LOGOS V BENEDICTINE DECONSTRUCTION

THE SOCIALIST PSYCHOLOGY OF REASONABLE LOVE

We might turn to Marxist-Freudian psycho-social analysis and to “the world-famous psychoanalyst’s daring prescription for love,” The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm, for the healing answer to our basic conflicts. He was descended from illustrious rabbis on both sides and born in Frankfurt in 1900; he emigrated to New York City in 1934, moved to Mexico City in 1950, where he worked until 1973, and then retired unto his death to Switzerland in 1980. We learn from his autobiography, Beyond the Chains of Illusion – beyond the religion Freud called an illusion – that it was the suicide of a beautiful young woman whose unremarkable widowed father had just died, and the frightening war hysteria and the mutual claims to national moral superiority of the Great War, that motivated Erich to question the irrational behavior of his kind, eventually leading him to the psychoanalysis and social philosophy of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, and to commutarianism as a third political way, somewhere along the continuum between capitalism and communism. “Suspicious of all ideologies and declarations and filled with the conviction that above all one must doubt,” he declared, he committed himself to pacifism, and in time concluded that human life is determined by the forces of nature and nurture, determinations from which humans may win some freedom given the ability to reason. But with freedom and self-consciousness come danger, responsibilities, and tormenting anxiety, too often followed by a flight from freedom into the dominant-submissive roles of destructive sadomasochistic authoritarianism and a patriarchal fetish or necrophilia involving objects, including females, that have been torn apart and superficially repackaged as dead products. If humankind would avoid total catastrophe, an emphasis must be placed on being instead of having. In stead of death he offered the humanistic solution of reasonable love, which would in effect replace the archetypically jealous and angry father-god, an arbitrary tyrant whose lore Erich had learned from the rabbis, a tyrant who insists that the very existence of his children is somehow wrong and shameful.

Erich’s Orthodox family members were intensely religious. His moody father and depressed mother afforded him a relatively unhappy childhood as a “highly neurotic”, “probably rather bearable” and “lonely pampered boy,” he said to friends, a boy who broke his boredom studying the Torah and the Prophets, which gave life to his prophetic disposition tempered by reason. He took a keen interest in the Talmud, particularly in the analysis of the Adam and Eve myth, which presented what everyone seemed to want, knowledge, as an evil thing. He identified himself as an “atheistic mystic,” and offered the thesis that parents must teach their children reason in an atmosphere of love if they desire a good, healthy and productive family life. His unique contribution to the field of psychoanalysis was his controversial socialist notions about the relationship between a person’s type and his economic class. Capitalist psychoanalysis rarely questions the hand that pays it very well for its conforming influence or dares to assert that the grasping, exploitative, hoarding and competitive nature of the market system of private capitalism is at the root of much mental illness. The normal individual plunges his individuality into the productive-consumptive mass market, where he rids himself of his conscience and becomes a cog in the machine, a cog who thinks his freedom is in his turnover as he automatically spins in the economic grave to avoid his basic anxiety.

 During his heyday in the Fifties and Sixties, Erich Fromm was the most prolific and popular analytical writer in the world; someone who had outlined the possibilities beyond the left-right ideological dichotomy; he was the foremost author of Third Way; the Talmudic thinker who inspired the Human Potential Movement. But his popularity waned some time after his break from the Frankfurt School of thought (The Institute for Social Research, which had removed itself to Columbia University). The dispute was ostensibly over his inability to obtain psychiatric credentials without a medical license; but there were underlying personal and ideological issues at play: Max Horkheimer, director of the Frankfurt School and Fromm’s sponsor in America, refused to publish his early study of the authoritarian nature of German workers before Hitler took power; not until 1984 was the study published, entitled The Working Class in Weimar German – under his influence the Frankfurt School took up the major issue of the Authoritarian Personality, of why people gladly submit to authority and do what they are told even when the action ordered is unethical or immoral.  A highly esteemed intellectual of the Frankfurt School and idol of the New Left, Herbert Marcuse, whom Fromm dared to call a nihilist and a utopian, eventually accused him of abandoning Freud’s revolutionary libido theory and by selling out wholesale to capitalism by adaptation. His humanism and penchant for ideal love also displeased the historical materialists. But in all fairness Fromm preached against adaptation to the norms he called “socially patterned defects” because they diminished the person’s ability to engage in love. We might add that such norms are not peculiar to capitalism, and that communism and capitalism alike are materialist ideologies, the former protesting the distribution of the matter at hand. In any case, he was dissatisfied with Freud’s theory of unconscious hence unknown motivations, and believed such motivations could be explained by reference to social and cultural factors that could be known and understood. At any rate, the Frankfurt School should deeply indebted to Erich Fromm for one of the most significant features of its famous Critical Method, the Marx-Freudian synthesis that provides a useful framework for reconciliation of the individual and collective mentalities.

Of course capitalists accused Fromm of being a Communist, a charge that has not helped his reputation with the rise of American neoconservativism, a moderately fascist or right-wing authoritarian, national socialist movement that culminated in Nazi Germany. Fromm’s relatives were persecuted by the Nazis, and his aversion to totalitarianism, whether it be right- or left-wing authoritarianism, moved him to the activism in favor of civil liberties and social welfare, and against workforce alienation and warfare.

THE FINE ART OF LOVING

The Art of Loving (1956) was a popular little book, and is still far more enjoyable reading than the arid academic accounts of what somebody else said unadorned by the author’s own brilliant perfusions. Therein, Erich Fromm, whose surname means “pious” in German, does not divorce faith from reason to uphold one at the cost of the other. He recognizes that, to do anything at all, including to reason, one must first of all have faith in the existence of a self to do the deed, and then to do repeat it consistently; thus are people reliable to themselves and others, and capable of being trusted to act reasonably. Faith for Fromm is not limited to belief in God. He divides faith into two kinds, one of them the irrational faith that submits to irrational personal authority or bows to the majority of the herd; the other sort of faith is the rational faith had with the self-help of one’s own thoughts and feelings. A practice productive of anything at all requires a certain methodic approach or rational order in the work, and the same goes for the art of loving as well as the scientific method. Both the artist and the scientist have faith in their reasons for doing things. Both are interested in the expression of truth, and enjoy some intuitive inkling or creative vision of what that might be, that the vision might be drafted and put to the test of experience. A reasonable person compares her words to her deeds, and her subjective intentions to her objective results, to ascertain to what extent they agree or are true to one another – good intentions alone do not suffice for doing good deeds. A suitable ratio is sought, and to that objective end called the truth the rational seeker humbly submits. He does not mount the pulpit and preach that the Sun orbits the Earth despite the evidence to the contrary simply because God’s representative said so, and then condemn to Hell, in the name of the god of love, all who have reasons to disagree, claiming at the same time that he is simply a humble servant of God delivering God’s message, wherefore the congregation should humbly submit to his logos with an Amen lending gravity to his childish vanity.

