Will Morrisey Reviews

Jósef Mindszenty: Memoirs. Anonymous translation. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2023. Introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney.

Defamed in life by Communists throughout the world and their dupes, Cardinal Jósef Mindszenty stands as witness to the character of the Communist regime in Hungary and such regimes elsewhere, inasmuch as the Party employed essentially the same strategies and tactics, worldwide. Communists used both national institutions and religious organizations whenever they could, preparatory to ruining and replacing them with their own ‘operatives,’ corrupting, torturing, and killing as they proceeded. Given the grim “destinies of my country and its Church,” Mindszenty “will not be able to speak merely of edifying and joyful things. I must tell about life as it is, filled with suffering and grace. In short, I must speak of reality.” He had witnessed more than a regime change.

Born in 1892, Mindszenty was ordained as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church in 1915, as the Austro-Hungarian Empire fought alongside Germany and the Ottoman Empire in the Great War. His mentor in the priesthood, Father Béla Geiszlinger, led him to work to understand the lives of all classes of people in the parish and to consider both the spiritual and the material needs of each person he met. “I owe a great deal to this remarkable man.” “I was especially happy when—even in cases of those who seemed to have hopelessly fallen out with God, the Church, and themselves—I was able to revive faith by persuasion and guidance.” 

The war only began the sufferings of Hungarian Christians, the Church in Hungary, and Hungary itself. Hungary’s founder, King Stephen, an aristocrat and Christian convert from the local paganism, began his reign in 1001, defeating pagan chieftains to gain and to keep the throne. His legitimacy recognized by Pope Sylvester II, Stephen faithfully, and forcefully, brought Christianity to his compatriots in the next four decades. He also fought to maintain Hungary’s independence from the Holy Roman Empire. On his deathbed, Mindszenty writes, he “dedicated the land of Hungary to the mother of Our Lord,” giving the Hungarian Catholic Church its Maronite inflection. After his death, the country fell into disunity once again, but he remained a symbol of Roman Catholic Christianity and the Hungarian nation throughout the subsequent centuries, canonized by the Church in 1083.

At the end of the Great War, Mindszenty writes, “the disintegration of St. Stephen’s country seemed to be proceeding inexorably, as the reigning king, Charles IV, “withdrew” and a republican government under Michael Károlyi took over. Károlyi proved a foolish and weak statesman. A wealthy aristocrat, he detested the Hapsburg Monarchy and admired the revolutionaries of 1848. Nor did he much esteem the Church, esteeming the Enlightenment and looking to technology, not God, for the salvation of mankind. His pacifist sentiments proved beneficial at war’s end, as he had opposed the now-loathed war itself and the Empire’s alliance with Germany. Once his republican regime was in power, however, he refused to defend the country against rival states, losing seventy-five percent of pre-war Hungarian territory. 

Mindszenty opposed “the new regime” in his sermons, writing in a newspaper he helped to edit, and as the local leader of the Christian Party, which stood for election in municipal and regional offices. He was arrested in February 1919, and a month later Károlyi, who by then shared power with the Marxist Social Democratic Party, “let the Communists seize power from him and proclaim the dictatorship of the proletariat.” In his usual incompetence, Károlyi had not known that the Social Democrats had allied themselves with the Communist Party. The Communist, Béla Kun, took over and launched a terror campaign against his many enemies. Quite rightly deemed “incorrigible,” Mindszenty was expelled from Zala County, in which he had served as an assistant parish priest and returned to his home county (both located on the eastern border of the country), only to return when the Communist regime in turn collapsed in August 1919. He replaced the now-retired priest. 

Wondering why Zala County, unlike his native, neighboring Vas County, had such a high rate of illiteracy and poor Church education, he began to study its history. He learned that it “was still suffering from a heritage of the period of Turkish rule,” which dated from the sixteenth century conquests. Many Hungarians had fled the area, fearing enslavement and death, and the Catholic churches and rectories had been burned. Although the Turks were pushed out a century later, the depopulated and desperately poor county had no funds to rebuild. Little had changed in the 150 years that followed. “My aim was to create a contemporary parish life.” 

Mindszenty proved a capable organizer. The parish was large; Catholics had difficulty traveling to attend religious services and schools. He increased the number of Sunday Masses in the existing churches and chapels, built a new monastic church in one of the working-class districts, and instituted “an energetic program of visiting people in their homes,” whereby “we created closer relations between the clergy and the flock.” He eventually established twelve new parochial schools. He took a seat on both the county council and the municipal council of Zalaegerszeg, the county seat; this was a common practice in Europe at the time, when priests often sat in national parliaments. Mindszenty stayed on the local level of government, however, having “never thought very highly of the role of priest-politician.” “I was all the more determined to fight the enemies of my country and Church with the written and spoken word and to support all Christian politicians by giving clear and decisive directives to the faithful. But I myself wanted simply to remain a pastor. I regarded politics as a necessary evil in the life of a priest. Because politics can overturn the altar and imperil immortal souls, however, I have always felt it necessary for a minister to keep himself well informed about the realm of party politics…. It would certainly be a sign of great weakness if a priest were to leave vital political and moral decisions solely to the often-misled consciences of the laity.” 

Interwar Hungary afforded many instances of such misled consciences, as the decade of the 1920s saw violent civil strife between the Hungarian Right and the Left. The Hapsburgs failed to regain power and no new royal dynasty was established, so the parliament designated Admiral Miklós Horthy as regent of the “Kingdom of Hungary.” Horthy ruled as a quasi-constitutional strongman for more than two decades, attempting to steer a relatively moderate course domestically by banning both the Communist Party and the fascist Arrow Cross Party. In foreign policy, however, he steered into ever-closer ties with the Axis Powers in the 1930s. In 1940, Hungary entered into formal alliance with them and joined their invasions of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union in 1941. Within Hungary itself, Horthy collaborated in the policy of genocide against European Jews, quite possibly not so much out of racialist anti-Semitism as out of his conviction that Hungarian Jews had aligned with the Left throughout his lifetime. He was nonetheless an unenthusiastic ally of the Axis, directing his prime minister to enter into peace negotiations with the United States and Great Britain in autumn 1943. Hitler’s informants were vigilant, however, and German forces rolled in by the next spring. arresting Horthy and installing their own puppet, a member of the Arrow Cross. “The hour of darkness was descending upon Hungary. From the West the brown peril threatened us; and from the East, the red.”

