Eric Voegelin: Hitler and the Germans. Edited and translated by Detler Clemens and Brendan Purcell. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999.
In the summer of 1964, a generation after the conquest of Nazi Germany by the Allied troops, Eric Voegelin gave a series of lectures at Munich University on the question of German responsibility for the rise of Hitler’s tyranny. After all, the Nazi Party won a free and fair election in 1933, even if without a majority of the votes. And Germans increasingly supported the new regime Hitler installed, their enthusiasm peaking in the middle of 1940, with the successful blitzkrieg on France. How could these things happen? And once the war was over, Hitler and Nazism defeated and rejected, a new republican regime founded in the western section of Germany, had Germans truly come to terms with themselves? Or did the trials and convictions of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg leave the average German feeling exonerated? What about ex-Nazi functionaries who found government jobs in the apparatus of the new republic? Were not the hundreds of anti-Jewish acts of vandalism in the late 1950s and early 1960s profoundly troubling evidence that Nazi ideology still had its adherents among Germans?
Voegelin advises his students to begin their study of political science not with abstract principles but with “the concrete political events you’re familiar with,” basing “your investigation on the political experiences and knowledge you have in daily life, in order to ascend from there to the theoretical problematic.” “Hitler’s rise to power [is]the central German experiential problem of our time. How was it possible? What consequences does it have today?” Hitler’s rise to power must be understood “in connection with the disposition of the German people, which brought Hitler into power.” What was that disposition and, “concretely, what happened in the different classes of the population?”
These historical questions mattered now because anti-Jewish sentiments persisted and because major German industrial firms, including IG-Faben, Krupp, and Siemens, used the available slave labor in the concentration camps, in which people “were completely worked to death and then incinerated.” Many of the top executives in those firms now were top executives then.
Voegelin tells the students that impeding your task of understanding of German complicity in the Hitler tyranny, then and, in a subtler way, now, stands a pile of “ideological junk.” Not only Nazi ‘race science’ and Marxist ‘class struggle’ but the principles of positivism, progressivism, and modern liberalism can prevent you from seeing matters clearly. These ideologies derive from “German philosophical language” first developed in the eighteenth century by Christian Wolff and Immanuel Kant. Such words as ‘intellect,’ ‘spirit,’ and ‘reason’ do not mean what they meant in the philosophical language of Plato, Aquinas, or today in the Anglophone world. The word ‘reason’ in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason does not mean the same thing as Platonic logos; Hegel’s Geist isn’t the Holy Spirit you meet in the Bible. The Greek philosophers’ nous or intellect and the Bible’s ruach (in Greek, pneuma, in English, soul) have a very different resonance than their apparent equivalents in modern German philosophy.
How so? To understand the change, Voegelin argues, you must first overcome “a whole series of clichés” or shibboleths you have likely picked off the ideological junk pile. One such cliché is the phrase, “the unmastered past,” referring to Germans’ failure to come to terms with Nazism. “There is no unmastered past. What is past, is past. There are only unmastered presents.” ‘The present’ means “two different things”: the moment between past and future “on the line of time in the world”; and “the present in the sense of presence under God,” life as lived sub specie aeternitatis. When action isn’t judged “as action in the world under the orientation of its presence to God,” the present is unmastered. Germans have yet to master the present, have yet to judge their actions in the past as they have played out in the present as witnessed and judged by God. To master the present in this sense means that one can neither transfer guilt from you who are young onto your fathers, or (as seen in some ancient peoples) transfer the sins of the fathers to the sons, punishing the sons for the sins of the fathers. God tells His prophet, Ezekial, “all souls are mine”; each soul is responsible to Me for itself. “Each one of us is obliged to be just.” There is no “collective guilt,” in the sense of intergenerational guilt.
There is, however, another quite valid meaning of collective guilt. Human beings live in societies; societies act through their representatives; if those representatives do evil, “even those who have nothing to do with the representatives’ misdeeds, have to bear, along with them, the consequences of these misdeeds, whether they are guilty or not.” If a society “chooses criminal imbeciles and crooks as representatives, then the society as a whole is in a very unpleasant situation.” Are Hitler and his political party solely responsible for genocide and for triggering the Second World War? No, and that leads to a further problem, very much a present reality in the Germany of 1964: the partitioning of the country into the republican West and the Communist East. Surely, “no responsible statesman in the East, whether Polish, Czech, or Russian, can, after all that this country has done, contemplate with equanimity that Germany should again become a great power.”
Therefore, “our problem is the spiritual condition of a society in which the National Socialists could come into power.” Nazi rule reflected the souls of Germans, “among whom personalities of the National Socialist type can become socially representatives.”
