Among the trenchant commentators on the "anthropological breakdown" (Jos. Brodsky) of the 20th Century, Nadezhda Mandelstam surely can claim pride of place. Her memoirs
Hope Against Hope and
Hope Abandoned set out her extended rumination on the breakdown of values in Communist Russia and the western world in general and the consequences occasioned for her husband Osip Mandelstam, who was arrested and sent away to the gulag where he quickly died, and for herself. Her memoirs aimed to preserve his memory and make sense of her loss within the larger cultural context of the West.
She comments (pp. 337 - 350 of
Hope Abandoned) on her husband's view that tragedy was no longer possible in the west because of its loss of "an integrated national consciousness," which, he thought, "can exist only during eras when a people preserves 'the torch bequeathed by its forebears,' that is, when it lives by established values whose desecration or upholding is then the concern of tragedy. What is catharsis but a cleansing or illumination of the spirit, following the triumph of values, the affirmation of their inexorable power? The European world was based on the supreme catharsis, accessible only to the religious mind: the conquest of death by atonement."
She notes further: "In the whole of the European-Christian world the basic values have been under attack for many decades, if not for centuries, but they have never anywhere been trampled and mocked to such a degree as in this country. If, however, one were to gather all our 'jackal-spectators' [Osip's term for those sucking up to power] together and reenact this defilement of our values before their eyes, they would howl with joy at the sight. For decades now this is how they have been trained to respond to any spectacle of desecration, whether it be of altars, private homes, or the hallowed rights of a whole nation. Some aided and abetted the desecrators, and all that can be said of the very best is that they turned away indifferently and attended to the business of keeping themselves alive. Unworthy of tragedy, we were capable only of melodrama staged with all the trappings of expressionism and pseudorealism, and -- more importantly -- a topsy-turvy plot in which the desecrator of values and the unrighteous judge is held up to us as a hero defending his claim to power over the human masses under his control."
The test of tragedy is the possibility of catharsis, which is defined as a "purification" and a "resolution of a tension," in which shared values reclaim ascendancy and give meaning to the suffering endured. In a world in which the desecrators, the "jackal-spectators," hold ascendancy, there are no shared values -- except each to his own -- and there is little hope of catharsis.
The same question of the possibility of catharsis arises in connection with the HHS mandate, and the mainstream reaction to it. A New York Times Editorial, "
The Freedom to Choose Birth Control," Feb. 11, 2012, claimed that the Bishop's objection to it, based on conscience and religion objection, was "phony," essentially because a religion's moral views are only "private" values, applicable to its adherents alone, and not "shared values" if the state does not happen to share them.
The "paper of record's" response reminds me of Hitler's "Commissar Order" in March 1941 (
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer, p. 830-31) in which he informed his chief military officers that the war against the Soviet Union must include the liquidation of all Soviet commissars (political class). Hitler specifically told the German officers they must "rid themselves of obsolete ideologies. I know that the necessity for such means of waging war is beyond the comprehension of you generals but . . . I insist absolutely that my orders be executed . . ." Of course, Hitler's word was the law -- the German people had earlier decreed it!
Everyone really knows that no "law" is law if it violates the moral law. Hitler's Commissar Order was at the center of the Nuremberg trial debate over whether the German generals "should have obeyed the orders of the Fuehrer to commit war crimes or obeyed their own consciences." Ibid., 830.
Unless conscience is allowed to speak shared values society devolves into barbarism. In our country, the "shared value" is the dignity of human life, which is everywhere threatened by abortion-inducing birth control. To call the bishops' claim "phony," as the NY Times does, is to argue that conscience, the avenue to purification and return to this shared value, should be closed off since it should not be heard over the contrary voice of the state. While we haven't yet reached the level of barbarism Hitler ordered, we are well down the road to another, equally violent, kind of barbarism.
Of course, we know that Soviet Communism did not survive. It eventually succumbed to the law of reality and "shared values" of human freedom. Catharsis finally occurred, and so we recognize the 20th Century Soviet history for the tragedy it was. But how much suffering and death occurred before this happened! And in our culture, how much more suffering and death will have to be endured by the unborn (and all injured by this violence) before the voice of conscience, the voice of our shared humanity, is heard and heeded? If the New York Times is an indication, it will be a long time.
Listen to "
Perfect Love"
What in another person do we love? His or her qualities, or something ineffable beyond all qualities? Only the latter supports the promise of faithfulness, which is loyalty through all possible changes of qualities. And so only the latter truly is love.
Robert Spaemann comments in his article on love: "Love gives the beloved the possibility to be a person, and to be a person in a unique, non-interchangeable way. It is the eyes of the lover that perceive the uniqueness of the beloved, a uniqueness that is more than the combination of empirical qualities. Nicolas Gomes Davila writes: 'To love someone means to understand the reason that God had to create this person.'