“The faculty to think objectively is reason,” Fromm averred. “The emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one’s reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has had as a child.” The immature adult’s concern is essentially with herself; she is the world, or the world is her vanity mirror: she sees nothing but herself in it, or she cares only for her self as its ultimate reality. But she is fatally embedded in her social environment, and if she is born helpless into an authoritarian society she might have no choice but to submit in self-defense and take up an infantile attitude towards God’s representative in her household, no matter how arbitrary he might be. Taken hostage by her circumstances at birth, she learns to love that authority or else; or else all hell will break loose. Her fear-based love is virtually incestuous, and she may be in respect to religion be the Father’s virgin bride. No doubt some part of her, more true to her original unity in the womb, rebels against her involuntary alienation, yet she cannot reunite with her true self, whatever that is. Even the slightest urge to vary from the arbitrary regime imposed threatens to ruin the cosmos and smear her cosmetic reputation, and causes her to panic accordingly. Thus the poor girl may for all intents and purposes be rendered frigid, and to break the ice might have catastrophic albeit therapeutic consequences. We do not mock her; of course we might laugh at her as a fictitious person, and then because there is truth in humor; she is a caricature of the truth about ourselves, caught up in an absurd paradox between us as individuals and our society that words cannot fully reconcile, for the I both is and is not WE, for it needs a world to be an individual, and has no identity without relationship. Are not all the identities somehow ridiculous in comparison to the ideal category of one that we are as one?

Wherefore we are not surprised to hear from Erich Fromm that “the experience of separation arouses anxiety; it is indeed, the source of anxiety.” But without this separation there is no freedom: “There is no good and evil unless there is freedom to disobey.” They were naked unto one another, and their sense of shame was not due to the sight of genitalia but followed the recognition of their separateness, hence the sin of self-consciousness as individuals. “The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love – is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety. Then Adam defended himself by blaming Eve instead of defending her against the jealous and angry tyrant of lost paradise. Why then does our psychologist recommend reason to us, for was it not reason that analyzed hermaphroditic Adam and Eve into two beings and evicted them from paradise? And now anxious people think of love not as loving but as being loved, being lovable, being popular, being sexy, and so on. Love is a bargain to be struck somewhere in the meat market. “Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love,” Fromm indited. That is, love is more a matter of getting rich than in giving. But people do not understand that the people who give the most are that much richer with joy, because it is the act of giving that gives them life. “In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power.” But we cannot help notice that Fromm the existentialist reverts to me, me, and me, here, so let us go to his potlatch party in trucks and joyously relieve him of his burdensome goods. We enjoy this statement: “In the sphere of material things giving means being rich. Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much.” But what proposition could be more absurd in this rightfully paranoid and competitive age of narcissistic individualism? The art of loving, then, “presupposes the attainment of a predominantly productive orientation; in this orientation the person has overcome dependency, narcissistic omnipotence, the wish to exploit others, or to hoard….” Now it was Fromm’s “productive” orientation that Marcuse took him to task over – we note that President Clinton’s Surgeon General defined mental health as an adjustment to production; that is, a sane person leads a productive life, welcomes change and follows orders while thinking s/he is free; s/he takes the narcissistic plunge into mass production, subserving the barely circulatory power-club of corporate capitalism, an anti-intellectual ruling elite whose speechmakers attach the glittering label ‘democracy’ to what is largely an anti-democratic, top-down, right-wing authoritarian or ‘fascistic’ managerial style that runs amok all over the globe as if it were a gigantic apocalpytic horse riding roughshod over the downtrodden producers instead of the parochial parasites who feed on the System’s synthetic carrion..

The psychologically mature adult has overcome narcissism. He has outgrown helpless attachment to the motherly goddess and submissive obedience to the fatherly god. He has learned that the unknown god is not the faults he has experienced with the lesser gods. The deity then is described in terms of what God is not. He may have faith in God’s grace, but he knows he does not know the one-god of monotheism. “The truly religious person, if he follows the essence of the monotheistic idea, does not pray for anything, does not expect anything from God; he does not love God as a child loves his father or his mother; he has acquired the humility of sensing his limitations, to the degree of knowing that he knows nothing about God. God becomes to him a symbol in which man, at the earliest stage of his evolution, has expressed the totality of that which man is striving for, the realm of the spiritual world, of love, truth, and justice. He has faith in the principles which ‘God’ represents; he thinks truth, lives love and justice…; and eventually, he does not speak about God – nor even mention his name.”

But what sort of man would Fromm’s man of faith be but a superstitious man who has too much faith in the magic power of words? In any case, we with Erick Fromm are still speaking of God and mentioning the originally pagan name for the deity spoken of, and even atheists should desist from freely speaking of the term for ultimate concerns from time to time, and that is a good thing, at least according to Pope Benedict, who had this to say on the subject when reminiscing on the good old days at the University of Bonn during his Regensburg speech: “The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily a part of the whole of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which the theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it has two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical skepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.”  The gist of the pope’s speech was that the Christian faith is most reasonable and therefore catholic hence nonviolent since it embraced Greek reasoning. No subject or being, whether it exists sensibly or not, is taboo in Socratic discourse – the atheist who deliberately refrains from speaking the holy name lest God be confessed works against his purpose.

But let us return to love, the noun Pope Benedict did not mention in his speech, and the subject connoted by the term. Again, at least according to Erich Fromm, the art of loving, which is an active practice and not merely feeling good about oneself, requires the relative absence of self-centered narcissism, an absence had by the “development of humility, objectivity, and reason,” he claimed. “One’s whole life must be devoted to this aim. Humility and objectivity are indivisible, just as love is. I cannot be truly objective about my family if I cannot be truly objective about the stranger, and vice versa. If I want to learn the art of loving, I must strive for objectivity in every situation….” Yet when striving for objectivity, we must remember that love is in the lover and not in the object, lest we project our own needs on the object and thereby idolize it, and then demonize it when disappointed. Rather, the true lover will care for the beloved objects as if they were flowering plants. We must respect the nature of the person; that is, to see him as he is, and let him unfold accordingly – respect implies this freedom. Hence we know the person in a certain way, a loving way of getting inside a person and forming some sort of unity, in contrast to the cruel method of cutting him into pieces to discover what makes him tick – apparently a loving approach heals. That approach is a matter of attitude regardless of the personality of the persons involved: “Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, and orientation of character.”