In the nineteenth century, in the wake of the philosophic revolution initiated by Wolff and Kant, German society “moved politically under the shadow of power politics,” as Bismarck moved to unify some 37 sovereign German states. Kant himself was a republican, as were many “intelligent people” in Germany, but after the failure of the revolution of 1848 those people “withdrew from politics” and Germans generally became politically passive. German liberalism, such as it was, became “nationalistic and chauvinistic.” This pseudo-liberalism died with Kaiserism at the end of the First World War. But the Weimar Republic that replaced the Kaiser Reich also failed. A genuinely liberal society, a society consisting of citizens who took on the responsibility of liberty, did not develop, although “it could have developed if the people had been a bit more intelligent than they were.” And today, in still another republican regime, Germans live “in the shadow of the occupation by the American and Russian armies,” the shadow of Cold War power politics. As a result, we Germans still lack any empirical, any experiential, “knowledge of what free Germany, in the sense of a Germany that gave itself a representation without being in the shadow of power politics, would look like.” Such representation would be twofold: “existential,” with a ruler or rulers who act(s) for the society in external and internal matters, the actual ruler(s) of the people; and “transcendental,” the degree to which the ruling element or politeuma “represents the transcendent order of the divine.”
Given this dual classification of “the sources of authority”—human and divine—three “propositions” arise, propositions “which are in contradiction with one another.” First: “Whoever has the power to shake the world, as Hitler did, is not contemptible” in his accomplishment, however contemptible he is as a man. Authority includes power, although it isn’t reducible to it. Power can’t be waved away, dismissed as a triviality. Second, “whoever shakes the world, even though or because he is irrational, is not contemptible.” He is dangerous, a destroyer of something better than himself. Third (and “most painful[ly], for us”), “a world that allows itself to be shaken by an irrational man is contemptible.” Paradoxically, then, “by the success of his contemptibility,” Hitler “has unambiguously proved the contemptibility of the world in which he had success”—an “eminent achievement.” Not only German society, unaccustomed to democracy in the sense of self-government, of political liberty, but “the surrounding Western democracies, have begun to rot spiritually and rationally in such a way that they are taken in by a man like Hitler and make possible his success.” Hitler’s success in this regard surprised even Hitler himself, confirming in his own perverse soul the rightness of his estimate of the world and his actions against it. The previous year, Percy E. Schramm had published Hitler’s Table Talk, an account of Hitler’s conversations (mostly monologues) with his inner circle. “They reveal in a completely open way his contempt for the people he had to deal with,” and his contempt was not ill-founded. “That is why Hitler’s remarks on this very point are of the highest value in a critical analysis of the period; and it is just for that reason that they are not welcome.” They point to uncomfortable truths about the Germans, who followed Hitler.
To the clichés of “mastery of the past” and “collective guilt,” Voegelin adds “the State” as defined by Hegel. Hegel regards the State as the supreme manifestation of the Absolute Spirit, and thus the supreme authority on earth. Voegelin brings his students down to earth. When you consider the State, what you really want to know is whether its officials know what they are doing, whether they are energetic in the performance of their duties, whether they have at least some minimal degree of moral probity, not “whether the state is the reality of the moral idea.” That is, “in politics we have to do with human things,” indeed human beings, persons. “If in place of the men who are the representatives, we put the state as cliché” the way Hegel does, “then we have already got completely away from political reflection.”
Then there is the matter of the regime, the form of government prevailing in the state—in West Germany, democracy. Here, Voegelin rejects what he calls Aristotle’s regime theory, classifying regimes into the rule of the one, the few, and the many, with democracy of course being the rule of the many. In fact, Aristotle also defines regimes into moral categories: good and bad rules of the one, the few, and the many. Voegelin does that, too, but with a continued focus on bringing his students to see reality. He first quotes George Santayana, who wrote that “Democracy is the unrealizable dream of a society of patrician plebeians,” a regime in which the many are themselves good, as (genuine) aristocrats are. He then quotes Winston Churchill, who “defined democracy as the worst form of government with the exception of all the others.” That is, realistically speaking, democracy will not be “patrician” or virtuous because democrats are not especially good; this notwithstanding, monarchs and ‘the few,’ neither genuinely aristocratic, behave even more badly than the people do. For his third quote he turns to Mark Twain, who said that democracy depends on three factors: “freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.”
