the Third Rome. Thus behind the closed world of the Soviet Republics, with its absolute identification with Communist ideology and its absolute submission to the Communist dictator there lies the closed world of Orthodox Russia with its absolute identification with the Orthodox Church and its absolute submission to the Orthodox tzar.
The State itself was finally captured by the secular Messianism of the revolutionary intelligentsia, which thus created the earliest and most complete form of the new totalitarian absolutism. The totalitarian idea was not Fascist or Italian or German in origin. It was a distinctively Russian creation which could not have arisen without centuries of cultural segregation and politico-religious unity. In Western Christendom both the religious and the cultural development are infinitely more complex. Here the religious divisions are of comparatively recent date and throughout a large part of Europe they are confused and indistinct. The countries which have taken the leading part in the development of modern culture, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, the United Kingdom and the United States, have also been divided in religion in varying degrees. Within the Protestant world we find the seeds of the spiritual conflict which to-day divides Western civilisation, and although the theological divisions were never profound and are now almost ignored, they have had historical consequences of incalculable importance. Nothing, in fact, is more striking than the way in which Lutheranism and Calvinism, in spite of their fundamental theological agreement, have produced or helped to produce totally different social attitudes and political traditions.
For while Lutheranism almost from the beginning adopted a passive attitude towards the State and accepted a highly conservative and even patriarchal conception of political authority, Calvinism has proved a revolutionary force in European and American history and has provided the moral dynamic element in the great expansion of bourgeois culture. How is this contrast to be explained? To a great extent, no doubt, it is due to accidental circumstances which confined Lutheranism to the static territorial States of Germany and Scandinavia, and brought Calvinism into relation with the rising commercial communities of the Netherlands and England. But this is not all. For the contrast is already present in the thought and personality of the two protagonists. Luther's political quietism is not simply the result of his social environment, It springs from the deepest roots of his religious experience. In spite of his super-Augustinian opposition of the Church and the world, Luther never regarded the State as evil or criticised temporal authority.
He himself said, "I have written about the secular authority as glorious and useful as no teacher has done since the time of the Apostles, excepting possibly St. Augustine." Still more important is the emphasis that, he lays on the acceptance by the individual of his place in the social order as the divinely ordered means of his sanctification. The words of the Church of England catechism, "to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters and to do my duty in that state of life to which it shall please God to call me," are thoroughly Lutheran in spirit. In fact, there is a remarkable resemblance between the old High Church Anglican doctrine of the sacred character of authority (the divine right of kings and the correlative doctrine of passive obedience on the part of the subject) and the conservative patriarchalism of German Lutheranism. There is, however, another element that is peculiar to Lutheranism and especially to Luther himself. That is the instinctive tendency to aggression and violence which is so characteristic of Luther's polemic writings and which emerges particularly strongly in his writings against the revolting peasants.
But there is more to it than that. There is a background of religion, almost of mysticism, to Luther's cult of power. For though he believes that all power comes from God and that the authority of the State rests on the natural law and the divine will, he sees this law not as St. Thomas did, as the law of reason, but as the mysterious and divine power which rules this present evil world. Consequently, he can even go so far as to say, "The hand that wields the secular sword is not a human hand, but the hand of God. It is God, not man, who hangs and breaks on the wheel, beheads and scourges. It is God who wages war."
This Lutheran tradition, with its strange dualism of pessimism and faith, otherworldliness and world affirmation, passive quietism and crude acceptance of the reign of force, has been the most powerful factor in the formation of the German mind and the German social attitude. It played a considerable part in the development of German idealism. But it had a still greater and far more direct influence on German political thought, where it fused with the Catholic elements of the romantic revival to produce the new Prussian conservatism of F. J. Stahl and Bismarck. Here Luther's cult of force and his "natural law of irrationalism" become transformed into the cult of militarism.
On the contrary, behind Western democracy there lies the spiritual world of Calvinism and the Free Churches, which is completely different in its political and social outlook from the world of Lutheranism, and which has had a far greater influence and closer connection with what we know as Western civilisation, or even as civilisation without further qualification. The genius of Calvin was that of an organiser and a legislator, severe, logical and inflexible in purpose, and consequently it was he and not Luther who inspired Protestantism with the will to dominate the world and to change society and culture. Hence, though Calvinism has always been regarded as the antithesis of Catholicism to a far greater extent than Lutheranism, it stands much nearer to Catholicism in its conception of the relation of Church and State and in its assertion of the independence and supremacy of the spiritual power. In this respect it carries on the traditions of medieval Catholicism and of the Gregorian movement of reform to an even greater degree than did the Catholicism of the Counter Reformation itself.
