Tuesday, April 19, 2005
Viva Il Papa! Hail Caesar!
The first week this blog existed in April 2003, I posted a quote by philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev, from his essay "Master, Slave and Free Man."
"It is slavery in everything; in the acquisition of knowledge, in morals, in religion, in art, in political & social life."Berdyaev wrote this in order to expose a paradox: We all are totally, utterly free, & we use this freedom mainly to enslave ourselves & each other. Is he advocating chaos? Of course not. He is refusing to advocate slavery. In every institutional religion is some degree of absurd & unnecessary bondage. I saw slavery on display today in Rome; the Curse of Constantine, an emperor who embraced Christianity to win a crucial battle, & later moved the capitol of his empire to a new city on the Bosporus, leaving behind in Italy the structure of an orthodox Church. Freed from 300 years of persecution, this Church was already gathering to itself the power, pomp, & political structures of pagan Rome, which was the only model it had (other than the singular example of its founder). How strange to see that model not only surviving 1700 years later, but praised & embraced, as if there were still sense in 115 hand-picked princes choosing a King-for-Life to rule over one-billion subjects. Il Papa! indeed! The crowd could just as well have been shouting "Hail Caesar."
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"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
I could care less about the individual lifestyles of the Cardinals, & I'm not even disputing fundamental doctrine. The Church of late antiquity did a great service by codifying some basic beliefs into creed, & taking a stand against Arianism (which Constantine himself accepted to some extent, it was such a common belief). But the pyramid political structure of the Roman Church has only one "democratic" expression, at the very top, & it's bogus. Clergy must be in some way answerable to the communion of believers. If they were, half of the Archbishops in America would have been recalled over the past decade for failing to maintain the well-being of their congregants, or the vitality of their institutions, or the integrity of their offices, or all of the the above. None of which are really theological matters.
One more thought: The papacy is by definition despotism. Whether the despot is benign or not depends upon his character & actions - & upon how he is perceived by his subjects.
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