Church Fathers had something to say about nationalism

With nationalism resurgent around the globe, as authoritarian leaders harness the political energies of populist discontent, it’s worth revisiting a stunning lecture given in Salzburg in 1962 by Father Joseph Ratzinger.

You know Ratzinger later became Pope Benedict XVI, but perhaps you didn’t know about this lecture, later published as the book The Unity of the Nations: A Vision of the Church Fathers.

What kind of higher unity should Christians think about, now that nationalism is creeping in various digital forms over their minds, threatening to colonize their consciences?

Ratzinger draws from patristic thought, focusing his attention first on Origen, and then on Saint Augustine. They provide insights on the meaning of national identity and the place of the Church in relation to this identity.

Origen bears witness to the role of Christianity as a revolutionary force bringing a “new order” that is “not a renewal of something this-worldly but rather the eschatological kingdom of peace,” says Ratzinger.

Origen describes the this-worldly component of politics, in blunt fashion, as a domination by demonic powers.

Ratzinger explains that, for Origen, the “angels of the peoples” are “the ones that allotted to the individual peoples their language and their land,” giving them national cultures and identities.

Origen calls these “angels of the peoples” by the name of “archons,” a Greek word meaning “rulers” or “princes.” They are the sinister spiritual powers and principalities of disorder, injustice, and unlawfulness.

In contrast, Israel is allotted no such this-worldly national identity under the rule of the satanic archons’ kingdoms of the world.

Instead, for Origen, notes Ratzinger, Israel “formed the true state which was the only true home for all human beings.”

In opposition to this, a bad angel is placed next to each human being, which tries to drag them into submission under the national rule of an archon.

The threat of these various this-worldly national identities for Origen is summed up by Ratzinger thus: “Whoever put himself in the category of a national identity had thereby betaken himself to prison and handed himself over to the archon and to the dominating power of evil.”

Explaining the role of Christ in relation to Israel, Origen himself uses the following words in his Homily on Luke about Luke 12:58: “Christ our Lord has conquered all the archons and brought the peoples everywhere … out of the captivity of the archons and led them to himself for salvation’s sake.”

In a passage that should give pause to our contemporary enthusiasts of nationalism (whose political goals include making nations great again), Origen contrasts salvation in Christ with enslavement to a national identity:

“You too used to be under an archon’s rule. Jesus has come and snatched you from the wicked power and brought you over to God the Father. But our bad angel is accompanying us and is trying to lead us to our archon.”

In other words, as Ratzinger observes, the salvation worked by Jesus is not some private religious experience confined to the inner psychology of believers. Rather, it is a politically significant, revolutionary accomplishment.

In short, says Ratzinger, for Origen the salvific action of Jesus consists in “the fact that he conquered the archons and led human beings out of the prison of national identity, into the unity of God and into the unity of a common humanity.”

The demonic angels of the peoples, however, seek to absolutize national identity, in order to enslave people. On this point, “Augustine’s thinking coincides with that of Origen,” notes Ratzinger. For Augustine, “the demonic power of the political” has also “suppressed the truth.”

In contrast, Augustine speaks of a supranational unity of Christians, which is the fruit of their redemption. In these political terms, observes Ratzinger, the redemptive sacrifice of Christ and Christians now becomes “truly understandable … as a setting free.”

Christ has overthrown the “political cult, which was a cult of demons” and “opposed to truth”; therefore, freedom consists instead in “the one universal service of the truth.”

Augustine writes in The City of God (V, 24) of what a Christian should consider political success to be: namely, the rule of justice; with leaders who are gentle and humble, rather than proud and vain; and who are not authoritarians, but rather work with others as “co-rulers”; and who do not use power “to satisfy their personal animosities,” but rather govern “with the leniency of mercy and the generosity of beneficence”; who do not “give free rein to self-indulgence” but “prefer to govern their own base desires more than to govern any peoples”; and who offer God “the sacrifice of humility and compassion and prayer.”

The contrast with today’s loudest proponents of nationalism could not be any clearer.