In the forward to the German edition of Joseph Ratzinger’s The Unity of the Nations, Mona Mury-Leitner begins, “Does what is Christian have a place in the political world?” She continues, “By the very act of choosing his name, Pope Benedict XVI wanted to confront this question.” Among the many works of Joseph Ratzinger, it’s difficult to piece together a full-blown and systematic political theology, let alone to attempt to begin sketching the outworkings of one by using the single lecture that is this small book, which consists of his lecture he gave in the Fall of 1962. But there are good reasons to look here for Ratzinger’s broad vision, or, at least, understanding of Christianity and politics. At times, while reading this book, I felt myself nodding along, while at other times I thought, well, yes, keep going, develop that thought some more. Ratzinger flags for his readers that his aim “was simply to sketch out a few of the main aspects of the problem,” so one isn’t surprised to desire a bit more flesh on the skeletal bones of his analysis.
The problem, however, to which he refers in his lecture is to the often strained relationship between national identity and human identity. What is the relationship between all the nations to each other, not just as nations but as members of the same human family? What might be a biblical account of this problem (not least of its solution)? If the Bible does, indeed, provide us with one. The problem is easily felt today in our American-political context. Here we are as a nation of laws, with obligations to our neighbors, one of which is to secure the borders we have surrounding those of us living together and bound under and obedient to those same laws which hold us together as a nation. And yet, those other nations are still, despite their funny accents or different languages altogether, part of the thing we call the human family. Which bonds are stronger? the national ones, strengthened as they are by laws, or the human ones, strengthened as they are by nature itself? It’s this problem that contextualizes the first soundings of a Ratzingerian political theology, what he describes as “early Christianity’s struggle for its precise place in the political world.”
That political world, which the early Church lived within, was the Roman Empire. This empire, too, had claims about one world and how all the peoples might relate to one another. The early Church no doubt had to answer this question within several other existing empires that would soon follow, while also seeing to it that it remained the task of Catholics in every age to think through the claims of the Gospel with the reality of the current political situation. The Roman Empire was itself aware of something like a tension in the fabric of human nations. But because the story it was telling had conflated human and divine power, equating them at every step of the way, the emperor really can bring about true unity among the nations, overcome the curse of Babel. Through the means of his own mind and will and army and resources, the Roman emperor could make it happen himself, since he is, after all, divine, making the state (taxes and roads and troops) the means by which the nations would become one. This attempt at empire-building and unity-seeking through the powers of the state was always what the prophet Daniel said it was: human folly and idolatry. Daniel, instead, spoke of a rock not cut out with human hands.
Ratzinger is right to point out that this has to mean something. And it does. It means what Ratzinger says it means in his book Values in a Time of Upheaval, that there is a power that comes from God that is not inherent in humans and their emperors and their taxes and roads and armies, or any other resources and constitutions provided by or to the state on its own. This is why the Roman pax, the promise and the reality, was a fool's enterprise from beginning to end. It could never do what it said it would do. Of course it couldn’t—Julius wasn’t David’s son; Augustus wasn’t Abraham’s seed; no Caesar even claimed to be of the tribe of Judah. Thus, as the story goes, promises of peace were themselves not from God. At least, not from the Creator God, no matter what Juno had foretold.
Much like combing through the crowds to find Waldo, the difference was to find the marks of true peace and unity, the false stripes of Caesar. And one cannot do metaphysics for this. This instead is a matter for history. The crowds of people, their forms of government, all change with each new age, but the unity they promised is actually a different Waldo—this one missing his hat, that one missing some stripes, the next one has no glasses. The only unity that we find lasting in every age and outlasting every kingdom is the one that remains the same: the Catholic Church. It is hardly a side issue, then, for the Catechism to elevate this as a third motive of credibility for the truth of Catholicism. This is Catholicism. The third motive is precisely what the other two motives (the miracles and prophecies) were pointing to.
