conspiratio

Nuclear deterrence and Christian silence. by Gerardo Muñoz

Almost at the end of the Cold War, arguably the most important natural law jurist of the West, John Finnis, published a very acrimonious and provocative essay in dialogue with the Christian theological morality and dogmatic tradition entitled “Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom” (1988). In many respects, this essay speaks volumes to our present, but it also solicits new questions around limits that have been severely traspassed in the current atomic age headed towards extinction. It is worth noting that from the outset, Finnis reminds us how a fellow Catholic liberal theologian, Jacques Maritain in a lecture of 1955, claimed with surprising conviction that “America is today the area in the world in which…the notion of Christian-inspired civilization is more part of the national heritage than any other spot-on earth. If there is any hope for the sprouting of a new Christendom in the modern world, it is in America…” [1]. If this sounds completely analogous to the current program of “national conservatism” that today animates American political elites, defined by the ruthless attempt at the convergence of instrumental Christian vocation and political imperium, it is because these prophetic words have been thoroughly realized. 

Finnis does not hesitate to put his thumb on the theological monstrosity maintained by Maritain at mid century – although he does not say it explicitly, it is a concrete restitution of imperial Eusebianism decades before denounced by Erik Peterson in his famous essay on political monotheism – that by accepting nuclear deterrence as a form of uncontested ‘minor evil’ in face of the Soviet menace Christians were endorsing heretic positions at odds with the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. As Finnis argues, the logical structure itself of nuclear deterrence, precisely due to its affirmative promise to exclude “target populations”, fails to differentiate between combatants and non-combatants in an endgame that promises the potential massacre of innocent human beings [2]. This means, first and foremost, that nuclear deterrence (as well as its new preventive forms that have become normalized among global hegemonic powers) terrorize human communities as a direct public act of forthcoming devastation [3]. 

Even though Finnis does not stop to reflect about the notion of “public act”, it is very clear that this action, insofar as it is a linguistic act, aims at the effective cancellation of the possibilities of language and communication. Nuclear deterrence and proliferation are instruments that speak publicly, and that by doing so, it contributes to the atrophy of human language. As a rebuttal to Maritain’s celebratory artificial gnosis, Finnis sees in the language of nuclear deterrence coincides with the language of ‘utopia’ as a new absolutization of morality. This means that Maritain’s philosophical error – which Finnis calls the “theologian’s position”, since it also implicates an official sector of the Church – is to abandon practical reason of allocated goods (including human life) in the name of a comprehensive aim of building a civilizational “Christendom” coupled in a national community [3]. But whoever fully identifies the spiritual-providential realm with the political-legislative order is already at the mercy of an utopian project embedded in the sacrificial structure promoted by nuclear deterrence.

Towards the end of his essay, Finnis laments (implicitly repeating Karl Barth’s well-known 1930s essay but in an opposite direction) that the relationship between Church and State from the point of view of the atomic age and nuclear deterrence has now been completely altered. From now on, the atomic age demands a Christian vocation based on conscience. Specifically, Finnis calls for a position of refusal and minoritarian observance against the general options of radical evil: “The choice to reverence human life by refusing to participate in public choices to destroy it, is thus a choice is material of the Kingdom and has real and truly lasting effects…even when worldly wisdoms understand it only as a choice of greater evil’ [4]. And citing Cardinal Ratzinger, Finnis endorses the position of Christians as “belonging to a minority” finding courage in nonconformity within the normative order of social space [5]. The Finnis-Ratzinger’s position was still oriented by a Catholic commitment to dogmatics and public reason and virtue, which depends on the luminosity of the subject of religion. 

But the objection of conscience is a subjective reduction of modern secularization. In this sense, it might be pertinent to compare Finnis’ position to Ivan Illich’s own stance in the wake of nuclear testing in Germany in the 1980s, which he witnessed in “horrified silence…in order to make the horror visible” [6]. For Illich, who had come to see the triumph of civilizational mysterium iniquitatis in the institutional deformity of the conspiratio of the human species towards controlled subjectivity (conjutario) amounting to “intolerable realities”. The language of Christian prophecy is not the same as the language of silence, because only in the second we can become witnesses through the voice of pain and experience, because pain can uplift a contact with the world without redemption. As Illich made clear in his text “The Eloquence of Silence”, it is through the condition of silence that the word can become flesh and prepare a new life. It is very telling that in a later footnote to the essay in the 2011 edition, Finnis appears doubtful about the religious ground stating that: “Over twenty years later, the unsatisfactory state of Catholic teaching on the matter remains just as it was in 1988” [7]. What changed? At the end of the eighteenth century Novalis had noted that for any orientation of public reason in the West to materialize there needs to be a substrate of the divine mystery, but this is precisely the substrate that desecularization has effectively untied and obliterated from the public. A public where general annihilation percolates without restraints.

