The Church and Humanity

One of the most interesting theoretical problems, however, which indeed is at the basis of [the German churches’ cooperation with the Nazi government]—the intellectual slovenliness and sloppiness, as [Fr. Alfred] Delp called it—is the fact that there is no worked-out idea of the nature of the church, neither in the Evangelical nor in the Catholic Churches, and that the relationship of the church members to their humanity is not the object of theoretical investigations. That was not always so.

And so I will now present to you a text from which you will see how one spoke about such things in better times, when spiritual heads were still dominant in the church. For this purpose I will read out to you Thomas Aquinas’s section on the corpus mysticum in the Summa theologiae, third part, chapter 8, article 3. It is headed “Utrum Christus sit caput omnium hominum,” “whether Christ is the head of all men.”

In the corpus of the article can be read (I am translating it now):

“The difference between the natural body of a man and the mystical body of the church [the ecclesia] is that the members of a natural body all exist together, whereas members of the mystical body do not. They are not together in their natural existence [esse naturae], because the body of the church is made up of people from the beginning to the end of the world. Nor are they all together in grace [ esse gratiae ], because at any given moment there are people who do not have grace then but may have it later on; and there are others who already have it.”

“So people can be classed as members of the mystical body because of their potentiality, and not merely when they are actually in it. Some members have a potentiality that will never be actuated. Others are eventually actuated, and this in three degrees: the first is by faith, the second by charity on earth, the third by the enjoyment of heaven. Therefore, it is generally to be taken that for the entire time of the world, Christ is the head of all men, but at different degrees.”

“So there now follows the distinctions of degree and the question of the manner in which the heathen and the Jews, particularly the patriarchs of the Old Testament, belong to the corpus mysticum of Christ. The text passages that support the investigation are, first, the [First] Letter to Timothy, chapter 4, verse 10, he is the salvator omnium hominum et maxime fidelium, “the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe”; and the First Letter of John, chapter 2, verse 2, ipse est propitiatio pro peccatis nostris: ‘he is the expiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.'”

Please note now this definition of what the corpus mysticum means in comparison with later interpretations. Let us first be clear what is proposed here: Christ is the head of all men, not only of the members of the church. Humanity is not disavowed by a thinker like Thomas. What happens to the nonmember of the church happens to a member of the corpus mysticum of Christ, just as much as what happens to a church member.

. . . . What is the significance of the appearance of Christ and of his incarnation as a historical event? It means that, in the sense of Thomas, the presence under God, and the presence of God in the world, which up to then was available to men only in a profoundly ineffable form, was differentiated through the incarnation and became historically clear. Thus the whole of mankind can become retrospectively included in the incarnation as a historic event, and all of mankind is a member of the corpus mysticum in the sense of inclusion in God, as he realizes himself in history. And this holds similarly for the entire future.

As opposed to the philosophic heights of the understanding of the problematic, there always arise the concrete practical problems. For the churches are organizations in the world—in relation to the appearance of Christ in historical reality—and therefore tend to set themselves up as interest groups and legal persons, which is quite all right. It is not all right, however, that the Catholic Church and other churches that have branched off from it, through schism and separations of other kinds, then set themselves up as the one and only corpus mysticum, as if the rest of mankind did not belong to it. So, since the Middle Ages, we have in theology a strange tension running parallel to the development of the nation states, where, in the idea of the corpus mysticum, the church understood as a social and legal institution predominates over the universal conception of the corpus mysticum as formulated from a philosophical height by Thomas.

From this tension arise the peculiarities of the churches in the contemporary situation, which in Germany are much more dangerous than in other countries. Because in other countries the church people and the clergy belong to a people’s society, or rather, to a national society, that, moreover, is civilized through the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and so on. These civilizational factors are missing in German society. Hence the particular danger that membership in the church, which, theologically, we need not further speak about here, is somehow misunderstood as a special position opposed to the rest of mankind, as if the rest of mankind did not belong to mankind, and as if that belonging to mankind were a privilege of church membership. . . .

So, because of the tension I have just characterized, there is this ghettoizing tendency that exists between the church as institution and the church in Thomas’s sense, the ecclesia as corpus mysticum, which comprises the whole of mankind from the beginning to the end. For Germany this is a particularly dangerous tension on account of the miserable intellectual and philosophical level that prevails in this country.

Existence Under God – The Central Problem of Order

Regarding the question of this tension between the broad Thomasic definition of the corpus mysticum and the very narrow ideas of churches as made up of persons who through the sacrament are received into a community, and which do not extend beyond this circle of persons, there is the general problem that mankind in history is not egalitarian, but has a history. And that means that men, insofar as their history is known at all, are always under God and express this knowledge of their existence under God through corresponding organizational and ritual institutions.

