Eric Voegelin (10)

The limits of the moral community

Voegelin puts considerable stress on the idea of universal membership in the fully-developed Christian community. He points to Thomas Aquinas as setting out this idea, in the form of a Mystical Body of Christ (corpus mysticum) which includes all human beings, of all places and times—even those preceding the Incarnation. Or at least, everyone is potentially a member of the mystical body:

. . . people can be classed as members of the mystical body because of their potentiality, and not merely when they are actually in it.

(Aquinas, "The Grace of Christ", Summa, vol. 49, cited by Voegelin in Hitler and the Germans, p. 202.) The closely related idea of universal human equality is also specifically Christian, Voegelin believes:

Only in terms of this problematic of incarnation, which then had as a consequence the whole problematic of the Trinity and the dogma of the Trinity, is it unequivocally said what man is. That is to say, man is man insofar as he is imago Dei, and insofar as he is imago Dei all men are equal . . . . This is precisely what is characteristic of Christianity, its unique achievement. Every attempt to withdraw from this achievement is a regression . . .

(Hitler and the Germans, pp 204&ndash205). This Christian universalism, Voegelin suggests, has been largely forgotten by Christians since Thomas Aquinas, and in particular by the churches in Germany in the Hitler era. Catholic and other churches have each set themselves up as "the one and only corpus mysticum". Karl Rahner, in 1943, contracted the membership of the church to those Catholics who have received the sacrament. Voegelin claims that this is "the most severe contraction of the membership of the church that it had ever received" (p. 211). With such a contraction, the way is open, Voegelin implies, to the treatment of those outside one's own denomination as subhuman. In one of his first books, Race and State, he also points out that with the decline of Christian allegiance, each major European nation—England, France, Germany—acquired a conception of itself as "the world", surrounded by lesser beings to be feared and hated; this was presumably also a "contraction".

To me Voegelin's discussion of this question in Hitler and the Germans seems somewhat unsatisfactory. In the first place, I think he ignores the case of the Polish Catholics. There was never any question that these were members of the same corpus mysticum as the large number of German Catholics; yet this did not stop the Germans, including the Catholics, from attempting to enslave the Poles on the same basis as other Slavs, and wiping out a large proportion of them in the process. In other words, the theory of the corpus mysticum, given considerable prominence in Hitler and the Germans, was actually more or less irrelevant in Nazi Germany: Christian allegiance had in reality long given way to national allegiance (now intensified into pseudo-racial allegiance by the Nazis)—as Voegelin himself had pointed out in Race and State. In this connection, Voegelin provides the interesting statistic that just seven German Catholics refused military service in Nazi Germany. (Six were executed; one was declared insane and survived.)

(To be continued.)

Eric Voegelin (9)