Civil disobedience: A philosophical reflection
Is the civil disobedience of the Last Generation justified in terms of democratic theory? The activists are pushing for political change in the face of the catastrophic consequences of climate change. In doing so, they are shaking up an authoritarian-legalistic understanding of the state that is characterized by ignorance and powerlessness. If the constitutional state now wants to forcibly prevent civil disobedience, “then it is not sovereignly protecting its liberal character, but rather unsovereignly undermining the foundation on which it rests”. Patrick Zoll SJ is Professor of Metaphysics at the Munich School of Philosophy. Vincent Schäfer is his research assistant and a member of the Last Generation.
By Patrick Zoll, Vincent Schäfer
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/9-2023/ziviler-ungehorsam-eine-philosophische-reflexion/.]
Members of climate activist movements such as the Last Generation or Extinction Rebellion refer to their unlawful protests as “civil resistance” or “civil disobedience”. They therefore do not deny the unlawful nature of their actions. Rather, they argue that actions such as blocking roads due to the climate crisis are legitimate forms of protest, namely acts of civil disobedience, i.e. actions that are not legal but legitimate. In the often emotionally heated and undifferentiated public debate, this claim to legitimacy is criticized primarily on the basis of two arguments. Firstly, it is argued that blocking roads is not peaceful and non-violent and therefore does not fulfill an important criterion of civil disobedience. Secondly, it is argued that even if the actions of the Last Generation are a form of civil disobedience, such disobedience should be rejected for reasons of democratic theory.
In the following, we will discuss from a philosophical perspective whether and to what extent these objections can be refuted. Let us begin with the question of what civil disobedience is. Jürgen Habermas defines it as follows: “Civil disobedience is a morally justified protest that must not be based solely on private beliefs or self-interest; it is a public act that [… ] can be calculated in its course; it includes the intentional violation of individual legal norms without affecting obedience to the legal order as a whole; it requires the willingness to stand up for the legal consequences of the violation of norms; the violation of rules in which civil disobedience expresses itself has an exclusively symbolic character – this already results in the limitation to non-violent means of protest. “1
As disobedience, civil disobedience has in common with other types of disobedience to applicable law that it involves breaking a law.2 This distinguishes civil disobedience from other forms of protest such as demonstrations. In direct civil disobedience, the law against which the protest is directed is broken. Rosa Parks, for example, sat on the bus in seats that were reserved by law for people with light skin color. Indirect civil disobedience, on the other hand, involves breaking a law (e.g. property laws or traffic laws) that is otherwise accepted in order to express protest against another law or political measure. What distinguishes civil disobedience from other (e.g. criminal) law-breaking is that it is an ethically motivated and morally justified symbolic act intended to express protest against a serious moral grievance.
For civil disobedience to be considered “civil”, at least four conditions must be met.3 Firstly, acts of civil disobedience must be aimed at communication. They have a target audience, namely the majority of the population, whom they wish to draw attention to a major injustice and win over for change or reform to eliminate the evil. Secondly, deliberate, ethically motivated breaches of the law aimed at communication are only acts of civil disobedience if they are public. This means, among other things, that their actors are not anonymous, that they are announced and that responsibility is taken for them. A third criterion is law-abidingness. This seems somewhat paradoxical, as deliberately breaking the law is part of the definition of civil disobedience. However, civil disobedience is characterized by breaking the law out of respect for the law. This respect is expressed by accepting the punishments imposed by the legislator for breaking the law. This distinguishes climate activists from Reichsbürger or anarchists. It is not about a fundamental overthrow of the democratic order or a fundamental rejection of the state and its legislative authority.
A fourth and final condition is non-violence, and the crucial question is whether this condition is fulfilled in the case of street blockades. While activists point to their purely passive and, in their view, completely non-violent behavior, their critics accuse them of accepting indirect harm (e.g. missing an important appointment) or exercising non-physical coercion as a form of violence.
The discussion about the question of the violent nature of passive resistance is not a new one. Particularly in legal debates, criticism of the dilution and lack of conceptual clarity of individual phenomena of violence was voiced following the Laepple ruling4 in 1969 under the heading of the spiritualization of the concept of violence. In this judgment, the BGH classified the symbolic blocking of a streetcar in protest against planned fare increases as a violent act in the sense of coercion (§ 240 StGB) on the grounds that the defendants “set a psychologically determined process in motion with a small amount of force “5. The Federal Court of Justice thus raised the concept of psychological coercion to a conceptual level with the previously common interpretation of violence in the sense of the coercion section of the “use of bodily (physical), external (mechanical) coercion against persons “6. At the same time, the Federal Court of Justice adhered to the interpretation of Section 240 (2) StGB (at the time), which had now become extremely questionable due to the expansion of the concept of violence, and confirmed that “the use of force is practically indicative of the reprehensibility of coercion “7. Any consideration of possible remote aims and protest purposes was thus shifted from the reprehensibility assessment to the sentencing.
In the debate at the time, the legal scholar Günter Frankenberg pointed out the problematic nature of such an expansion of the concept of violence: “If passivity is interpreted as the deployment of violence and strikes or sit-ins as violent coercion, if even the refraining from any physical or psychological coercive influence on other persons can already be considered passive violence, then the obligation to use non-violent means of protest leads straight to the obligation to refrain from any protest which, as a politically motivated existence, could provoke the displeasure of others or even insignificantly impair the freedom of movement of others. “8
The problem with a spiritualized concept of violence is that it sets the hurdles for non-violent protest so high that it can ultimately be used to delegitimize almost any form of protest as violent. It can be used to characterize any gathering, no matter how small the disturbance, as violent. It can therefore easily be misused to withhold unwelcome forms of protest from the scope of protection of Article 8(1) of the Basic Law. This allows everyone to assemble peacefully and without weapons without registration or permission.
However, case law has not stood still in recent decades. In 1995, the Federal Constitutional Court attempted to limit the concept of violence again and pointed out that “cases are certainly conceivable in which sitting on the street does not have to be considered violence within the meaning of Section 240 of the German Criminal Code. “9 But the Federal Court of Justice did not stop there. It accepted the Federal Constitutional Court’s now narrower definition of violence and conceded that blocked motorists in the front row do not constitute violence within the meaning of Section 240 StGB, as the human barrier is only a psychological and not a physical obstacle. For all following vehicles, however, the barrier is of a physical nature, as the vehicles surrounding them represent an insurmountable obstacle that the blockaders accept, i.e. the drivers are physically and not just psychologically prevented from continuing their journey.10 The so-called “second row case law” corresponds to current legal practice. The problem of the legal characterization of roadblocks as violent continues to exist, only now with reference to their physical rather than psychological nature.
Such a legal practice is problematic because it interprets street blockades as coercion and, through this designation, conveys to the (media) public that these actions of the Last Generation can be removed from the concept of civil disobedience, which is limited to non-violent means, as legitimate means of protest. This is because the clear distinction that civil disobedience makes against acts of resistance is clearly given in the case of street blockades, which can only be understood as symbolic protest.
Violent reactions
From a philosophical point of view, however, it is urgently necessary to reflect on the violence with which climate activist actions such as those of the Last Generation are reacted to by the police, the judiciary and individual (national) governments. Targeted pain attacks, raids, preventive detention lasting several weeks or long prison sentences against activists who commit at most petty offenses are disproportionate and sometimes involve a massive use of force on the part of the state.