But in the insight into the nature of man’s existence under God there are developments from relatively compact conceptions of this order of existence of individual men and of society under God to the highly differentiated ones. And the unfolding of this problem of existence under God as the central problem of order, that is history. Please note this definition; it is very carefully considered. The problem of history lies here, not anywhere else. So there is history insofar as the presence under God and the knowledge of such presence under God runs through phases of compactness and differentiation.

In this historical process of increasing transparency for the central problem of order, Christianity takes a special place, insofar as in it, through the symbolism of the incarnation, the presence of God in man in society and in history is thoroughly formulated. That happened nowhere else. Only in terms of this problematic of incarnation, which then had as a consequence the whole problematic of the Trinity and the dogma of the Trinity, is it unequivocally said what man is. That is to say, man is man insofar as he is imago Dei, and insofar as he is imago Dei are all men equal as participating in the reality of God and thus united with God, who historically has become flesh in the process of history.

This is precisely what is characteristic of Christianity, its unique achievement. Every attempt to withdraw from this achievement is a regression in differentiation and an attempt to reintroduce more compact ideas of the existence of man and of his order. To such regressions, however, also belongs, now in a sociological sense, the attempt within the church at restricting Christianity or the membership of Christ to members of a historical church.

The second point to notice is the following. These advances in differentiation do not occur in the sense that suddenly, through a kind of biological mutation all over the world, all men pass on from a more compact to a more differentiated insight into their order. Rather, these insights occur in determinate men, who, again, are in determinate societies, and very often they do not immediately penetrate beyond the bounds of the given society. Very often they are ineffective even within the bounds of this society, for the one who is immediately understanding is always only one individual human being, and whether he is a prophet or a philosopher makes no difference.

And so we have a remarkable structuration of history insofar as the insights that are representative because they more sharply differentiate and make clearer the nature of man are bound to determinate historical points and are only gradually able to spread out from such centers. From this structure of history, that insights are found to be representative for the whole of humanity, there now arises a whole series of encumbrances upon this insight. Think for the moment about the problems of philosophy. It is in Greek philosophy that an insight into the nature of man was attained, one which indeed was representative for all men, insofar as there, too, all men were recognized as being under God and recognized as being in an order that is to be determined in terms of its transcendent type of openness.

But these ideas—think for example of classic politics in Plato and Aristotle—were at the same time bound up with the order of the society in which they were found, so that politics, in its first formulation, for example, in Aristotelian politics, then become the politics of a determinate type of society, that is to say, of the polis. The ideas of the order of man and of society were not expanded beyond the polis and, within the paradigm of the polis as sketched in the seventh and eighth books of the Aristotelian Politics, remain as the pattern of order of a society that naturally cannot be used anymore today, because we do not have a polis anymore.

Exactly the same problem occurs in the pneumatic sphere, if it is to be distinguished as such from the noetic sphere of philosophy. The insights into the presence under God, as they were found in Israel, especially by Moses, are immediately connected with the idea of the chosen people, that is; of the people in which this insight was found through one of its members, Moses, and then crystallized in the covenant of Sinai.

Now, these orders under God are primary, and that applies above all to the pneumatic sphere. They are primarily clarifications of the relation of man to God, and secondarily of man to man. The Decalogue, which contains the essence of the Sinaitic covenant, thus contains rules for the behavior of man to God and to his fellowman. It does not contain any determinations of any kind as to how a society should be organized, not even that of the chosen people. This is because the internal social organization according to clans or families is presupposed and will be questioned by no one. There now arise, therefore, remarkable problems. The clan society as such, which is not put in question, exists under God. That is the situation that Martin Buber denoted by the expression “theopolity.” [fn 2]

The same problematic repeated itself in early Christian times. What is in question is the further clarification of the relationship of the existence of men under God through Christ, and again the emphasis is on the problematic of right order in relationship to God and to the fellowman. But once again, there are no statements regarding the organization of a society for duration in the world.

Now, in one passage in the sacred scripture, these problems do become explicit. When the tribal constitution (Israel in its old form), under the pressure of external political events in the wars of the Philistines, is compelled to transform itself into an organization under a king like the other nations, then there arises the problem of the king, who emerges now as ruler in competition with the ruler who up to then was the ruler of the chosen people, namely, God.

The Function of the Prophets and Natural Law

[The problem of the conflict between the power of the king and the covenant of the people with God] reaches into the modern era: There is always the question that the order of man to God and to his fellowmen has been laid down through the covenant with God. Now if the ruler, who has the instruments of power at his disposal, violates this order by setting up a temple for other gods, or violates the duties of the Decalogue regarding his fellowmen by building up the military or at least some kind of bureaucratic organization where certain levels of society, of employers and merchants, emerge who no longer display the right behavior in the decalogical sense toward their fellowmen, then there arises the question of the control of the ruler in the social as well as political sense, through representatives of the idea of the covenant, of the covenant with God.