In an age when the Papacy was dependent on the Hapsburg monarchies and when Catholics accepted the theories of passive obedience and the divine right of kings, the Calvinists asserted the divine right of presbytery, and declared that "the Church was the foundation of the world" and that it was the duty of kings to "throw down their crowns before her and lick the dust from off her feet." But these theocratic claims were not hierarchic and impersonal as in the medieval Church; they were based on an intense individualism deriving from the certainty of election, and the duty of the individual Christian to co-operate in realising the divine purpose against a sinful and hostile world. Thus Calvinism is at once aristocratic and democratic; aristocratic inasmuch as the "saints" were an elect minority chosen from the mass of fallen humanity and infinitely superior to the children of this world; but democratic in that each was directly responsible to God, who is no respecter of persons. Calvinism is, in fact, a democracy of saints, elect of God, but also in a sense self chosen, since it is the conscience of the individual which is the ultimate witness of his election.
It is not, however, in Genevan Calvinism but in English and American Puritanism that those concepts of the holy community and the cosmic mission of the saints attain their full expression. For in England the pure Calvinist tradition was united with that of the Anabaptist and the independent sects to produce a new movement which was political as well as religious, and which marks the first appearance of genuine democracy in the modern world. And in this revolutionary attempt to transform the English state into a holy community "to build Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land," the Calvinist conception of the democratic aristocracy of the wants provided the driving force. It was, however, not in Parliament but in the army that the aristo-democracy of the saints found its most complete expression. It is the dominant note of the army debates at Putney in 1647, when the delegates of the regiments took matters into their own hands, and stood forward as the representatives of the people and the saints against both King and Parliament.
This translation of the conception of the holy community from an ecclesiastical ideal to a principle of revolutionary political action was not confined to the sectarian extremists such as the Baptists and Fifth Monarchy men; it was accepted by the leading independent divines. The great experiment of the Cromwellian Commonwealth, short lived though it was, by the momentum of its religious impulse opened the way for a new type of civilisation based on the freedom of the person and of conscience as rights conferred absolutely by God and nature. The connection is seen most clearly in America, where the Congregationalist Calvinism of New England, which was a parallel development to the Independent Puritanism of old England, developing from the same roots in a different environment, leads directly to the assertion of the rights of man in the constitutions of the North American States and to the rise of political democracy. Taking a broad view, therefore, it is impossible to deny the importance of the Calvinist Free Church tradition in the development of Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy. The differences between the political ideals of a Gladstone or an Abraham Lincoln, and those of Stahl and Bismarck, show the great differences between the Continental Lutheran and the Anglo-Saxon world of thought, which was determined or influenced by Calvinism and the Free Churches. Behind the latter there lies the ideal of the holy community, secularised insofar as it is now applied to great civilised nations, but still preserving its moral activism, and its will to dominate and reform the world. Thus, the modern Western beliefs in progress, in the rights of man and the duty of conforming political action to moral ideals, whatever they may owe to other influences, derive ultimately from the moral ideals of Puritanism, and its faith in the possibility of the realisation of the holy community on earth by the efforts of the elect.
The German combination of realism and mysticism, of external discipline, and internal anarchy, which is so alien to our way of thought, has its roots in the Lutheran world view with its conception of humanity as the passive instrument of the mighty forces of irrational nature and irresistible grace. The two main types of Protestantism represent not only two different ideas of the Church and of its relation to the world, but also two opposite concepts of natural law. Luther's conception of the natural law, insofar as it affects the State, is a realistic recognition of the concrete order of society as produced by Providence in the course of history. It is the natural law of irrationalism. Calvin, on the other hand, regarded the natural law in the traditional way as identical with the moral law, as the norm to which all social and individual behavior must conform and which rests, in the last resort, on the will of God, as revealed to man's reason and conscience. And this opposition still holds good to-day, in spite of the centuries of secularisation which have transformed European culture. For the conflict between Western democracy and Nazi Germany is at the bottom a conflict between two opposite conceptions of natural law, and consequently of public morality.
To the German, the Anglo Saxon appeal to morality in international politics and their abortion of ethical humanitarian ideals appear unreal, hypocritical, and a cloak for selfish imperialism. To us, the German exaltation of power for its own sake, the glorification of war, disregard of the rights of the individual and contempt of humanitarian ideals appear irrational, immoral and anti-Christian. Hitherto, however, we have said nothing of the religious tradition which underlies the whole development of Western culture, and which has contributed more than any other factor to the formation of its spiritual and social unity. Catholicism was the matrix out of which the two religious traditions of which we have been speaking emerged, and from the Protestant point of view history would have been much simpler if Catholicism had ceased to exist with the coming of the Reformation. In fact, however, Catholicism not only exists, but co-exists with Protestantism so that there is to-day no cultural area which is exclusively and homogeneously Protestant.