The Art of Loving is not a How-To book. It does not set forth a particular objective discipline, a specific technique for loving others, but rather elucidates certain artistic principles for the practice of love. The principle of good discipline is that a discipline or way of loving should not be imposed from without, but should be voluntarily practiced and enjoyed enough to become habitual. And a practitioner of the art must concentrate his efforts and have considerable patience Some critics still believe that the fundamental principle of art adhered to by good artists is that art should instill and enhance a sense of well being in others and not merely cater to one’s own disordered vanity and ill humor or simply to slap things together and have careless fun as is often done in Contemporary Art. The objective art of love is true to its object. “According to what I have said about the nature of love, the main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s own narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one.  The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are.”

The true lover like the true artist aims to please in the highest sense of the word; in fact, does not all art practice the art of loving? Are we not all alike in our enjoyment of love? In fact Fromm says that truly loving a single person implies the love of humankind; but to feel for oneself or one’s family without regard for strangers signals the inability to love.  We do notice contradictions in Fromm’s professions of love, but contradictions are inherent in the court of love and inhere in the ambiguity of abstract thinking. When the author does make rather specific recommendations, people made cynical by experience might scoff. Since what we love most of all is life, we might say that Erich Fromm’s art of loving is synonymous with the art of living espoused by the life-philosophers; that is, the aesthetic life that either/or authoritarians tend to despise for its tolerance.

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

Erich Fromm the social psychoanalyst was certainly a generous, considerate, and thoughtful author, but did he practice the reasonable love that he preached? Verbal intercourse of the rational sort can leave us a bit cold in contrast to sexual intercourse, a touchy subject he must have personally enjoyed at some length. He explicitly expressed his high regard for sensual gratification. Although he believed that Freud had erred in viewing love as an exclusively sexual expression or sublimation of sex, he felt sexuality to be the most potent source of pleasure and happiness.  How fortunate he was in erotic love because of the careful application of his reasonable definition of love alone remains a matter of opinion upon which we may not propound at length due to the paucity of juicy details about his private life. If what other people say is true, we may disregard his theory of love and say that he was lucky in love: He was born a charmer; at least he was the pampered apple of his mother’s eye, and her neurotic little boy was destined to have numerous affairs as he matured. No doubt his early successes gave him the confidence that made him seem a tad arrogant to some acquaintances. His last wife was fated to be the most romantic love of his life, perchance the inspiration for his turn towards the rationalizing of ideal love in The Art of Loving.

People are inspired by biographies, but Fromm was averse to personal interviews because he felt biographies constituted hero worship and were unwarranted invasions of privacy. He left specific instructions to his last wife to destroy his personal correspondence. As far as would-be biographers are concerned, her compliance with his wish was overzealous. To make matters worse, his intimate friends and colleagues cannot be interviewed because they are deceased. In sum, the biographies of the once most popular social analyst in the world are mainly rehashes of his sketchy autobiography about his childhood, some bits pieced together from other people’s biographies, together with a description of his intellectual career.

Most recently, Lawrence J. Friedman, professor of history at the University of Bloomington, undertook with some success to reconstruct a general biography of the sort of person Erich Fromm was; in fine, a welcoming and generous man who loved pasta, pastries, pineapple punch, jokes and laughing friends; a professional gentleman who regularly walked, meditated and practiced Tai Chi; a person who was happiest when leading his ideal productive life, that of writing books. Professor Friedman refers to other appraisers, who said for instance that Fromm was an analytic thinker, on the one hand, and a prophetic messiah on the other, or was rather a humanist on the whole. Moreover, we hear that he was an empathetic, charming and warm man, a brilliant, almost flashy man, one who needed to be taken care of; an exceptionally sincere, power-driven prima donna, kind, wise and very generous person; a detractor perceived him as an arrogant phony.

Fromm’s best known affair outside of marriage was in New York with the prominent psychoanalyst Karen Horney, with whom he had become acquainted while training at the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis in the early 1923. They reportedly shared their socialist perspectives on the unity or multiplicity of basic anxiety, and repudiated the Freudian emphasis on the mechanics of sexuality and the subsequent notion that a well-adjusted and well-oiled uninhibited sex machine could bring unadulterated happiness to its owner. In any event, Horney was most influenced by Fromm, and gossip has it that Fromm took Horney’s ideas and used them, for instance he picked up her citation of matriarchy in her paper, ‘The Overvaluation of Love ‘, and made the concept of matriarchy one of his main ideological notions. Otherwise we know very little of the relationship, except that the breakup was painful for Karen Horney.

It seems that Erich, a nice Jewish boy from an Orthodox family, was basically an old married man at heart. In 1926, he married a strong woman more than ten years his senior, an experienced psychiatrist by the name of Frieda Reichman.. Frieda had become interested in psychiatry while she was a medical student; her interest intensified when studying brain injuries during her residency in neurology. She took a course in autogenic relaxation therapy at Dresden, and soon became acquainted with the work of Sigmund Freud. We learn from Gail A. Hornstein’s To Redeem One Person Is To Redeem The World that Erich was originally Frieda’s patient: “I began to analyze him and then we fell in love. We stopped the analysis. That much sense we had!” Once married, they operated the Frankfurt psychoanalytic training institute together; and in 1930 they opened a kind of Jewish-psychoanalytic sanitarium to treat patients pursuant to a synthesis of Orthodox Jewish and Freudian principles – the principles would soon be melded with Marxist concepts.

Frieda’s leading Judaic concept was tikkun, the notion of individual inward restoration or redemption, in contrast to gilgulim, the restoration of the race: these notions are known today by Gentiles through the popularization of the Kabbala (Cabala), which constituted Jewish theology prior to the modern era. As today’s pop-star Madonna knows very well, some of the vessels below the upper triad on the Tree of Life or the Perfect Man were shattered by a burst of energy from above; sparks descended with the material shards of the cracked pots into the realm of evil darkness. Wherefore we have been alienated from the Perfect Man. It is our job to help pick up the sparks and restore the perfect Man that we may be as gods on Earth – no man or woman shall be left behind. To that end the performance of 613 mitsvots, consisting of 365 prohibitions and 248 positive injunctions, is indispensable. We note well that the Perfect Man of the Cabala is someone all of humankind is responsible for from the bottom up, and is not merely the top-down deity fashioned according to the preferential priestly logic of the Catholic councils. Needless to say, the Fromms’ Hippie-like sanitarium attracted unusual people.