Walter Benjamin’s highly regarded and controversially discussed essay On the Critique of Violence provides a starting point for analyzing this phenomenon. He states that every legal regime forcibly establishes a normative framework through its initial act of law-making, from which it can only derive and maintain its own legitimacy – naturally in distinction to an outside of the law. In the act of maintaining law, it perpetuates the violence of its establishment incessantly, since it can only constitute itself in constant opposition to the extra-legal. Benjamin concludes that “the interest of law in the monopolization of power over the individual is not explained by the intention to preserve the purposes of law, but rather by the intention to preserve law itself. That violence, where it is not in the hands of the respective right, threatens it, not by the ends it may seek, but by its mere existence outside the right. “11 If one follows this analysis, a rigid legal regime must declare acts of civil disobedience to be a violent threat despite shared ends, even if they make use of non-violent and peaceful means.
In his work on the emergence of modern civil rights, Christoph Menke takes up Benjamin’s fundamental analysis and develops it further. Modern law, which operates in the mode of self-reflection, limits its own violence by “legalize[ing] the non-legal (or natural). “12 As a result, it is ultimately condemned to limit itself to securing the private sphere against the violence of arbitrariness or participation. Menke sees the unjust or – to use Benjamin’s terminology – violent initial establishment of power of bourgeois law in the legal authorization of “private claims that it presupposes as given “13, i.e. the positive juridification of pre-legal and thus natural conditions. It thus pays the price for the ability to differentiate between the violence of violation and the violence of change. Menke therefore concludes: “For this reason – because it excludes the change of that which it legalizes – the legal protection of what is one’s own is indistinguishable from the preservation of what exists. In this, the basic bourgeois program of security proves to be the anti-political program par excellence. The legal protection of what is one’s own withdraws it from change. “14
Self-empowerment of politics
This is the self-empowerment of politics, as it legalizes the natural through the declaration of bourgeois rights and withdraws it from its own political penetration through the indefinite legal security. While Menke therefore argues for the necessity of a kind of “counter-rights”, Étienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière see in the Declaration of Human Rights the creation of a “new kind of legal order: an order in which the ‘insurrection’ against the order is inscribed in the form of a (human) right. “15
The analyses of these philosophers are extremely helpful in understanding the vehemence with which a society blocks the necessity of change and indiscriminately categorizes its demand as violence. However, it is precisely this need for change that has long been dictated to us by the physical reality of the climate crisis and is repeatedly and unignorably demanded by disruptive activists in the face of a collective that is constantly repressing it. In acts of civil disobedience, which are symbolically directed against forms of individual action that are legally conceded but collectively unacceptable due to their devastating effects, the demand for the repoliticization of the legalized natural is formulated in a radical way. It is the decisive objection to the form of subjective rights that justifies egoism.
Actions of civil disobedience pose a challenge to the rule of law, as they clearly leave the framework of legality. There is no right to civil disobedience in our constitution. It is something decidedly different from the right of resistance regulated in Article 20 (4) of the Basic Law and therefore cannot generally derive its legitimacy directly from our constitution. Its extra-legal character already results from the conceptual definition of civil disobedience. Attempts to legalize civil disobedience would, on the one hand, undermine its moral-appealing effect, which consists in the willingness to bear massive legal consequences for one’s protest, and would also become entangled in legal-theoretical contradictions. A legal system that, in cases of grave injustice, legally concedes a morally justified protest in the form of violations of the law would admit its own failure in the procedure of democratically secured and institutionally guaranteed possibilities of revision and, as a result of such a failure, would put its own binding character of order at the free disposal.
Despite its extra-legal character, civil disobedience has by no means abandoned the law. By referring to its morally justified motivation, it cannot claim a dispensation from the law for itself, but rather sees itself in a mature political society as always being tied back to it and ultimately in a paradoxical way. Habermas sums up this intermediate character in the following formulation. Civil disobedience involves “acts that are illegal in their form, although they are carried out with reference to the commonly recognized bases of legitimacy of our democratic constitutional order. “16 The reference to commonly recognized bases of legitimacy is central and should be emphasized once again in order to make it clear that civil disobedience is not based on recourse to any kind of private morality, but is committed to universal fundamental rights and democratic constitutional principles. A look at the development of universalist constitutional principles or fundamental rights shows a discontinuous process characterized by setbacks, the further development of which often had to be fought for against great resistance, but is now taken for granted. It would be hubris to think that this learning process is complete.
The very basic principles of a liberal democracy impose a duty to take a differentiated approach to forms of civil disobedience. The democratic constitutional state is characterized by the fact that it does not exhaust itself completely in its legal order. This becomes clear with reference to the famous Böckenförde dictum (The liberal, secularized state lives from preconditions that it cannot guarantee itself). Ultimately, the liberal state cannot demand absolute obedience, but only qualified obedience. This shows the risk that the liberal state must take and presuppose as its own condition of possibility, but without being able to guarantee it, as it would otherwise negate its own condition of possibility.
From a philosophical and democratic-theoretical point of view, the frequently expressed “law-is-law” mentality and the call for harsher punishments should be viewed critically, as it can hardly be distinguished from authoritarian legalism, which undermines the condition of possibility of a liberal state. A liberal legal system cannot base its legitimacy solely on its legality. If the constitutional state currently reacts to the civil disobedience of climate activists in such a way that it seeks to declare them members of a criminal organization within the meaning of Section 129 of the German Criminal Code or takes them into preventive custody under police law for several weeks, then it is not sovereignly protecting its liberal character, but rather undermining the foundation on which it rests in an unsovereign manner and, according to Habermas, placing itself in a questionable and historically oblivious tradition of stubbornly clinging to apparent unambiguities: “[T]he civil disobedience in the constitutional state relates to the active resistance against the unjust state like the authoritarian legalism in the constitutional state relates to the pseudo-legal repression of the unjust state. […] Authoritarian legalism denies the humane substance of the non-unique precisely where the democratic constitutional state feeds on this substance. “17
What if everyone did that?
Finally, let us briefly turn to a second influential democratic-theoretical objection, which can be simplified as follows, based on Kant’s categorical imperative: “You cannot reasonably want everyone to do this”. In terms of democratic theory: “If civil disobedience (e.g. in the form of climate-activist motivated road blocks) is recognized as a legitimate means of political protest, then anyone in a democracy could block roads in the future in order to push through a political agenda”.
The objection is based on the correct intuition that civil disobedience is associated with the risk of destabilizing society and should therefore not simply be used in an inflationary manner as a common means of asserting political interests. What this objection fails to take into account, however, is that the recognition of climate activist civil disobedience as a legitimate form of political protest does not necessarily imply the recognition of any form of civil disobedience as a legitimate form of political protest.
With John Rawls, for example, a distinction can be made between justified and unjustified civil disobedience.18 Civil disobedience is justified and therefore a legitimate form of protest if it fulfills a substantive and a formal criterion. According to Rawls, civil disobedience may not be used for every political goal or issue. Rather, from the point of view of democratic theory, breaking the law is only legitimate if the aim is to persuade politicians to eliminate a fundamental and serious injustice in the constitution of society or its order. From the point of view of democratic theory, the risk of destabilizing society associated with civil disobedience can only be accepted if it concerns issues of fundamental justice, such as fundamental rights or issues of access to and distribution of basic goods. And in formal terms, civil disobedience is only justified and therefore legitimate if it is the last resort, the ultima ratio.
So can anyone in a democracy block roads in the future in order to push through a political agenda if climate-activist motivated road blockades are recognized as a legitimate means of political protest? No, because not every political goal or issue is an issue of fundamental justice where all means of political decision-making or enforcement have already been exhausted.
Is the climate activist civil disobedience of the Last Generation justified in terms of democratic theory? By means of a detailed reflection on the concept of violence, we have argued that the accusation that actions such as street blockades are not non-violent and therefore do not fall under the concept of civil disobedience is under-complex and problematic. Furthermore, we have shown that common democratic-theoretical objections to climate-activist motivated street blockades can be refuted, for example, by distinguishing between justified and unjustified civil disobedience.