And Catholicism cuts across the national political and cultural frontiers and ideological differences. To-day, with the decline of liberal democracy, it is natural that the traditions of political authoritarianism and traditionalism in Catholic countries should reassert themselves, but the principles of natural law are so deeply implanted in the Catholic tradition that they can never be ignored. Thus, the belief in the ethical basis of social and political life, which was the original inspiration of Western democracy, finds its justification in the teaching of the Catholic Church and the tradition of Western Christendom. It is opposed to-day by the unethical natural law of race and class, and the Machiavellian realism which makes power the supreme political value, and which does not shrink from the blackest treachery or the most brutal cruelty, to gain its ends. The centre of these hostile forces is to be found in the States of Central and Eastern Europe which, in spite of their great cultural achievements, have been relatively backward in political development and lacked the political ethos which the Western peoples acquired through their intensive training in self-government. But these forces are not confined to Eastern Europe. They are spreading rapidly throughout the modern world owing to the deterioration of cultural standards which accompanies the development of mass civilisation. In time of war, all the power and resources of the modern State are organised for human destruction. In war the temptation to "howl with the wolves" is often overwhelmingly strong. Nevertheless, the end of war from the Christian standpoint is not the release of the forces of disorder, but the mastering of them by a violent effort of disciplined will. The only thing that makes the evils of war bearable is the hope of peace: not merely the negative peace of a cessation of hostilities, but the true peace of justice and freedom.
Catholic Weekly (Sydney, 1944) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article146490837
Foundation Of Peace
The more we can bring to light these hidden sources of conflict, the more hope there will be of a spiritual reconciliation which is the only true foundation of international peace. There are three problems to be considered: the schism between Eastern and Western Christendom, the division between Catholic and Protestant Europe, and the internal divisions of Protestantism itself. The religious division between the East and the West coincides with a very clearly cut cultural division which separates Eastern and Western Europe. The Orthodox Christendom of Russia and the Balkans was for centuries a closed world to the Latin West. For the Orthodox Russian of the later Middle Ages the Christian West did not exist; and after the fall of Byzantium and the Turkish conquest of the Balkans nothing existed save Russia herself, the Third Rome. Thus behind the closed world of the Soviet Republics, with its absolute identification with Communist ideology and its absolute submission to the Communist dictator there lies the closed world of Orthodox Russia with its absolute identification with the Orthodox Church and its absolute submission to the Orthodox tzar.
The State itself was finally captured by the secular Messianism of the revolutionary intelligentsia, which thus created the earliest and most complete form of the new totalitarian absolutism. The totalitarian idea was not Fascist or Italian or German in origin. It was a distinctively Russian creation which could not have arisen without centuries of cultural segregation and politico-religious unity. In Western Christendom both the religious and the cultural development are infinitely more complex. Here the religious divisions are of comparatively recent date and throughout a large part of Europe they are confused and indistinct. The countries which have taken the leading part in the development of modern culture, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Low Countries, the United Kingdom and the United States, have also been divided in religion in varying degrees. Within the Protestant world we find the seeds of the spiritual conflict which to-day divides Western civilisation, and although the theological divisions were never profound and are now almost ignored, they have had historical consequences of incalculable importance. Nothing, in fact, is more striking than the way in which Lutheranism and Calvinism, in spite of their fundamental theological agreement, have produced or helped to produce totally different social attitudes and political traditions.
Effects Of Heresies
For while Lutheranism almost from the beginning adopted a passive attitude towards the State and accepted a highly conservative and even patriarchal conception of political authority, Calvinism has proved a revolutionary force in European and American history and has provided the moral dynamic element in the great expansion of bourgeois culture. How is this contrast to be explained? To a great extent, no doubt, it is due to accidental circumstances which confined Lutheranism to the static territorial States of Germany and Scandinavia, and brought Calvinism into relation with the rising commercial communities of the Netherlands and England. But this is not all. For the contrast is already present in the thought and personality of the two protagonists. Luther's political quietism is not simply the result of his social environment, It springs from the deepest roots of his religious experience. In spite of his super-Augustinian opposition of the Church and the world, Luther never regarded the State as evil or criticised temporal authority.