Frieda Reichman believed that, if an individual Jew could free himself from mental shackles, so could the Jewish people. Her therapeutic approach was dubbed “torahpeutic” by the Zionist philosopher Gershom Scholem. The couple weaned themselves from the obsessive rituals of Orthodoxy – Erich’s ecstatic praying was an object of ridicule – by eating forbidden foods on Passover – the penalty for eating leavened bread on Pesach is death. Erich contracted tuberculosis, and fled to Switzerland for treatment in Davos. Nine months after his illness began, Frieda had pregnancy symptoms provoked by myoma – the tumor-baby “attained the size and configuration of a child,” she said after the evulsion. The utopian sanitarium had failed. Frienda visited Erich in Davos, but the couple ahd separated and the marriage, apparently an unhappy one, would end in divorce after she immigrated to New York, where Erich helped her get established – she had supported him financially in Germany. Frieda had been brutally raped when she was a medical student, and had apparently been advised to keep quiet about it; she allegedly became an asexual woman after her marriage. Since both Frieda and Erich would reamin childless, it was as if they were under the curse of karet because of their violation of Orthodox ritual. They continued to be friends and collaborators after her immigration to New York, where together with Fromm’s intimate, Clara Thompson, and Frieda’s teacher and mentor, Harry Stack Sullivan, they founded the William White Institute, named after the esteemed psychiatrist who had headed Washington’s Saint Elizabeth Hospital for many years.

Although she praised her ex-husband’s work to no end, and he said next to nothing of hers, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann was a pioneering psychoanalyst in her own right. Like Erich, she had scant faith in Freud’s libido theory, and looked instead to relationships. Contrary to the prejudice of the Freudians, who believed schizophrenics were hopeless cases because a transference relationship was supposedly impossible to establish with them, she believed they were in fact capable of intense transference relations. She took a sort of non-critical, motherly approach with them early on, standing between them and society in a protective role, just as she had protected her constantly criticized ugly sister back home. In fact, her approach to all people was often in form of the question, “What can I do for you?” She took care to never arouse her patients’ distrust, at least not until her colleagues took her to task for being to warm. She tested their criticism for its merits, and soon discovered that her schizophrenic patients were much tougher than she thought. Her seminal book is Principles of Intensive Psychotherapy. Joanne Greenberg, a patient with whom she was successful wrote a book under the penname Hannah Greene about the therapeutic experience: I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, who had planned to coauthor the book, corrected her, claiming that she had said a “garden of roses,” not “a rose garden.”

Fromm married Henny Gurland in 1944. Their marriage would be short-lived due to her mysterious death at a young age. She was apparently the last person to see Walter Benjamin, a Jewish mystical philosopher inclined to Marxism, alive at a hotel in the Catalan town of Portbou, in late September, 1940. Benjamin was an impractical and clumsy intellectual who depended on the support of friends and who seemed to stumble into the wrong circumstances time after time – the Frankfurt School funded him even after it relocated to New York. Benjamin and Gurland were part of a small party including her son that had fled France on foot through the Pyrenees. Orders were received from Madrid not to permit their entry; they were placed under house arrest at the hotel pending deportation back to France; given Benjamin’s derogation of the Nazi culture, his return would probably have been a death sentence. Seeing no way out of the predicament but by his own hand, he apparently took an overdose of morphine pills, and several hours later he allegedly gave Henny Gurland a letter for herself and a letter addressed Theodor Adorno at the Frankfurt School, letters she allegedly destroyed and later summed up in the form of a suicide note, in French although she was addressing Germans, on a postcard bearing the approximate date of Benjamin’s death.

The note identified Portbou as village in the Pyrenees although it is a rather large town on the coast; and why it was written it in French when it was addressed to Germans is a mystery. Furthermore, a briefcase containing a manuscript, which Benjamin had deemed valuable enough to fear for his life for the writing of it, was somehow lost or destroyed. Perhaps the manuscript denounced Stalinism if not Nazism; on the other hand, writing on remote subjects, such as his current work on the sequel to his Baudelaire, was his way of avoiding harsh reality. Baudelaire, a disturbed and unlucky founder of modern literature, was Benjamin’s kindred spirit. In a January 17, 1940 letter to Gretel Adorno, he explained that his flight from France had been delayed by writing the sequel to his Baudelaire: “I definitely hold this work more dear to my heart than any others. It would consequently not suffer being neglected even to ensure the survival of its author.”

Due to the pact between Hitler and Stalin, the secret police forces of the Nazis and Communists were cooperating at the time of Benjamin’s untimely death, and the Reds were liquidating Communists who challenged the current Party Line. The altogether sketchy information respecting the Portbou incident has lately been employed by conservative conspiracy theorists to tarnish Erich Fromm’s reputation by defaming his second wife Henny Gurland, claiming that Benjamin’s death was no suicide and that Henny Gurland had somehow cooperated with Communist agents in liquidating him for being a turncoat communist. Of course the Nazis would be the most likely suspects given his Jewishness and his insults regarding their level of mentality. Benjamin’s friend Arthur Koestler stated in his memoir, Scum of the Earth, that some time before the incident Benjamin had shown him a stash of 62 morphine pills, and had split them with him so they would both have the ultimate option to free themselves from Hitler’s vices. When Koestler heard of Benjamin’s death, he wanted to kill himself – much later, in 1983, he died via a suicide pact with his young wife. The total number of pills changes from 62 to 30 in another account. Therefore Koestler is somehow implicated in the supposed double-crossing plot, or more likely had inadvertently talked too much and had caused politically incorrect information about his friend to be revealed to the Soviet secret police.

In any case, after Walter Benjamin’s death the rest of the party confined to the Portbou hotel were released. Henny made it to the United States, where she married Erich Fromm. It was her life-threatening arthritic condition that sent him to Mexico in hopes of obtaining a cure for her in 1950; she died in 1952; the specific cause of death was a mystery, and it has been speculated that she might have been poisoned in Portbou. While in Mexico Fromm fell in with the psychoanalytic community there, and wound up living in the country for 23 years.

In 1953 Erich Fromm married the wife who survived him, Annis Freeman. She was a traditionally feminine woman, in marked contrast to the feminist predecessors who had taken up the professional ambition and careerist rivalry for which aggressive males were most notorious. Fromm’s often-cited biographer Ranier Funk happily provides us with some information about her in Erich Fromm, His Life and Ideas. Erich was reportedly madly in love with Annis for all of twenty five years. His hundreds of little love notes to her were hardly the rational expressions of love he had set forth in The Art of Loving; for instance: “My beautiful Love, I love you so much that it hurts, but the hurt is sweet and wonderful. I wish you feel it in your sleep…” Annis, younger than Erich, was a very attractive and intelligent lady with a Southern accent – she had been raised in Alabama. The death of her husband, David Freeman, an attorney in India, had left her acquainted with Eastern religion and culture, and quite wealthy. She and Erich built a fine residence forty-three miles from Mexico. Annis was keenly interest in palmistry and astrology, and she was well versed in social science; indeed, Erich considered her his equal in their frequent scientific discourse. Finally, he would still have no children, perhaps due to the curse put upon him and Frieda for their violation of Jewish law, but the secular recompense in Annis was more than sweet, and we opine that its lovechild is The Art of Loving.