In Voegelin’s rendering, the consequence of these three mots is the need in politics, very much including democratic politics, for courtesy, compromises, concessions to others. “Whoever has a fixed idea and wants this to be carried into effect, that is to say, whoever interprets freedom of speech and freedom of conscience to the effect that the society should behave in the way that he considers right, is not qualified to be [a] citizen of a democracy.” By contrast, genuinely “political interplay,” which Voegelin calls patrician (the Greeks, the Romans, and the English would say ‘gentlemanly’), may be seen specifically in Aristotle, who defines politics itself as ruling and being ruled in turn. “It is based on the fact that one thinks a lot about what the others do, but does not say it; that one is always aware that in the society there is more than one good to achieve, not only the good of freedom, but also the good of security, the good of welfare, and that if I specialize in one or other of these good, I could thereby bring the whole society into disorder, because I could destroy the balance between the realization of good on which the society is based.” Such single-minded concentration on one good leads to irreconcilable factions, as in reaction to my hard single-mindedness you will engage in “counterhardening,” bringing about the impossibility of social cooperation.” No democratic regime can endure without prudence, practical wisdom. Voegelin is teaching the new generation of Germans how to think politically, a way of thought occluded by both the prevalent philosophic theories and the political practices prevailing in Germany for nearly two centuries.
It is only with a sense of ‘the present’ reality in this concrete sense that one can ascend from practice to theory. Voegelin now turns to the pre-modern and Biblical understanding of humanity and its enemy, “radical stupidity”—the sort of stupidity that permits tyrannical rule. What is man? And “what are the symptoms of the falling down and the derailment of man?” Once again, in asking these questions he directs his students to pay attention to concrete circumstances in which these questions arise.
Concretely, then, “When was man as such discovered? and “What was he discovered to be?” In Hellenic society, philosophers “experienced” man as a being constituted by nous or rational intellect. In Israelite society, man was experienced as constituted by pneuma or spirit, as a being “to whom God speaks his word,” “a being who is open to God’s word.” “Reason and spirit are the two modes of constitution of man.” This means that “man experiences himself as a being who does not exist from himself” but rather lives within “an already given world,” a world mysteriously given, present, a world that raises the question. Where did this world, and I, Man, within it, come from? “Dependence of existence [Dasein] on the divine causation of existence [Existenz] has remained the basic question of philosophy up to today.” In Leibniz’s formula, Why is there something rather than nothing? and Why is the something as it is?
Man has wants. Most distinctively, he wants to know. To want is to love, and “the loving reaching out beyond ourselves toward the divine in the philosophical experience and the loving encounter through the word in the pneumatic experience” amounts to a “participation in the divine.” “Insofar as man shares in the divine, insofar, that is to say, as he can experience it, man is ‘theomorphic,’ in the Greek term, or the image of God, the imago Dei, in the pneumatic sphere.” This is what is meant by the claim of “human dignity.” In abandoning this quest, man stops participating in the divine, gives up the distinctively human activity, and so this “dedivinizing” of man invariably causes his “dehumanizing,” the loss of his dignity. Whenever an individual or group of individuals closes himself, itself, to the rationally divine or the pneumatically divine, they also close themselves to reality, to the ground of being which supports the beings, including human beings.
And so we read in Novalis, “The world shall be as I wish it!” In that phrase, “you have the whole problem of Hitler.” The world is not as we wish it, and is highly unlikely ever to be such. As human beings, we are as much ‘givens’ as the world is. To take the classification of human types Aristotle proposes, a classification first set down by Hesiod, the best man “considers or thinks through all things,” teaches himself; the second-best man “listens to the best,” learns from them; the least impressive man neither thinks for himself nor learns from those who do. The best man is truly free because he “lets himself be led by his own nous.” The second-best man is partly free, inasmuch as he follows reason without fully exercising it. The ‘last’ man (to borrow a later philosopher’s term) Aristotle calls the natural slave, Hesiod calls the useless man. Voegelin rejects these terms because the Greeks tied these terms to what they took to be a natural social hierarchy, although not necessarily the conventional one. To avoid confusion, to acknowledge the fact that slavish, useless men exist “at all levels of society up to its highest ranks, including pastors, prelates, generals, industrialists, and so on,” he deploys the term “rabble.”
The rabble are stupid and illiterate. By stupidity, Voegelin means the condition in which “a man, because of his loss of reality, is not in a position to rightly orient his action in the world in which he lives.” Not guided by intellect or spirit, consequently out of touch with reality, this man “will act stupidly.” In Hebrew, this man is the nabal, the fool, who causes “disorder in the society” because he refuses to obey God’s revealed Law. For Plato, this is the “irrationally ignorant man, the amathes (literally, the unknowing one), who either “does not have the authority of reason or who cannot bow to it.” For Aquinas, he is the stultus or fool, combining the Hebrew nabal and the Greek amathes. He is an illiterate man, not in the sense of being unable to read or write but a one who lacks the language needed to characterize “certain sectors of reality,” the things that require either theoretical or practical reasoning. “They do not get it.”
