Theologians From Germany

"Fear God and thou shalt not quail before the terrors of men."

"My Son, make it no matter of thine, if thou see others honoured and exalted, and thyself despised and humbled. Lift up thine heart to Me in heaven, and then the contempt of men upon earth will not make thee sad."

"The greatest saints used to avoid as far as they could the company of men, and chose to live in secret with God."

"One hath said, “As oft as I have gone among men, so oft have I returned less a man.” This is what we often experience when we have been long time in conversation."

"Many men have many opinions, and therefore little trust is to be placed in them."

"I am He who in an instant lift up the humble spirit, to learn more reasonings of the Eternal Truth, than if a man had studied ten years in the schools. I teach without noise of words, without confusion of opinions, without striving after honour, without clash of arguments. I am He who teach men to despise earthly things, to loathe things present, to seek things heavenly, to enjoy things eternal, to flee honours, to endure offences, to place all hope in Me, to desire nothing apart from Me, and above all things to love Me ardently."

"If to-day thou art not ready, how shalt thou be ready to-morrow? To-morrow is an uncertain day; and how knowest thou that thou shalt have a to-morrow?"

"For the love of God thou must willingly undergo all things, whether labours or sorrows, temptations, vexations, anxieties, necessities, infirmities, injuries, gainsayings, rebukes, humiliations, confusions, corrections, despisings;"

"That which profiteth little or nothing is looked after, and that which is altogether necessary is negligently passed by;"

"I offer also to Thee prayers and Sacramental intercessions for those specially who have injured me in aught, made me sad, or spoken evil concerning me, or have caused me any loss or displeasure; for all those also whom I have at any time made sad, disturbed, burdened, and scandalized, by words or deeds, knowingly or ignorantly; that to all of us alike, Thou mayest equally pardon our sins and mutual offences. Take away, O Lord, from our hearts all suspicion, indignation, anger, and contention, and whatsoever is able to injure charity and diminish brotherly love. Have mercy, have mercy, Lord, on those who entreat Thy mercy; give grace to the needy; and make us such that we may be worthy to enjoy Thy grace, and go forward to the life eternal."

"Thou art miserable wheresoever thou art, and whithersoever thou turnest, unless thou turn thee to God."

"Thinkest thou that thou shalt always have spiritual consolations at thy will? My Saints had never such, but instead thereof manifold griefs, and divers temptations, and heavy desolations."

"And he who seeketh not to please men, nor feareth to displease, shall enjoy abundant peace."

"What doth care about future events bring thee, save sorrow upon sorrow? Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. It is vain and useless to be disturbed or lifted up about future things which perhaps will never come."

"What canst thou see elsewhere which thou canst not see here? Behold the heaven and the earth and all the elements; for of these are all things created."

"It is easier not to speak a word at all than to speak more words than we should."

"Grant me prudently to avoid the flatterer, and patiently to bear with him that opposeth me;"

"O Lord, self-renunciation is not the work of one day, nor children's sport; yea, rather in this word is included all perfection."

"Strive, My Son, to do another’s will rather than thine own. Choose always to have less rather than more. Seek always after the lowest place, and to be subject to all. Wish always and pray that the will of God be fulfilled in thee."

"watch thou thyself in godly peace, and leave him who is unquiet to be unquiet as he will. Whatsoever he shall do or say, shall come unto him, for he cannot deceive Me. Trouble not thyself about the shadow of a great name, nor about the friendship of many, nor about the love of men towards thee. For these things beget distraction and great sorrows of heart."

"Thou dwellest among foes, and art attacked on the right hand and on the left. If therefore thou use not on all sides the shield of patience, thou wilt not remain long unwounded."

"Be thou never without something to do; be reading, or writing, or praying, or meditating, or doing something that is useful to the community."

"No man ruleth safely but that he is willingly ruled."

"Know thou that the love of thyself is more hurtful to thee than anything in the world."

"Grant that I may die to all worldly things, and for Thy sake love to be despised and unknown in this world."

". . . do with me what Thou wilt, for whatsoever Thou shalt do with me cannot be aught but good. Blessed be Thou if Thou wilt leave me in darkness:"

"And because many seek knowledge rather than good living, therefore they go astray, and bear little or no fruit."

"What is all flesh in Thy sight? For how shall the clay boast against Him that fashioned it?"

"I gently bore contradictions and hard words; I received ingratitude for benefits, blasphemies for My miracles, rebukes for My doctrine."

"Seek a suitable time for thy meditation, and think frequently of the mercies of God to thee."

"Happy is the man who hath the hour of his death always before his eyes, and daily prepareth himself to die."

