| Commentary on a 'Doctrinal Note' issued by the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith In the modern world, there is no doubt that only
democratically-elected Governments can claim full legitimacy for their
power, since today democracy is universally recognized as the only
naturally justifiable form of government. This observation, taken
absolutely for granted in itself and for itself, nonetheless contains a
paradox, because the idea that there exists a single natural ethic which
can be objectively shared by all, irrespective of their religious,
political and cultural differences, has never been so eroded as in our
age.
There is only one way to solve this paradox: by interpreting the
logic of democracy in a strictly procedural manner. The natural primacy of
democracy would thus depend on the fact that it is the only ethically
neutral political regime, hence, one able to embrace visions of the world
in the perspective of values that are not only different but actually in
opposition.
The universal value of democracy
If one succeeds in this way
— to
tell the truth, brilliantly
— in
justifying the universal value that many attribute to democracy, at the
same time they are draining it of its life-blood. Every political regime
— and
democracy is no exception
—
needs to be motivated by values (Montesquieu spoke explicitly of
religious motivation); but a merely procedural democracy which
formally aims to neutralize the conflictual values present in the social
fabric in the conviction that it can give them the only possible
legitimate foundation, cannot refer in its turn, on pain of contradiction,
to prior founding values. This gave rise to one of the most subtle forms
of unrest that pervades democratic awareness in these early years of the
new millennium, at the time it is coming to realize the tragic fragility
of that democratic model it so enthusiastically helped to build and
spread.
There is one thoroughly mistaken way out of this difficulty:
fundamentalism.
Contrary to what many people still believe,
fundamentalism is not anti-democratic but post-democratic; likewise,
fundamentalism is not a regressive, backward-looking paradigm but, in its
own way (aberrant, of course), it is progressive, that is, oriented to
building a future.
Indeed, for the fundamentalist, ethical-political truth has such a
dazzling fascination that it does not allow any to stray from it, not even
a few; but at the same time, this [ethical-political] truth has a
universal character which forbids all discrimination: it is a truth of
and for everyone.
A regime founded on it can never be anything but democratic
because, from the outset, it is hostile to any undue privilege, to any
crystallization of caste, category, class or race. All the great
totalitarian experiences of the 20th century had fundamentalist
connotations, but not everyone perceived them clearly because they
appeared to be essentially ideological processes marked by the
State.
On the other hand, fundamentalism in our day attributes no special
value to the role of the State in the historical process, nor,
consequently, to the role of any collective movements. It calls upon the
individual who is an absolute protagonist of political dynamics.
Adverse affects on Christianity
Within this dialectic, Christianity is suffering obvious hardships. It
runs the risk, because of its constant reference to the primacy of truth,
of being likened to a fundamentalist movement. If this comparison is not
made to its ultimate consequences, it is because, materially, the
outlook of Christian Churches and their faithful is very different from
that of fundamentalists.
But for non-Christians, and especially, those who have a stereotypical
vision of Christianity, which today is more and more frequently the case,
the material distance of Christianity from fundamentalism does not
exclude the discernment of a disturbing formal similarity between
them: after all, the same God is invoked by both Islamic fundamentalists
and Christians!
Moreover, there are always some who, with a smattering of
religious-historical culture, do not remember that the very expression
fundamentalist originated within the Christian (and precisely,
Protestant) tradition.
As Christians feel their comparison to fundamentalism is unjust and
unwelcome, they often give in to the temptation, against their better
judgment, of becoming pale, unwilling and somewhat passive apologists of a
procedure-oriented democracy: thus, by bringing grist to another's mill,
they rouse neither particular sympathy nor gratitude.
Yet in this way they manage to remain within that typically modern
game, the game of democracy, but without realizing that this, like any
other political game, is not one that belongs to them constitutively,
since the eschatological essence of Christianity prevents it from being
wholly integrated into the framework of any kind of political paradigm;
this is why any reduction of Christianity to fundamentalism is absolutely
out of the question.