Mindszenty says almost nothing of the politics of Hungary during the interwar years. It is likely that the regime left him to his clerical duties, unmolested. In March of 1944, at the age of 52, he was appointed Bishop of Veszprém, a city-county located immediately to the west of Zala and Vas. The area had been occupied by the Nazis, but by then Mindszenty was free to undertake the traditional bishops’ confirmation tour. “Already well aware that the war would end badly for Hungary and that breakup of the large landed estates would follow hard upon the defeat,” he hoped to sell ten thousand of the twenty-four thousand diocesan lands and to distribute among the peasants, “with the idea of improving societal conditions among a sizable portion of the population.” This also would have tightened the bonds between the peasantry and the Church; needless to say, the Communists had other plans, and his plan was never realized. Unlike the doomed Rightist regime, Hungary’s Catholic bishops protested the confinement of Hungarian Jews. In a strongly worded pastoral letter, they reaffirmed that all human beings enjoy “innate rights,” including the rights to life, personal freedom, and “the free exercise of religion,” rights endowed “not by individuals, not by associations, not even by representatives of the government, but by God Himself.” This protest saved some lives, spurring Christians to protect Jews—as best they could. [1]

By Christmastime, Mindszenty found himself arrested by the Arrow Cross government, having had the temerity to write them a letter, signed by other bishops, begging it to try to prevent a Nazi-Soviet battle in the heartland of the country. He held Christmas Mass in the prison chapel, attended not only by Catholics but men of the Left—even “atheists whose praying and singing deeply moved me. The peril of death had brought them close to God.” “Never again, and nowhere else, has a Christmas Mass moved me as did this one.”

A few months later, retired Bishop János Mikes visited him in his cell, offering to help him to escape to the Soviet-held territories. Bishop Mikes naively imagined that the Soviets “had changed and no longer threatened the people of the Church”—as did many Hungarian politicians, who “did not know how to judge Soviet intentions correctly.” Mindszenty knew better, having seen the double-dealing of the Communists after the First World War. Hungarian politicians hadn’t studied the writings of Lenin and Stalin, nor had they attended to “the practices of Bolshevism.” “I had always noted the lack of public education on this score—even under the Horthy regime.” Mindszenty, however, “had “early realized what kind of enemy the Church was confronting, what sort of terrorism awaited us.” Not merely atheistic but contemptuous of Christian humility, intent on combatting individuality and private property and on “reshap[ing] the family and marriage in their own terms,” ready to liquidate their enemies, the Communists were worse than Neronian. “Historical studies had taught me that compromise with this enemy will almost always play into his hands.” As for Bishop Mikes, he died of a gunshot wound inflicted by Soviet troops, when he tried to prevent rapes in his village. In addition to rapes and murders, Soviet plundering showed that “the passion for private property shattered Communist collectivism.” When asked by a couple of priests to write a letter thanking the Red Army and its leaders “for our liberation,” Mindszenty declined. 

The Soviets brought with them a set of exiled Hungarian Communists whom they installed as the proximate rulers of the country. The Communists did not abolish the Church; they undertook to hollow it out, gouge by gouge, suppressing the substance of its teachings while leaving the forms of worship intact. Proclaiming “religious freedom,” they meant only the Church services; Catholic education, Catholic associations, and Catholic charities were strictly curtailed. “They also declared that in all disputed questions between Church and state, a solution would be sought in the spirit of true democracy,” “true democracy” meaning the rule of the Communist Party. [2] This rule began mildly, following the Leninist recommendation that “the battle against religion must in certain cases be so waged that religious groups do not take alarm.” Hungary was such a case, as so many Hungarians adhered to Catholic or Protestant Christianity. “If possible,” clerics “were to be enlisted in the service of Communist goals” and Communist agents attempted to infiltrate religious congregations. Soon, “the Communists inflicted three severe blows on the Church”: agrarian reforms transferring farmlands which supported many Church institutions to collectives controlled by the Party; harassment of the Catholic press, aimed at “driv[ing] the Church out of public life, to diminish her influence as a source of information, and to paralyze her activities”; and regulation governing the formation of political parties, including Church-affiliated parties. On the educational front, August 1945 saw the beginning of a campaign to re-write national history, “reevaluated from the Communist standpoint.” “Teachers were required to make Marxism the basis for their educational work instead of ‘the outmoded Christian ideology.'” St. Stephen himself was denounced, in one Communist youth newspaper. In a November 1946 radio address, Mindszenty warned that “the first three centuries of the Christian era, the French Revolution, and the Hitler regime all teach us one lesson: those who restrict religious liberty will soon deprive citizens of all their other human rights.” The Church has always “insisted on maintaining her independence from secular authority.” [3]

Backed by the Vatican (Pius XI had elevated him to the primateship of Hungary that summer), Mindszenty continued speak against the Communists, delivering a nationwide radio address adjuring “every Christian believer” to “exercise his civil rights in accordance with his religion, disregarding all attempts at intimidation.” Still moving slowly, the Communist regime had not yet ended real parliamentary elections, but “were preparing for them with a great deal of political cunning and equivocation.” In speaking against them, Mindszenty followed the example of previous Hungarian primates, who had rebuked any king who violated the constitution and “demand[ed] that he obey the law of the land.” This practice had continued under the constitution enacted after the First World War. “The nation expected that of its primates,” and Mindszenty had no intention of disappointing them by shirking his duty. He drafted a pastoral letter on the elections, citing Communist abuses of power and calling “for a political program on the Christian foundation.” It worked. The Smallholders Party, which had “committed itself to the defense and pursuance of Christian principles, received a firm majority of the votes, while the Communists limped in at seventeen percent. But votes are one thing, military occupation another. The Red Army remained firmly in control, and some Smallholder Party men distanced themselves from the Church. The resulting coalition government gave the Communists control of the police.

Mindszenty shows why Communism proved such a formidable enemy. It was itself “a kind of religion,” “with dogmas and a hierarchical leadership.” According to Marxist ideology, “matter is the sole reality,” uncreated, but self-moving. Although the consequence of “a dialectical movement,” the world’s “order and purpose” obey not a Hegelian ‘Absolute Spirit’ but evolution or progress resulting from “the contradictions inherent in matter itself.” One might recall the ‘swerve’ Epicureans attribute to atoms, except that the Marxist dialectic is teleological, not cyclical. This “constant motion gives matter the ability to evolve and change,” moving from simple chemical reactions to biological life and human consciousness. The dialectical character of these evolutionary changes makes them abrupt; “accumulated quantitative change suddenly spills over into qualitative change.” In human societies, this accounts for the violence of revolutions. If asked to prove their claims, Communists regard them as “incontrovertible axioms which need no proof,” “amply supported by science.” Mindszenty permits himself to observe, drily, “in this respect they do not ask for much by way of proof.” He is sufficiently astringent to suggest that “the spokesmen of Communism have learned the nature of human wishful thinking and turn it to good account.” And they appeal to compassion, drawing in many of those “who take the side of the poor and the suffering and who desire a just social order.” “Such people often become unwittingly the henchmen of the Communists.” They also appeal to Christians whose beliefs have weakened, those “on the lookout for new and stronger premises.” Communists carefully “concealed their plans for seizing control and maintained that they had no intention of imposing the Marxist doctrines on everyone,” contenting themselves to speak “of human rights and freedom of conscience quite in the tone and style of Western bourgeois politicians.”

