Last year, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI wrote this document to commemorate the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Allied forces landing in Normandy in 1944. It is, as one might expect, an almost stoically well-written text. Toward the front:

They [the first-generation post-war politicians] did not want to found a state upon religious faith, but rather a state informed by moral reason, yet it was their faith that helped them to raise up again a reason once distorted by, and held in thrall to ideological tyranny.

Across Europe ran a frontier, and not just across our continent, but dividing the entire world. A great part of Central Europe and Eastern Europe came under the domination of an ideology that subjected state to party, in the end, effacing the difference. Here, again, the result was the rule of lies.

He writes then that if post-war Europe experienced a period of relative peace, South-East Asia, the Middle East, most of Africa, and parts of the Europe on the eastern side of “the frontier” experienced nothing less than a sustained and bloody arc of armed conflict. He suggests that two (somewhat) new symptoms seemingly common among these disperate conflicts were:

  1. The collapse of the “cohesiveness of law” - that is, the usurping of conscience-based order by “the cynicism of ideology”, which he corrleates at least in part with the interests of big business. The “good,” he suggests, “is shoved aside by the expedient, and might setup in the place of right.”
  2. The phenomenon of terror, which, as he notes, “so often has its source in standing injustice, not addressed by effective measures.” The forces which have access to “right and law” of course must also have access to “carefully calibrated force,” to combat the phenomenon, but, he firmly intones, “is it important to vouchsafe forgiveness in advance, in order that the circle of violence may be broken.”

He continues, “In all these cases it is important that no one particular power act as the champion of justice. All too easily can interest interfere with action, and contaminate one’s view of what is just. Most urgent is a genuine jus genitum, free from hegemonic predominance and action which follows from it: only thus can it remain clear that what is at stake is the defense of collective law and right, and those also of them who stand, so to speak, on the other side.”

A secular viewpoint of enlightened reason, he says, is opposed to a fanatical fundamentalist religious viewpoint. There are pathologies of reason (say, Pol Pot) and of religion. Both pathologies “are life threatening for peace - indeed, in an age of global power structures, for humanity as a whole,” a formation that I think Derrida himself would have liked. In the following jarring short paragraph, he continues:

To a reason fallen ill, all recognition of definitively valid values, all that stands on the truth capacity of reason, appears finally as fundamentalism. All that remains is reason’s dissolution, its deconstruction, as, for example, Jacques Derrida has set it out for us. He has “deconstructed” hospitality, democracy, the state and finally, the concept of terrorism, only to stand in horror in the face of the events of September 11th. A form of reason that can acknowledge only itself and the empirical conscience paralyzes and dismembers itself.

The fact that he seems to accuse Derrida of relativism must be put aside. It is an old and long-standing tradition to imagine that Derrida or deconstruction in itself clearly indicates a sort of ethical relativism. Doubtless, there is more to be said, but not here. Back to the Cardinal’s ontology: “God himself is Logos,” he says, “the rational first cause of all reality, the creative reason out of which the world came to be, and which is reflected in the world. God is Logos - Meaning, Reason, Word, and so it is through the way of reason that man encounters God, through the espousal of a reason that is not blind to the moral dimension of Being.” This theology will be the condition of possibility absolute and sovereign reason and absolute justice, which is commented on shortly in the amazing formulation, “There is a justice love will not annul.”

Again, ontological arguments between the Pope and Derrida are unproductive, and at any rate I am unqualified to arbitrate them. But, is there a justice love will not annul? What a question. I really don’t know how to even begin to think it. But it is now being thought. I am intrigued.

Meanwhile, I think that short of what might be called their respective theologies, Benedict might find himself much closer to what might be called the ethical Derrida than he seems to think. This fact is littered through the above quotes. It is clear. From one small example:

I believe it is necessary, by way of a philosophical, historical analysis, to deconstruct the political theology of sovereignty…But at the same time you shouldn’t think that you must fight for the dissolution pure and simple of all sovereignty: that is neither realistic nor desirable. There are effects of sovereignty which in my view are still politically useful in the fight against certain forces or international concentrations of forces that sneer at sovereignty.

And finally,

My intent here is not anti-religious, it is not a matter of waging war on the religious messianisms properly speaking, that is to say Judaic, Christian, Islamic. But it is a matter of marking a place where these messianisms are exceeded by messianicity, that is to say by that waiting without waiting, without horizon for the event to come, the democracy to come with all its contradictions. And I believe we must seek today, very cautiously, to give force and form to this messianicity, without giving in to the old concepts of politics (sovereignism, territorialised nation-state), without giving in to the Churches or to the religious powers, theologico-political or theocratic of all orders, whether they be the theocracies of the Islamic Middle East, or whether they be, disguised, the theocracies of the West…