1 Jürgen Habermas: Autumn 83 – or the moral neutralization of law. In: The new complexity. Frankfurt am Main 1985, 77-117, 83.
2 In characterizing civil disobedience here and in the following – in addition to the definition proposed by Habermas – we are guided by Candice Delmas and Kimberley Brownlee: Civil Disobedience. In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Winter 2021 Edition). Edited by Edward N. Zalta. At: <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/civil-disobedience/>.
3 Cf. ibid.
4 Cf. BGHSt 23, 46/60.
5 Ibid. 54.
6 RGSt 45, 151/157, 156.
7 BGHSt 23, 46/60, 55.
8 Günter Frankenberg: Civil disobedience and constitutional democracy. In: JuristenZeitung 6/1984, 266-275, 269.
9 BVerfG 92, 1/25, 7.
10 Cf. BGHSt 41, 182/187.
11 Walter Benjamin: On the Critique of Violence. In: On the Critique of Violence and Other Essays. With an afterword by Herbert Marcuse. Frankfurt am Main 2019, 29-65, 34 f.
12 Christoph Menke: Critique of Rights. Frankfurt am Main 2018, 405.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid. 406.
15 Ibid. 392.
16 Habermas (note 1), 82.
17 Ibid. 97 f.
18 Cf. John Rawls: A Theory of Justice. Frankfurt am Main 2021, 409-414.
Author
Zoll, Patrick
Patrick Zoll
Patrick Zoll SJ is Professor of Metaphysics at the Jesuit School of Philosophy in Munich. He studied philosophy (M.A.) and theology (B.A.) in Munich and Madrid and holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Bonn.
Schäfer, Vincent
Vincent Schäfer
Vincent Schäfer studies and works at the Chair of Metaphysics at the Hochschule für Philosophie SJ in Munich. He is a committed member of the Last Generation.
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Last reservation
By Klaus Mertes
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/8-2023/letzter-vorbehalt/.]
Whenever social conflicts reach the legal level, the question is narrowed down: is the Last Generation a “criminal organization” within the meaning of Section 129 of the German Criminal Code? From a legal point of view, there is room for interpretation. In order to constitute a crime, the “purpose or activity” of the association must be “directed towards the commission of criminal offenses”. However, the Last Generation blockades – which, incidentally, are comparable to the road blockades of farmers’ protests in terms of the form of action – have a different declared aim, namely to prevent the climate catastrophe. It may be debatable whether the actions effectively serve this goal or whether they are perhaps even detrimental to the cause – as I personally believe. But that does not mean that the activists of the Last Generation
activists of the Last Generation can be accused of pursuing a purpose other than the one they claim.
Now, setting up road blockades is considered “criminal coercion” in current case law. And the end does not justify the means, not the purpose of preventing the climate catastrophe. At least that is what those who infer the criminality of the association from the criminal acts are referring to. But that is too short-sighted. Case law must also respect the principle of proportionality, especially as the initial suspicion of membership of a criminal organization is associated with considerable powers of investigation. Not every criminal offence legitimizes such a serious initial suspicion. In addition to criminal coercion, a significant threat to public safety would have to be established. But whether this exists in the case of the Last Generation can be disputed with good reason. There is therefore room for discretion. The dangers of climate change must be discussed in society. Different assessments of the situation must remain possible. To this end, it is advisable to disarm linguistically, on both sides: Neither are the sit-in blockaders “criminals”, nor are democratically elected politicians guilty of “murdering” future generations if they take responsibility, even with compromises.
As early as the spring, voices were raised that attested to the Last Generation’s “parallels to a sect” (Michael Utsch, Domradio, February 11, 2023). In a more recent publication on spiritual abuse, the group is described as a “closed system”; its members think and live in a hermeticism that is typical of associations in which the danger of emotional abuse of power lurks: “sacred science” (Jay Lifton), high internal pressure of loyalty, purity thinking, black-and-white world view, willingness to self-sacrifice, etc. (see Stephanie Butenkemper: Toxische Gemeinschaften. Review in this issue: p. 638 f.). Such assessments are also in line with the concerns and fears of family and friends of activists who contact state sect information centers or church sect commissioners.
Is the sect accusation still criticism worthy of discussion, or is it already defamation? This is where a differentiation of minds is needed. Categories of consideration and compromise really don’t catch on with the activists. Arguments at this level tell them nothing that they have not already known and considered. They carry on, despite all the counter-arguments and hostility. To do so, they invoke the traditions of resistance. They want to raise public awareness of the catastrophe with symbolic actions, in the prophetic tradition. The more outrage they trigger, the more effectively they succeed. In their self-image, an element of vocation resonates, bordering on religious language.
When arguments of consideration and political compromise no longer work, the only alternative to accusations of sectarianism is to concede that the activists have reached a point where they can no longer help but obey their own conscience or “God rather than men” (cf. Acts 5:29), despite all reservations. But how can we recognize that such and comparable groups claim this exceptional state for themselves in a good and not in an abusive, sectarian spirit? By the way they relate to those people who, on the basis of consideration, think differently, even oppositely, on the same issue. “For it may be that the same divine Spirit moves me (to one position) for one reason and moves others (to the opposite position) for another” (Ignatius of Loyola, Letter to Francis of Borgia, July 5, 1552). If both positions are of the good Spirit, then good can also come from them, which neither side can already see. Only God is the Lord of all history. In theological language, this reservation is called “eschatological”. It protects against last errors.
Klaus Mertes
Superior of the Ignatius House in Berlin, editor of the cultural magazine STIMMEN DER ZEIT, studied classical philology and Slavic studies in Bonn and, after joining the Jesuit order, philosophy in Munich and theology in Frankfurt. He has worked as a teacher since 1990, first in Hamburg from 1990-1993 and then at Canisius College in Berlin from 1994-2011, where he was rector from 2000. From 2011 to 2020, he was Director of the International Jesuit College in Sankt Blasien.
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Vietnam: Religious freedom in a communist society
In April 1975, the second Vietnam War ended with the victory of the communist North over South Vietnam and its ally, the USA. After the founding of the “Socialist Republic of Vietnam” in 1976, the government reduced religious life in the country to a minimum. The Catholic Church also lost numerous pastoral, educational and charitable institutions. Since 2008, however, the relationship between the Vietnamese state and the religious communities has eased. However, these developments should not obscure the fact that religious freedom on the ground is still severely restricted, writes A. Pham Van (pseudonym for security reasons). The author worked as an adult educator in the field of development awareness-raising. He is intensively involved with the social development, cultures and religions of Southeast Asia. The article is an abridged version of the country report “Religious Freedom Vietnam” by the Catholic aid organization “missio”.
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/8-2023/vietnam-religionsfreiheit-in-einer-kommunistischen-gesellschaft/.]
Vietnam is located on the east coast of the Indian peninsula. Within a radius of four thousand kilometers, it borders the most densely populated areas in the world (China, India, Japan and Indonesia). Vietnam itself is a melting pot of many ethnicities, cultures and religions. The country has three distinct geographical, climatic and vegetation zones. Northern Vietnam is mainly characterized by the plain of the Red River and the Black River as well as numerous tributaries. In addition, the foothills of the South China Highlands in the Vietnamese plateaus influence the climatic conditions. There are large temperature differences: hot and humid summers and dry winters. Rice is the main crop grown in the water-rich plains. Central Vietnam consists mainly of a narrow, long coastal strip. It is affected by heavy annual rainfall, typhoons and flooding. Southern Vietnam is largely occupied by the alluvial plains of the Mekong Delta and its numerous tributaries, two meters above sea level. It is the most fertile part of the country, producing up to three rice harvests a year and many types of fruit trees. Vietnam has a population of around 99 million. The majority of them are ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh). Around 14.2 million people belong to 53 ethnic minorities. The population of Vietnam can be roughly divided into two groups: the inhabitants of the plains (mainly the Kinh) and the hill tribes. The latter are still socially disadvantaged today.