In view of conditions in Hungary, “I decided to prepare our people for a difficult time of oppression and want.” Penance, prayer, replies to Communist accusations against the Church would all “intensify the religious life of the whole nation.” He coined a phrase that carried throughout the country: “The harder the hammer, the tougher the anvil.”

In fall of 1946, the pope elevated him to the rank of cardinal. Upon returning from his ordination in Rome, he held Holy Mass two days before Christmas in the factory town of Csepel, which the Communists regarded as “their citadel.” To their “bitter surprise,” the Mass and his visit was well received, Mindszenty’s message of Christian love, contrasted with the interclass hatred fomented by the Party, striking a core among Hungarians who detested the military occupation and its agents more than they resented ‘capitalists.’

But a more lasting, institutional counter to the Communist regime ideology and hierarchy was needed, especially in answer to the regime’s planned takeover of the schools. Mindszenty didn’t trust the Smallholders Party to defend Hungarian schools with steadfastness, so he “mobilized the parents to defend our schools.” Lectures, conferences, courses for parents and teachers, mass meetings “to answer the charges of the parties and the press,” all “forced the Communists to change their tactics.” Instead of appealing to ‘the masses,’ whom they couldn’t sway, they appealed to the leaders of the rival political parties to meet with Communist Party leaders, circumventing parliamentary debate with negotiations in private. In these, collaborators within the ranks of the non-Communist parties could exert outsized influence. The Smallholders Party leaders didn’t know who the collaborators were and lacked the experience to match “the machinations of the politically skilled Marxists,” who had been carefully trained in Moscow during their years of exile. The voters, especially the parents, weren’t fooled, however, “calling public attention to the dangers threatening the church schools and the Christian education of their children.” Bypassing the corrupted political process, they simply enrolled their children into the Church schools. For a time, at least, Communist policies stalled.

Communists used the schools, first, “to alienate the youth from religion,” and second, to alienate them from their families. “Inexperienced boys and girls were taught in school that their parents were backward, were prisoners of old superstitions, and were altogether reactionary.” In this way, the regime could exploit children’s natural restiveness under parental authority by making their habituation to a real tyranny seem as if it were an act of liberation. “The modern family is exposed to many temptations,” beginning well before children go to school. “An unborn child has just as much right to live as a child lying in the cradle or in its mother’s arms; it has as much right to live as you or I.” Even married couples who use contraceptive methods forget that “all rights,” including conjugal rights, “involve responsibilities,” and “those who attempt to avoid the responsibility of conceiving a child turn the sanctuary of marriage into a den of iniquity” in which “the marriage partners become companions in sin.” [4]

By 1947, however, the Soviets had worn down the Smallholders Party, seizing more power within the government for themselves in a cabinet reshuffle. The next year, they seized power outright in Czechoslovakia. Mindszenty protested and the Communists “began preparing the way for my arrest.” And not a moment too soon, from their point of view. The Cardinal had seen how the Communists in the Soviet Union had “destroyed the Greek Rite Catholic Church in the annexed territories of the western Ukraine and in the sub-Carpathian region, which had once been part of historic Hungary.” And Mindszenty evidently had read his Tocqueville, understanding the moral and political importance of civil associations. “To me it seemed that the most effective defense against atheistic materialism was a deepening of the religious life throughout the country,” which he undertook to accomplish in a series of talks with priests and laymen throughout Hungary. These visits “strengthened cooperation between the flock and the clergy in defense of the faith and of institutions of the Church.” Against the Communists’ charge that the Church “had been little concerned for the people and had always stood on the side of the exploiters,” Mindszenty could cite historical facts to the contrary, given the Church’s extensive charitable efforts throughout the centuries. But he also understood that “in the struggle of ideas abstract reasoning and dry theory are of little use”; steadfastness goes farther. “Especially when dealing with determined Communists, a hesitant, irresolute attitude could prove disastrous. And I think to this hour that our position is seriously weakened by those Christians whose primary concern seems to be worrying about whether any of the charges brought against the Church may not sometime, someplace have been justified. The excesses of modern ‘self-criticism’ often serve only the interests of our bitter enemies.” Precisely so. “Christianity and Communism were about to measure their strength in a decisive contest,” a Kulturkampf. “We could not ask whether the Christian spirit would win,” but only insist that the Church must bear witness to the struggle and to engage its enemy in such a way that hope would not fade out within the Church itself. 

“Religion is not in fact the private matter it is often said to be.” That is because “no power exists that can more deeply affect human life, can more deeply stir the souls of men.” [5] Not only does religiosity affect social and political institutions, those institutions also “can influence…religious life for good or ill”—a point pastors need to recognize. Although in countries with relatively settled commercial-republican regimes this might easily be overlooked, not so “when [political] parties are competing and fighting on the ideological front,” when they contend over the type of regime itself. In Hungary, public schools had long required students to attend classes of religious instruction. Needless to say, the Communists moved to abolish that, and some “so-called progressive Catholics” advocated accommodation “for the sake of ‘peace.'” Mindszenty understood that there would be no peace between the Church and the Communist Party.  Under severe public pressure, the government backed down, temporarily. “The Church’s resistance had plainly shown how deeply rooted religion is in the souls of the Hungarian people.” But thanks to several electoral machinations, “Parliament became a docile tool in the hands of the totalitarian Communists”; sooner or later, the new regime would renew its pressure on the Church, Hungary’s principal resister to their ‘totalizing.’

In the meantime, since the Communist Party wasn’t the only ‘international’ organization in the world, Mindszenty made sure “that the Catholic press in the West obtained documentary evidence of what had really happened,” giving the world “a truthful view of the methods employed in Bolshevist persecution of the churches.” This “gave the anti-Communist movement in the free world a tremendous impetus,” and as a result “both Hungarian and foreign Communists came to look upon me as one of their chief enemies, who had to be gotten out of the way.” It began with ad hominem attacks in speeches and newspaper articles by Party operatives. This was accompanied by the charge that the Hungarian Church “was guilty of spiritual terrorism when in fact she was merely the anguished witness of spiritual terrorism.” In November 1948, the Communists accused Mindszenty of conspiring against the Hungarian State. 

The story of his arrest, interrogation-torture, show trial, conviction, and imprisonment amounts to an account of the way the regime ruled the Hungarian nation and the Hungarian Church. More, Mindszenty’s imitatio Christi parallels Christian life as such, renewing the example Christ Himself set for Christians in His regime, that is, His Ecclesia or assembly. “I would have to go this route to the end, and so too would they.”