In Germany, such illiteracy “runs through the elite.” It lends itself to manipulations of language—lies and propaganda. Such was the way of the Nazis, who employed the tactic of telling the truth once, thereby gaining credibility, then lying believably ever after. For example, “in the Thirties, in Germany, there was a saying, in constant use, that the National Socialists had never touched a hair on anyone…. But that was about the only thing they did not do,” and it wasn’t long before they were touching plenty of hairs on plenty of heads, too. Nazis did that in their diplomatic ventures, too, beginning with their just complaints about the real damage the Treaty of Versailles had caused Germany, then fabricating a series of false justifications for acts of aggression, all of them supposedly taken to redress Germany’s just grievances. Even in postwar Germany, courts have excused “various concentration camp murderers” on the grounds that “under the given conditions of German society it was not possible for a man to recognize a crime as a crime.”
“How does a man bring himself to commit crimes, and at the same time dispute he ever committed them, and still be honest?” It is quite possible, thanks to stupidity. It is surely true, Voegelin concedes, that under circumstances of extreme disorder, “qualities such as cunning, craftiness, and violence are indeed necessary in order to preserve one’s life and to prevail, and whoever lacks them is incompetent and perhaps may perish.” And under orderly conditions, such qualities become symptoms of stupidity, since “a man who behaves in this way will be socially boycotted.” As Aristotle would teaches, “stupidity is always to be understood in relation to the social and historical context” in which you think and act.
In his 1937 essay, “On Stupidity,” Robert Musil identified here two kinds of stupidity: simple stupidity or lack of understanding and the higher stupidity, intelligent stupidity. The more interesting, higher, stupidity comes from hubris or “spiritual arrogance.” “The spirit now becomes the adversary, not the mind.” Much earlier, Schelling had called this “pneumopathology”—not psychopathology or madness but “sickness of the spirit,” a closing off of the mind from God (from “the ground of Being,” as Voegelin likes to say) caused by a refusal to train the intellect on what it naturally wants, the truth. The opposite spiritual quality, Anstand, quite often appears not in the elites but in the middle classes (the class Aristotle wanted in the polis because it moderates the greedy few and the envious many). Honesty, diligence, cleanliness, reliability, moderation: these are the modest virtues of a regime within the overall regime, a way of life that keeps intellects open to reality. These virtues can be misdirected, however, as a Nazi functionary, the man who ‘only follows orders,’ may exhibit them. This is “the problem of the simple man, who is a decent man as long as the society as a whole is in order but then goes wild, without knowing what he is doing, when disorder arises somewhere, and the society is no longer holding together.” As a ‘second-best’ man without the best men to guide him (whether in the form of living persons or in the written words of wise teachers and lawgivers), this “citizen par excellence” will careen into evil, without intending any such thing or recognizing that that is what’s happening to him.
As for the higher, intelligent stupidity, it is the province of the elites, the educated, the sort of people who served in the German parliament and gave Hitler the power to enact laws without their consent. Such persons are sophisticated in the literal sense of the word—entangled in their own sophistries. They lack prudence, deceiving themselves.
“There is no right to be stupid.” German elites have indulged in stupidity in part because German philosophers have deranged the philosophic quest, and German theologians have joined them in their derangement. Stupidity issues from derangements of the spirit. Deranged spirits revolt against God, revolt against the ground of Being. “In the classical and Christian sense,” the will is the voluntas of Aquinas, “always and only the rationally ordered will.” The “classic Christian” term for human intention that separates itself from reason and spirit is libido as in Augustine’s libido dominandi or Aquinas’s concupiscentia. This “existence-powerful desire” is, however, what German philosophers, notably Fichte and Nietzsche, call the will. When people call Hitler a strong-willed man, they take on the now-characteristic German definition of the term. But in classical and Christian terms, “there is no willpower in Hitler at all,” no “existence that was ordered by reason or spirit,” only “an extraordinary existence-intensive libido,” which “he maintained up to the end.” In him, “reality and experience of reality are replaced by a false image of reality,” one he insisted was reality, and which came into “constant conflict” with reality itself, culminating in his suicide beneath the rubble of the capital city. [1]
How, then, did Hitler come to tyrannize the Germans? Some, he simply misled. Cut off from the teaching of the churches, many Germans responded to what later generations would call Hitler’s ‘charisma’—itself a perversion of a religious term. Such persons are analogous to those who understand the wise at second hand, but instead of heeding right reasoning they heed the only thing that can replace right reasoning: the libido. “The one who reacts only to power succumbs to the aura of the existence-power that radiates from Hitler.” Those who retain “a certain spiritual rank” do not succumb. Voegelin recalls the women who sat in the front row at the Nazi rallies, fascinated by his sheer energy and by “the aura of the blue eyes.” It is not a uniquely German phenomenon, as in the America of the Forties girls swooned at Sinatra concerts, although in those instances they may have been paid. The example of later ‘rock concerts’ may be a more just analogy, although even that stupidity is often enhanced by drugs.