For most of its history, Vietnam was influenced by foreign powers. Since 111 BC, China had sought and largely achieved the complete dependence and Sinicization of Vietnam through infiltrations and armed conflicts. The influence was evident in language and literature, art and architecture. After gaining independence from China in 1428, Vietnam experienced a relatively peaceful period. However, there were numerous internal conflicts and power struggles between local ruling houses. Between 1527 and 1802, the country was divided into North and South for the first time. During this time, the first European traders came to Vietnam and missionary work by European missionaries began. In 1802, Gia-Long appointed himself ruler, ending the division into north and south. Two of his successors began persecuting Christians, which gave rise to French military interventions. From 1858 onwards, France gradually conquered and occupied Vietnam until it became a protectorate under French administration.
During the Second World War, Japan occupied Vietnam until its surrender in 1945, when France returned as occupier. Various resistance groups, coordinated or uncoordinated, attempted to liberate the country. Ho Chi Minh, an avowed communist who waged guerrilla warfare against the French army, stood out among them. Ho Chi Minh formed the first North Vietnamese government and declared the country’s unilateral independence. After the military defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and the withdrawal of France, Vietnam was divided again. The Communist Party ruled in the north; the south opted for the republic as a form of state and government. The Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in a military coup in 1963. After the assassination of the president, which was at least supported by the USA, the power to govern was in the hands of changing military rulers. At the same time, the communist north infiltrated the south with both guerrilla fighters and regular combat troops. The South was supported militarily by the USA, which did not prevent the North from winning. The war resulted in more than one million deaths and up to one million people who were and are disabled or whose health was severely impaired by the poison gas Agent Orange used by the USA.
The country was reunified in 1976 under the name “Socialist Republic of Viet Nam” in a one-party system. In 2014, a new constitution came into force, which cemented the Communist Party’s monopoly on power as the legislature, executive and judiciary. Critical engagement by citizens is difficult, as freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly are permitted by the government in principle, but are severely restricted.
Multi-religious country
Vietnam is a multi-religious country. It would be misleading to describe Buddhism as the natural religion of the Vietnamese. Animistic nature religions and ancestor worship are rooted in the people, which influenced Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. Over time, one of the three religions was proclaimed the state religion, depending on the convictions and inclinations of the ruling rulers. At times, all three were considered equal.
Belief in nature and ancestor worship: The religious practices of the Vietnamese rural population bear witness to an animistic world view. According to this view, nature is animated by spirits that influence people’s lives. Various areas of Vietnamese life and practiced nature cults bear witness to this: Tree and stone cults near Hue, whale cults on the central Vietnamese coast, agricultural and death cults in the mountainous regions.
Confucianism: Confucianism remained the state religion from the 15th to the end of the 19th century. With the disappearance of the ruling dynasty, Confucianism lost its organizational center. As in China and Korea, Confucianism still determines the religious, social and individual life of the Vietnamese, regardless of whether a person is Christian, Buddhist or atheist.
Taoism: Even before Confucius, Lao Tse taught his metaphysics of the perfect harmony of human beings with nature. The religion is based on a mother-right order, which is also close to the original Vietnamese mentality. The ideological proximity to Buddhism is striking. In Vietnam, Taoism lives on in numerous popular forms, beliefs and customs.
Buddhism: Buddhism arrived in Vietnam around the second century AD through Chinese pilgrims from India and spread widely. From the 11th to 15th century, it became the official religion of the country. At times, Vietnamese rulers became Buddhist monks. According to Buddhist belief, the renunciation of all worldly desires as causes of human suffering leads to leaving this earthly illusory world and entering Nirvana. Modern Buddhism attaches great importance to social activity and educational work. A Buddhist university was founded in Saigon as well as the Institute for the Propagation of the Faith.
Christianity: From the end of the 16th to the beginning of the 17th century, European chaplains accompanied merchant ships and their crews to East and Southeast Asia, including Vietnam. Systematic missionary work by the Jesuits began in 1615. From 1800, there was persecution of Christians as a result of some missionaries’ connections with the French colonial rulers.
In the course of its church history, Vietnam experienced frequent conflicts between the state and the church. The dispute over ancestor worship took on particular proportions. The ban on ancestor worship by Pope Clement XI in 1704 led to the alienation of the Catholic Vietnamese from their deep-rooted relationship with their ancestors. All ancestor worship practices were considered superstitious by many missionaries and by some popes. This misunderstanding by Rome became a reason for the ruling rulers in Vietnam to regard the Christian religion as a cultural betrayal and to consider Vietnamese Christians as enemies of the nation. It was not until December 8, 1939 that Pope Pius XII lifted the ban on ancestor worship. In Vietnam, the Bishops’ Conference allowed ancestor worship again in 1965 after approval from Rome.
The history of the Protestant church in Vietnam goes back to the end of the 19th century. Missionary efforts by French, English and Northern European missionaries were initially unsuccessful until the modern era, when American missionaries in particular led to an increasing number of converts. Protestant Christians have been forming a structured organization since 1911. They currently have around 1.5 million members, most of whom are Pentecostal Christians or Mennonites. They are subject to strict control and harassment by state bodies. In general, they were and are suspected of not being well-disposed towards the state. Pastoral care by Protestant pastors was torpedoed in many ways. Since 1975, almost all Protestant Christians have been grouped under the state-influenced Evangelical Church of Vietnam, which was officially registered in 2001.
Islam: An estimated 60,000 Muslims from various ethnic groups live mainly in the Mekong Delta and on the high plateau of Central Vietnam. There is also a mosque in Ho Chi Minh City.
Hinduism: Indian immigrants brought Hinduism to Vietnam towards the end of the 19th century. There are two Hindu temples in Ho Chi Minh City, each dedicated to a different deity. After 1975, almost all of the Indian inhabitants left the country. Parts of the Cham ethnic minority in the mountain regions belong to Hinduism.
Other religions: In addition to the religions mentioned above, there are several smaller religious communities in Vietnam. They bring together elements of various religions such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Islam, Christianity and ancestor worship and teach, for example, the immortality of the soul, the unconditional protection of living beings, a moral life and compassion.
Constitutional framework
of religious freedom
The Vietnamese constitution of 2013 enshrines freedom of religion and belief for all citizens. The constitution states that all religious communities are equal before the law (Article 24). The state should respect and protect freedom of religion and belief. However, freedom of religion can be restricted for reasons of national security and order (Article 14, paragraph 2).
Based on the new constitution, the government enacted a religion law in 2016, which has been in force since the beginning of 2018. It states that all religious communities must register. After successful registration, they are considered legal and may plan and carry out their religious activities – provided that these are approved and that the religious communities report on their activities to the state authorities. The general clause prohibiting acts against “national security”, “national sovereignty”, “public safety and order” and “abuse of democratic rights” applies to all activities and programs. These clauses provide leeway for arbitrary interpretation of laws and lead to convictions of critical citizens by state authorities. In today’s practice, the exercise of religious practices is more or less unproblematic for registered religious communities.
In particular, members of religious communities that have not applied for or received registration report various forms of state discrimination and attacks. Newly founded religious communities encounter problems when attempting to register. They are held up and blocked by the authorities. How and whether the religious communities express themselves on political issues is more important to the authorities than the content of the faith itself. Newly founded communities are also often pressured to register as part of existing religious communities.
The Catholic Church
The Vatican established Vietnam’s independent Catholic hierarchy by decree on November 24, 1960. In the north of the country, which was ruled by the communist regime, a time of suffering began for the Catholic Church. Just over a million people fled from North to South Vietnam. Just over 50 percent of them were Catholic Christians. The percentage of clerics who fled was much higher. Several bishops also fled with their faithful. The priests, theologians, religious and believers who remained were placed under house arrest or imprisoned, and many of them died in prison.