Beatings with truncheons, sleep deprivation, and food mixed with drugs were administered with caution, as the Party needed to keep Mindszenty alive for the fraudulent public trial they planned. They needed him to be strong enough to make a false confession before the world. The strategy behind these tactics “was to pound the charges into the prisoner’s mind, so that he gradually became convinced he actually had fomented a plot” against the Communist regime. As one torturer shouted, “Your business is to confess to what we want to hear.” If so, Mindszenty replied, why bother to extract a confession at all?—a piece of disrespect to socialist authority that earned him another truncheoning. 

One thing can be said for such tactics: they work. “My powers of resistance gradually faded. Apathy and indifference grew, More and more the boundaries between true and false, reality and unreality, seemed blurred to me. I became insecure in my judgment,” and “now I myself began to think that somehow I might very well be guilty.” He was almost literally dehumanized, as “my shaken nervous system weakened the resistance of my mind, clouded my memory, undermined my self-confidence, unhinged my will—in short undid all the capacities that are most human in man.” 

“We are the masters now.” His torturers were right. “Without knowing what had happened to me, I had become a different person.” After four weeks of torture, however, the written confession he signed still had to be forged by his captors. At the subsequent show trial, “the prosecution went so far as to characterize my stand against the Communist Party as a crime against the democratic system,” which was upheld as being identical to Communist Party rule. The attorney designated by the Party to mount his ‘defense’ argued that the accused “must be regarded as a victim of the Vatican,” which obviously was the larger target of the Soviet Union, ruler of Hungary. He assured the court that his client had repented of his sins against democracy, so defined. This enabled to court to avoid sentencing a cardinal of the Catholic Church to death, which the Party fully understood would have made him a bit too much of a Christian martyr to suit their purposes. He received a life sentence, instead. 

Prison conditions themselves were designed to precipitate death, anyway, by disease. His first cell was in “an unheated dungeon,” below ground level, with water seeping in through the walls. It was not his last, however, because policy required that political prisoners be shifted from one place to another—a “Soviet invention,” intended to further disorient the prisoner and to ensure that he could form no “lasting relationships with any of the individuals in his environment.” After all, the Bolsheviks themselves had plenty of experience in jails; they knew that prisons can be excellent places to ‘network.’

After months of this, the prison’s rulers permitted Mindszenty to read. As he understates it, “choices were very limited.” Secular novelists on the Left were available—Hugo, Balzac, Zola, France—as of course were Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin. “The library’s accent was as distinctly Russian as it was Communist.” That is, after the physical torture came the attempt to change the regime of the soul—exactly paralleling the tactics of regime change imposed upon the Hungarian nation, and in all the nations ruled by the Communists. And, as in those regimes, even ‘totalitarianism’ wasn’t quite total: “As I read, I felt amazement that the Communist censors had shown mercy to such writers as Dante, Zrinyi, and Sienkiewicz.” Gogol and Dostoevsky, too, escaped the censorious net, perhaps on the grounds that they were Russians.

“Those outside prison walls might think that doing nothing can have no history. But it can.” He took notes on his readings, wrote critiques of the Communist materials and an essay “on philosophy and its responsibility”—which, one might surmise, included some stringent observations of the Encyclopedists and Herr Marx. He assembled an anthology on apologetics, a subject with which he had more than passing familiarity, and also brought together “material for a book on the lives of the Hungarian saints,” continuing his interest in the strong link between Hungarian patriotism and Christianity. He worked in view of the regime question, spiritually posed. “I thought over my decades of struggle, the achievements of which were now being extinguished. I also asked myself what were the faults and sins of our country. How could all this have come about? What form should the rebuilding—with God’s help—take? How could so many wounds be healed? Where would the work have to begin?”

He lived Dante’s Commedia. “Faith alone helped me to get through this foretaste of Purgatory.” Imprisonment “can direct men’s minds toward God, as “solitude often revives memories of long-forgotten religious truths.” Not that the Communist regime failed to persecute religious practice, even there, closing the chapels and converting them into cells for the growing prison population. Although, “for decades the political Left has been given to hero worship of prisoners,” now that Leftists were in charge of the jails their esteem for them ended. “In the peaceful atmosphere at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, we in the Church tended to think that the age of the martyrs was over. But it will never be over.” Nor is martyrdom in the end a thing to be regretted, since “in prison you learn to feel with every fiber of your being that this world in its essence is not a place of joy but a vale of tears.” Mindszenty recalls Augustine’s prayer, “It was in mercy thou didst chasten me, schooling me to thy obedience”; now, one might also call Solzhenitsyn’s sentences in The Gulag Archipelago: “Bless you, prison, bless you for being in my life For there, lying upon he rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”

Mindszenty would have perished, had the regime not feared “the reaction of the outside world if, after the deaths of so many priests and loyal Catholic laymen, the head of the Hungarian Church were also to die in prison.” He credits, also, the prayers of his mother (herself “the most wonderful gift of Providence,” throughout the years they both lived) and of so many other Catholic faithful. Released in 1955, he witnessed the Hungarian uprising of the following year. He had not anticipated this, but finds it understandable, since “the Hungarians had never been a herd people; for them the individual, the family, the clan were always what counted.” Hungary’s “urge for freedom and her pride were not broken by oppression.” When the Soviets crushed his people physically, in November, he sought asylum in the U. S. embassy. “The moral force, the solidarity, the tenacity of the Hungarian people were sublime and the sympathy of the outside world was a great solace to us. But what became of the seed that had been sown?” Verbal expressions of sympathy poured in but “our cries for help met with no response in deeds.” Even as the nations captive within the Soviet empire intensified their detestation of Moscow, the influence of the Soviets in the Western countries “steadily grew” in subsequent years. 

Even more discouraging to Mindszenty was the capitulation the regime had forced upon the Hungarian Church while he was imprisoned. The religious orders were dissolved, a move justified by saying that the useful Church functions had been assumed by the socialist State, while the teachings of the Church were worse than useless. Threatened with further persecution, the episcopate accepted a proffered concordat in August 1950. This “profound humiliation” was intended to undermine the prestige of the Church and to turn it to regime purposes. “The regime, which had objected to my pastoral letters as improper interference in political affairs, now demanded that the clergy throw its weight behind all those political and economic measures that it hated—collectivization, forced deliveries to the state, and so on.” The “peace priests,” once marginalized, now rose to prominence, as “all episcopal offices became mere executive arms of the Bureau for Church Affairs,” receiving orders from the minister of the interior and its officers from the state security police. But “the servility, wickedness and irresponsibility of the peace priests naturally made it all the more debasing,” not only in Hungary but internationally, when they ‘represented’ the Hungarian Church at conferences abroad.  