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Notes 

1. John Finnis. “Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom” (1988), in Religion and Public Reasons, Collected Essays: Volume V (Oxford University Press, 2011), 

2. Ibid., 280. 

3. Ibid., 286-287.

4. Ibid., 288.

5. Ibid., 289.

6. David Cayley. Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journal (The Penn State University Press, 2021), 80. 

7. John Finnis. “Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom” (1988), 290. 

Osculum pacis. by Gerardo Muñoz

It has taken Pope Francis’s public letter addressed to the Bishops of the United States to put in perspective how late American imperial politics in matters of immigration and probably other spheres of social life is not only at odds with the Christian vocation, but even waging war against the very dogma of Christian revelation. The reminder does not come completely out of context, since as we know, the marching band of intellectuals that for a long time have defended a “Christian postliberal” transformation – some of which not long ago offered theological justifications for the Church as the universal ark for migrants – given the current hegemonic configuration find themselves as mere scribes of whatever is enacted by unilateral executive command. The impossibility of enacting a transitional political theology evidences the emptying of politics into a technical mobilization of apocalyptical overtones, as clearly defended by Peter Thiel. The attempts to pilotage a planetary gnosis to his own image in the last stage of imperial stagnation, definitely supports Francis’ assertion politics today is built “on the basis of force, and not on the truth about equal dignity….begins badly and will end badly”.  But in a way, this “end” has already taken place through the revocation of the ethical tenor of the Christian mystery. 

It comes to no surprise, then, that if the erosion of an ethics is at stake, that Pope Francis would allude to the parable of the Good Samaritan and fraternity, something that he has explored previously in the encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” [1]. It is also important to note that Francis is not opposing the Good Samaritan to the ordo amoris; rather the operation is more subtle: for any community to be organized around ordo amoris, there needs to be a space for the infinite discovery that the Good Samaritan parable solicits of every Christian’s responsability. According to Francis: “The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception”. In other words, and implicitly taking distance from the Calvinist dependency on community of salvation, the Pontifex is disclosing the memory of an ethical vocation that cannot end in social norms or national unity without exteriority. The communitarian ordo at times could also amount to oppressive familiarity, as it appears in Corrado Alvaro’s Revolt in Aspromonte: “Village life seemed to him a strange invention, a protective agreement between people who were afraid”. Thus, what the Samaritan teaches human beings is that there are no ethical standards for which we can respond, since every encounter opens up a ‘decision of existence’ before an absolute other beyond the sacramental duty of “I ought”. 

Who is this “other human being” that now becomes your brother? As we know, in Ivan Illich’s late work the ethical inflection of the Good Samaritan illuminates the true character of our poetic relationality and creative act: “You can recognize the other man who is out of bounds….and create the supreme form of relatedness which his not given by creation but created by you. Any attempt to explain this “ought” as corresponding to a norm takes away the mysterious greatness from this act” [2]. Indeed, Illich goes further in telling us that the suppression of the ethical decision of encountering the Samaritan can only leave us with a “liberal fantasy…where bombing our neighbor for his own good” [3]. Just like today the moral justifications of “ordo amoris” or the administrative allocation of a substantive “common good” can produce justifications for mass deportation of immigrants and dividing the social space between citizens and noncitizens (removing the foundation of ius soli) can become the strange patent of a monstrous theological manipulation. 

The ethical mystery exemplified by the parable of the Good Samaritan introduced into history a new conception of “brotherhood” that was not conditioned by national, political, or family affiliations, but by a common vocation expressed upon acting through mercy and charity. Belonging to the “human fraternity” allows me to decide who is my brother through the osculum pacis – a conspiratorial mouth-to-mouth kiss that creates proportionality and peace through the encounter that yields mutual creation. Before the Samaritan we give everything without waiting for anything in return, as required by any true ethical disposition. As the scholar of Ancient Christianity, Christine Mohrman once noted, the osculum pacis was a universal relationship of the human species through their voices coming together to assert external political peace as well as interior health of the soul [4]. If the predatory programs of mass deportations and intensification of hostilities between nations have come to forefront in our days, this is due to the fact that the overall end is not to piecemeal ordo amoris coordinated by state social policies, but rather a permanent assault against the association of the free souls constitutive of the osculum pacis. 

In light of the theological drama of Christianity, nationalism can only be taken as a symptom of brute force and inequity (radical evil). As Erik Peterson reminded in his essay “Das Problem des Nationalismus im alten Christentum” (1951), the cult and strife between nations and imagined communities, at least for the Chirstian vocation, do not have any traction, since the warring angels of nationalities have been overcome by the event of resurrection [4]. The ‘strange career’ of American political Catholicism is precisely that through a technocratic administration of social pain and spectacular delirium, it can only offer an noncorporeal ideal of ordo amoris “in the service of a single nation which seeks to establish its supremacy, by identify its own interest with that of humankind”, as Peterson observed  in the wake of European nationalism, but that it applies today to the letter with little variations [6].

