Dear Editor,

Ben Dwyer (JMI Nov–Dec 2003) paints a picture of contemporary Western civilisation which, on the whole, is persuasive. However, I was taken aback by the suggestion that ‘the scientific and technological developments in the twentieth century, under the powerless (consenting?) eye of the Christian Church, made possible the annihilation of maybe seventy million people between 1914 and 1945.’ The innuendo in brackets ‘(consenting?)’ is as disturbing as it is unfounded.

Dwyer seems to be unaware that it was the Church that first sounded the alarm bells with regard to what he calls the ‘breach’ between science and art (cf. the Galileo affair), whereby ‘art’ in this context could stand for the larger sphere of ‘meaning’, where religion is also at home. Neither does Dwyer recognise that, in the West, the Church almost alone has fought for the primacy of the spiritual in a world increasingly dominated by technology, which dominance reached its apogee in the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century.

There is a huge difference between being powerless and consenting. The Church is powerless if people choose to ignore her warnings. That is the price of freedom. Those warnings constitute the body of Catholic Social Teaching, beginning with Leo XIII’s warning against Marxism in 1891. It includes Pius XI’s letter Mit brennender Sorge that was smuggled into Germany and read from the pulpits on Palm Sunday 1939 denouncing the regime’s theories of race, people and state as fundamentally anti-Christian. Not that I want to exonerate Church representatives of all guilt, yet it is the Church that usually pays the price when people choose to ignore her warnings – witness, for example, the some 2,000 Catholic priests interned in Dachau concentration camp alone during the war. The same applies to the Russian Orthodox Church, which was practically eradicated by the Soviet Union Communist Party that had its own share of supporters in dominant post-Christian intellectual circles of left-wing leanings – and not just in Russia …

The real question is: how did ‘trahison des clercs’ occur in the ranks of ‘consenting’ Western intellectuals (cf. Raymond Aron’s L’opium des intellectuals)?

To clarify the task of the creative artist in a ‘post-religious’ world, Dwyer depends on Heidegger, whose Nazi sympathies are not in doubt. Apart from the irony of this in the light of the above, what Dwyer takes from the German philosopher might help us to answer the question I just posed.

Dwyer makes much of a (spurious) distinction Heidegger makes between fraglich and fragwuerdig. In fact, both words mean the same thing, namely ‘questionable’ in the sense of ‘doubtful’. The point is that it was precisely this capacity of German Idealism to twist language to suit the writer’s subjective assumptions that made German intellectuals like Heidegger incapable of questioning the evil of Nazism and its claims. To adopt this attitude today could only lead to a contemporary form of that nihilism. This is so, because, if there are no verifiable answers (according to Dwyer, following Heidegger) and ‘the process itself is the answer’, then there can be no critical thought, no truth to challenge false assumptions, no opposition to the totalitarian claims of political ideologies and their propagandists.

And there can be no hope-inspiring art, which Dwyer rightly calls for, in a world thus conceived as self-contained, immanent to itself, trying to give itself meaning. There can be neither criticism nor art without an openness, a sensitivity to that which transcends everything, is beyond our grasp, and yet gives meaning to all that is.

D. Vincent Twomey
St Patrick’s College
Maynooth