If a person is what he thinks or does symbolically even more than what he physically does, we believe Fromm is a reasonable lover of his kind – the reasonable college students who were more drawn to him than to Timothy Leary and the like certainly thought so. At least he was reasonably consistent, someone whose love we can have faith in. As for love between the sexes, Fromm’s sketchy record is not a bad resume of cleavage, and at the risk of being platitudinous we can say that all is well that ends well. Before that relatively happy ending, we are inclined to overlook the faults and fill in the gaps in his favor, noting well that he maintained social and professional relationships with former intimates, so he must have had something endearing about him. At the same time, we keep in mind that the relationship between the sexes can be a battle for everyone concerned, including those who are confused about their gender.

THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES

Since we have mentioned Walter Benjamin and his kindred spirit and pioneer of modernity, Baudelaire, we may take the liberty of quoting, in respect to the battle of the sexes, a play, Miss Julie, written another agent provocateur for modernity, August Strindberg:

Jean, the valet of the house, has seduced the young lady of the house who tempted him to the deed, one Miss Julie. Jean has persuaded her to flee to Switzerland with him to avoid the wrath of the Count before he discovers their escapade. Julie wants to take her bird along, but the Jean will have none of that baggage and chops its head off in the kitchen. Julie stares at the chopping board, and declaims:

“You don’t think I can bear the sight of blood. You think I’m so weak. Oh, how I would like to see your blood and your brains on a chopping block! I’d like to see the whole of your sex swimming like that in a sea of blood. I think I could drink out of your skull, bathe my feet in your broken breast, and eat your heart roasted whole. You think I’m weak. You think I love you, that my womb years for your seed…. You think I’m a coward and will run away. No, now I’m going to stay… and let the storm break. My father will come back…find his desk broken…his money gone. Then he’ll ring that bell – twice for the valet – and then he’ll send for the police…and I shall tell everything….”

Erich Fromm said men express their hostility by overpowering people, while women work to undermine male dominance. He acknowledged the existence of the battle between the sexes, and said the relationship between men and women is between a victorious and conquered group. “One cannot understand the psychology of women,” he said in a 1975 interview published in Italy, “and for that matter the psychology of men, and one cannot understand the element of sadism, of hostility and destructiveness in men and women if one does not consider that there has been a war between the sexes going on in the last six thousand years. The war is a guerilla war. Women were defeated by patriarchalism six thousand years ago and society was reconstructed on male dominance. Women were possessions and had to be grateful for every new concession that men made to them. But there is no domination of one part of mankind over another, of social class, of a nation or of a sex over another, unless there is underneath a rebellion, fury, hate, and a wish for revenge in those who are oppressed and exploited and fear and insecurity in those who do the exploiting and repressing.”

Of course Fromm favored the underdog, and identified socialism with the matriarchal ideals derived from his study of Johann Jacob Bachofen’s theory of matriarchy, a theory adopted by both left and right to their respective ends. On the left side, the side traditionally occupied by women, society when ruled by women is a communitarian if not a communist affair. Sex is free and uninhibited, there is no property in women, who in turn love their kids unconditionally, and fathers do not know who their kids are, kids who happily trust their mothers. Indeed, Fromm argued in The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (1970) that the mother-centered principles discovered by Bachofen are in fact the “basis of the principle of universal freedom and equality, of peace and tender humaneness. It is also the basis for principled concern for material welfare and worldly happiness.”

But matriarchy along with its Mother Goddess and her high priestesses was violently overthrown by decisive men, rational, calculating creatures who would ration out the world and the women in it as they please. Women were taken captive and exchanged like cattle. At least they found time to invent agriculture, according to Fromm, hence found civilization. Sons were wanted by fathers, to follow in their warpaths. Men took pleasure in killing and dominating one another in the pursuit of life, liberty, and property. Real men could care less about women, occupied as men were with the exercise of power to obtain obedience to their abstract conception of the fascist political state.  They routinely abused women and children to maintain male superiority. Fromm named Sophocles’ character, Creon, the king of Thebes, as a model fascist leader. We recall that Creon, together with Polynices and Eteoces, the sons of Oedipus, succeeded Oedipus to the throne after Oedipus’ mother and wife, Queen Jocasta, Creon’s sister, hanged herself. A struggle for power between the brothers ensued – Polynices left Thebes and returned with an army; he and Eteocles killed each other in combat. Creon assumed sole power over Thebes. He sentenced his niece Antigone, who was engaged to be married to his son Haemon, to death by starvation, so she would have time to worship, he said, the god she adored –Death – for disobeying his prohibition against giving his rebellious nephew, Polynices, traditional burial rites, although full honors had accorded to Eteocles for his defense of Thebes. The burial was by no means completed: Antigone had cleaned the slimy corpse, quickly sprinkled it with handfuls of dust, and crowned its head with three libations. She was apprehended on the spot, and denied nothing.

When Creon confronted Antigone, she admitted she had broken his vengeful edict. It had not been handed down by Zeus himself, she explained, and she did not think that Creon, “a mere mortal, could override the gods, the greatest unwritten, unshaken traditions. They are alive, not just for today or yesterday, they live forever, from the first of time, and no one knows when they first saw the light. These laws – I was not about to break them, not out of fear of some man’s wounded pride, and face the retribution of the gods…. And if my present actions strike you as foolish, let’s just say I’ve been accused of folly by a fool.” (1) But Creon, his pride wounded, clung to it, and remarked that stubbornness was brittle, bound to be shattered first of all, and that if he desisted from punishing the insolent girl, then “I am not the man, not now: she is the man if this victory goes to her and she goes free.”

As for Polynices: “Once an enemy, never a friend, not even after death.” To which Antigone responded that she was “born to join in love, not hate,” and Creon rejoined, “Go down below and love, if love you must – love the dead! While I’m alive, no woman is going to lord it over me.” In any case, “Whoever steps out of line, violates the laws, or presumes to hand out orders to his superiors, he’ll win no praise from me. But that man the city places in authority, his orders must be obeyed, large and small, right and wrong. Anarchy –show me a greater crime in the world! She, she destroys cities, rips up houses, breaks the ranks of spearmen into headlong rout. But the ones who last it out, the great mass of them, owe their lives to discipline. Therefore we must defend the men who live by law, enver let some woman triumph over us. Better to fall from power, if fall we must, at the hands of a man – never to be rated inferior to a woman, never.”