Lutheranism
He himself said, "I have written about the secular authority as glorious and useful as no teacher has done since the time of the Apostles, excepting possibly St. Augustine." Still more important is the emphasis that, he lays on the acceptance by the individual of his place in the social order as the divinely ordered means of his sanctification. The words of the Church of England catechism, "to order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters and to do my duty in that state of life to which it shall please God to call me," are thoroughly Lutheran in spirit. In fact, there is a remarkable resemblance between the old High Church Anglican doctrine of the sacred character of authority (the divine right of kings and the correlative doctrine of passive obedience on the part of the subject) and the conservative patriarchalism of German Lutheranism. There is, however, another element that is peculiar to Lutheranism and especially to Luther himself. That is the instinctive tendency to aggression and violence which is so characteristic of Luther's polemic writings and which emerges particularly strongly in his writings against the revolting peasants.
Cult Of Power
But there is more to it than that. There is a background of religion, almost of mysticism, to Luther's cult of power. For though he believes that all power comes from God and that the authority of the State rests on the natural law and the divine will, he sees this law not as St. Thomas did, as the law of reason, but as the mysterious and divine power which rules this present evil world. Consequently, he can even go so far as to say, "The hand that wields the secular sword is not a human hand, but the hand of God. It is God, not man, who hangs and breaks on the wheel, beheads and scourges. It is God who wages war."
Cause Of Militarism
This Lutheran tradition, with its strange dualism of pessimism and faith, otherworldliness and world affirmation, passive quietism and crude acceptance of the reign of force, has been the most powerful factor in the formation of the German mind and the German social attitude. It played a considerable part in the development of German idealism. But it had a still greater and far more direct influence on German political thought, where it fused with the Catholic elements of the romantic revival to produce the new Prussian conservatism of F. J. Stahl and Bismarck. Here Luther's cult of force and his "natural law of irrationalism" become transformed into the cult of militarism.
On the contrary, behind Western democracy there lies the spiritual world of Calvinism and the Free Churches, which is completely different in its political and social outlook from the world of Lutheranism, and which has had a far greater influence and closer connection with what we know as Western civilisation, or even as civilisation without further qualification. The genius of Calvin was that of an organiser and a legislator, severe, logical and inflexible in purpose, and consequently it was he and not Luther who inspired Protestantism with the will to dominate the world and to change society and culture. Hence, though Calvinism has always been regarded as the antithesis of Catholicism to a far greater extent than Lutheranism, it stands much nearer to Catholicism in its conception of the relation of Church and State and in its assertion of the independence and supremacy of the spiritual power. In this respect it carries on the traditions of medieval Catholicism and of the Gregorian movement of reform to an even greater degree than did the Catholicism of the Counter Reformation itself.
Calvinism
In an age when the Papacy was dependent on the Hapsburg monarchies and when Catholics accepted the theories of passive obedience and the divine right of kings, the Calvinists asserted the divine right of presbytery, and declared that "the Church was the foundation of the world" and that it was the duty of kings to "throw down their crowns before her and lick the dust from off her feet." But these theocratic claims were not hierarchic and impersonal as in the medieval Church; they were based on an intense individualism deriving from the certainty of election, and the duty of the individual Christian to co-operate in realising the divine purpose against a sinful and hostile world. Thus Calvinism is at once aristocratic and democratic; aristocratic inasmuch as the "saints" were an elect minority chosen from the mass of fallen humanity and infinitely superior to the children of this world; but democratic in that each was directly responsible to God, who is no respecter of persons. Calvinism is, in fact, a democracy of saints, elect of God, but also in a sense self chosen, since it is the conscience of the individual which is the ultimate witness of his election.
Puritan Ideas
It is not, however, in Genevan Calvinism but in English and American Puritanism that those concepts of the holy community and the cosmic mission of the saints attain their full expression. For in England the pure Calvinist tradition was united with that of the Anabaptist and the independent sects to produce a new movement which was political as well as religious, and which marks the first appearance of genuine democracy in the modern world. And in this revolutionary attempt to transform the English state into a holy community "to build Jerusalem in England's green and pleasant land," the Calvinist conception of the democratic aristocracy of the wants provided the driving force. It was, however, not in Parliament but in the army that the aristo-democracy of the saints found its most complete expression. It is the dominant note of the army debates at Putney in 1647, when the delegates of the regiments took matters into their own hands, and stood forward as the representatives of the people and the saints against both King and Parliament.