In South Vietnam, on the other hand, the Catholic Church experienced a flourishing period. The church grew strongly due to the arrival of Catholic refugees from the north. The number of conversions also increased. The church ran numerous educational institutions that were open not only to Catholics, but also to children and young people from all population groups.
The Vietnam War ended on April 30, 1975 with the victory of the communist liberation army over the Republic of South Vietnam and the USA. North and South Vietnam were officially reunited in 1976. Despite promises and declarations of goodwill, the policy of the communist unity party led to a serious crisis of confidence among the population. Numerous members of the old republican government and its army, including Catholic army chaplains, were sent to re-education camps or prisons. A climate of waiting and watching developed in the southern part of the country, also on the part of the Catholic population. Immediately after the end of the war, some Catholic dignitaries welcomed the new government and offered the Church dialog and cooperation with the new rulers. The state and the party did not take up this offer. Only after several decades were the bishops of South and North Vietnam allowed to meet for their first bishops’ assembly in 1980. The first joint pastoral letter of the reunited bishops’ conference was dedicated to the main concern “Church in the midst of society”. It emphasized that the church is connected to its homeland and strives to make an active contribution to the country’s development. The pastoral letter is still a signal of the willingness for dialog between church and state today. However, for the church to be able to make its contribution, appropriate conditions and framework conditions must be in place. These have not yet been created due to mistrust or fear.
The rigid, centrally organized system of state-controlled companies and cooperatives led to a major shortage economy. At the end of the 1970s, famine loomed. In order to avert the threat of famine and drive forward economic development, Vietnam underwent a radical change of course in 1986. Private companies and activities were permitted. State-run collective farms were abolished. Private individuals and companies were allowed to do business at their own expense. National and foreign investment flowed into the Vietnamese economic cycle. A boom phase set in. However, the economic opening did not and does not go hand in hand with a political opening.
In 2013, Vietnam’s Land Law (GSGB) came into force. Article four stipulates that individuals and institutions may own land. However, they can only acquire the right to use it. To this day, this law has led to ambiguities, uncertainties and conflicts between state authorities and citizens, NGOs and religious communities. After 1975, the Catholic Church in Vietnam lost numerous properties such as land, schools, hospitals, infrastructure of religious communities and parishes. After several decades, the church is demanding the return of some of the facilities that were transferred to it, along with the associated land and facilities, in order to use them for its own pastoral and educational activities. The state has always rejected the requested restitution in accordance with the GSGB. Other religious communities in Vietnam also have difficulties finding sufficient space for community and places of worship.
Religious communities are not allowed to establish and operate their own general education schools such as elementary school, high schools, colleges and universities. Only kindergartens and day care centers are permitted for parishes and religious communities. These are generally concerned with literacy, reading, writing and arithmetic. In the health sector, religious communities are not allowed to operate hospitals or health centers. In contrast, foreign investors and organizations are allowed to run private schools – from kindergartens to universities – and private hospitals.
In Vietnam, most people belong to a religion or religious community. There is often a problem with the practical implementation of promoting dialog between religions. In many cases, the dialog merely consists of mutual visits on the major religious holidays of the respective religions, such as the Christian Christmas festival. But there are also more sustainable approaches, such as in the archdiocese of Saigon. Here, the “Interreligious Dialogue” commission was set up in 2009. It has the following tasks: Meeting with believers of other religions; studying the teachings and practices of other religious communities; reciprocal visits to establish friendships and then to develop and implement joint concrete projects in the social and charitable fields; building platforms and holding seminars on relevant topics.
A joint interfaith health center with volunteer medical staff was also founded in Saigon to offer free examinations and treatment to indigent patients. Vietnam was hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic in 2021. Hospitals, clinics and spontaneously erected health containers were overloaded. In the midst of the disaster, the Bishops’ Conference issued an appeal to all Catholics to do everything possible to help people. An unprecedented relief campaign spread throughout the country. Thousands of priests, religious and lay people volunteered to help in the hospitals. At a major event in Saigon at the end of 2021, representatives of state bodies and medical associations expressed their gratitude to all religious communities in the city.
Development and peace
48 years after the communist regime seized power, the church has held countless talks and negotiations and submitted appeals, criticisms and petitions. In addition, the church has repeatedly demonstrated through concrete activities and its involvement in emergencies and disasters that it makes a reliable contribution to the country’s development. As a result, those in political power have realized that the Catholic Church is not a political institution that wants to replace the government. Little by little, mutual cooperation is growing for the good of the country.
More and more seminaries are being approved. A university for theology was founded in 2015 with the approval of the government under the name “Catholic Institute of Vietnam”. In contrast to the early days of the opening policy, the church now has the freedom to design the training programs both in this university and in the seminaries itself and to recruit teachers. The initially obligatory course on Marxism-Leninism has been abolished. Today, seminarians and candidates for ordination are selected without interference from state authorities.
In view of the steadily improving relationship between the Church and the state in Vietnam and between the Vatican and the Vietnamese government, it seems realistic to hope that the Catholic Church will be able to make an even greater contribution to the development of the country and the welfare of the population in the future. The prerequisite for this is the right to become active and responsible for school education and healthcare. As these two areas still have major deficits today, urgent efforts are required from as many social groups as possible.
The party and the state no longer see any danger from the religious communities, especially not from the Catholic Church. The state, the population and the Church should be and remain aware of this: More religious freedom is more development and peace.
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Destructiveness in the soul
By Christian M. Rutishauser
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/7-2023/destruktives-in-der-seele/.]
Who doesn’t know their own psychic drive dynamics! Not being able to get away from surfing the internet or indulging in alcohol, even though there are more sensible things to do. Clinging to an enemy, lashing out at them, even though it only hurts and helps no one. People have always tried to get to the bottom of these destructive forces of the soul. The ascetics of late antiquity turned their own bodies into laboratories for this purpose. In Syria and Egypt, they went into the desert and practiced introspection in seclusion. They relentlessly pursued self-knowledge. The desert father Anthony, for example, described his inner “demons”. He is depicted on the Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar with grimaces and devils tugging at him. Salvador Dalì also painted the naked athlete, at the mercy of oversized figures on stilts.
In the fourth century, Evagrius Ponticus also practiced “soul archaeology”. He organized and named the forces in order to banish them: Gluttony, rampant sex and greed. They would spring from a vital instinct for self-preservation and become self-destructively inflated. Only asceticism could tame them. Forces that are more damaging to interpersonal relationships are anger, envy and disgust with the world, which can lead to a lack of drive, a crisis of meaning and depression. The will is often too weak to fight it. Evagrius recommends enduring and tracing the sources of these dynamics. If they are accepted, they begin to dissolve. Finally, he mentions vanity and pride, which stand in the way of life. People cannot free themselves from this. If they succeeded, they would be proud of themselves again. Therefore, man would ultimately have to be liberated.
Such teachings on the soul were often passed on in monasteries. Among the population, however, a doctrine of character prevailed. The church spoke of seven deadly sins. Today, psychoanalysis speaks of the libido, the will to power and the survival instinct. Through them, people get into rival conflicts. However, without injuries and projections, losing oneself to objects and fearfully clinging to them, no human being matures and develops.