"And say not ‘I cannot bear these things from such a man, nor are things of this kind to be borne by me, for he hath done me grievous harm and imputeth to me what I had never thought: but from another I will suffer patiently, such things as I see I ought to suffer.’ Foolish is such a thought as this, for it considereth not the virtue of patience, nor by whom that virtue is to be crowned, but it rather weigheth persons and offences against self."

"If thou seek rest in this life, how wilt them then attain to the everlasting rest? Dispose not thyself for much rest, but for great patience. Seek true peace — not in earth, but in heaven; not in men, nor in any other creature, but in God alone."

"In the morning make thy resolves, and in the evening inquire into thy life, how thou hast sped to-day in word, deed, and thought;"

"There is no creature so small and abject, that it representeth not the goodness of God."

"For they truly know their Lord in the breaking of bread, whose heart within them so vehemently burneth, whilst Thou, O blessed Jesus, dost walk and converse with them."

"In his last tour de force, published under the Federal Republic, Der Nomas der Erde (‘The Law of the Earth’), Schmitt showed that the very term fetishised by Oakeshott and Hayek to bespeak the transcendence of abstract procedural rules, exempt from all specific social directives, in its origins actually signified the opposite: and that none other than Thomas Hobbes had been the first to make this clear. […] For Schmitt, such original distribution presupposed a founding appropriation, what he called a Landnahme: the occupation of territory that necessarily preceded any division of it, and which English soil had known as memorably as any, under Roman boot and Norman stirrup. The ‘radical title’ (as Locke put it) underlying any law lay in such taking and allocating, as the etymological linkage of nomos with nemein (to take) suggested. Here, conceptually and historically, the oppositions between rule and goal, law and legislation, the civil and the managerial, dissolve. Nomos and telos are one."

"More serious consideration must be given to the conceptual definition of the political offered by a well-known Roman Catholic exponent of Constitutional Law, Carl Schmitt. In his view the political has its own criterion, which cannot be derived from the criterion of another realm. It is the distinction between friend and foe which in his view corresponds to “the relatively autonomous criteria of other oppositions, good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic, and so on”. The eventuality of a real struggle, which includes the “possibility of physical killing”, belongs to the concept of the foe, and from this possibility the life of man acquires “its specifically political tension”. The “possibility of physical killing” — really it should be “the intention of physical killing”. For Schmitt’s thesis carries a situation of private life, the classic duel situation, over into public life. This duel situation arises when two men experience a conflict existing between them as absolute, and therefore as capable of resolution only in the destruction of the one by the other. There is no reconciliation, no mediation, no adequate expiation the hand that deals the blow must not be any but the opponent’s; but this is the resolution. Every classic duel is a masked “judgment of God”. In each there is an aftermath of the belief that men can bring about a judgment of God. That is what Schmitt, carrying it over to the relation of peoples to one another, calls the specifically political. But the thesis rests on an error of method."

"In the Weimar Republic, the Westphalian Schmitt began his career as the most original Catholic adversary of socialism and of liberalism. In polemics of electric intensity, whose charge was increasingly aimed at the precarious parliamentarism of post-Versailles Germany, he treated their ideas as dilute theologies, which were bound to prove weaker than the force of national myth. His own positive doctrine became a neo-Hobbesian theory of politics. Its critical edge was to protect the state of nature depicted in Leviathan, the war of all against all in which individual agents are pitted against each other, onto the plane of modern collective conflicts: thereby transforming civil society itself into a second state of nature. For Schmitt, the act of sovereign power then becomes not so much the institution of ‘mutual peace’ as the decision fixing the nature and frontier of any community, by dividing friend from foe – the opposition that defines the nature of the political as such. This stark ‘decisionist’ vision came out of a regional background in which the choices seemed, to many others as well as Schmitt, to reduce themselves to two: revolution or counter-revolution."

"Value has its own logic. In the constitutional state that is most clearly recognizable in the enactment of its constitution."

"The most rigorous attempt to construct a theory of the state of emergency can be found in the work of Carl Schmitt. The essentials of his theory can be found in Dictatorship, as well in Political Theology, published one year later. Because these two books, published in the early 1920s, set a paradigm that is not only contemporary, but may in fact find its true completion only today, it is necessary to give a resume of their fundamental theses. The objective of both these books is to inscribe the state of emergency into a legal context."