That means that the prophet will now be the critic of the political and social organization. This is a new phenomenon. So, the prophet is first and foremost a social critic, because he must keep the political organization under control, in accord with the standards of the covenant. The question now is, Who in each individual case has the calling to be the interpreter of the covenant and its determination?

As I have said, these problems continue into the modern era, where the prophets are no longer a social institution, but where new prophets must emerge in order to carry out the social criticism. In the discussions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in the English revolution, we therefore have two opposed viewpoints. One holds that the king is the legitimate interpreter of God’s covenant, which is the opinion represented above all by James I. The other holds that the people is the legitimate authority for the interpretation of God’s covenant, represented in particular by Puritan preachers. That would play a great role in the Puritan revolution.

So we have to detect in the seventeenth century the emergence of a new wave, which now, in order to distinguish it from the Christian and old Israelite problems, may be called that of “Hebraism” in the sense of the problematic of the king and of the prophets, approximately as in the books of Samuel. Within Christianity itself there is no such development with regard to social organization and social criticism, for the early Christian idea of the relationship to God and to fellowmen is apocalyptically determined, that is to say, it is dominated by the expectation of the approaching end of the world. So, unlike in the ancient Israel of the kingdom, there is not developed a Christian organization and a Christian organizational criticism. When the Christian communities come into contact, positively or negatively, with political organizations, the church—now transformed into an organization in the world—must, in order to clarify conduct within its organization and to explain the relationship between it and the permanent secular community, consult as sources above all the classic philosophers and the post-classic Stoic natural law.

As a result, the early church fathers, above all Lactantius, inserted the natural law, particularly in its Ciceronian form, into the Christian idea of order in the world, thus making that order viable in the world. Thus we have two great sources for world organization in the Western world: the Hebrew tradition and the Stoic-natural law tradition, one introduced to ancient Israel, the other to early Christianity. Consequently further problems arise.

Representative for order, therefore, are not only the covenant or the Sermon on the Mount or the formulations of the New Testament—handed on in apocalyptic expectation—but also the philosophic insight into the nature of man and the ideas of human and social order arising from it, as they were taken over from the pre-Christian philosophic complex. From this rather complicated situation there now arises a whole series of problems for the relationship of the church to the temporal community. Because the church took over the worldly idea of order from classic and Stoic philosophy, this became a component of Christian theology, as for example in the Summa theologiae of Thomas. This had disastrous consequences for the later development of natural law, for, first of all, it became, as it were, Christian natural law and the church took on the role of guardian of natural law.

However, it is nowhere written that in the various historical situations church personnel are particularly suitable guardians of the natural law. For all the propositions of the natural law derive from the noetic experience, whereas within the church the noetic experience is not the primary source of experience and truth for clerics and theologians, but is replaced by the pneumatic experience of revelation. Thus there is a very considerable stock of knowledge of order coming from philosophy that is denatured and deformed in the theological field, because it had to be inserted into a complex of pneumatic symbols of revelation not intended to establish the order of temporal society.

Therefore we have the odd situation today that the Social Democrats, for example, who want to get out of revolutionary ideology and again recognize that there is something like natural law—which indeed also held for Marx, before the aspect of natural law was completely lost in the revolutionary phase—turn to the churches for information on natural law. They flirt with Christian natural law, apparently in complete ignorance of the fact that it is a pre-Christian, philosophically pagan phenomenon concerning existence in the world, with absolutely nothing to do with the church as such. So it would be much better for such rather openminded Social Democrats to begin to interest themselves in the pre-Christian natural law instead of allowing themselves to be instructed by the church about what natural law is.

The Church’s Duty and Failure to Represent Humanity

. . . . The church exists in relation to the world and thus must also define its behavior with regard to the temporal aspect of its existence in the world. On both sides, the spiritual side from revelation and the noetic side from philosophy, the representative function—being human in history has traditionally been encumbered by the fact that the insight became part of the respective dogma.

This means, that on the one side, the temporal side, there is the insight that the order of society has to be at the level of humanity—in the sense that the nature of man achieves fulfillment in the order of society and has to determine its order. But this insight is restricted, because the order only occurs within a limited community, so that the interests of the limited community in history enter into an amalgam with the general problematic of order at the level of humanity. And the particular interests of a society can thus appear in the cloak of more universal formulations of humanity—and thereby again denature and deform humanity in general.

In the church, the matter is even more critical, because here we have the problem that there is not one particular church but several concrete churches, Evangelical, Catholic, Greek-Orthodox Churches, and so on, each one claiming for itself the specific purity of representation of man under God, which only they can preach. Moreover, this specific historical form again amalgamates with the claim of generality, so that this church with the claim of generality, since it must indeed exist in the world and in specific societies, somehow balances its interests with those of the temporal aspect of the society.

