The Second Annual Continental Address
-
It is an honour and a joy for us to speak before this league, before the assembled peoples and nations Europe, that meets here as a peaceful assembly of christian Europe in order to work for the good of all humanity. We would like to thank King Leopold IV for his invitation to deliver this address and for the kind words of greeting and appreciation with which he has delvered to us upon our election to our office . At this moment we turn to you, distinguished gentlemen of Europe, not least out of our solidarity with the people of Europe in the aftermath of the great war, but out of our own love and concern for all Europes people. However the invitation to give this address was extended to us as Pope, as the Bishop of Rome, who bears the highest responsibility for Catholic Christianity. In issuing this invitation you are acknowledging the role that the Holy See plays as a partner within the community of peoples and states. Setting out from this international responsibility that we hold, We should like to propose to you some thoughts on the current trends of the modern world, and on the foundational principles of a free state of law..
Allow us to begin our reflections on the foundations of law with a brief story from sacred Scripture. In the First Book of the Kings, it is recounted that God invited the young King Solomon, on his accession to the throne, to make a request. What will the young ruler ask for at this important moment? Success – wealth – long life – destruction of his enemies? He chooses none of these things. Instead, he asks for a listening heart so that he may govern God’s people, and discern between good and evil (cf. 1 Kg 3:9). Through this story, the Bible wants to tell us what should ultimately matter for a politician. His fundamental criterion and the motivation for his work as a politician must not be success, and certainly not material gain. Politics must be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish the fundamental preconditions for peace. Naturally a politician will seek success, without which he would have no opportunity for effective political action at all. Yet success is subordinated to the criterion of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding of what is right. Success can also be seductive and thus can open up the path towards the falsification of what is right, towards the destruction of justice. “Without justice – what else is the State but a great band of robbers?”, as Saint Augustine once said. We know from our own experience that these words are no empty spectre for throughout history, and into this modern age the words of Augustine have rung true, as attests events in Prussia where countless thousands on no basis other than their ethnicity have been brutally murdered. This atrocity must be absolutely condemned by all nations, and is an abomination before men and before God!
As such, and in light of these things, to serve right and to fight against the dominion of wrong is and remains the fundamental task of all politicians. At a moment in history when man has become more powerful than ever before, this task takes on a particular urgency. Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He can, so to speak, make human beings and as has been seen in recent events he can deny them their very humanity. How do we recognize what is right? How can we discern between good and evil, between what is truly right and what may appear right? Even now, Solomon’s request remains the decisive issue facing politicians and politics today.
Some propose that in regards to matters that need to be regulated by law, the support of the majority can serve as a sufficient criterion. Yet it is evident that for the fundamental issues of law, in which the dignity of man and of humanity is at stake, and in which the fundamental liberties of men are concerned, the majority principle is not enough: everyone in a position of responsibility must personally seek out the criteria to be followed when framing laws. In the third century, the great theologian Origen provided the following explanation for the resistance of Christians to certain legal systems: “Suppose that a man were living among the Scythians, whose laws are contrary to the divine law, and was compelled to live among them ... such a man for the sake of the true law, though illegal among the Scythians, would rightly form associations with like-minded people contrary to the laws of the Scythians.”
But how do we recognize what is right? In history, systems of law have almost always been based on religion: decisions regarding what was to be lawful among men were taken with reference to the divinity. But unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law – and to the harmony of objective and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative reason of God. Christian theologians thereby aligned themselves with a philosophical and juridical movement that began to take shape in the second century B.C. In the first half of that century, the social natural law developed by the Stoic philosophers came into contact with leading teachers of Roman Law. Through this encounter, the juridical culture of the West was born, which was and is of key significance for the juridical culture of mankind.
For the development of law and for the development of humanity, it was highly significant that Christian theologians aligned themselves against the religious law associated with polytheism and on the side of philosophy, and that they acknowledged reason and nature in their interrelation as the universally valid source of law. This step had already been taken by Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans, when he said: “When Gentiles who have not the Law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves ... they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness ...” . Here we see the two fundamental concepts of nature and conscience, where conscience is nothing other than Solomon’s listening heart, reason that is open to the language of being.
This seemed to offer a clear explanation of the foundations of legislation up to the time of the Enlightenment, however since that time there has been a dramatic shift in the situation, particularly in the last half-century, one that we fear is contrary to the very principles of true liberty grounded in God. Indeed the idea of natural law is today viewed as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth bringing into the discussion in a non-Catholic environment, so that one feels almost ashamed even to mention the term. Let us outline briefly how this situation arose. Fundamentally it is because of the idea that an unbridgeable gulf exists between “is” and “ought”. An “ought” can never follow from an “is”, because the two are situated on completely different planes. The reason for this is that in the meantime, the positivist understanding of nature has come to be almost universally accepted. If nature is viewed as “an aggregate of objective data linked together in terms of cause and effect”, then indeed no ethical indication of any kind can be derived from it. A positivist conception of nature as purely functional, as the natural sciences consider it to be, is incapable of producing any bridge to ethics and law, but once again yields only functional answers. The same also applies to reason, according to the positivist understanding that is widely held to be the only genuinely scientific one. Anything that is not verifiable or falsifiable, according to this understanding, does not belong to the realm of reason strictly understood. Hence ethics and religion must be assigned to the subjective field, and they remain extraneous to the realm of reason in the strict sense of the word. Where positivist reason dominates the field to the exclusion of all else – and that is broadly the case in our public mindset – then the classical sources of knowledge for ethics and law are excluded. This is a dramatic situation which affects everyone, and on which a public debate is necessary. Indeed, an essential goal of this address is to issue an urgent invitation to launch one!