The library at the U. S embassy, where he lived in exile, afforded him the chance to learn much more than he had ever done about the Anglo-American world and especially “to appreciate the nature of Catholicism in the United States,” which proved sounder than he had supposed it to be. He was touched by a church in Connecticut, whose parishioners set up a statue of Our Lady of Hungary, having it modeled on a photograph of his mother, who had died in 1960. “My mother was a gleaming star in hard and confused times. My gratitude for having had her in life had to be greater than my sorrow at her passing.” In this, Mindszenty’s family life embodied his understanding of Hungary. On his deathbed, King Stephen had dedicated “our land and people to the mother of our Lord, Hungary’s ‘Great Lady.'” The first country to pledge itself to the Virgin, Hungary “since that time…has been officially known as ‘Mary’s land.'” At those times when Hungary “forsook the protection of Our Lady, an abyss opened wide to swallow us, and the battlefield became our common grave”; when Hungarians have freed themselves, they devoted themselves to Mary as their savior. This was true before and after the rule of the Tartars and the Turks. “In recent times, anticlerical and liberal ideas have sown the seeds of atheism in our land, the morals of our people have decayed,” and still “the grace and prayers of the Virgin have enabled our country to survive its many afflictions.” [6]

Although grateful for the asylum the United States had extended to him, the foreign policy of the United States, and of the West generally, was another matter. “‘Coexistence’ and ‘detente’ had become magic words in international politics,” and the Communist regimes played along, “chiefly so that public opinion in the West would not oppose the forthcoming disarmament and economic and trade conferences with the Soviet bloc.” By the time the Nixon Administration took charge, “I knew quite well that I had become an undesirable guest in the embassy not only because of my illness but also because I stood in the way of the policy of detente.”

In September 1971, he left Hungary and took up residence at the Vatican, but found little sympathy there, either. Indeed, the Vatican, now under papacy of the unimpressive Paul VI, “lifted the ban on the excommunicated peace priests two weeks after my departure” and evinced “general indifference to my affairs.” After regaining some of his physical strength, he departed for a seminary in Vienna. There, “as primate of Hungary,” he intended “to take the many hundreds of thousands of homeless Catholics”—i.e., his fellow exiles—under “my episcopal care; to warn the world public of the peril of Bolshevism by publishing my memoirs; and perhaps now and then to concern myself with the tragic fate of my nation.” The Vatican blocked the first initiative, fearing to “vex the regime in Budapest.” The Vatican also attempted to induce him to cease criticizing that regime, demanding that he submit all his future public statements to its staff. He refused.

He did send the manuscript of his memoirs to the Pope, who praised it while worrying that it might spur Budapest to “punish the entire Church of Hungary.” Mindszenty scarcely let such an attempt at moral intimidation go unanswered, replying that “the history of Bolshevism, which already goes back more than half a century, shows that the Church simply cannot make any conciliatory gesture in the expectation that the regime will in turn abandon its persecution of religion,” since “that persecution follows from the essential nature and internal organization of its ideology.” Communism is the Church’s enemy in principle. Further, given the corrupted character of the Hungarian Church, now controlled by the regime, why would the regime punish its own puppet? At this, the Pope requested his resignation as archbishop of Esztergom, which Mindszenty declined to do. The Pope then declared the archiepiscopal see of Esztergom vacant, venturing to issue a press release that Mindszenty had retired. Mindszenty then issued a correction: “Cardinal Mindszenty has not abdicated his office as archbishop nor his dignity as primate of Hungary. the decision was taken by the Holy See alone.” With this, “I arrived at complete and total exile.”

Notes

1. See also Mindszenty’s pastoral letter in the aftermath of the war, in which he blamed Hungarians’ wartime sufferings on “the failure of our leaders to observe our traditions and our ancient faith” and their consequent violation of divine law. “This kind of thinking caused innocent people to be interned in concentration camps, robbed of all their possessions, exiled, or murdered outright.” But rulers who choose “to place themselves above the laws of God” undermine “the foundations of their own authority,” since God is the one who ordains rulers, expecting them to rule in accordance with His commands, aligning their own commands with His. Mindszenty thus intended to focus Hungarians’ blame where it belonged, assuring that “women who were raped by violence…are without sin.” Similarly, Hungarian prisoners of war should not be greeted “with reproaches and contempt, but only with love and respect.” This is the Christian law of love: “Long ago our nation was conquered by the sword,” wielded by Tartars, and again by the Turks; but” it was preserved and nourished by the Cross.” (Pastoral Letter, May 1945).
2. In an article in the Catholic publication Uj Ember, Mindszenty called democracy “the modern watchword.” In the Church, he remarked, “there is no predominance of any particular class.” In appointing its officials, it “has always looked for quality and personal character,” not “social standing.” Further, “in opposition to the claims of the totalitarian state, the Church proclaims the right of the individual, human rights, and the rights of the family.” (September 23, 1945). In a pastoral letter several weeks later, he wrote that “the world has suffered long enough under the various forms of tyranny,” one of which “caused this insane and murderous war and forced it to drag on and on,” treading “underfoot the most sacred rights of mankind.” The Hitler regime now defeated, the democratic nations do not “wish to exchange the totalitarian rule of a Führer for the equally totalitarian rule of some other dictator,” namely, Josef Stalin. “True democracy is based on the recognition that every human being possesses certain inalienable rights—rights which no power on earth may wrest from him.”
3. In this address, Mindszenty details the steps by which the Nazi regime undermined the German churches. Those steps were conspicuously similar to those currently employed by the Communists in Hungary, a point no listener there and then could have missed. Further, “Religious persecution has two faces, just like Janus. One of its faces may shine brightly and promise us liberty; but its other face glares at us with the grim gaze of a tyrant.” He immediately cited a law passed in January 1946, guaranteeing “all Hungarian citizens certain inalienable civil and human rights,” including freedom of worship,” a law supported by Marxists in the parliament which passed it—the smiling face of Janus. In a 1947 article, “Communism and the Russian Orthodox Church,” he showed the parallels between the tactics of the Soviet Communists in the first decade of Soviet rule and those seen in Hungary today. These included separation of Church and state, expropriation of Church property, secularization of schools, banning of the religious press, placing the head of the Church under arrest, collaboration “of certain liberal-minded priests bent on reforming the Church,” deceptive promises to the Orthodox clergy, and collectivization of Church property. “All the [Orthodox] Church’s efforts at peaceful coexistence and humiliating cooperation were in vain. For Communism in s an atheistic doctrine which is by nature the enemy of religious faith. A kind of inner compulsion something akin to fear of the spirit and the soul, drives it to struggle against religion. It merely conceals its fundamental hostility to religion only when concern for the preservation of its power forces it do so.”
4. See “A Sermon in Szentendre, n.d., delivered shortly after Pius XII had designated him a bishop. In a contemporaneous sermon, he identified four “fortresses” of Catholicism: the parish churches, Catholic schools, family homes, and consecrated churchyards and cemeteries. “What his heart is to a man, the church is to a town.” (Sermon in Szentgottárd, n.d.).
5. People who separate religion from the rest of life are trying to get rid of religion altogether; for they do not want it to interfere with the way they live.” This being so, “societies which regard religion as a personal matter, unrelated to the conduct of public life, will soon be swallowed up in corruption, violence and sin.” To proclaim, with Nietzsche, that God is dead, that “we must all pass beyond the antiquated concepts of good and evil,” is to risk the eventual disposition of the Europeans to whom he proclaimed those teachings. 
6. See Mindszenty, “Brief Survey of Hungarian History,” n.d.