And if this community remains in unity with or without human forces making-it-all-happen—such forces as we find, say, in the U.S. Constitution, or in the character and decrees of a Roman Emperor, in a legally-binding contract, or, still, a well designed and fortified border wall—then it can mean several things at once, one of which is Ratzinger’s main point: there are no human hands that can cut this kind of rock. Here is how Ratzinger summarizes it, along with other sharp conclusions added:
“In the Bible, on the other hand, God stands free vis-à-vis the world. The story of the Tower of Babel in Gn 11:1-10, which follows right after the list of the peoples that points to the unity of all human beings, informs the reader that God punished humanity, which had grown sinful, by breaking it up into a multiplicity of different and mutually incomprehensible languages. The division of humanity is, to be sure, the fault of men, but it is also their punishment and hence not merely something that one day, when they wanted to, they could get themselves out of. The fact that God stands apart in freedom, and that his power is independent of the world, limits the power and possibility of man, who can in no way bring about the unity of the world on his own, since this division was imposed upon him by God’s sovereign will. The Old Testament, indeed, constantly looks forward to the moment when all peoples will make their way, pilgrim-like, to Mount Zion, and when Jerusalem will be the capital and center of a unified humanity, yet it sees this not as a mission that can be carried out in a direct political fashion but rather as an eschatological hope whose accomplishment is, in the last resort, God’s doing.” (12-13)
He doesn’t say that moving from apostolic mission to Christendom is not the ideal or is even a bad thing, but that Christendom is exactly the kind of society we need, since it too recognizes—it’s the only one that can recognize, with its doctrine of Original Sin and the Creed looking forward to the future coming of the Son of God—that utopian dreams of establishing a perfect society cannot be realized without the before of Original Sin and the after of the second coming and the much needed sacramental invasion that takes up everything in between. Some might mistakenly read Ratzinger here and say, “see, see what he is getting at; we must keep our hands clean, stay out of politics, not recognize the world’s true Lord for who he really is as the Lord of society and the Son of David, and allow the nations to take it from here until that same Davidic king returns.” No; that’s precisely the opposite of what Ratzinger is saying. He is saying that the ideal society, the ideal political situation, is for both of these to live in such a way as to admit the following. First, that the state does not have the ability intrinsic to itself to bring about the reign of God. Second, any one state or nation or ruler is not the Son of David or Son of God. Third, the state does not have the power to bring about the unity it promises.
Now, put all these things together and ask yourself what kind of society and political situation Ratzginer is thinking of. Which society would be cautious of establishing a utopia on this side of history, which would readily recognize a distinction between the authority of God and the authority of the state? Which society would point beyond itself to God and the Church? Which society admits the need for supernatural intervention to make men good? Some read Ratzinger and force him to admit what he does not—namely, that this kind of society would be a neutral society, one in which we have a separation of Church and State, that doesn’t see the need for the Church to busy itself with politics. But this is entirely wrong. The society and politics that Ratzinger is envisioning would have to be Christendom, through and through. He is envisioning the leader of the free world swearing an oath to the world’s true King, of leaders being crowned by bishops to signal their limited access to resources, resources which only these ambassadors have.
Ratzinger, then, is right to contrast the Roman pax with the peace that was promised to and through Jerusalem. The name Jerusalem itself contextualizes God’s calling of and covenant with Abraham involving the city of Salem, the name of the city itself meaning peace. It’s out of this city (and not another) that God promised to bring the peace and unity among the nations. One is hardly surprised, then, to hear the early Catholics insisting on what they were insisting on:
“Make every effort to live in peace with everyone and to be holy… You have not come to a mountain that can be touched… But you have come to Mount Zion to the heavenly Jerusalem… to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant… since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, so worship God with reverence and awe…” (Heb 12: 14, 18, 22a-24a, 28)
We make an effort to live at peace, is not the kind of effort that is intrinsic to man, a kind of acquired habit through state intervention. That’s not really even entirely how habits work, never mind what we are talking about here. The effort is the human will responding to the actions and resources provided by God, a mountain and temple that cannot be touched and cut by humans, and therefore cannot be built by human hands. This is what it means, for Paul and others, for the unity of the nations, to be fulfilled in the one worldwide family of Abraham, to be entirely based, not on circumcision (the very literal work of human hands), but the promise itself. God promised, so God will do it. If the inheritance of peace came through the work intrinsic to and thus by human hands, then as Paul says explicitly, “it is not longer by promise”. “But,” he says, “God gave it to Abraham by a promise” (Gal 3:18). Paul thinks that’s the point about the kingdom of God and the unity and the peace among the nations! And anyone reading the entire story from beginning to end can hardly disagree with him. Yes, yes Paul, that’s exactly what seems to be going on.
If the question of Christianity and politics was one of destination, rather than what it is here in Ratzinger and the story of Scripture, which is about resources, then one might interpret the kingdom of heaven as merely signally a place where we go as our final destination after bodily death when we can finally escape something artificially forced upon man: earthly existence and political society. But when Ratzinger’s interpretation is overlaid on top of the kingdom of heaven, then we can see its original shape and colors, that is, as of a reign on earth that was always part of man’s original vocational calling but originating from and being powered by someone outside, by God (no human hands). This makes it very hard to see things the way they really are. It does damage to all our false idols of presidents and their intentions and wills and abilities. It puts everything, and everyone, in its proper context.
