Christianity Reconsidered [i]Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War [/i] by Michael Burleigh - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Christianity Reconsidered [i]Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War [/i] by Michael Burleigh

Earthly Powers: The Clash of Religion and
Politics in Europe from the French
Revolution to the Great War
by Michael
Burleigh (HarperCollins, 2005). 530 pp.
Sacred Causes: The Clash of Religion and
Politics, from the Great War to the War
on Terror
by Michael Burleigh
(HarperCollins, 2007). 557 pp.

MARK MOLESKY is Assistant Professor of History at Seton Hall University.

In September 1993, just months before his
triumphant return to post-communist Russia,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn traveled to a remote
village in the Vendée region of western
France. There, far from the salons of Paris and
Brussels, he spoke at the dedication of a
memorial to the more than two hundred
thousand anonymous Catholic peasants who
had died resisting the anti-clerical policies of
the French Revolutionary government. For
Solzhenitsyn, the lessons of the Vendée were
plain. “I would not,” he remarked, “wish a
‘great revolution’ upon any nation.”

For Michael Burleigh, the distinguished
historian of the Third Reich and author of
Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes, the link
between the Vendée and the totalitarian violence
of a later age is equally clear. Yet, as
Burleigh shows in his remarkably illuminating
two-volume history, the massacres in the
Vendée are also part of a larger, less frequently
studied narrative: the epic clash of religion and
politics in Europe over the past three centuries.

Begun as a comparative study of Jacobin
civic cults and the festivals of the Bolsheviks
and the Nazis, Burleigh’s work grew in scope
as he came to realize that religion—so often
neglected by contemporary historians—offers
a more effective window into the origins
of modernity than other, trendier subjects.
“Perhaps we need less exposure to the Second
World War and more on such themes as
how Christianity came to be the dominant
creed, the Reformation and the Counter-
Reformation, relations between Church and
state, and the deep causes of present secularity,”
he writes in the introduction to Earthly
Powers. The result is a penetrating and deeply
learned work filled with surprising insights
and a consistently powerful moral compass.

Like fellow English Catholic Christopher
Dawson, Burleigh sees the central tragedy of
modern history in the “Moloch-like expansion
of the modern state” and its colonization
of all areas of human life, including morality:
“[The] alliance of throne and altar duly broke
down as the temporal power of the Churches
was challenged by nation states which vied
for the ultimate human loyalties.” Yet the
churches would fight back, not only to secure
their own existence, but also to protect individuals
from the grasp of government. “Christianity,”
Burleigh reminds us, “has much to
do with the notion of the autonomy of the
individual, with the preservation of a sphere
beyond the state that anticipated civil society,
with the notion of elected leadership, and
with holding rulers accountable to higher
powers.” It has also provided a tangible moral
function that has sustained the West in some
of its darkest hours.

Earthly Powers opens with a harmonious
(and perhaps slightly exaggerated) portrait of
Church/state relations in eighteenth-century
France, where the religious orders were responsible
for dispensing charity, education,
and ecclesiastical justice. With the outbreak
of Revolution, all this changed. The new
prophets of an earthly paradise declared war
on the Church, confiscated its lands, imprisoned
its recalcitrant clergy, and ultimately
assumed many of its functions. Although
Napoleon tried to undo some of the destruction
with his Concordat of 1801, the damage
had been done. Secularization is the great
theme of Burleigh’s nineteenth century, when
newly minted political ideologies learned to
cloak themselves in quasi-religious dress to
attract followers.

Nationalism effortlessly incorporated some of
the major themes of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
including the notion of divine election, or
the belief that a people had been chosen to fulfill
a providential purpose, a notion that is alive and
well in the universal values pursued by the
United States, and for that matter in the allegedly
gentler, less strident role which some Europeans
view as their continent’s post-imperial mission:
the repository of softer values, after earlier nationalism
had eventuated into disastrous wars
and the Holocaust.

Yet the Churches also proved capable of
adapting to the new realities. As the century
wore on, the papacy assumed an increasingly
powerful and visible role: “a solitary dignity in
a drastically simplified landscape,” as Burleigh
puts it. While Protestantism would largely
accommodate itself to the state, the Catholic
Church—assuming its ancient duty—sought
to limit the state’s power and reach. There
was, however, one surprising development:

Contrary to many pessimistic predictions, the
loss of religious faith did not result in the wholesale
de-moralization of morality. On the contrary,
in Victorian Britain morality—meaning an
interlocking series of individual-social virtues
and stigmas—became a sort of ‘surrogate religion’
to which the vast majority of respectable
people (of whatever class) subscribed.

In Germany, the situation was similar. The
Protestant middle classes were too self-absorbed
in their own private pleasures and
“family duties” to pay more than a passing
interest to religion. “Outsiders, who are routinely
deaf to the nuances of religion in
Germany,” writes Burleigh, “are often perplexed
as to how Nazism could have taken
root in a Christian nation without overtroubling
themselves with the question of
whether one part of the proposition is true.”