Tzvetan Todorov: In Defense of the Enlightenment. Gila Walker translation. London: Atlantic Books, 2009. [First published, 2006].

Todorov asks his fellow Europeans, “After the death of God and the collapse of utopias, on what moral and intellectual base do we want to build our communal life?” No base at all, reply the postmodernists, rejecting all such ‘foundational’ thinking. Having seen postmodernism follow Church establishments and regimes animated by historical determinism into authoritarian habits, Todorov answers that Europe will more readily thrive if it recurs to “the humanist dimension of the Enlightenment.” With the Enlightenment, “for the first time in history, human beings decided to take their destiny into their own hands and to set the welfare of humanity as the ultimate goal of their acts.” Europeans can do so, again. 

The Enlightenment had many dimensions. Its scientistic rationalism has attracted the most hostile scrutiny from postmodernists, but that isn’t what Todorov takes from it. He points to three principles: autonomy or free will, seen practically in the pursuit of knowledge; a telos of human benefit, as distinct from service to God or ‘state’; and universality, the acknowledgment of the human species as a whole consisting of individual rights-bearers. For the Enlighteners, that rival universalism, religion, “was the greatest target,” first and foremost as a set of sociopolitical structures claiming moral and often political authority, but second and more profoundly as theocentrism. As their name implies, humanists are anthropocentric, replacing the quest for salvation with the quest for happiness.

Humans are more readily knowable than God, and humanists worked to wrest control of the universities from the churches and their priests, who claimed to know the hardly knowable. Enlighteners also demanded an end to religious and political censorship, campaigning for freedom of thought, speech, and publication. In their publications they invented new literary genres centered on human individuals: the novel, the autobiography. Their paintings, too “turned away from the great mythological and religious subjects to show the ordinary gestures of unexceptional human beings depicted in everyday activities.” Politically, they fought for civil rights of individuals vis-à-vis the increasingly centralized modern states, along with the popular sovereignty that, they hoped, would remain vigilant in the defense of such rights. Behind civil rights, Enlighteners saw unalienable natural rights, “common to all human beings on earth.” 

Natural right found its critics, however, among the Enlighteners themselves. Dedicated to the conquest of nature for the humane end of relieving man’s solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short “estate,” and buoyed by the substantial progress toward that aim by experimental modern science, many were tempted to suppose that political science might similarly conquer the unlovelier aspects of the human ‘self,’ with which Enlighteners had largely replaced the soul. They touted the possibility of human perfectibility in a very strong sense. Others—notably Rousseau—were not so tempted, and in the aftermath of the ‘totalitarian’ debacles of the past century, “we can see today that Rousseau was right.” “Knowledge of human societies comes up against the impossibility of predicting and controlling all the wills; the individual will in turn comes up against his or her inability to know the reasons for his or her own acts.” Human societies and individuals may be more knowable than God, but they are not entirely knowable, not sufficiently knowable to enable tyrants to exert the ‘total’ mastery they seek.

This self-critique of the Enlightenment can be brought to good account as Europeans seek their own identity in this century, seeking their own way of life amidst the diverse ways of life seen in the European nations. But before addressing that quest, Todorov needs to understand critiques of the Enlightenment from outside the Enlightenment. European conservatives (not to be confused with almost anyone labeled ‘conservative’ in the United States, then or now) objected precisely in the “pride of place” the Enlightenment gave “to man, freedom and equality.” Some Enlighteners, such as Montesquieu and Rousseau, agreed that their ‘project’ (itself a term redolent of the Enlightenment atmosphere) raised serious dangers. The “excessive recourse to reason,” rationalism, could not sustain the strong social and political bonds needed for an enduring political community, and any thoroughgoing doctrine of materialism would undermine individuals’ confidence in their own freedom of will along with their loyalty to civil liberty. Enlightenment could also cloak less enlightened motives, as European imperialism sought to justify itself as a vast liberation of all humanity while in fact serving “national interests.” Insofar as it did bring ideals of moral and political liberation to the conquered peoples, it inspired them to rebel against their conquerors, but often enough it was the scientistic rather than the humanistic dimension of the Enlightenment that was seized. 

Nonetheless, the Enlightenment wasn’t as bad as its conservative critics alleged. It did not cause totalitarianism, as argued by T. S. Eliot, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Pope John Paul II. Or rather, the Enlightenment tout court did not—the scientistic and ‘statist’ sides of it did. “Scientism is dangerous, to be sure, but it cannot be deduced from the spirit of the Enlightenment because the Enlightenment…rejects the idea that the world is totally transparent to the eye of the scientist and that the ideal proceeds from a straightforward observation of the world,” deducing ‘ought’ from physical ‘is.’ Standing alone, without humanism, “scientism is a distortion of the Enlightenment, its enemy not its avatar.” Nor does the individualist dimension of the Enlightenment alone define it. Moral subjectivism, leading to moral relativism or to a moral doctrine of “egotistical self-love,” ignores the Enlighteners’ practice of consulting with one another, sharing the knowledge each one gained through the exercise of the intellectual and civil freedoms they prized. Montesquieu wrote that justice “is founded on the existence and sociability of reasonable beings, and not on the dispositions or particular wills of those beings.” Freedom, yes; arbitrariness, no. And that goes for sovereign peoples as well as for individuals.