“The tragedy of the German character,” so to speak the birth of tragedy in Germany, comes into relief “when this filthy rabble comes into power” and “the culture is finished.” Against genuine intellectual and spiritual culture arises the cult, the Hitler cult. Voegelin describes Hitler’s ideas on religion as “those of a relatively primitive monism”—a set of beliefs based not on God but nature ‘scientistically’ understood. In this, it resembled the positivism of Auguste Comte, except that the science was biology, not sociology. The German zoologist, Ernst Haeckel—a distinguished zoologist but wretched theorist—founded the Monist League near the beginning of the century, calling it “the monistic church,” whose underlying doctrine was “the omnipotence of the law of matter.” He adhered to a version of ‘race science’ which held that the several human ‘races’ evolved separately, a claim which he appended to Social Darwinism. Hitler drank it all in. Looking at him, and also the likes of Lenin and Stalin, Thomas Mann wrote, “Never before have the powerful, the makers and shakers of the world’s affairs, taken it on themselves in this manner to act as teachers of a people, indeed of mankind.” Napoleon and Bismarck, for example, founded new states with new regimes, but they didn’t think of themselves as beings marching in History’s vanguard. Hitler wanted “to get his own way,” no less than they did, but in all areas of human thought and practice. He never read philosophy or great literature, but why, in his mind, would he? In principle, he already knew everything, so reading was only a matter of extracting information or ideas that could be fitted into his “world-view.” “There is absolutely no question of learning from reality,” as he already had his ‘values.’ A book is, “so to say, a rubbish heap from which one pulls out relevant things”; “the entire area of the spiritual and rational, which is based on meditation and reproduction of meditative experience, is systematically excluded from perception.” And so, for example, in reading (or much more likely, reading of) Heraclitus’ aphorism, “War is the father of all,” he took this to be an early statement of Social Darwinism, the ‘survival of the fittest,’ and said so in a 1942 speech to young officers of the Wehrmacht. Adding Haeckelian ‘race science’ to this, Hitler had his imperative to make war against Jews and Slavs.
Where, in all this, were the real churches? They, too, had allowed themselves to sink into pneumopathology. Voegelin begins by distinguishing the several meanings of the term, ‘church.’ First, it means the Evangelical and Catholic Churches of Germany “as social institutions”; it also means churches in other countries, also as such institutions. There are also supranational institutions, such as the Roman Catholic Church. There is “Christ’s Church,” a “collective term for all ecclesial institutions that confess themselves as Christian, and there is finally the corpus mysticum Christi, which includes all human beings “from the beginning of the world to its end.” In terms of the first definition, in the 1930s almost all Germans were ‘churched.’ These churches were intended to be “nothing other than the representation of the spiritual transcendence of man.” In this sense, there could be no separation of church and state because church members and citizens were the same people, the same Germans, “only with different representations, temporal and spiritual.” This means that Germans’ “spiritual and intellectual disorder” afflicted both churches and the state.
“Loss of reality had already taken place within the church itself,” as “contact with the reality of man in his individuality as theo-morphes, and thus his real human nature, had got lost.” This happened, initially, because the churches in Germany no longer (in some instances, never had) recourse to classical philosophy, with its understanding of human nature as noetic. “This picture of man in classical philosophy was never available in Germany because of the parallel decline of university philosophy,” which had taken up Wolff, Kant, Hegel and the Romantics instead of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas. Practically, this meant that the churches, since they did not uphold the right understanding of man, inclined to defend their own “institutional, cultural-political interests” while remaining “indifferent to the interests of man.” Their criticisms of National Socialism remained on this superficial level.
For this reason, the churches were also blind to the character of Nazism and Communism. “It was characteristic for Germany that contact with the temporal reality of politics was not established by humanism, Renaissance, natural law, and Enlightenment, but through German Romanticism and irresponsible chatter about Volkstum,” as seen in the writings of Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. The nationalism or ‘folkishness’ of the German Romantics had closed German churches to the universality of the Christian teaching.
Voegelin finds this pathology more readily among the Evangelical churches because their theologians are entitled to interpret the Bible freely, and so their teachings are not “disguised by the iron discipline of the organization,” as they are in the Catholic Church. With only rare exceptions, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, evangelicals in Germany quite openly mixed Christianity with ‘race science,’ and particularly anti-Semitism. “This is why…from the ecclesiastical side, Hitler was able to come to power: because the very ones the people relied on for their spiritual guidance told them to vote for Hitler and obediently voted for Hitler themselves,” having “no spiritual organ for perceiving the problem posed by National Socialism.” Moreover, and ominously, “this situation of decadence, predating Hitler and National socialism, has not essentially changed since Hitler.”