Bourgeois society has set virtues against vices: Diligence against laziness, humility against pride, patience against anger, moderation against greed, chastity against fornication, charity against greed, benevolence against envy. It called for personality development. Today it is probably more about self-optimization. But you still argue with your belligerent neighbor. A dose of internet addiction is part of being single. Stinginess is cool, and air travel, whether for shopping in London or a vacation in Bali, is part of the lifestyle, even if global warming is on the rise. What’s more, the ideology of unrestrained economic growth is re-evaluating urges. It promotes the old vices: envy stimulates business and awakens needs that the market can satisfy. The porn industry is making record sales. Add an Advent sale and Black Friday to spur on greed. Excessive bonuses and wages also seem legitimate. The lazy put their money to work on the stock market. In short: greed, fornication, envy, etc. are no longer seen as destructive, but are put at the service of success and prosperity. Giambattista Vico († 1744) already wrote that cruelty, greed and ambition should be used in national defense, trade and politics, thereby creating a prosperous and functioning society. The revaluation of old deadly sins into legitimate interests seems to be accepted today. It has become the basis of the Western world.
The individual may have been exonerated in the secular, individualistic society, but the destructive forces have not disappeared. They have been transferred to the collective. Greed and envy are channeled outwards when a nation goes to war against an enemy. Within a society, they are controlled by bureaucratization. Above all, the socialization of instincts can be felt globally. It manifested itself in the shameless colonization and exploitation of entire continents. Today, its deadly effects are manifested in an unprecedented extinction of species and in climatic catastrophes. In reality, vices have been outsourced to structures and opaque processes. And is anyone still surprised when refugees from distant countries come and demand their share back? And climate activists have to justify themselves when they hold up a mirror to society!
If not therapy, then every soul needs self-knowledge and work on its own inner self. Those who refuse to do so not only give free rein to destructive forces. They pass on their energy to others. After all, someone always pays the price for their social outsourcing and ideological justification.
Christian M. Rutishauser
Christian Rutishauser, born in 1965, studied theology in Fribourg and Lyon and joined the Jesuit order in 1992. After a period as a student chaplain and ordination to the priesthood in 1998, he studied in Jerusalem and New York and completed a doctorate in Jewish Studies at the University of Lucerne. From 2001, he was Director of Education at Lassalle-Haus Bad Schönbrunn, a center for spirituality and interreligious dialogue. From 2012 to 2021 he was Provincial of the Swiss Jesuit Province; since then he has been Delegate for Universities of the Central European Province of the Jesuits.
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Truth, lies and emotional turbulence
The search for truth is one of the oldest questions of mankind. Not only religion and philosophy, but also the arts have always been dedicated to this longing. The symposium of the Academy for Film and Television Dramaturgy “Top:Talents” searched for “Truth in Film” in Rome this spring. We document the abridged and edited contribution by Susanne Heine, Professor of Practical Theology and Psychology of Religion at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Vienna.
By Susanne Heine
[This article posted in 2023 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.herder.de/stz/hefte/archiv/148-2023/7-2023/wahrheit-luegen-und-seelische-turbulenzen/.]
The theme of three films at the symposium was “Truth”. Truth, lies and deception cannot be clearly grasped or defined. They form a tangle, a thicket, into which I try to cut a few paths.
The serpent: It starts early with the story of a tree and a serpent in Genesis 3. This is not about a fall from good to bad, but about the fragile and ambivalent human being: The fragile and ambivalent human being is packed into an origin narrative with mythical motifs, into an etiology. What appears here as the past wants to say: this is the human condition, which has never been different and never will be different. Man is capable of throwing everything overboard when something desirable is on the horizon.
The first human couple are forbidden to eat from the fruit of a certain tree because otherwise Adam and Eve will die. But the serpent questions this and finds a sympathetic ear. The serpent is also ambivalent, because he lies and tells the truth. He lies: “By no means will you die”. But all people die, it says at the end. Of course, the serpent also tells the truth: “God knows that your eyes will be opened to the knowledge of good and evil. And so it happened: People know that there is a difference between good and evil, and therein lies their moral capacity.
Nevertheless, people are limited by their finite history. For all talents such as moral ability, reason or language are never absolutely certain, never “naked”, but always clothed with the respective zeitgeist, with personal and political interests, with mental or physical sensitivities, with emotions of all kinds. So although people may know that there is a difference between good and evil, right and wrong, they are limited by this clothing and do not always know what is good or evil in a particular situation; they may not always want to know. Incidentally, in the original Hebrew text, the snake is called Nachash (nāḥāš) and is male, i.e. the serpent. Accordingly, it was not Eve, the woman, who seduced Adam, but a male being who seduced the woman. In any case, the serpent only tells half the truth, because knowing does not mean recognizing.
The scandal: our zeitgeist loves facts and evidence. But facts do not speak. The fact is, for example, that Julius Caesar was murdered on the Ides of March. Many questions immediately arise: Why? Who profited from it? What happened to the perpetrators? The fact calls up all kinds of interpretations. Now there is a sensible convention in journalism: reports are committed to the truth in the sense of factual accuracy, commentaries interpret and formulate the judgment of the writers. Sometimes this can get mixed up.
Did Claas Relotius (Lars Bogenius in the film) lie and deceive with his sometimes fictitious Spiegel reports? Can a newspaper “tell it like it is”? Such questions are not easy to answer, especially not with a moralizing finger, which the film “1000 Lines” thankfully dispenses with. What comes across here with humor for me corresponds to a dilemma. Because every word is surrounded by different meanings, every sentence interprets a fact that first has to be peeled out of the interpretation. Strictly speaking, the commentary is there earlier, preceding the report, which requires a laborious abstinence from interpretation.
The nature of interpretation and the culture of interpretation
The philosopher Wolfram Hogrebe sees people as mantic beings, endowed with a nature of interpretation, longing for meaning, even fearful of meaning.1 The door slams; was it the wind or the silent anger of a housemate? A certain look – should I fulfill a hidden wish? A sudden illness – God’s punishment for an unatoned sin? Such interpretations arise spontaneously, and only the clarifying word can shed more light on such dark suspicions. This happens through the culture of interpretation, which follows the nature of interpretation by persistently asking questions, even of written texts: Who is speaking to or with whom, about what, when and where, why, for what purpose and how? Do I want to convince by putting interests, opinions and arguments up for discussion? Or do I want to persuade by using emotional overpressure and suggestion to calm a world of fear or create a world of desire, but also vice versa: calm a world of desire and create a world of fear?2
Fake news arises because we like people who share our beliefs, emotions and preferences. We therefore automatically prefer news that confirms our opinions and attitudes, as this creates good feelings and a sense of well-being, according to the theory of confirmation bias or selective exposure. In other words, having our biases confirmed and only being exposed to content that matches them makes us immune to contradictory or even modified opinions. That’s clear, because contradictions and counter-arguments are exhausting and disturbing. Questioning everything is fine, but being questioned is very unpleasant. As a result, a society disintegrates into many small groups that remain among themselves.
Recognition instead of knowledge: The culture of interpretation also produces works of art, poetry, novels, comedies or tragedies. Is there truth in poetry? Everything speaks for it. But this is not about the truth of the facts, but about impulses to recognize truths about people, their abilities, limitations and abysses. Even the biblical writer who tells of trees and a snake is not talking about facts, but says something about people, about possible experiences with themselves and with others.
This includes the ability to recognize, an ability that has nothing to do with information about knowledge, but with a process that allows something to become clear. People are addicted to meaning, and meaning means becoming certain of a truth. This is particularly true of religions, but meaning and certainty of faith cannot simply be plucked like apples from a tree. Sense is different from holding certain doctrines to be true, it cannot be learned, it cannot be forced upon a person or talked out of it. Sense is not, sense happens,3 occurs, is received, owes itself to what the linguist Wim de Pater calls a disclosure, an experience of development. He links this with everyday expressions such as: That makes sense to me, a light has dawned on me.4
A flash and half a truth
Such an experience is also familiar to die-hard scientists, such as the chemist Friedrich August Kekulé (1829-1896). He racked his brains over the structure of benzene for a long time without success. Tired, he nods off in an armchair in front of the fire. Half asleep, he sees the flames coalesce into a snake biting its own tail – a circle: the benzene ring had been discovered. It struck him, as he himself says, like a “lightning bolt”.5 Whether Bible or chemistry – knowledge of the subject area and the active search for insight are prerequisites, but the results are not a necessary outcome of the effort.
