two forms of pelagianism
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An Excerpt from Joseph Ratzinger's The Yes of Jesus Christ: Exercises in Faith, Hope and LoveTRANSCRIPT
80 The Yes oJ [esus Christ
person's conscience and calls into question the self-
justification in which such a person has taken refuge after
the loss oE Eaith. The downtrodden conscience speaks
again from outside, and now everything that gives it voice
must be crushed underEoot along with it. More generally
we can say that the person who refuses his or her meta-
physical greatness is an apostate with regard to the divine
vocation of being human. The monstrous and enormous
hatred that seethes in many terrorist organizations today
cannot indeed be understood at all without this cornpul-
sion to crush ones conscience underfoot arid along with
it everything that recalls its message?
Spitefulness (malitia) in the strict sense consists for
Thomas Aquinas in deliberate rebellion against God, in
hatred of God: a stance that is actually absurd and that
be comes possible only when metaphysical inertia, the
rejection of God's love, has become the core of someone's
existence. Here it becomes clear that slothfulness or
inertia (false humility) and pride of rejection are inter-
locked. Today we are discovering how this kind of out-
come spreads and casts its spell over people who in the
captivity of their rejection are driven to a hatred that can
only be satisfied by the destruction of man. This kind of
despair can also wear the mask of optimism. Indeed, the
ideological optimism we have described earlier is funda-
mentally always a mask hiding despair.
Hope and Love 81
Varieties oj Seif-Satisfaction: Bourgeois Pelagianism
and tbe Pelagianism oj tbe Pious
In order not to draw this meditation out too long I will
skip an analysis of presumption, that twin-sister of
des pair: the common foundation of both attitudes lies in
the error of thinking that one does not need God for the
realization and fulfillment of one's own being. Following
Josef Pieper closely, I would like merely to try to offer a
few comments on two widespread forms in which this
vice finds expression and which from a purely superficial
point of view can appear harrnless."
The first variation of presumption that we need to talk
about is the bourgeois liberal Pelagianism that rests on
considerations such as these: "If God really does exist and
if he does in fact bother about people he cannot be so
fearfully demanding as is described by the faith of the
Church. Moreover I'm no worse than the others: I do my
duty, and the minor human weaknesses cannot really be as
dangerous as all that,' In this widespread attitude to life
we find the human self-belittlement that we have already
described in the case of accidie and the self-sufficiency
with regard to infinite love that people think they do not
need in their bourgeois self-satisfaction. Perhaps in times
of peace one can live for quite a long time in this frame of
82 The Yes 0/ Jesus Christ
mind. But at the moment of crisis people will either be
converted from it or fall victim to despair.The other face of this same vice is the Pelagianism of
the pious. They do not want any forgiveness from God,
nor indeed any gift at all from him, They want to be okay
thernselves, wanting not forgiveness but their just reward.
They want security, not hope. By means of a tough and
rigorous system of religious practices, by means of
prayers and actions, they want to create for themselves a
right to blessedness. What they lack is the humility essen-
tial to any love-the humility to be able to receive wh at
we are given over and above what we have deserved and
achieved. The denial of hope in favor of security that we
are faced with here rests on the inability to bear the ten-
sion of waiting for what is to come and to abandon one-
self to God's goodness. This kind of Pelagianism is thus
an apostasy from love and from hope but also at the pro-
foundest level from faith too. Man hardens his heart
against himself, against others and ultirnately against
God: man needs God's divinity but no longer his love. He
puts himself in the right, and a God that does not co-
operate becomes his enemy. The Pharisees of the New
Testament are an eternally valid representation of this
deformation of religion. The core of this Pelagianism is
a religion withour love that in this way degenerates into a
sad and miserable caricature of religion.
Hope and Love 83
Fear, Hope, Love
If we talk of the connection between hope and love the
subject of fear must finally also be touched on. The Pela-
gianism of the pious is a child of fear, of a damaged hope
that cannot endure the tension of awaiting the uncom-
pellable gift of love. So from hope arises anxiety, and that
in its turn gives birth to the striving for security in which
no uncertainty can remain. Love does not now overcome
fear because the egoistic person does not want to entrust
hirnself or herself to its kind of certainty that can always
only be a certainty of dialogue. From this point of view
fear must be exorcized independently of the others
through what is at my own disposal-through what I domyself, through my own work.
This kind of striving for security rests on the total self-
assertion of the ego, which refuses to take the risk of
emerging from its shell and entrusting itself to the other,
This is in fact the test for the absence of true love. On
the other hand we need to ding firmly to a kind of fear
that is not only compatible with love but necessarily fol-
lows from it: the fear of hurting the beloved, of destroy-
ing the foundations of love by one's own fault. Liberalism
and the Enlightenment want to talk us into accepting a
world without fear: they promise the complete elimina-