And he advises Antigone’s beau, his son Haemon, that he ought to be subordinate to his will in every way: “That’s what a man prays for: to produce good sons –a household full of them, dutiful and attentive, so they can pay his enemy back with interest, and match the respect his father shows his friend. But the man who rears a brood of useless children, what has he brought into the world, I ask you? Nothing but trouble for himself, and mockery from his enemies laughing in his face. Oh Haemon, never lose your sense of judgment over a woman.” But Haemon is recalcitrant, and that moves Creon to pronounce this sentence: “You, you soul of corruption, rotten through – woman’s accomplice!”

 Oh, but what is this thing we call progress? That these ancient words ring so true today makes us wonder.

Enter the blind old prophet Tiresias, who warned Creon in no uncertain terms that his refusal to bury Polynices insulted the gods.

“And it is you – your high resolve that sets this plague on Thebes. The public altars and sacred hearths are fouled, one and all, by the birds and dogs with carrion torn from the corpse, the doomstruck son of Oedipus! And so the gods are deaf to our prayers, they spurn the offerings in our hands, the flame of holy flesh…. Take these things to heart, my son, I warn you. All men make mistakes, it is only human. But once the wrong is done, a man can turn his back on folly, misfortune too, if he tries to make amends, however low he’s fallen, and stops his bullnecked ways. Stubbornness brands you for stupidity –pride is a crime. No, yield to the dead!”

Where is the all-seeing blind prophet today, now that the offense to the gods is even graver thanks to high technology and low morality, now that we need dire warnings even more than before? If it were not for the fact that men kill one another in the name of gods to have revenge and assuage their blood-guilt, perhaps the lesson would be better learned from doom.

Creon had second thoughts, buried the corpse, and then went to release Antigone. Alas, it was too late: she had hung herself, and Haemon, who thought his father insane yet hated him for his offense, had killed himself in her tomb. To make matters worse, Creon’s wife Eurydice stabbed herself in the heart when she heard of the death of her son. Creon was inconsolable and prayed for his own death. Wherefore the Chorus, pronouncing the moral of the story, said that “wisdom is by far the greater part of joy,” and that the “mighty words of the proud are paid in full.”

Of course men felt guilty over the centuries. They justified their sadism with masochism, and suffered the cross, reasoning that everyone is guilty just for being born of woman, and therefore must be duly punished.

But men and women alike would like to be freed from this unwholesome insanity, this patriarchal crime against humanity. They would somehow return to the paradisiacal womb of Big Mama, or progress to a socialist utopia that would, with the help of cooperating fathers, mother all mankind, give all persons their fair share of the primordial heritage. Men indubitably need women for this original projection. If women are emancipated, men shall also be emancipated from the murderous patriarchy and its death-religion, before the race, enraptured by violence, meets its doom once and for all. Wherefore socialism is naturally identified with feminism. But this neoteric feminism is not as loving as the matriarch of old; behind the bared teeth of its lovely smile with lurks the smoldering rage of a beast cornered for millennia; and it would, if only it could, express its resentment belligerently instead of sulking around the house and behaving hysterically.

So we should remember, Erich Fromm among many others said, that the weaker sex have a score to settle with the stronger. What are we to do? Love them, of course, and make sure our love is reasonable; that is to say, nonviolent.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN FAITH AND LOVE

Given Erich Fromm’s synthesis of reason and love, we might suppose that Pope Benedict would be Fromm’s avid reader if not his fan. After all, the pontiff’s first papal encyclical elaborated on love, and his project is the merger of reason and faith. Of course human beings have never needed a reason besides “be-cause” to have love or faith. In fact reason constitutes a drag on both. Yes, we may assume that love differs from faith; and then we may wonder how much faith the pontiff really has in love’s efficacy when actually applied to people –particularly Muslims who refuse to recognize Jesus as God – in contrast to his professional love of God. Both the Pope and the psychoanalyst have similar German origins, notwithstanding the religious and cultural difference between German Catholic and German Jew. While Erich Fromm and his people were fleeing Germany, the future pope became a member of the Nazi youth and then manned the German antiaircraft guns protecting a slave-labor factory: How could he have done otherwise, he asked, when to do so would have been impossible for a young fellow his age; he did the will of God, and perhaps Erich would have manned his guns for Der Fuehrer if Erich’s people had not been the victim of fatherly love. Since they are keenly interested in the same philosophical points, they have much in common in their germaneness. As for motherly love, Erich Fromm had his Mother Right to go by, while the Pope has Mother Mary and her church-womb. Still, men rule the Church, and socialist feminism is anathema to the pope. In fact, we have good reason to believe that Pope Benedict would not buy Erich Fromm’s art of love, at least not whole hog, although it may suit his predilection for reasoning.

For one thing, the prophetic, mystical Jewish aspect of Fromm’s Germanic love is perforce too Oriental for our Bavarian lover of Christian testimony in the ancient Greek language. On the other hand, Fromm’s Occidental reasoning converts the originally arbitrary and ambivalent, anthropomorphic one-god from a personal substance into dynamic principles with little guidance as to the particulars. Although Fromm does not go along with Freud’s notion that religion is an unwarranted illusion, and although he recognizes certain aspects of religion as meritorious and convenient to humanist ends, we think his sort of reasonable faith would smack loudly of infidelity and atheism in the Pope’s mind. Indeed, Fromm called himself a mystical atheist, whatever that meant; it might have meant that he believed in the unity of the universe absent a central one-god, for such a god would contradict the principle of unity: monotheism is in effect dualistic as it sets a one-god apart from the world

Moreover, Fromm’s activist disposition and orientation to the left side of the political spectrum is anathema to the reactionary pontiff. Faith in the things of this planet, that they might somehow be rationally manipulated to realize the Kingdom of God on Earth before man is buried therein, is bound to lead to grave disappointment and Hell on Earth. No, the oppressed people of the world must not revolt against the temporal powers now that they have been saved by the grace of the Mother Church. Reborn from the waters of her virginal baptismal font, obedient children of Father God are guaranteed good circumstances after they die to this world, provided they confess their sins and do or buy penance as they continue in sin; happily for the existence of the Church, everyone is by nature a sinner in need of salvation. The Church will nurse them at her breast; if not with whole milk, from the ocean of milk at the beginning, then with a dogmatic formula of words, which will take the edge off for awhile, and then make them hunger even more. They must gladly suffer the imposition of the political-economic system that the Church begrudges for its materialism from time to time, yet ironically preserves for its own good. Lest one become too envious and resentful, he should know that poverty is not an evil thing, but is really a blessing in disguise, a chaste lady to whom the most faithful among us obediently take vows.