We come again then to the grotesque situations that when a war breaks out anywhere, the priests on both sides willingly explain that the society is engaged in a just war, that the others are really bad types, and that God is always on their side. Always the same God. That can, in the extreme case, as we have seen in Germany in the National Socialist period, lead to the fact, first, that from the purely ecclesiastical problematic no one is seen as human who does not belong to the church—he lies outside the interests of humanity. And second, when it’s a matter of coming to terms with the temporal aspect of the society, the respective church in the specific society will always side with those who are the strongest at the time. And if those who are strongest, as for example the National Socialists, exclude from humanity everyone who is not a National Socialist, then arises the terrible consequence of mass murder, where the church does not intervene.

You must remember, for example, that the Einsatz commandos—who, to make Lebensraum for Germans, perpetrated mass murder on the civilian population in Poland in order to exterminate Poles—were 22 percent Catholic. Yet no representative of the German Catholic Church, and even less any representative of the German Evangelical Church, told any of these members of the SS (if they themselves did not know that already), who very happily still remained members of the church, that one was not allowed to shoot people dead. So, a complete decline, because the historically concrete actions were encumbered with the National Socialist idea that they were representative of the whole of humanity, with the result that the general humanity gets lost.

Karl Rahner, Sacramental Humanity, and the Corpus Mysticum

Against this tendency [to view with indifference people outside the Church] there are now a few passages to be noted. I am speaking only of the German situation; in general, of course, people know that everywhere. But within the German churches it is not so well known. I refer you to a very interesting treatment by Karl Rahner, “Membership of the Church according to the teaching of Pius XII’s Encyclical, Mystici Corporis Christi .” This encyclical, which first appeared in 1943, makes the most severe contraction of the membership of the church that it had ever received, insofar as here the community of the corpus mysticum is limited very strictly to members of the Catholic Church who have received the sacrament. Whoever does not have this sacramental character is not a member of the church, and since “church” is now identified with corpus mysticum, he is, so to say, not a member of the corpus mysticum.

In this situation, a theologian like Rahner has to first establish that these very restrictive formulations of the encyclical make only positive statements about this narrower membership, define only membership of the church, but—since they draw no conclusions—that they have nothing to say about the wider problem of the corpus mysticum. So, the theologian is free to go beyond the encyclical and make a series of reflections that then lead to where Thomas began in the High Middle Ages, that is to say, that Christ is the head of all men from the beginning of the world to its end.

However, a theologian like Rahner, certainly in the framework of the formulated Christian doctrinal pronouncements, as, for example, in this encyclical, has to behave himself. He must now erect all sorts of interesting constructions to make these doctrinal pronouncements compatible with his intended thesis, that Christ is the head of all men. The worst offense is naturally the problem of the sacrament. For if, according to an explicit doctrinal pronouncement, church membership and membership of the corpus mysticum is limited to persons who have received a sacrament, how then can persons who have not received a sacrament still be members of the corpus mysticum? And arising from that, something remarkable is now achieved. From this lack of proper terms (which is precisely that of the theologian—we are not bound by such a problematic of having to start with the sacrament), he established that being a follower of Christ outside the church is not only an individual problem of personal acceptance of the word, or something like that, but, as he discreetly expresses himself, has a “quasi-sacramental” character.

So if we drop the expression “quasi-sacramental,” which is caused by the lack of theological terminology, we can say what every anthropologist, every archeologist, everyone who is involved with the science of religions, and so on, knows in the secular sphere: that is, that obviously all men who are historically known to us and who have existed in historic societies have always had sacraments to express their presence under God. So there is absolutely no reason to restrict to the church, or to any specific church, the idea of sacrament, whose general and constitutive idea holds for every community. Every primitive tribe has sacraments of divine worship, of rituals for initiation into the community, all of which always represent the presence in terms of very compact ideas of attachment to the world of the divine, in space-time reality.

From the point of view of comparative religious studies and of history in general, there is absolutely no problem. There have always been sacraments; and there are only specifically Christian sacraments that have something to do with the higher degree of differentiation, of the incarnation and of the insight into the presence of all men under God. So the problematic which Rahner tried to formulate very carefully, resolves itself in the insight that all men exist under God, and that, however, this insight into the existence under God passes through a historical process from compactness to differentiation. Therefore, the results of modern science are absolutely compatible with, for example, the Thomasic theology of Christ as the head of all men.

For, indeed, nothing else is expressed in the symbolism of Christ than the differentiated insight that all men always exist under God and under grace and salvation. And all men in all communities have always known that and symbolize it through the institution of sacraments. So we have here, from the theological side, an attempt to develop ideas that are again compatible with the contemporary level of secular science. However, one must say that secular science, since it is not bound by this balancing act between theological doctrinal pronouncements, has proceeded much further along in the understanding of what the community of mankind is.

 

This excerpt is from Hitler and the Germans (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 31) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998)