Intending to preach from the Bible but blocked from understanding this by the pile of intellectual and spiritual detritus that had accumulated for more than a century, Evangelical pastors in Thirties Germany often cited Romans 13, in which the Apostle Paul tells Christians to obey the divinely ordained powers of Caesar. Voegelin recognizes this command as a borrowing from Stoicism: “The idea is that of a hierarchy of authorities in the cosmos, where God is in the highest place, in the lower places are the authorities in society, in the lowest place is man himself.” It implies that the imperial government “in fact obey[ed] and sanction[ed] the moral law in the Stoic sense.” It does not imply “that one should be subject to any authorities whatsoever, let alone…that one should have to be subject to the authorities even when they do evil.” Voegelin suggests that Martin Luther, in basing his understanding of the Gospel on the words on the page alone, missed the political circumstance in which Paul wrote, inadvertently distorting his meaning. Paul was writing to “persons in the Christian community” of his time “who misunderstood the freedom of the Christian under God as meaning that one no longer has to obey the ethical order of society”—antinomians. But if, as Paul goes on to say, the fullness of the law is love, in social terms love of neighbor, then this “is not very different from Aristotelian politics,” which identifies “the fundamental ethic of the political community as the philia politike in the spirit, the homonoia, the noetic virtue,” as constitutive of the right political order. The Christian addition to this order is agapic love, love of the person ‘unconditionally,’ as one says nowadays, as a fellow creature made in the Image of God. To those who complain that this is too ‘unselfish,’ that it neglects the need to protect oneself and the political community from evildoers like Hitler, whom Christians must also love, the Christian may well reply that I can hate the sin while loving the sinner, and therefore must oppose the sinful acts of the sinner out of love for the sinner. At any rate, “all of this has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with one having to be subject to any kind of authorities—above all, naturally, nothing to do with having to comply with the Hitler laws,” as Evangelicals and Catholics alike commanded.
Whereas German Protestantism tends to be open to science—or rather to opinions about science, including race pseudo-science—Catholicism tends to be open to philosophy. As a result, the German Catholic Church denounced Nazism before the Nazis took power but accommodated it afterwards, in a show of false prudence, but not a theoretical capitulation, as with Protestants. “Under the pretext that the church as against neopaganism but had really no objection to an authoritarian regime the matter dragged on for some time.” The Gestapo became suspicious: Might not the Catholic Church be doing what it had done in other countries, “adapt[ing] itself to the outer forms and thus use camouflage to work its way in,” going so far as “speak[ing] of Jesus as the Führer”—a horrifying apostasy in the eyes of any dedicated National Socialist, who held there to be only one Führer, Adolf Hitler, with none before him.
The Catholic Church in Germany tread lightly, opposing Nazi policies of sterilization, euthanasia, attacks on baptized Jews, but “not in a very intense form.” To make sure that his students would not be tempted to suppose that the concentration were ‘not so bad,’ Voegelin read passages from Karl Kraus’s uncompromising 1933 anti-Nazi satire, Die Dritte Walpurgisnacht, which accurately anticipated the enormities the new regime would commit. [2] Among the very few Catholic clergymen who diagnosed the underlying problem was Father Alfred Delp, who wrote, “We are somehow lacking the great courage that comes, not from hot blood and youthfulness nor unbroken vitality”—the ‘vitalism’ or life-worship of Nietzsche, vulgarized by the Nazis—but “from the possession of the Spirit and the consciousness of the blessing we have received,” the courage that comes from knowing that we act “before the sovereign God.”
For his part, Voegelin sees that today “there is no revival of philosophizing in the church.” Attempts to supplement Catholic Church doctrines with such current intellectual fashions as “positivistic sociology or psychoanalysis or existentialism” fail to recover the Church’s “intellectual order” because these fashions partake of the reality-denying ‘philosophy of freedom’ that shouldered Thomism aside. Instead, the Church should return to its fundamental principles, abjuring pride, recognizing that it is “by the grace of the Word man will be elevated above his nature,” not from anything he does himself. Thus, “Christ is the head of the corpus mysticum” and “not the president of a special-interest club.” Further, the Christian’s elevation above his nature by grace “does not relieve one of the duty of being a human being”; it does not make you into a god. Nor does it elevate those who wield state power into gods, contra the misreading of Romans 13, or make rulers into the fathers and mothers God commands us to honor. Similarly, the nation isn’t a god and German Romantic nationalists aren’t fathers of the Church. In all, when Jesus tells us, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” He does not say, “Blessed are the weak in the head.” Only the weak in the head and the arrogant of spirit will imagine that Jews are less than human; only they will fail to say with the prophet Ezekial, “If you warn the wicked to turn from his way, and he does not turn from his way, he shall die in his iniquity, but you will have saved your life.” Voegelin cites Aquinas, who understands Christ as the head of all men, not only of Christians. Moreover, “the presence under God, and the presence of God in the world,” means that “all of mankind is a member of the corpus mysticum in the sense of inclusion in God, as he realizes himself in history.” No one church, not even the one that calls itself catholic, can set itself up “as the one and only corpus mysticum.” “This ghettoizing tendency,” Voegelin writes, recalling the mistreatment of Jews in Germany, and elsewhere, with Kraus-like satirical intent, really ought to be resisted by every Christian church, given the creation of Man as the imago Dei. Philosophers are not exempt from this stricture, either, as the human being as characterized by intellect and spirit, “the one who is immediately understanding” reality, “is always only one individual human being, and whether he is a prophet or a philosopher makes no difference.” Theologians and philosophers, clergy and laity, need to think about politics, but this time with intelligence.