Charles Darwin spent his life working with observation, facts and evidence. However, he lost his enjoyment of art, poetry and music, including religion, and called this a loss of “higher faculties of the soul” and thus of happiness. He wishes for the joy of novels back with a character “that I can love through and through”. He says to his wife Emma: “Fortunately, there is no doubt about how one should act.” She quotes this sentence in a letter and contradicts it: “No, unfortunately we don’t always know that.” Charles only keeps this one letter; sometimes he kisses it.6 Mrs. Darwin has seen through the half-truth of the snake.
Abysses: Biology and symbol
“You will not die,” the snake lies, but it is also hiding something: humans are the only living beings who know, even when they are young and flourishing, that they and they must die. This can be frightening, depressing and paralyzing. Even worse is the idea of dying like an animal without meaning. To escape this terror of natural existence, people search for a meaning that gives them significance. This is the conclusion reached by social anthropologist and psychologist Ernest Becker.
Immortality: The Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942 is a fact, the film production (The Wannsee Conference. 2022)7 is, of course, a fiction. There is only one set of minutes and nobody knows exactly who said what. Nevertheless, it is clear from the film what was to be coordinated at the time: the “final solution” to the so-called Jewish question and a Europe free of Jews. If the truth in poetry is to show truths about people, including their abysses, then the film shows a truth about some people who try to gain immortality through heroic deeds.
Ernest Becker’s Jewish family immigrated from Eastern Europe to the USA at the turn of the 20th century and settled in Massachusetts, where Ernest was born in 1924. At the age of 18, he joins the army and in 1945 liberates a Nazi concentration camp in Germany with his troop; it is not known which one. Nowhere does he write about what this experience triggered in him. But his most famous book, “The Denial of Death”, which was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize, is entitled: “Do not mock, do not lament, do not curse, but understand. “8
For Becker, human beings are existentially caught between physical necessities and mental and spiritual processes, living in two very different worlds.9 Becker knows how to vividly visualize the bloody struggle for food and survival and calls life on this planet a “science fiction nightmare. “10 This is where the biblical narrator of Genesis 3 comes into play again. For when people’s eyes open, they see that they are naked and are ashamed. Finding themselves as a mere digestive and sexual organism leads to an attack on self-esteem, according to Becker. The fear of not being recognized as a distinctive personality, of ultimately being erased as meaningless with the physical end, gives rise to a burning desire to count for something, not to have lived, worked, suffered and died on this planet without meaning.
After all, writes Becker, “man is not a will-less droplet of protoplasm, but a being with a name in a world full of symbols and dreams and not just full of matter”. For him, the sources of symbols are ideas, fantasies and desires in relation to oneself, but also to a world that makes sense. This is why people create a society as a “symbolic system of action” that extends beyond their own lifetime with order, stability and duration.11 Religions can also alleviate the fear of the terror of natural existence and increase self-esteem. “But with you even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not be afraid,” says Jesus in Matthew (10:30-31). The promise of eternal life after death can also make people see their lives as valuable.
Out of deep conviction: But social orders are unstable and can break, religions can be shattered by criticism of religion. What then remains is what Becker calls a causa sui project: people must create their own meaning out of themselves in order to be remembered for their great achievements or heroic deeds and thus achieve immortality. In his latest work “Escape from Evil”, Becker aims to show that the denial of mortality and a heroic self-image are at the root of human evil.12
What was once beyond reality in religion is now to be created in reality: a perfect world cleansed of animal degradation. Becker attributes the success of the Nazis as secular heroes to their drive to bring this about definitively through final victories and final solutions. In order to be able to radically fight people and entire nations, they are credited with everything from which the actors see themselves liberated: from animal existence. For Becker, this is also behind the genocide of the Jews. They must be destroyed because they are, allegedly, pathogenic vermin, lice that must be combed out. And the henchmen of this dirty business see themselves as heroes who make every sacrifice for a cleansed world and achieve immortal glory for it. “Our grandchildren will still admire us,” says one of the men in the film about the Wannsee Conference.
For Becker, the paradoxical root of evil lies not in the biological, but in the “symbolic human animal”.13 He thus attempts to explain the tragedy that people do terrible harm not out of conscious evil intent, but out of enthusiasm and the deepest conviction that they are serving the good. It is not man’s animal nature, but his inventive spirit in the service of his own immortality that brings such a bitter fate upon his fellow human beings.14 More recent historical research since the 1980s has confirmed Becker’s theses.
For a long time, Adolf Eichmann and Co. were seen as puppets and mere recipients of orders, but they were proud of their misdeeds. That Eichmann, for example, operated his sophisticated machinery of extermination out of the deepest conviction is clear from conversations that the Israeli police captain Avner Werner Less had with Eichmann in his cell in Jerusalem before the start of the trial. Like Becker, Less also wanted to understand. Less summarizes the fact that Eichmann then became entangled in lies due to the overwhelming evidence in one image: “He was the apple, the others were the snake. “15
Why the Jews?
Jesus was a Jew, his followers were Jews, the apostles were Jews. Of course, not all Jews agreed with the way Jesus interpreted his Jewish Bible, known as the Old Testament. This gave rise to internal Jewish disputes between Jesus, those who professed belief in him and the Jewish authorities. The associated polemics then fed Christian hostility towards the Jews for centuries. It was only after the Shoah that Christian theology began to read the texts more closely.
One example: In John 8:44 it says: “You have the devil for a father and you want to do what your father wants you to do.” But who is Jesus talking to? To the Jews? No, but, as verse 31 before it shows, to those Jews “who had come to believe in him: If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples”. The rest of the text refers to Jews who had joined Jesus, but without inner conviction. This passage is not a criticism of the Jews, but of half-hearted, hypocritical Christians. The lesson: no text without context!
When the Christian church was on its way to becoming a world church from the 4th century onwards, former inner-Jewish disputes broke down into opposites: here good Christians, there bad Jews. From then on, the Jewish self-criticism of the prophets, such as Isaiah or Amos, was directed against the Jews according to the motto: You yourselves admit your misdeeds. As early as the end of the 2nd century, Meliton, Bishop of Sardis, accused the Jews of murdering God in his Easter sermon, and this has become an anti-Jewish commonplace. It says, for example, “What terrible injustice, Israel, have you done? […] you have killed the one who made you alive. “16 Defamation, persecution and murder of Jews are the paving stones of the church’s path to power. It was not until the 1960s that the churches began to admit their guilt towards the Jews and recognize God’s irrevocable covenant with the Jewish people.
Without this long history of Christian hostility towards the Jews, the Nazi genocide of the Jews would not have been so widely applauded by the population. The “German Christians”, who cheered Hitler and turned Jesus into an Aryan with blue eyes and blond hair, would not have been so successful either.17 The conviction that only a Europe free of Jews would be a good Europe is rooted in Christian hostility towards and persecution of the Jews. The Nazis had decided to bring this to fruition at Wannsee in order to create an eternal monument to themselves. That was their deadly truth.