Enlightenment freedom or ‘autonomy’ means both liberation from claims to rule “imposed from outside” and “construction of new norms of our own devising”—norms, that is, social customs and civil laws—not natural rights, which should guide such devising. Human beings were by nature and should everywhere be self-governing. No fools, Enlighteners “knew perfectly well that our species is not self-governing.” Individuals and groups are often “driven by their will and their desires, by their affections and their conscience, and also by forces over which they have no control.” But reason can “enlighten them in their search for truth and justice.” Political science cannot be all-knowing, but it can guide human beings to construct ruling institutions that moderate their irrational impulses and deploy those impulses at the service of effective but limited government. Within that framework, “Enlightenment thinking fosters the development of a critical spirit,” itself a check on fanatical misrule. Todorov ventures to say that “this principle still needs to be defended today, notably against those who treat to any criticism that displeases them by immediately taking the matter to court,” or at very least to the university dean or the head of the human resources department. He reminds postmodernists that “those who, benefiting from the freedom of expression that exists in the democratic public space, adopt an attitude of wholesale denigration, turn criticism into a pointless game that subverts their own starting point,” as “too much criticism kills criticism.” (That of course may be the point, however, as turning civil liberty against civil liberty is ever the tactic of aspiring tyrants in liberal democracies.)

Modern European history has opened civic space for the practice of reasonable criticism, in part by “strengthening the separation between public institutions and religious traditions,” vindicating “individual freedom” by distinguishing (as Beccaria did) between sins and crimes, offenses against God and offenses against men. Between the freedom of conscience of the ‘self’ and the legal obligations imposed by the state, with the consent of the many ‘selves’ it governs, Europe has established “a vast public or social area steeped in norms and values, which are not, however, binding”—the moeurs studied by Montesquieu and Tocqueville. This intermediate realm guards against statist usurpation of religious authority, against attempts “to found a new cult around the state itself, its institutions or its representatives.” It was, humanists admit, “the removal of the Christian Church from its dominant position” in Europe that “made this new religion possible.” As Condorcet ruefully observed, “Robespierre is a priest”—indeed, ordained by the Catholic Church—and “never be anything else,” even having switched from Catholicism to the Cult of the Supreme Being. “Alternating seduction and threats,” such a “political religion” will exercise “a tyranny that is in no way less efficient than those that preceded it,” and under “the mask of liberty,” at that. The political or civil religions of the Ancients had not posed such a threat, since in the small polis the citizen was unlikely to need defense “against his own representatives.” But political religion with the powers of the modern state behind it did pose such a threat. As Todorov remarks, in the past century, Eric Voegelin and Raymond Aron saw this as clearly as Condorcet. [2] He calls his readers’ attention particularly to the less well-known Waldemar Gurian, a Russian Jewish convert to Catholicism, who preferred not to sully the word ‘religion’ by attaching it to this phenomenon, preferring ‘ideocracy,’ which nicely conveys its ideological character, as distinguished from both religious and philosophic doctrines. “As Condorcet predicted, this new attack differed both from theocracy and from caesaropapism, inasmuch as the latter conflated the spiritual and the temporal and yet maintained the distinction between the two, requiring only that one yield to the other whereas the new political religions eliminated the distinction and sacralized either the political power itself, in the form of the state, the people, or the party, or the regime that it imposed, namely, fascism, Nazism or Communism.” Totalitarian ideologies “replace and supersede religion.” Europeans must never submit to them, again.

Todorov analyzes the idea of freedom as “autonomy” by distinguishing two kinds of acts and discourses it entails. “The aim of one is to promote good; the other aspires to establish truth.” The Enlighteners separated morality from science “in order to remove the knowledge of man and the world from the control of religion.” Considering education, for example, Condorcet recommended “national education,” which consisted of promoting moral and political principles, from “public instruction,” teaching empirical facts and mathematical calculation. Readers now will recognize Weber’s famous distinction between facts and values, here. Condorcet warns that government has no “right to decide where truth resides or where error is to be found” or “to decide what is to be taught in school,” in terms of scientific and mathematical instruction. “Truth is above the laws.” Republican government is the realm of deliberation, not scientific investigation. As with Weber, Condorcet demands that legislative powers, “contingent upon popular will alone” remain separate from “regulatory powers,” wielded by administrators, who do have recourse to science. Todorov follows this, even to the point of opposing natural law teachings in the moral and political realm, finding them too scientistic. But he drops off when it comes to granting authority to scientific administrators. “The temptation to rely on ‘experts’ to formulate moral norms or political objectives, as if the definition of what is good proceeds from knowledge,” leading to the attempt “to absorb the knowledge of human beings into the knowledge of nature and to ground moral and political conduct in the laws of physics and biology” should lead Europeans to reject the authority of bureaucrats. “There are other paths to knowledge than science, as Giambattista Vico insisted, even at the height of the Enlightenment. [3]

This means that “scientism and moralism are both alien to the spirit of the Enlightenment,” despite what one often hears. “Truth cannot dictate the good but neither should it be subjugated to it.” Worse still are the later attempts by totalitarian and even democratically elected rulers, at times taken up by religionists and postmodernists alike, to erase “the very distinction between truth and falsehood, between truth and fiction,” to serve moral or political ends. Todorov cites the teaching of ‘creation science’ in schools and what he takes to be the deliberately false allegation of the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as examples of this, but he surely knows of the attempts to suppress free speech in the universities, as well. The abuse of Enlightenment principles threatens individual and political freedom, wherever it is practiced.

“Autonomy alone cannot suffice to characterize the Enlightenment’s ideal conception of human conduct,” however. Free will is all very well, “but to go where?” Since “all desires and all acts are not equally worthy,” and since the Enlightenment rejected the Bible as a source of moral standards, Enlighteners turned to “humanity itself” as its standard: “Whatever contributes to the welfare of human beings was deemed good,” as human happiness on earth replaced the salvation of souls in Heaven. [4] In contemporary Europe, now that the totalitarian deformation of Enlightenment principles has gone so catastrophically wrong, “people have stopped pinning their hopes of worldly happiness and self-fulfillment on political structures at all,” making the state into “a mere service provider.” This ‘privatization’ of the pursuit of happiness ignores the moral and political importance of civic engagement. Todorov continues to resist the lessons conservatives draw, rejecting the Enlightenment’s “Copernican revolution” of morals and concluding, with Dostoevsky’s character, that if God is dead, everything is permissible.” Freedom has rightful limits.

The principal limit to individual freedom is “the fact”—and notice it is a fact, not a ‘value’—that “all human beings belong to the same species and that consequently they have the same right to dignity.” That is, Todorov does not go all the way with Weber. Acknowledging the natural ‘species-being’ of man, he thinks of it not so much as the source of natural right—being nervous about deriving ‘ought’ from ‘is’—but, more vaguely, from “universality.” He would meet Hume’s challenge with Kant’s reply, initially by way of Rousseau. The acknowledgment of universality leads one away from immorality, defined as selfishness, insofar as (per Rousseau) “love of the human race” brings us to consider the general interest. “It was in this spirit,” the spirit of equality, purged of its naturalism, “that Kant was to formulate his categorical imperative.” Other Enlighteners formulated the theory espoused by “the modern school of natural law,” which Todorov ascribes to both the American “Declaration of Rights [sic] in 1776 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in France in 1789.” Unlike either the Americans or the French, Todorov derives a prohibition of capital punishment from these rights. 

