Missing the object of fear

You chaired the lecture which Prof. Paul Van Geest of Amsterdam gave at the Augustinian Institute on the subject of ‘Fear’. Why did you find this subject topical?

The Dutch scholar, who, besides being an expert on Augustine and also the editor of a Christian Democrat cultural review, had as his main objective to exonerate Augustine from the accusation that some famous sociologists like Philippe Aries levelled at him.

Augustine is said to have been responsible for Europeans becoming more fearful in their daily living.

Their general feeling of guilt was accentuated because of his emphasis on the doctrine of original sin. Geest responded by analysing a few sermons, in which Augustine does indeed exacerbate fear in his listeners, but only in order to amplify their sense of the mercy and grace of God. He even goes so far as to say that to speak of God’s judgment without referring to his mercy is sinful!

Any just fear of God had to be cheerful. Despondent fear was only justified if one stopped at consideration only of the evil lodged in the human heart.

As Geest spoke, I could not help thinking that there was an intensification of fear in Augustine’s age perhaps not so much because of any increased awareness of original sin as because of the barbarian invasions that were bringing about the collapse of civilisation as it was known to Romans and Greeks.

This fear is of a different kind to the two kinds of fear that have always been felt by human beings in all ages. The first is the intimate sense of being condemned to a personal death. The second is the fear of what might befall one in an afterlife assuming that it depended on one’s conduct of the present life.

The fear that assaulted Western humanity on the eve of the fall of the Roman Empire, like that which swept Europe at the fall of Byzantium to the Ottomans who had descended from central Asia on their horses, was of a different kind. It is the fear of what might be called the death of a civilisation or of a certain way of being human.

This is the kind of fear that is almost overpowering mankind in our own time.

What are the causes of this fear?

I am old enough to remember August 6, 1945, when news reached us that the first atom bomb had been dropped. I can still hear my father’s voice solemnly telling us: “Today a new age in human history has begun. From now on human beings have the power in their hands to destroy the entire race.”

At Oxford I had been deeply impressed when one of my philosophy mentors, Elizabeth Anscombe, decided to oppose the university’s grant of an honorary degree to the US President at the time, Harry Truman, precisely because of his decision to use the atom bomb against Japan.

The cause that drew most commitment from my generation in our youth was unilateral nuclear disarmament from which I marched many times alongside Anthony Kelly and Charles Taylor. But it was not until Chernobyl that awareness developed to any great degree of the dangers to future generations that were inherent not only in nuclear warfare but also in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

I suspect that it is only because of the very limited capacity of human intelligence and human imagination that people live unalarmed at the hundreds of nuclear power stations operating at present in France alone, and that quite recently Angela Merkel’s Germany is reactivating nuclear power after its use had been suspended in the wake of Chernobyl.

Climate change could also be a cause of similar fear but the panic remains within the minds and hearts of people, probably because its external expression is repressed in our search for tranquillity.

Our leaders have succeeded through the elaborate if still inefficient systems of security they have established at airports and such places to give much more visible expression to fear of a third phenomenon of our age that has been baptised terrorism.

It was not difficult to evoke its peculiar fearsomeness after 9/11 because of the lack of knowledge when and where it will strike. Two connected remarks can be made on this topic. The first is that ‘war’ on it to be successful cannot be the sort of standard military imperialist action taken in Afghanistan or Iraq, precisely because the enemy does not stand up to be counted.

The second is the relevance of Augustine’s warning not to be afraid of the devil as much as of the evil lodged in one’s own heart.

Is the Church today teaching anything relevant to this topic?

Actually Pope Benedict’s second encyclical, Spe Salvi (‘In hope we are saved’) published in Advent 2007 centrally evokes Augustine. A major theme of Spe Salvi is that we should not be afraid of tinpot Satans (such as Bin Laden and his minions have been pictured to be) but rather of our own loss of ethical values, our idolatry of Mammon and our individualist egotism. Without those characteristics of the West terrorism could hardly retain its hold over its recruits.

The other great theme of Spe Salvi (section 4) is that the Christian hope even in the context of menacing catastrophe is not individual escape into another world, but working together towards a global just society.

But can one really hope for this? Hope as against mere wish supposes evidence that things are changing in the hoped-for direction. The Pope criticises most strongly Christians who underestimate their capacity to create and transform. The Pope harks back to his first encyclical in which he had drawn ample attention to the marvellous power of love at work. Love is able to produce miracles.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.