Andrew Sullivan finds former Pope Benedict, still alive and kicking and issuer of semi-papal letters on the state of Church affairs, a frustrating subject. After beating on him for refusing to take responsibility for the travails of the Roman Catholic church (see the second part of his diary entry) ….
… this is especially true because Benedict’s critique is so familiar, evasive, and exhausted that he sounds more like an old neocon re-upping Allan Bloom one last time than a pope emeritus speaking with any kind of restraint or serenity. And it’s all to say one more time that everything went to hell in the 1960s and that every sex scandal in the church since then stems from that, and there was no real abuse before. Seriously. The hippies made us do it! The crisis had nothing do with clericalism, or stunted psychosexual development in some priests, or the corrupting culture of the clerical closet: It was still just those damned students all those years ago.
Andrew then finds his thoughts bizarrely beautiful:
Seeing a former pope reduced to this is just sad. There is no reflection at all on his own culpability in handling all the sex-abuse cases under John Paul II; there is just an easy, knee-jerk attempt to blame his old enemies for them. And then, as so often with Benedict, something happens, and the anger and bitterness and lashing out cedes to a suddenly beautiful statement of the truth of Christianity:
The Lord has initiated a narrative of love with us and wants to subsume all creation in it. The counterforce against evil, which threatens us and the whole world, can ultimately only consist in our entering into this love. It is the real counterforce against evil … A world without God can only be a world without meaning. For where, then, does everything that is come from? In any case, it has no spiritual purpose. It is somehow simply there and has neither any goal nor any sense. Then there are no standards of good or evil. Then only what is stronger than the other can assert itself. Power is then the only principle. Truth does not count, it actually does not exist.
Been boning up on some Nietzsche, I see. But Benedict is and always has been this strange combination: rigid and bitter and petty — while also bearing a gift for cutting through the cant to craft words, often beautiful, that convey the essence of the faith. It makes me want to yell at him and revere him at the same time.
An analysis of Benedict’s strangely worded paragraph will help. Briefly, Benedict is simply saying that, without God (and the cynical might say “the Church”) there is no Right or Wrong, no moral system; only Power will correlate to survival. The first part is a common assertion among the faithful, because that’s how they were brought up, and by the leaders, because that’s one of the defensive stones around their circle of power. The second is a statement that ignores the importance of truth in all interactions between entities. Truth, unaffected by power, brings predictability and dependability, and, in turn, prosperity. Power ascending to the top of the social pyramid, seasoned by human irrationality, turns prosperity into poverty, and monarchies into smoking ruins. See the Romanovs for a graphic example.
If Sullivan wants to resolve this conundrum, he should take seriously the old atheistic contention that morality does not require divinity. Once it is accepted that a successful moral system can be constructed from non-divine foundations, Benedict’s mysteriously beautiful statement loses any perceived majesty, and can be seen for what it really is – a defense of the power ladder Benedict ascended and has forever given his loyalty.
All philosophy starts with some set of basic assumptions, and sometimes some of those assumptions are cracked and unstable. Someday I hope to find the time to start exploring an agnostic morality system, starting from scratch. This is not to say that I reject all other such attempts, for the simple truth is I’ve never studied them. I try to live well, and the Golden Rule seems to be a fine rule-of-thumb. But a formalized system helps explain how one behaves, or should behave – and why.