As sainted Mother Theresa, may God bless and keep her, noted so well in the slums, grinding poverty shall always be with us, so our rightful duty is to feed the hungry and tend to the sick and so on. She is right about that, but we might also try to strike at the root of the disease lest we have too many to tend to.  We might think that too much of everything is being held in too few hands, and we note that early Christianity expressed a great deal of righteous hatred for the rich and powerful few; but the new, catholic religion embraced the rich as well as the poor for the sake of the institution. It was then written in I Clement (38.2) that impoverished and exploited people should thank God for the rich men who handed out scraps to the poor. It seems that God really placed Jesus Christ on Earth to justify the Roman Empire.

Egads, perhaps we should write a Creed of Greed and thank Greed for making Christian Charity necessary lest the most significant heads be paraded around the streets on pikes and nailed to the public podiums. Religious conservatives, if they know what is good for them, should simply treat the symptoms of poverty with compassion, providing a bare minimum of goods lest the incentive to wage slavery be lost, and not try to root out the causes of poverty, for that implies popular revolt and perhaps the decapitation of the Holy Father himself. Catholic activists should be relieved of their posts and even excommunicated if not executed if they persist in trying to make sure that all Christians are as equal on earth as they are in the sight of God. Never mind the highly successful Catholic orders of dictated communism, including the Benedictine and Cistercian orders, which prospered spiritually and materially as free-labor camps until overrun by greedy princes: God’s kingdom is in heaven and shall never be a commune on Earth. Now each man can be a little king of his castle or hovel at the very least. Let each man be the crown of the queen below him and let each little king and queen be resigned to the existing higher power and keep to their proper stations along the Great Chain of Being. Wherefore it is most convenient for salvation’s sake to have faith in nothing but the things of the Catholic system of salvation, and certainly not in the nothing left by fanatic Jewish iconoclasts of various cultic hues, suspected atheists who smash every definition of deity and will not even pronounce a name pretending to denote the unknown god. Thus they have, at the bare minimum, freedom in name only, or rather freedom from names. In the final analysis, the One suffices: the thing-in-self or no-thing; and nothing is perfect, for nothing is enough. They might be fond of Buddhism or existentialism and so on, but let them deny all particular faiths in one thing or another.

In any event, we are suspicious of the imaginary, ambiguous line Pope Benedict would trace between East and West, or between the Irrational and the Rational, in the first place. The East has its despots and the West its democracy, but the East has its communist tendencies and the West its barbarian tradition. We think a truly catholic spiritual leader would speak more on love, whatever that might be, something of which we heard nary a word in the pontiff’s Regensburg speech, wherein he cited imperial hatred for Islam in favor of his reasoning, nor did we hear love directly mentioned in his Guadalajara address as cardinal. Following the assassination of a Lebanese political leader in November of 2006, he did call the people of Lebanon to national unity and justice, two of the foremost excuses for mass murder in human history, instead of invoking the presumably peaceful Christ he is sworn to profess: No, Pope Benedict did not call for their unconditional love, for loving their hostile neighbors, for the forgiveness of enemies, namely other People of the Book.

TURKEY TALK

Pope Benedict visited Turkey in November 2007, after deeply offending Muslims during his Regensburg University speech, wherein he cited a Byzantine emperor’s personal insult to their Prophet:“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” And two years prior, while presiding as Cardinal Ratzinber over the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he publicly stated his opposition to Turkey joining the European Union. He said Europe was a cultural continent united by its deeply Christian identity. Bringing Turkey into the European Union would put European culture at risk, he claimed. "Turkey always represented another continent throughout history, in permanent contrast with Europe," so to equate the two continents "would be a mistake," he stated in an interview. Furthermore, equating the continents of Europe and Asia for the sake of economic benefits would sacrifice their richness and culture. Cardinal Ratzinger indicated that Turkey will always be a contradiction for Europe. He recalled that the Ottomans had once been at the gates of Vienna and had waged war in the Balkans. In his opinion, Turkey should seek its future among Islamic nations, not in the European Union.

Pope Benedict’s apologists had said he meant no offense to Muslims, claiming they had taken the insulting quotation out of context. Pope Benedict apologized, not for quoting Emperor Manuel’s insult, but for the fact that Muslims were insulted by it. Vatican observers who claim to know him well said the pope was a careful speaker and had intended the insult to provoke Muslims into dialogue. Unintended consequences were the murder of at least one nun and one priest, and the persecution of thousands of Christians in Iraq.

As for his opposition to Turkey’s bid to join the European Union, the nation’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said the pope had reversed himself after his arrival in Turkey, informing him that he personally backed the membership, reminding him, however, that the Church does not play a political role in the matter. Several hours later the pope’s spokesman issued a brief clarification, stating that the Vatican has “neither the power nor the specific political task” of getting Turkey admitted to the European Union. Rather, the Vatican supports “the road of dialogue and of moving toward integration of Turkey in Europe on the basis of common values and principles.” Since as cardinal he had identified Europe not as a geographical but as a cultural continent whose culture is Christian, it would appear that the conversion of the Turkey’s population to Christianity would effect the integration wanted by the Church.

The pope reportedly said on the plane into Turkey that one of his chief aims was to get a dialogue going that would bring Christians and Muslims, West and East, closer together. And even before he boarded the plane in Rome, he told reporters, “The scope of this visit is dialogue, brotherhood, a commitment to understanding between cultures, between religions, for reconciliation.”  Needless to say, he did not venture to claim that, if only Christians and Muslims would get rid of their mutually hostile religions and embrace secularism, republicanism, and capitalism wholeheartedly, then they would get along much better together, nor would he claim that Muslims would be saved for eternal peace hereafter if and only if they converted to Christianity. In any event, the foremost and original purpose of the papal visit, as it had been planned for a year earlier, a plan to which the Turkish government had objected at the time, had little to do with Islam directly: the pope would venture to Turkey for a day to salve the thousand-year-old wound from the rift between the Roman and Orthodox churches. He would personally express his support for Turkey’s tiny Christian minority, a minority that had in past times struggled for independence from Muslim imperialism, sometimes leading raids against Muslim forces and assisting the Crusaders. Now that the pontiff had offended Islam so egregiously, he would still speak of love and brotherhood and reconciliation, seemingly including Muslims in his circle of love, yet of course it appeared that most of his filial love was reserved for his beleaguered Christian brothers whom he had come to visit in the first place.