The positivist approach to nature and reason, the positivist world view in general, is a most important dimension of human knowledge and capacity that we may in no way dispense with. But in and of itself it is not a sufficient culture corresponding to the full breadth of the human condition. Where positivist reason considers itself the only sufficient culture and banishes all other cultural realities to the status of subcultures, it diminishes man, indeed it threatens his humanity. I say this with Europe specifically in mind, where there are concerted efforts to recognize only positivism as a common culture and a common basis for law-making, reducing all the other insights and values of our culture to the level of subculture, with the result that Europe vis-à-vis other world cultures is left in a state of culturelessness while at the same time extremist and radical movements all across Europe in Spain, in Finland and in many other places emerge to fill the vacuum that has been created by the rejection of natural law to the detriment of all.
We can see the rise in Europe of dangerous revisionist ideologies, which seek to make man, divorced from the principles of natural law, the center of of his own fabricated legal construct. Yet in making man the centre of law and of morality, these ideologies, Liberalism, Socialism and Proletarianism amongst them, would reduce the liberty ordained by God for all men, and supress it under the tyranny of the majority, under a conception that the will of the many negates the liberty of the minority. For the individual christian liberty that has underpinned all law in Europe until recent times, that is that every man in the State may follow the will of God and, from a consciousness of duty and free from every obstacle, obey His commands is dismissed and threatened by these groups. For by the patrons of liberalism, and of certain new and radical ideologies who in rejecting the foundations of law in nature and in God, make the State legal authority absolute and omnipotent, and proclaim that man should live altogether independently of God, the liberty of which we speak, which goes hand in hand with virtue and religion, is not admitted; and whatever is done for its preservation is accounted an injury and an offense against the State. Indeed, if what they say were really true, there would be no tyranny, no matter how monstrous, which the citizen would not be bound to endure and submit to irrespective of his own values and beliefs. This we saw manifest in Prussia, where attempts by prussians to defend their liberty were accounted as treason against the state!
In its self-proclaimed exclusivity, the positivist reason which underpins this dangerous tendency recognizes nothing beyond mere functionality. It resembles a concrete bunker with no windows, in which humans ourselves provide lighting and atmospheric conditions, being no longer willing to obtain either from God’s wide world. They propose an artificial construct, and discern nothing from nature! Yet they cannot hide from themselves the fact that even in this artificial world, they are still covertly drawing upon God’s raw materials, which they refashion into our own products. Thus it is clear to us that the windows of Europe that have been closed and darkened through recent history by these developments must be flung open again, we all must see the wide world, the sky and the earth once more and learn to make proper use of all this in pursuit of liberty and peace.
But how are we to do this? How do we find our way out into the wide world, into the big picture? How can reason rediscover its true greatness, without being sidetracked into irrationality? How can nature reassert itself in its true depth, with all its demands, with all its directives? In this regard we would like to underline a point that seems to us to be neglected, that is that today as in the past: there is also an ecology of man. Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he respects his nature, listens to it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled. Ergo we must not fall into the error of assuming the perfectibility of man, as the liberals do, but comprehend and acknowledge our own fallen nature, our own intrinsic irrationality and capacity for evil. This is something clearly evident in the aftermath of the great war, which showed to all the world humanities capacity for needless violence and evil! Simply we need to understand the need to rely upon the higher principles of nature and the eternal law of God. For in losing sight of our nature, the human freedom, divinely given to all men, which we seek to see advanced and protected ultimately crumbles, giving way to the banalities of our being, to the caprice of the powerful, to tyranny and oppression.
Let us now come back to the fundamental concepts of nature and reason, from which we set out. Firstly the great proponents of legal positivism abandoned the dualism of “is” and “ought”. Indeed previously they have said that norms can only come from the will. Nature therefore could only contain norms, they add, if a will had put them there. But this, they say, would presuppose a Creator God, whose will had entered into nature. “Any attempt to discuss the truth of this belief is utterly futile”, they propose. Is it really? – I find myself asking. Is it really pointless to wonder whether the objective reason that manifests itself in nature does not presuppose a creative reason, a Creator Spiritus?
At this point Europe’s cultural heritage ought to come to our assistance. The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe as it stands arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law with these three pillars being united under the aegis and protection of the Catholic Church, which was and is the foundation of European civilisation as it was built after the fall of the Roman Empire. This three-way encounter under Catholic Chrstianity has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history as there arise those who would reject them.
As to our final remarks we would recall that as he assumed the mantle of office, the young King Solomon was invited to make a request. How would it be if we, the law-makers of today, were invited to make a request? What would we ask for? I think that, even today, there is ultimately nothing else we could wish for but a listening heart – the capacity to discern between good and evil, and thus to establish true law, to serve justice and peace so that through this listening heart we may ensure the liberty of all peoples, founded upon nature and upon God, is re-emphasised amongst this modern world.
-
Pope Paul VI
And it should relate to the current events in Europe, from the Pope's angle, though otherwise I don't want to really set any constraints for you)