In vain should we attempt to pin down the osculum pacis as professionalization of care or the hospitalization of pain that have become practices of a “corrupted core of a very clear and powerful ideal of democracy”. In the disjointed time that characterizes the end of political theology and its warring nomoi, the osculum pacis will be not be found in those that attempt to conjure a “Christian civilization”, but only in those that dwell in the state of adelphos, faithful to the scandal of peace and the endless conspiracy of speech. 

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Notes 

1. Pope Francis. “Encyclical Letter Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship), 2020: “By his actions, the Good Samaritan showed that “the existence of each and every individual is deeply tied to that of others: life is not simply time that passes; life is a time for interactions”: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20201003_enciclica-fratelli-tutti.html 

2. Ivan Illich. The Rivers North of the Future (Anansi, 2005), 207. 

3. Ibid., 208.

4. Christine Mohrmann. “Quelques traits caractéristiques du latin des chrétiens”, in Études sur le latin des chrétien (Edizione Di Storia E Letteratura, 1961) , 29-30.

5. Erik Peterson. “Das Problem des Nationalismus im alten Christentum”, Theologische Zeitschrift, 7, 1951, 81-91.

6. Erik Peterson. “Die Frage nach dem Menschen”, in Offenbarung des Johannes und Politisch-theologische Texte (Echter Verlag, 2004), 250.

Fratribus nostris absentibus: sobre la discreción. por Gerardo Muñoz

En una epístola póstuma que consulté hace algunos años en los fondos de Penn State University, fechada en 1989 y dirigida a una comunidad de monjas benedictinas de la abadía de Regina Laudis, el ex-sacerdote Iván Illich avisa de la pérdida del sentido de la caritas ya no solo ante los vivos sino también ante los muertos. Illich le recordaba a la Madre Jerónima que su carta no pretendía establecer un “secreto”, sino un sentido de discreción (discretio); una virtud que la Iglesia había irremediablemente abandonado en su caída al mal.

La discretio – decía Illich siguiendo las recomendaciones de San Benedicto – era la madre de las virtudes, ya que nos hace distinguir la singularidad de cada situación sin que esto suponga una obediencia ciega ante lo predecible. Obviamente, desde la discretio se introducía el problema de la muerte, siempre singular y pasiva, e imposible de homologar a ninguna otra. En realidad, Illich llevaba este procedimiento a un plano experiencial, ya que hablaba de una amiga y de su “final” al que describe como un estado de “inusitada serenidad”.

Illich le decía a las monjas benedictinas: “Lo que quiero compartir con ustedes no es una opinión, sino una angustia que conmemora a los muertos que se escapa del alcance de la forma ordinaria de la caridad”. ¿Pero qué puede significar atender a ese momento oscuro que es sombra de la vida fuera de la vida? Para Illich este era el único momento de una fidelium animae que tanto la medicina como el sistema productivo del Welfare state ya no podían recoger. Desde la experiencia inasible de la muerte de su amiga (quien permanecía innombrable, como toda amistad verdadera), Illich extraía lo que llamó la sistemática “guerra contra la muerte” en Occidente, carente de sentido de “lugar” o de “tierra”. Por eso Illich la describía como una caída hacia la atopia, desentendida del atrium mortis.

Illich se encomendaba al fragmento benedictino: Fratribus nostris absentibus. Pero esa máxima monástica aparecía en un sentido transfigurado; a saber, lo “divino” (como también supo ver Erik Peterson sobre los modos de vestir) es el umbral donde la vida y la muerte se dan en un recorrido ex-corpore. Escribía Illich: “La fe termina cuando la visión de lo eterno está por llegar”. No hay transcendencia ni redención ni salvación compensatoria, solo un sentido especular por lo velado.

¿Por qué recordar todo esto hoy? Porque la crisis pandémica ha puesto de relieve que ninguna de las metrópolis en Occidente y sus guardianes de la “vida” han estado en condiciones de recoger el sentido de Fratribus nostris absentibus. Una década antes, en una serie de conferencias en el Seminario Teológico de Princeton, Illich notó la oscura transformación médica en los Estados Unidos en cuanto al pasaje del “asistir a la muerte” a la administración del “delivery of death“. La “guerra contra la muerte” continua en nuestros días ya sea desde la retórica de la protección de la vida o bien en defensa de la economía. Por eso, hoy más que nunca, la tarea del pensar exige la destitución de lo que llamamos metrópoli.

 

 

*Imagen: retrato de Iván Illich de niño en Austria, 1936. Del film “Three Boys House” (1936).