The nature of 'authority'
If, on the one hand, knowing that the human being is "a political
animal", Christianity has always preached the divine origin of authority
and has always urged people to proper, if not unlimited obedience to it,
on the other, it has always encouraged and fostered the awareness that
political and social structures are unnecessary for salvation. "Quid
interest sub cuius imperio vivat homo moriturus?" (what does it matter
in which empire man lives when in any case he is destined to die?), St
Augustine asked himself.
That is why the Christian faith has never forced believers to adhere to
any specific political ideology and has always demythicized all
ideologies whenever it was desired to impose them as exclusive paths to
salvation.
In the same way, democracy itself also requires demythicization
when it claims, as it frequently does today, to set itself up as a
superior form of mediation for not only political but also ethical
conflicts.
If it is true, as Maritain wrote, that democracy, as a movement that
champions the freedom and dignity of the person, "emerged in human history
as a temporal expression of evangelical inspiration" and as such is
closely "linked to Christianity", it is equally true that the connection
between democracy and Christianity is historical and not dogmatic; and
that also today the historical connection is tending to deteriorate, to
the extent that democracy in our time seems to be putting its basic focus
on the person in parentheses in order to accentuate its
formalistic foundation.
At this point we can return to rethinking the relationship between
natural ethics and democracy.
Far from making us run fundamentalist risks, respect for natural ethics
can quite safely be assumed as an a priori of the democratic
paradigm, because the object of the outcome of these ethics is not concern
for the last things, but the next-to-last things, to use an
expression dear to Bonhoeffer.
Last vs next-to-last things
The pursuit of the last things
— in
short, the logic of meaning and faith that goes beyond the limits of time
and space —
cannot be set bindingly by the political community with its laws and
through its institutions: failure to understand this point constitutes the
dramatic and at times criminal error of fundamentalism.
But pursuit of the next-to-last things, that is, the temporal
good of human beings, is well-suited to politics and in particular to that
form of political experience called democracy, precisely because it leaves
people free to identify, albeit by chance and as the occasion arises, the
most suitable political objectives. In this context and for various
reasons, both fundamentalist universalism and democratic relativism appear
aberrant and violent to Christians: the former because, by sacralizing
profane things, it seeks to reduce the polyphonic riches of goodness to
monophony; the latter, when it claims to subject radical options of life
to systematic control, thereby showing that it is obtusely blind to the
objective dimension of goodness and value that are inherent in profane
things and which natural ethics enables everyone to see with perfect
clarity (as Rousseau knew well when he described ethics as the sublime
science of simple souls).
To conclude, let us return to our previous reference regarding the
religious motivation that should form the basis of every political regime
(and not only of democracy!).
Those who, in the name of misunderstood secularization, hold that this
religious motivation should be marginalized or even suppressed are
mistaken (as De Tocqueville well knew). Understood correctly, it does not
express in itself a temptation to fundamentalism but a simple, profound
principle: to provide a sound guarantee for the democratic search for the
common good, which is at the root of every authentic political
process (given that a policy which does not promote the common good is
merely violence and abuse).
A policy that reduced democracy to a mere convention could not do this,
as is demonstrated by the nihilistic yet impeccably democratic result
(from the strictly formal point of view) of so much contemporary
legislation in areas that do not involve a casual evaluation, but life
itself: I am thinking of legislation that legalizes abortion, euthanasia
and genetic manipulation. When decisions regarding life are put to the
ballot, the binding character of laws is flawed: no conscience feels duty
bound to bow down to mere numbers, nor can a polling booth be exchanged
for a chapel.
The violence of fundamentalism has succeeded in awakening from their
dogmatic torpor the theorists of democracy who have forgotten this simple
truth, and with them, all Christians who have deluded themselves into
thinking that the global imposition of the democratic model has made their
social commitment as Christians superfluous once and for all by
definitively secularizing politics.
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