Thinking intelligently about politics is hard for modern men. The greatest political philosopher, Aristotle, thought about politics within the polis, a small political community in which political speech and political actions were more easily heard and seen. We moderns “do not have a polis anymore” but a large and complex nation-state. As for the spiritual life, the first giving of God’s Word occurred in one nation, now scattered, with no “determinations of any kind about how a society should be organized, not even that of the chosen people.” [2] Nor did Jesus leave instructions on how to organize His ecclesia.
Early Christians met the problem by inserting Ciceronian natural law “into the Christian idea of order in the world.” Political order therefore entails not only the Covenant at Sinai or the Sermon on the Mount “but also the philosophic insight into the nature of man and the ideas of human and social order arising from it, as they were taken over from the pre-Christian philosophic complex.” But this caused the Catholic Church to take on “the role of guardian of natural law,” a role clergy are not “particularly suitable” to undertake. “For all the propositions of the natural law derive from the noetic experience, whereas within the church the noetic experience is not the primary source of experience and truth for clerics and theologians, but is replaced by the pneumatic experience of revelation.” This circumstance inclines clergy to denature and deform “a very considerable stock of knowledge of order coming from philosophy…because it had to be inserted into a complex of pneumatic symbols of revelation not intended to establish the order of temporal society.” In contemporary Germany, this led to the well-meaning but risible attempt by Social Democrats who wanted to get rid of Marxism, replace it with natural law, but had no source of information on natural law than the Catholic Church.
Having offered his critique (and not in the Kantian or Marxist sense) of German philosophers and churchmen, Voegelin turns his attention to the German lawyers. Their faults also predated Hitler and also “are still here today.” Their faults result from the doctrine of legal positivism, which locates right not in God or in nature but in human laws. Legal positivists claim that the law is the law, and that is all there is to say. But “if the question about who makes the law is eliminated, then you again have the situation of rabble-like demoralization,” which ignores the question of the order that frames the law, the criteria of justice. This makes it “psychologically impossible to rebel, if the content of the positive law, that is to say, of the laws, is criminal.” If the sociopolitical order, the regime, itself becomes corrupt, you will need good laws more than ever but be even less capable of framing them. “If the men are corrupt and not capable of law and justice, or if they proffer some kind of ideology under justice, then, of course, one cannot have any legal order.”
The history of law in modern Europe ranges from Jean Bodin’s argument in favor of putting all legislative power in “the hand of the prince”—thereby excluding authorities outside the state (pope, Holy Roman Emperor) or inside it (legal guilds) from lawmaking—to the replacement of monarchic regimes with republics, with popular sovereignty, to the separation of powers that prevents any branch of government to make a law “without the others.” This history confirms that it is the ethos, the character of the political society, and it alone, that finally determines whether laws will be just, and whether good laws will be justly enforced. But under legal positivism, that point is fatally obscured. Even in the Federal Republic, where law is said to be based upon the “dignity of man,” described as “inviolable,” one can find no suggestion within the legal code regarding what that dignity consists of, how a legal violation of it might be identified, were one to occur. “It is very fine if one protects the dignity of man, but what happens if men degrade themselves? There is no protection from the state against that.”