Because, unlike the natural rights theorists, Todorov prefers to sever morality from nature, he needs to find a counter to the fanaticism of the dogmatic assertion of ‘human rights.’ “If human rights are the sole unquestionable reference point in the public arena and the unique yardstick by which the orthodoxy of discourse and acts is judged, then we find ourselves in an arena of political correctness and media lynching, the democratic version of a witch-hunt—a sort of one-upmanship of virtue, the effect of which is to eliminate the expression of thoughts that diverge from it. This moral blackmail lurking in the background of all debates is harmful to democratic life.” To counter this, he recurs to the doctrine of consent, the limitations set by contracts and other legally recognizable forms. Although this criticism cuts into the pretensions of postmodernists, given his interest in Europe as a whole, he chooses rather to emphasize international law deriving from the Peace of Westphalia—particular the principle of non-intervention into the internal affairs of sovereign states without their consent. That is, he doubts the morality of ‘humanitarian intervention,’ just as he had set himself firmly against European colonization. “A noble end cannot be achieved by ignoble means”—and he clearly regards killing in war an ignoble means—because “the end will be lost on the way.” Europeans should “draw a clear line between proposing and imposing, influencing and forcing, peace and war; the first term does not negate our compassion for the suffering of other; the second does.” Plurality, yes, so long as “it avoids radical relativism”; universality, yes, so long as it does not override consent. 

Although the humanist element of the Enlightenment has universal validity, it originated in Europe. Why there? Elements of it can be seen in other places, other civilizations, but not the Enlightenment tout court. Todorov credits Europe’s “political autonomy,” freedom of sovereign states and of individuals. “Europe is at once one and many,” its states constituting “a kind of system…connected by commerce and politics,” underpinned “by the same general principles.” Ancient natural law traditions, along with Christianity, unified Europeans on the moral and political side, “the unity of science,” perhaps deriving from ancient philosophy, unified them on the ‘knowledge’ side. “At the same time, Europeans were equally aware of the differences between their countries and, above all, the number of those countries. “One cannot help being struck by the contrast in comparison with China, for instance, which covers about the same area: a single state on the one hand as against forty-odd independent states on the other.” (Indeed, it wasn’t so long ago when Germans alone populated thirty-seven such states.) Hume saw the significance of this: China is eminently civilized; “it might naturally be expected to ripen into something more perfect and finished, than what has yet arisen from them.” But, Hume continues, China’s advancement in science and morals has been retarded by its homogeneity—one language, one system of laws, one set of moeurs. Without contrasts to consider, without competition (except between warlords on the peripheries of the empire and the imperial center), “minds were dulled by the uncontested reign of authority, traditions and established reputations.” Although often at each other’s throats, Europeans enjoyed “the advantages of diversity,” including ” cautious attitude towards established assertions and reputations.” In this, Europe resembled ancient Greece, with its many small city-states and its contending philosophic schools. And contemporary European states have republican regimes, frameworks for plurality within unity. Todorov again recurs to Rousseau: the “will of all” is the sum of individual wills, expressed in practice by majority rule, which can incline to majority tyranny. But the “general will” limits the will of all by holding no citizen to be “inferior to others” but entitled to “equality before the law.” The general will seeks “a generality that encompasses differences.” Sidestepping Rousseau’s firm adherence to natural right, and rejecting the imposition of unity by force, Todorov would “encourage people to recognize that their perspective is partial, to detach themselves from it (to act ‘in the silence of passions,’ to borrow Diderot’s expression), and to position themselves from the standpoint of the general interest,” an act that “requires seeing thing from the point of view of our neighbor, whose opinion differs from our own.” This, he trusts, would integrate individual differences “into a superior form of unity,” first by encouraging tolerance, fostering a critical spirit, and facilitating detachment from ‘one’s own.’ 

But is this not a tepid brew? It may be “a certain European spirit that the inhabitants of the continent can be proud of,” and it is European in its origin, and many other places today share the Enlightenment heritage, precisely because Europeans conquered and colonized so much of the world. However, “This common substratum does not suffice to organize a viable political entity” in Europe itself.  As Charles de Gaulle once said, “Good luck to this federation without a federator!” And de Gaulle, who famously identified himself with France, also recognized that “Sartre, too, is France.” That is, both the world at large, with its modern but anti-humanist regimes, and Europe itself, with its latter-day Sartres, poses a threat to the humanist decency Todorov upholds. As Todorov himself recognizes, “Faith is a European tradition but so is atheism, the defense of hierarchy and that of equality, continuity and change, the expansion of the empire and the fight against imperialism, revolution as well as reform and conservatism.” These facts notwithstanding, “the ability to integrate differences without erasing them distinguishes Europe from the world’s other great political areas: from India and from China, from Russia and from the United States.” Unlike the United States, for example, Europe “not only recognizes the rights of individuals, but also those of historic, cultural and political communities that are the member states of the union.” True, but if that is a strength, why can’t European defend themselves without the assistance of the (somewhat) more coherent American Union? At least so far.

Military and political defense of the Continent of the Enlightenment will continue to be needed. “The traditional adversaries of the Enlightenment—obscurantism, arbitrary authority and fanaticism—are like the heads of the Hyra that keep growing back as they are cut,” drawing “their strength from characteristics of human beings and societies that are as ineradicable as the desire for autonomy and dialogue,” such things as security, comfort, groupishness, and the will to power. And so “the vocation of our species,” and not only of Europeans, will be “to pick up the task of enlightenment with each new day.” 

Notes

1. For a full discussion, see Todorov, The Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.  For a discussion of this book, see “In Defense of Humanism,” on this website under the category of “Nations.”
2. For a review of Voeglin’s Hitler and the Germans, see “Voegelin, Hitler, and the Germans” on this website under the category of “Nations.” For discussions of Aron, see Raymond Aron: Aron et De Gaulle and Liberté et Égalité on this website under “Aron and De Gaulle: Wartime and Postwar” on this website under the category of “Nations” and José Colen and Elisabeth Dutarte-Michaut, eds. The Companion to Raymond Aron on this website under “Aron Companion,” also under the category of “Nations.”
3. See Giambattista Vico: Principles of the New Science of Giambattista Vico Concerning the Common Nature of Nations. For discussion, see “What Is Vico Trying to Accomplish?” “Vico’s Periods of History,” and “Seeking Wisdom in Poetry,” on this website under the category of “Philosophers.”
4. See, for example, François-Jean de Chastellux: De la Félicité Publique, ou Considérations sur le sort des hommes dans les différente époques de l’histoire (1772).