Death
“There’s a lot of death”, was my first reaction to the film adaptation of the novel “And then someone gets up and opens the window” (2022). The wife of the dying companion Fred died a long time ago. Karla, the main character (played by Iris Berben), is approaching death. Then young Phil turns up. He does a job on Karla’s behalf and is simply there, unafraid to be around a dying person, just like his father Fred later is. A movie against the denial of death, because strictly speaking we are still sitting on the lie of the serpent: “You will not die”. Today, a decent person dies in hospital or in an old people’s home, at least not in front of other people. Death is marginalized and with it the dying are outsourced. Those were the days when people died at home, surrounded by their families. Whether loved or hated, they were not alone. Then they were laid out in the living room, relatives and neighbors held the candlelight wake. Dying and death embedded in a dignified celebration. Tempi passati.
What remains is the fear of dying alone: Who will mourn me and remember me? We are just beings with a name, says Ernest Becker. Remembering, not forgetting, is a central biblical theme. In Psalm 31 (13), the psalmist laments: “I am forgotten, like a dead man out of mind.” Psalm 25 (7) asks: “Remember me, Lord, according to your mercy, for you are gracious!” Other people are also in view in Psalm 74 (19): “Do not give the life of your dove to the beast of prey, do not forget the life of your poor!”
Practice and poetry: In the film, it is Phil who brings a new dimension to the scene. He quotes poems, e.g. by Rilke: “The leaves fall, fall as if from far away, as if distant gardens were wilting in the heavens; […] And yet there is One who holds this falling infinitely gently in his hands. “18 In his Nicomachean Ethics (VI, 4-5), the philosopher Aristotle made a distinction that is still valid today: Praxis and poiesis. He can refer to two different Greek terms: práttein (practice) and poieĩn (poiesis), and both mean: to act. But praxis means practical action and refers to helping one’s fellow human beings, like the merciful Samaritan who rescues the man who has fallen among the robbers. This type of activity has its value in the ongoing practice of helping. There is a saying by Václav Havel that I hardly dare to quote because the short version is used inflationarily by Christian communities, but also by banks and tattoo artists. The long version: “Hope is not optimism, it is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense – regardless of how it turns out. “19 In Karla’s case in the film, it is clear that things will not turn out well, but being there, hugging and holding hands help and make sense. This is what Fred, the companion, stands for.
Poietic action is different, as it aims to express something inner, a feeling, a conviction on the outside. Since time immemorial, people have expressed outwardly and collectively what moves them inwardly. Poetic activity derives its value from the aesthetic quality of the product and from the way in which people are addressed. Here we could speak of the truth of the heart. Poiesis can consist of painting pictures, composing songs, writing poems or novels or collectively creating a rite, even a religious one. This is what Phil stands for, who performs a specially designed poetry slam at the end – not Rilke, but original. Just as the two forms of action in a person’s life cannot be separated from each other, they also come together in the film in the characters of Fred and Phil.
No reconciliation: One scene in the movie seems to be out of the ordinary. Karla is hopelessly at odds with her sister. Why and about what, who did what to whom, is not told. But Fred wants to reconcile the two and secretly arranges a meeting on his terrace. A flop: the nurse appears and everyone leaves the scene, which says something about the dying companion: Fred wants Karla to leave the world reconciled. Did he learn this in his training as an end-of-life caregiver? Is there a Christian demand behind it? Is he projecting his own lack of reconciliation with his deceased wife onto Karla? Sigmund Freud could see it that way. “When you have forgiven someone everything, you are done with them. “20 This sentence by Freud circulates on the Internet under “wise sayings”, but Freud sees it quite differently. The saying refers to Otto Rank, his favorite student. When Rank begins to develop his own position, he is asked to recant. Rank does not do so, and Freud, bitterly disappointed, is finished with him and the relationship is severed.
Did something similar happen between the sisters in the movie? In any case, Fred feels responsible for Karla and presumes to bring about a reconciliation that only Karla herself could initiate. For this to happen, the quarrelling partners would have to be interested in restoring their relationship. That would be the prerequisite for forgiveness, from which reconciliation can, but does not have to, follow.
In the Gospels, the question of how often a person needs to be forgiven is answered radically: seven times a day, according to Luke (17:4). This sounds like a routine in which guilt and forgiveness follow one another in brutal succession. Those who are not prepared to forgive immediately with a gun to their chest can also incur moral reproach. I call this the Christian short circuit. However, forgiveness and reconciliation are painful and often long processes. However, the escape scene on Fred’s terrace makes one truth unmistakably clear: forgiveness and reconciliation cannot be forced.
“What is truth?”
The snake can lie as much as it likes, but it cannot prevent people from helping each other and from writing poetry! What is created in poetry is sometimes pleasing, sometimes frightening, but in any case it shows an insight into the truth about human beings. The poet Sophocles says it succinctly: Humans are “gifted with the cleverness of inventive art”, which sometimes turns for the worse, sometimes for the better.21
The search for truth is a theme of humanity. But: “What is truth?” asks Pontius Pilate. His skepticism is justified. The truth, the whole truth, remains shrouded under rags and tatters, uniforms and magnificent cassocks. Who can reveal it? Perhaps a question for future film productions.
Literature
1 In: Wolfram Hogrebe: Metaphysics and Mantics. The interpretive nature of man. Frankfurt am Main 1992.
2 Hellmut Geißner: Rhetoric and political education. Frankfurt am Main 31986, 134.
3 Hellmut Geißner: Speech science. Frankfurt am Main 21986, 131.
4 Wim A. De Pater: Development situations and religious language. In: Manfred Kaempfert (ed.): Probleme der religiösen Sprache. Darmstadt 1983, 197.
5 The description of this event with source reference in: Gottfried Gabriel: Erkenntnis. Berlin and Boston 2015, 90-94.
6 The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin. Edited by his Son Francis Darwin. In Three Volumes. Vol. 1. London: John Murray 1887, 119. at: <Darwin-online.org>. Otto A. Böhmer: New great moments in philosophy. Munich 1995, 121 f.
7 Available free of charge in Germany until 2024 in the ZDF media library: <https://www.zdf.de/filme/die-wannseekonferenz/die-wannseekonferenz-104.html>.
8 Ernest Becker (1924-1974): The Denial of Death. This book was translated into German in 1976 under the inappropriate title “Dynamics of Death”. Based on Becker’s theory, the US social psychologists Solomon, Greenberg and Pyszczynski developed a measuring instrument for empirical research in 1991: the Terror Management Theory. See the Becker Foundation founded in 1993: <ernestbecker.org/about-becker>.
9 Immanuel Kant also calls man a citizen of two worlds, a natural-animal world and a second world in which morality is a matter of consciousness and self-determination; in the essay “The Controversy of the Faculties”.
10 In: Ernest Becker: Escape from Evil. New York 1975, 1-3.
11 Becker (note 8), 22-24.
12 Becker (note 10), Preface, XV.
13 Becker (note 8), 271.
14 Becker (note 10), 5.
15 Avner Werner Less and Bettina Stangneth: Lüge! All lies! Zurich 2012.
16 Meliton of Sardis: Vom Passa (Sophia. Quellen östlicher Theologie 3). Translated by Josef Blank. Freiburg 1963.
17 A pictorial example is given by Margit Ehrlich: Historische Last. Church buildings of the Nazi era (15.04.2018), on: br.de. Theologians and exegetes who had founded the “Institute for the Research and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life” at Wartburg Castle in 1939 were also involved in the creation of the Aryan Jesus.
18 Rainer M. Rilke: Autumn. In: The Book of Images, Part 2.
19 Václav Havel: Fernverhör. Reinbek near Hamburg 1987, 220-221.
20 Helen Walker Puner: Sigmund Freud. His Life and Mind. Revised edition. New York, 1992, 112.
21 Sophocles: Antigone. Chorus of the Theban Ancients, Act 2. Translation in: Hans Jonas: Das Prinzip Verantwortung, Frankfurt am Main 1984, 17 f.
Author
Susanne Heine
Susanne Heine is Professor of Practical Theology and Psychology of Religion at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Vienna.
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