After he landed in Turkey, he quoted another pope’s love for the Turkish people: “I love the Turks,” Pope John XXIII had said of his papal diplomacy in Turkey in the 1940s. And in his address at the Patriarchal Church of St. George, Pope Benedict cited the filial tribal love expressed in Psalms 133.1: “Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brother’s dwell in unity,” and went on to recite how Western popes and Eastern patriarchs gave signs of love for one another; for instance, Pope Paul VI began his brief to Patriarch Athenagoras with the exhortation from Ephesians 5.2: Walk in love. “It is on this foundation of mutual love that new relations between the Churches of Rome and Constantinople have developed,” said Pope Benedict. He gave tribute to ancient Christiandom in the region, and concluded his address with, “I greet you in the love of Christ. May the Lord be with you.”  Patriarch Bartholomew, on the other hand, presented an article entitled, That They May All Be One,’ for the occasion of the pope’s visit, which he considered “an opportunity to manifest our fraternal love to His Holiness Benedict XVI and to renew our commitment to continue on our common spiritual path toward the unity of the Church…. We pray fervently that the One and the Triune God will continue to guide us in all that we do to fulfill his commandment: “That they may all be one.” (John 17.21)

Street protests were strictly limited for security reasons, but the best-selling novel, Assassinating the Pope: Who will kill Benedict XVI in Istanbul?, was selling like hotcakes on the Internet. A Turkish man on the street, a young physics student by the name of Merve Celikkol, thought he detected hypocrisy in the pope’s new demeanor: “How is it possible that he changed so much?” Another man, found in luxury watch shop, gave the pope a chance: “This can be his way of confessing his sins for the wrong he has done to the Muslim world. After all, he’s human, and human’s make mistakes.”  Which brings to mind again the blind prophet Tiresias’ advice to the fascistic king, Creon: “Take these things to heart, my son, I warn you. All men make mistakes, it is only human. But once the wrong is done, a man can turn his back on folly, misfortune too, if he tries to make amends, however low he’s fallen, and stops his bullnecked ways. Stubbornness brands you for stupidity –pride is a crime.”

On his last day in Turkey, Pope Benedict visited Istanbul, the city that had been the residence of the emperor whose hateful remark he had quoted in Regensburg. Ali Bardakoglu, Turkish President for Religious Affairs, chided him for feeding fear of Islam instead of ameliorating it – Ali had previously charged the pope with having a hateful heart. But Istanbul’s mufti, Mustafa Cagrici, who had once been highly critical of the pope, was exceedingly pleased that the pope had prayed with the imam at the Sultan Ahmet or Blue Mosque – a local newspaper ran the photo with the words “Forgiven in Sultan Ahmet.” Had the pope really had a change of heart? Did he want to make amends in Turkey, which he identified as a “bridge between religions”? Or was he deftly playing politics for a change? Pope Benedict, although the news reports failed to mention it, was in fact slightly tracing the spiritual path fully illuminated by his charismatic and astute predecessor, Pope John Paul II, whose act was admittedly hard to follow in any respect – but  Pope Benedict, who was looking forward to retirement in Bavaria, had been involuntarily drafted to the pontifical task. John Paul II’s admirable stance on Turkey can be gleaned from his greetings to Turkey’s ambassadors to the Holy See.

On 6 December 1997 John Paul II informed the arriving ambassador that the foundation of social peace depends on the dignity of each human person and the unity of those persons in the human race derived from its creator; to wit: the one God. Harmony, he said, can only be obtained between peoples if their legitimate differences are not divisive but enrich mutual reality. To that harmonious end people should engage in constructive dialogue wherein all seek each other’s good besides their own. As for Turkey’s interest in integration into the European family of nations,  it would be imperative for everyone concerned to elevate the increasing economic interdependence of nations into a solid determination to effect the common good, “to the general good of everyone and that of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all. This applies also to countries: there will never be genuine peace if one country prospers while its neighbor is in need…. As a bridge between Europe and Asia, your country serves as a reminder that the more prosperous countries of this continent should be ever more ready to respond to the needs of peoples beyond its borders.”

On 7 December 2001 John Paul II reminded the arriving ambassador of his 1979 visit to Turkey, where he paid homage to the land that the ambassador had just remarked was a great part of Christian development. “It was there that Saint Paul was born,” said the pontiff, “and where he and other Apostles preached the Gospel.” He said he was left with profound esteem for Turkey’s past and for its more recent achievements. The past thousand years were witness to troubled relations between East and West, but the twentieth century “saw fresh attempts to build a constructive relationship, based upon the trust and respect which at times require what I have called ‘a healing of memories.’ The need for such healing is everywhere evident, for in many parts of the world we see that wounds of past grievances continue to fester from generation to generation.” He noted that Turkey is a secular state, and that secularism is identified with Western modernity; hence Turkey is “a synthesis of East and West.” Although secular political states distinguish themselves from the religious sphere, the distinction must not mean separation: “For if distinction becomes separation, the transcendent dimension vanishes from public life. It is then that totalitarianism appears, with its customer disregard from freedom and human dignity.” So the secular state must be open to the spirituality that transcends it, the “vision of the human person created in the image of God and possessed therefore of inalienable and universal rights.” One right being, of course, religious freedom. and not just the right of private worship, but the right to bring “personal values to bear upon public life, in the belief that these values contribute to the common effort to build a society genuinely open to every dimension of the human person.” And that is why the small minority of Catholics in Turkey see no contradiction in being both Catholic and Turkish. Yes, “Turkey can serve as a bridge, by making clear that justifiable concerns for national unity are not in conflict with respect for the rights of individuals and minorities.”

On 12 February 2004 John Paul II reiterated his concern for the right to freedom of conscience and religion in Turkey, particularly in respect to Catholics, to the newly arrived Turkish ambassador. He said that church and state should not be rivals but partners, who in healthy dialogue encourage “integral human development and social harmony.” He was mindful of his predecessor, Pope John XXII, who identified truth, justice, love and freedom as the four pillars of peace. “Pope John called for a nobler vision of public authority and boldly challenged the world to think beyond its present state of disorder to new forms of international order commensurate with human dignity.” After all, the ambassador had referred to Turkey as a democratic state governed by rule of law and in which all citizens enjoy equal rights. “Indeed, the rule of law and equality of rights are essential for any modern society that truly seeks to safeguard and promote the common good.” To help achieve that end, John Paul II recommended multilateral legal instruments be established to deal with terrorism, which “defies the traditional logic of a legal system set up for regulation relations between sovereign states.”

(quoted) Robert Fagles’ beautiful translation of the play, Antigone, published by Penguin Books.

To Be Continued in LOGOS VI Benedictine Deconstruction