A view from the precipice

A few days after Benedict XVI's visit to Germany, it is worth asking if there is anything specifically German about this papacy. Is there a specifically German experience that informs the Pope's insistence on Europe's Christian identity and warning against DIY religion?

The evidence points to the obvious: Pope Benedict's thought is informed by his German upbringing and background and not just by his theology. Consider his take on Europe and Christianity, which might seem at first to be an obstinate popish refusal to acknowledge that, so to say, the Enlightenment happened.

Well, the French Enlightenment was certainly hostile to Christianity, to the intellectual worth of theology as much as to the claims of organised religion on the state. The Scottish (and English) Enlightenment placed an emphasis on the individual, with the starting point of his knowledge being his own experience (understood as sensations). This emphasis placed it in a tense relationship to any claims made for collective faith handed down by tradition.

But the German Enlightenment, as the Dominican friar Aidan Nichols has pointed out in his republished study of the theology of Joseph Ratzinger (The Thought of Benedict XVI, Burns and Oates), had an easier relationship to Christianity. Especially in its late period, it understood "experience" to incorporate history and its deeper meanings for the whole person.

Theology could therefore serve to enrich, and be enriched by, other intellectual disciplines (particularly history and philosophy), rather than contradict them. For related reasons, theology was thought of as a public discipline, both indebted to and contributing to a public culture.

Protestant and Catholic theology were not, till 1945, on an equal footing, however - according to Nicholas Boyle, professor of German literary and intellectual history at Cambridge (in an article that appeared in the May 7 edition of The Tablet); Catholic theology was the poorer relation in both public prestige and official acceptance in the Germany united by Bismarck under Calvinist Prussia. But that might have contributed to give German Catholicism (not just theology) more European horizons: the inability to identify completely with the national culture was associated with a tendency to both more regional and broader identification.

The national catastrophe of Nazism and the division of Germany had implications for German Catholicism that reinforced these traits. In the Federal Republic of Germany, Catholicism was now the majority religion (and with a Rhineland Catholic, Konrad Adenauer, as a dominant, Europhile Chancellor). Furthermore, the Catholic Church could take credit for having resisted Nazism: not very effectively, perhaps, but as Fr Nichols points out, the Nazi killing of 70,000 disabled persons (one was Pope Benedict's cousin) was denounced by the bishop of Muenster in his sermon of August 3, 1941. In a post-war Germany, in which the state bureaucracy was tainted by its involvement with Nazism, the Catholic Church had both a record and the European horizons to help rebuild a sane public culture.

Last year, in a public dialogue with Germany's leading (and non-Christian) contemporary political theorist, Juergen Habermas, then-Cardinal Ratzinger argued that both secular reason and faith needed each other's critical input to avoid catastrophic extremes. His references to totalitarianism indicate that his own country's history inform his political thought on relations between the Church and state. The state should be secular, but somehow open to dialogue with religion.

Pope Benedict's warnings against DIY religion are of a piece with this experience. It might at first seem that the cultural individualism and libertarianism associated with mix 'n' match religiosity could not be further from totalitarianism. Well, they are far apart. But the lesson that, rightly or wrongly, the young Joseph Ratzinger drew from the horrific Nazification of Germany is that any theology that has a weak grip on doctrine, as some liberal Protestant theologies were, will also be a weak adversary of totalitarianism. DIY religion has a weakness for fashion and is liable to be swept along even with a fashion for right-wing ideology.

For Pope Benedict, a Church with a grip on articulated doctrine that might seem to exclude those who do not subscribe to it, might be a better guarantor even for those outside it - since its doctrine has a universal vision of humanity and fiercely resists fashionable, politically correct watering down. The first widely disseminated theological essay by Joseph Ratzinger (as opposed to historical study), according to Fr Nichols, was an exploration of the meaning of Christian brotherhood.

To place Pope Benedict's thought against the background of his personal and national identity is to do two things. First, it is to practise something whose need he recognises: the placing of religious experience, even if it is transcendent, within history. Second, it is to point out the need to translate his German experience into terms commensurate with the Maltese. His understanding of the Church, his pessimistic understanding of history, is informed by a view of his fallen nation from the edge of the precipice - something quite unlike the view that Pope Benedict's more poetic, ebullient Polish predecessor, Pope John Paul II, ever personally had.

ranierfsadni@europe.com