Eventually, of course, this spiritual neglect
would lead to social catastrophe. In his second
and most trenchant volume, Sacred Powers,
Burleigh explains how the trauma of the First
World War combined with the decline of
religious faith to create a values vacuum,
allowing totalitarian regimes to gain footholds
in Germany, Italy, and Russia. Here
too, the new politics drew from religious and
biblical forms. “The fundamental structure of
the Nazi creed…,” Burleigh writes, “was a
redemptive story of suffering and deliverance,
a sentimental journey from misery to
glory, from division to mystic unity based on
the blood bond that linked souls.”

Yet fascism was, at its core, evil: a fact the
Catholic Church was quick to realize. Far
from accommodating Mussolini and Hitler,
as some recent, highly publicized works have
suggested, the Church fought valiantly against
a foe that it knew wished to destroy and
replace it. When the first racial laws appeared
in Italy, Pius XI was swift and clear in his
denunciation: “If there is anything worse
than the various theories of racialism and
nationalism, it is the spirit that dictates them.”
When Fascist attacks on him intensified during
the final year of his pontificate, 1938, he
refused to back down. “Through Christ and
in Christ,” he told a group of Belgian Catholics,
“we are Abraham’s descendants. No, it is
not possible for Christians to take part in anti-
Semitism. Spiritually we are Jews.”

Burleigh provides his most fervent defense,
however, for Eugenio Pacelli, who
fought fascism as the Vatican’s Secretary of
State in the 1930s, and from 1939 onwards as
Pius XII. He explains Pacelli’s role in the
1933 Reichskonkordat with Germany, examines
his devastating philosophical critique of
Nazism (the encyclical Mit brennender Sorge),
reveals the full extent of his wartime actions
against the Nazis, as well as his efforts to
protect Europe’s imperiled Jewish population.
It is a much-needed corrective to the
recent spate of politically motivated slanders
against both Pius and the wartime Church.

There are many criticisms one might make of the
Catholic Church, but responsibility for the Holocaust
is not among them. That was the devil’s
work of the Nazi government of Germany, and
those who took the opportunity its evanescent
continental empire afforded. Nor is there the
slightest evidence to support the idea that Pius
XII was ‘Hitler’s Pope’, a title more befitting
‘Hitler’s mufti’, the anti-Semitic Haj Muhammed
Amin al-Husseini of Jerusalem…. Pius was actually
involved in a conspiracy against Hitler which
the Allies failed to support. Making use of the
Holocaust as the biggest moral club to use against
the Church, simply because one does not like it
policies on abortion, contraception, homosexual
priests or the Middle East, is as obscene as any
attempt to exploit the deaths of six million
European Jews for political purposes. When the
Church could intervene, as in the smaller satellite
states of Eastern Europe, it did so, to the gratitude
of the Jews concerned. Everywhere, those clergy
who risked their lives by helping Jews attributed
this to instructions they had received from Pius
XII. That is why some people now argue that
Israel ought to recognize him as ‘Righteous
among the Nations’.

Yet this is no whitewash. Burleigh frankly
admits that

[Pius’s] attempts to maintain peace [in the 1930s]
were ineffectual. For reasons of either personal
character or of professional training, his statements
were exceedingly cautious and wrapped
up in an involuted language that is difficult for
many to understand, especially in this age of the
resonant soundbite and ubiquitous rent-a-moralists.
A more robust character, like Pius XI or
John Paul II, not to speak of medieval popes who
took on emperors, might have said more in fewer
words.

In short, Pius must be judged within the
context of the historical record—and Burleigh
proves more than up for the challenge.

In the immediate postwar era, religion
once again demonstrated its relevance. In
Eastern Europe, the Catholic Church was
one of the few institutions willing to stand up
to communist tyranny, eventually playing a
crucial role in its demise. In the West, buoyed
by rock-solid Catholic statesmen like Konrad
Adenauer, the Church worked to strengthen
democratic institutions and comfort a population
left spiritually and emotionally shellshocked.

Despite these successes, many in the West
would abandon traditional Christianity for
the promise of New Age religion, defined by
Burleigh as “fused snippets of Eastern mysticism,
astrology and occultism, environmentalism,
and psychotherapy.” Where communism
and fascism had sought to destroy traditional
values, the New Age merely sanctified
the silly and the absurd, an incense-infused
escape from the work-a-day world of the
white middle-class.

New Age religions often reach backwards to premodern
(or utterly fantastical) cultures and
times—the Native Americans and King Arthur
are favorites—or reach outwards to less developed
societies. Viewed superficially, [they] seem
little more than an updated form of the romantic
belief in ex oriente lux, a post-imperial cultural
cringe that has replaced the alleged arrogance of
Western imperialism with limitless credulity in
response to the spiritual beliefs of the underdeveloped
world.

Today, much of Western culture worships
at the newly-erected altar of multiculturalism,
while the modern European state has all but
lost touch with its Christian roots. In drafting
the constitution of the European Union,

[l]iberal and secular politicians, many with a
lawyers’ limited historical consciousness, decided
to omit a religion that made a major
contribution to the dignity and sacred identity of
autonomous individuals regardless of their ethnic
origins, as the greatness of one God paradoxically
lessened human dependence.

Yet Burleigh remains an optimist. Although
weakened by self-doubt and at war
with radical Islam, the West may find it has no
choice but to acknowledge and, ultimately,
reclaim those values and institutions which
have sustained it for thousands of years. “[An]
increasingly sharp definition of what is at
stake,” writes Burleigh, “is itself surely part of
the solution.”

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