This—all of it—makes the point Matthew was trying to make, as least in part, in deploying the phrase “kingdom of heaven” while Mark and Luke opt for “kingdom of God”. These phrases were interchangeable and meant the same thing, unless you are a super skeptic and see every turn of phrase, every point an individual author is making as contradicting every other point someone else might be making. The point is the same: Heaven is not just a location where God “is” but is God. When Jesus tells Peter that what he binds on earth is bound in heaven, the obvious point is that God is doing the binding through Peter. Heaven is not merely a place (it still is that) so much in this instance as being interchangeable with God, with God’s will, with God’s power, with God’s rule, and with finally God’s very own hands. Heaven is God’s space, kingdom is God’s reign; therefore one rightly prays the way Jesus taught us to pray—for God’s reign to come on earth as it is in heaven.
This sets later thinkers, like St. Augustine, up well for distinguishing between two different kingdom-reigns, utterly opposed to one another. If these two cities, as St. Augustine calls them, are not properly (their exact characteristics) and sufficiently (the extent to which those characteristics differ) identified then one can end up in a host of trouble when interpreting the New Testament, not least trying to figure out what to do now in one’s own time and cultural-political situation. Ratzinger does more of the work for us here:
“In the New Testament this opposition between the biblical and the Greco-Roman idea of unity was further sharpened by the confrontation of the two-Adams doctrine, featured especially in Rom 5:12-21 and 1 Cor 15:45-49, and the earlier one-Adam doctrine.” (p 13)
Ratzinger explains what this means:
“The two-Adams doctrine says that humanity in its former condition, when in its entirely it was a single Adam, had no finality to it, that it was wholly marked by its failed beginning, and that hence, as a whole, it was something which needed to be overcome — that is, which needed to pass through death and downfall. It indicates, furthermore, that with Christ, the Crucified and Risen One, there began humanity’s second and final phase, into which a person is incorporated not by way of blood descent but rather by being made subject to the death-destiny of the Crucified One — in other words, by overcoming the formerly natural human condition and by embracing the life of the new ‘second’ humanness of the incarnate God, which unmasks as false the humanness that merely divinizes itself.” (14-15)
That last line is really Ratzinger’s main point. In it, he finds the line of demarcation between the stuff Rome was doing and the stuff Christianity was claiming about God and the world. But in it we also see why Ratzinger says such startling statements as, for example, this one from an interview he did with Peter Seewald:
“We should of course add that in ancient Israel the legal framework, the moral ordering of the state, and the ordering of worship, are all interconnected. With the coming of Jesus this network is separated. Religion receives, as it were, its independence. It still informs the state and its laws, and presents it with moral standards, but there is a distinction between the law of the state and what morality or faith tells us.”
There is no hard line of division between Church and state here, but there is enough ambiguity as to what “informing the state” really means—as to what, and through whom?— that one could, if they wish, argue that the Church might as well be separate, since there are a host of authorities and organizational entities informing the state on a host of issues. The pressing question comes more from the inquiry as to why the Church would be a unique authority to begin with? What kind of people would someone in State office need to be for this authority to be recognized and assented to? What would the state be telling itself if it were to recognize the Church as an authority on matters religious and moral? What would these people look like?
“The community of Christian believers,” Ratzinger argues, “claims to be this second and final humanity, which even now is being built upon the structure of the old humanity” (emphasis added). Ratzinger adds the adverb of time — “even now” — that caused much of the turmoil for Catholics surrounding the kerygma message that Jesus is Lord. These are the exact verbs and adverbs that the early Catholics insisted upon (even and especially as they were being tortured on account of them). Yes; There will be a time when Jesus will finally put all his enemies under his feet, the last reportedly being death itself (1 Cor 15:24). But Paul prefaces that statement, in that same 1 Corinthians 15, with “he must reign until.” This implies what we already knew from everything else he says in his other letters, that Christ is currently ruling, and will go on ruling until death has been finally destroyed.
Ratzinger, then, is entirely correct to point out that this new humanity or humanness, as he calls it, is already living among us. This, therefore, sets us up for how the two humanities might tackle the tension differently, the tension between nationhood and international order, with the shared nature of all man with respect to and from the perspective of the origins of the nations and the present reality of the unity of the Church.
To trace these origins out in greater and greater detail, Ratzinger turns to Origin and Augustine. To follow him, we will need another chapter. For now, it wouldn’t be the worst idea to consider spending time in prayer asking Jesus to speak into the deep and lasting implications of Jesus as the New Adam, reigning through the Church, the new humanity, in the here and now. Until then, stay tuned to this channel for the next chapter.
Jesus and Mary, be with us on the way.