"According to Schmitt’s aggressive critique, which Fraenkel reiterated in his own writings, the parliament had not originally been an institution of democracy and national politics. When first created in the nineteenth century, it was a distinctly bourgeois institution, open only to wealthy elites. Its purpose was to provide a forum for capable and independent individuals to engage in free discussion and peaceful competition of ideas, then legislate laws for the benefit of the general public. In the Weimar Republic, however, this bourgeois institution had begun to unravel. The electorate now comprised not only wealthy individuals but also the masses, huge parties, powerful pressure groups, and private interests that no longer cared about the public good and sought only to serve their own constituencies. In Schmitt’s narrative, celebrated by many anti-republican conservatives, this irreversible process had turned the German parliament, the Reichstag, into a pathetic institution, in which there was no free discussion or any form of cooperation. As he famously put it, “[s]mall and exclusive committees of parties or party coalitions make their decisions behind closed doors, and what representatives of … interest groups agree to in the smallest committees is more important for the fate of millions of people, perhaps, than any political decision.” Schmitt thus acidly dismissed the parliament as an empty shell that was irrelevant to modern politics. Germany had to dispose of it altogether and reconstitute itself as an authoritarian dictatorship. While Fraenkel agreed with the crux of Schmitt’s painful critique, he strongly rejected his anti-parliamentary conclusions. Schmitt was correct in asserting that the Reichstag had emerged from a bourgeois worldview that sought to preserve individual liberties and free economic enterprise, one that was no longer attuned to the twentieth century. Indeed, the rise of the working class had introduced a new concept of rights to politics. Workers were not interested in individual rights but in what Fraenkel called “collective” rights, which were based on the identity of the group. According to Fraenkel, this concept of “group rights” had spread beyond the working class to religious, ethnic, and other groups. These groups were now demanding that the state represent their interests, not just as individuals, but also as members of collectives. “It has rarely been noticed before,” he maintained, “that our era is experiencing the rudiment of a new social order … [in which] not only the individual, but also associations as such engage independently in the creation of public affairs.” It was this modern focus on group demands that had transformed the parliament into a stage for rival blocs. The difficulty that politicians faced in building coalitions between parties reflected the conceptual conflict between the individualist principles of bourgeois parliamentarianism and the collective nature of modern parties and politics."

"The various philosophies of life presented themselves as a conquest of materialism, or in any case, they readily claimed it. That does not change anything: their valuations, revaluations, and explanations of disvalue have been emptied into the over-all secularization stream, where they have only hastened the tendency to unlearn, which is a neutralizing process, after all."

"Nobody can valuate without devaluating, revaluating, and serving one’s interests. Whoever sets a value, takes position against a disvalue by that very action. The boundless tolerance and the neutrality of the standpoints and viewpoints turn themselves very quickly into their opposite, into enmity, as soon as the enforcement is carried out in earnest. The valuation pressure of the value is irresistible, and the conflict of the valuator, devaluator, revaluator, and implementor, inevitable."

"In a community, the constitution of which provides for a legislator and a law, it is the concern of the legislator and of the laws given by him to ascertain the mediation through calculable and attainable rules and to prevent the terror of the direct and automatic enactment of values. That is a very complicated problem, indeed. One may understand why law-givers all along world history, from Lycurgus to Solon and Napoleon have been turned into mythical figures. In the highly industrialized nations of our times, with their provisions for the organization of the lives of the masses, the mediation would give rise to a new problem. Under the circumstances, there is no room for the law-giver, and so there is no substitute for him. At best, there is only a makeshift which sooner or later is turned into a scapegoat, due to the unthankful role it was given to play. A jurist who interferes, and wants to become the direct executor of values should know what he is doing. He must recall the origins and the structure of values and dare not treat lightly the problem of the tyranny of values and of the unmediated enactment of values. He must attain a clear understanding of the modern philosophy of values before he decides to become valuator, revaluator, upgrader of values. As a value-carrier and value-sensitive person, he must do that before he goes on to proclaim the positings of a subjective, as well as objective, rank-order of values in the form of pronouncements with the force of law."

"As long as the state is a political entity this requirement for internal peace compels it in critical situations to decide also upon the domestic enemy. Every state provides, therefore, some kind of formula for the declaration of an internal enemy."

"The state as the decisive political entity possesses an enormous power: the possibility of waging war and thereby publicly disposing of the lives of men. The jus belli contains such a disposition. It implies a double possibility: the right to demand from its own members the readiness to die and unhesitatingly to kill enemies."

"That the state is an entity and in fact the decisive entity rests upon its political character."

"Like other German theorists of the state, Carl Schmitt held to the idea that politics is always about violence; if we really and truly disagree with other people, we ought to treat them as enemies. Fish does not follow Schmitt this far. To be sure, he fills his books with examples of people who ought to, and usually do, hate each other: secular liberals dealing with religious fundamentalists; full-stop opponents of affirmative action confronting those who support it; defenders of speech codes and critics of hate-crime laws."

"Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy. The political does not reside in the battle itself, which. possesses its own technical, psychological, and military laws, but in the mode of behavior which is determined by this possibility, by clearly evaluating the concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish correctly the real friend and the real enemy."