Democracy
This translation of the conception of the holy community from an ecclesiastical ideal to a principle of revolutionary political action was not confined to the sectarian extremists such as the Baptists and Fifth Monarchy men; it was accepted by the leading independent divines. The great experiment of the Cromwellian Commonwealth, short lived though it was, by the momentum of its religious impulse opened the way for a new type of civilisation based on the freedom of the person and of conscience as rights conferred absolutely by God and nature. The connection is seen most clearly in America, where the Congregationalist Calvinism of New England, which was a parallel development to the Independent Puritanism of old England, developing from the same roots in a different environment, leads directly to the assertion of the rights of man in the constitutions of the North American States and to the rise of political democracy. Taking a broad view, therefore, it is impossible to deny the importance of the Calvinist Free Church tradition in the development of Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy. The differences between the political ideals of a Gladstone or an Abraham Lincoln, and those of Stahl and Bismarck, show the great differences between the Continental Lutheran and the Anglo-Saxon world of thought, which was determined or influenced by Calvinism and the Free Churches. Behind the latter there lies the ideal of the holy community, secularised insofar as it is now applied to great civilised nations, but still preserving its moral activism, and its will to dominate and reform the world. Thus, the modern Western beliefs in progress, in the rights of man and the duty of conforming political action to moral ideals, whatever they may owe to other influences, derive ultimately from the moral ideals of Puritanism, and its faith in the possibility of the realisation of the holy community on earth by the efforts of the elect.
The German combination of realism and mysticism, of external discipline, and internal anarchy, which is so alien to our way of thought, has its roots in the Lutheran world view with its conception of humanity as the passive instrument of the mighty forces of irrational nature and irresistible grace. The two main types of Protestantism represent not only two different ideas of the Church and of its relation to the world, but also two opposite concepts of natural law. Luther's conception of the natural law, insofar as it affects the State, is a realistic recognition of the concrete order of society as produced by Providence in the course of history. It is the natural law of irrationalism. Calvin, on the other hand, regarded the natural law in the traditional way as identical with the moral law, as the norm to which all social and individual behavior must conform and which rests, in the last resort, on the will of God, as revealed to man's reason and conscience. And this opposition still holds good to-day, in spite of the centuries of secularisation which have transformed European culture. For the conflict between Western democracy and Nazi Germany is at the bottom a conflict between two opposite conceptions of natural law, and consequently of public morality.
Opposing Views
To the German, the Anglo Saxon appeal to morality in international politics and their abortion of ethical humanitarian ideals appear unreal, hypocritical, and a cloak for selfish imperialism. To us, the German exaltation of power for its own sake, the glorification of war, disregard of the rights of the individual and contempt of humanitarian ideals appear irrational, immoral and anti-Christian. Hitherto, however, we have said nothing of the religious tradition which underlies the whole development of Western culture, and which has contributed more than any other factor to the formation of its spiritual and social unity. Catholicism was the matrix out of which the two religious traditions of which we have been speaking emerged, and from the Protestant point of view history would have been much simpler if Catholicism had ceased to exist with the coming of the Reformation. In fact, however, Catholicism not only exists, but co-exists with Protestantism so that there is to-day no cultural area which is exclusively and homogeneously Protestant.
Catholic Solution
And Catholicism cuts across the national political and cultural frontiers and ideological differences. To-day, with the decline of liberal democracy, it is natural that the traditions of political authoritarianism and traditionalism in Catholic countries should reassert themselves, but the principles of natural law are so deeply implanted in the Catholic tradition that they can never be ignored. Thus, the belief in the ethical basis of social and political life, which was the original inspiration of Western democracy, finds its justification in the teaching of the Catholic Church and the tradition of Western Christendom. It is opposed to-day by the unethical natural law of race and class, and the Machiavellian realism which makes power the supreme political value, and which does not shrink from the blackest treachery or the most brutal cruelty, to gain its ends. The centre of these hostile forces is to be found in the States of Central and Eastern Europe which, in spite of their great cultural achievements, have been relatively backward in political development and lacked the political ethos which the Western peoples acquired through their intensive training in self-government. But these forces are not confined to Eastern Europe. They are spreading rapidly throughout the modern world owing to the deterioration of cultural standards which accompanies the development of mass civilisation. In time of war, all the power and resources of the modern State are organised for human destruction. In war the temptation to "howl with the wolves" is often overwhelmingly strong. Nevertheless, the end of war from the Christian standpoint is not the release of the forces of disorder, but the mastering of them by a violent effort of disciplined will. The only thing that makes the evils of war bearable is the hope of peace: not merely the negative peace of a cessation of hostilities, but the true peace of justice and freedom.
Catholic Weekly (Sydney, 1944) http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article146490837
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