As the arch-surrealist, Lenin, once pointedly asked, What is to be done? Voegelin summarizes his main theme. There is a “first” reality, the actual moral, social, and political condition human beings face, the one he had directed his students to consider in his opening lecture—reality here and now. There is also a “second” reality, a mythical condition that seeks to replace it. Sancho Panza sees the first reality, Don Quixote imagines and wants to impose the second. “If there are enough people who believe some tomfoolery then this will become a socially dominant reality, and whoever criticizes it moves into the position of the buffoon who must be punished.” “I believe that what I imagine is in fact really so,” and, on the receiving end, so to speak, if the authorities say it, it must be so. Thus, language becomes “a second reality within which one operates, without having the relation to the first reality.” Voegelin sees this in the writings of Heidegger, devotee of what he called the inner truth and greatness of Nazism. Although “it is certainly not Heidegger’s intention thus to characterize language as second reality…he has in fact done that.” That is why he and his followers are “no longer thinking in relation to reality.” Under such circumstances, “words acquire their own existence; language becomes an independent reality in itself,” as seen in German Romanticism. A century later, ‘modernist’ literature (he has in mind Gottfried Benn, among others) partook of this “highly concentrated imbecility.” And after Heidegger, beyond Voegelin’s critique of Heidegger, thinkers calling themselves ‘postmodernists’ have performed much the same trick on themselves, although the more cynical ones have limited the con to those they intend to subordinate. Under the aegis of the second reality, “political conviction is understood as a kind of slit in an armored car through which one glimpses only arbitrary facets of reality.” Instead of noetic perception, one adopts a ‘worldview.’
“Aristotle had defined nous as the core of personality. If man doesn’t love his core, and thus his own self, he has lost contact with reality.” This kind of self-love in no way conflicts with Christianity, inasmuch as “Love your neighbor as yourself” means you are right to love your self, insofar as it partakes of you as an imago Dei. And love of your self as an imago Dei implies love of “the divine.”
The philosophic revolution effected by Hegel was followed by four German thinkers “of world rank”: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Weber. They shared three traits, regarding man in terms of passion and conflict, not reason and political order, unmasking moral principles, now demoted to the status as ‘values,’ as masks for interests and instincts, and an aversion to the ordinary citizen, especially the bourgeois. But “even if Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche thoroughly murder God and explain him away as dead, divine being remains eternal and man must still get on with living his life sealed by his creatureliness, and by death.” All such attempts “to transform [man] from the imago Dei into an imago hominis” conflict “with the first reality, whose order continually exists.” The “world-immanent apocalypses of history created by Kant, Condorcet, Comte, and Marx” never quite happen. When these false apocalypses of the gods that fail, “there arises the phenomenon of disillusionment,” the “suffering of Godforsakenness” experienced by Nietzsche, who grasps not for reality but for yet another surreality, the Superman. And even this brings no final consummation, only the endless cycle of Nietzsche’s ‘Eternal Return.’
Among these thinkers, Voegelin thinks best of Weber, who has at least the sense to despair at the condition of modern man. For Weber, since there no genuine purpose of human life, and no “dimension of the vita contemplativa” that could discover one, “the life of reason has sunk to nonreality, replaced by the world-immanent activism of science”—Voegelin-speak for the fact that science progresses, new discoveries “superseded in thirty to forty years at most,” but the progress is pointless. True, Weber “thought he possessed the recipe for the solution of evil: The sights of a value-free social science should and could educate the revolutionaries to a sense of responsibility by making them aware of the consequences of their action.” This hope makes Weber un homme sérieux. He nonetheless “suffers from the false attitude” of one who wishes for moral responsibility without asking, ‘Responsible to whom? To what?’ “As a result we find in him an extreme spiritual sensitivity, which recognizes the falsity and wishes to resolve the tension, but no definitive breakthrough.” In the end, he cannot “break through the closure and turn back to openness toward transcendence.”
Notes
- On the highest level, Nietzsche, in valorizing the ‘will to power,’ suffered because “he knew what reality was” from reading Pascal. “The constant debate between Nietzsche and Pascal is stimulated precisely by his recognition of genuine reality in Pascal and his knowledge of himself as having a false idea of reality and that he constantly lived in this tension between the image of the swindle he is pursuing and the reality he admires in Pascal.” To assuage the tension, he lied to himself, since “it is necessary to lie constantly” in order to cover up the truth. Far below Nietzsche, in between Nietzsche the philosopher-tyrant and Hitler the ideologist-tyrant one finds the “swindling petty bourgeois” man, in the Nazi regime the orders-following bureaucrat, unaware of the swindle, lying in “good conscience” to himself and to others.
- This is an unusual claim, given the very extensive legal code Moses brought down from Mount Sinai. Voegelin probably means that the Mosaic Law aims primarily at fixing moral limits and rites of worship for Israelites, not ruling institutions as such.
- The Third Walpurgis Night wasn’t published until 1952, as Kraus, an Austrian Jew, feared retaliation by the Nazis against German Jews, few of whom had had the chance to flee the country. Among many other thrusts, Kraus called the language deployed in Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda, “Germanogibberish,” and wrote of the Führer himself, “Hitler brings nothing to my mind”—a succinct remark on the tyrant’s nihilist core.
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