Dr Paul Thelakat

1. Revelation is Dialogue
This writer met the retired cardinal Joseph Pareccattil on a special occasion years back. As I was taking leave of him after a long conversation, he gave me a gift, which was nothing but a letter he wrote to the secretary of the Oriental Congregation in Vatican. It was a critical response to the letter of Abp Miroslav Stefan Marusyn (1924-2009) on his “last Judgment” of the Syro-Malabar order of Raza which was inaugurated by St Pope John Paul II in Kerala. Cardinal Joseph asked the Ukrainian Archbishop, “Who is he to make the last judgment?” His letter clearly said any text is final only in a provisional way and to define finality is a type of fundamentalism. He was criticizing an attitude of authority without faith in logos and dialogue of the Vatican office. The letter was shocking for its criticism and enlightenment. Not mincing words, the cardinal clearly stated that any text will change as generations and mentality of the faithful change. May I quote from Hanna Arendt’s The Human Condition: “What I propose in the following is a reconsideration of the human condition from the vantage point of our newest experiences and our most recent fears? This, obviously, is a matter of thought, and thoughtlessness—the heedless recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of “truths” which have become trivial and empty—seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time. What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.” It is a continuous process. Within the framework of a people can a man live as a man among others? Only when people live and function in consort with other peoples can it contribute to the establishment upon earth of “a commonly conditioned and commonly controlled humanity. Not man but men inhabit this planet. Plurality “is the law of the earth.” The individual is actually left not in isolation; the Syro-Malabar Synod has not accepted it nor attempted to live it. The recent history of the Syro-Malabar Church is in the deaf atmosphere of the abdication of dialogue and rationality. But, strangely, synodality stands for dialogue at all levels. Cardinal Ratzinger himself described the newly emerging understanding of revelation that is “seen basically as dialogue.” This understanding of the unfolding of revelation is expressed as an ongoing dialogue between God and humanity in human history. The human race actually exists only in the form of individual men. The individual is of vital importance. There is the fact that all human beings belong to the same species and are sufficiently alike to understand one another. Arendt refers to this as equality: “To avoid misunderstanding: the human condition is not the same as human nature, and the sum total of human activities” (HC 9-10). The process of human thinking will go on, no authority can stop it.
2. Return to Soliloquy
A serious soul searching of the way the Syro-Malabar Synod’s proceedings will reveal that it is betraying the fundamentals of the Catholic Church. Many priests and people see in the Synod two fundamental burning problems. The Major Archbishop had committed a series of violations of canonical, civil and criminal laws. He is facing more than a dozen court cases, including criminal cases. There are two Church conducted investigative reports submitted in Vatican and the Synod is fully in the know of the issues involved. Added to that, both the Income Tax department and the Enforcement Directorate of the country have taken cases against him and the procedures are on. The High Court of Kerala has ordered him to face criminal trial. In spite of them, the Synod has always defended the Major Archbishop saying he has done nothing immoral. Such a stand is suicidal and betrayal of Christ before the public. It was indeed an indefensible position. The synod refuses any kind of dialogue.

“The Synod has withdrawn from the Logos, i.e language. They have got shut up in the Deed, their collective Will to power!”

The synod is hand in glove with the Major Archbishop and has converted his personal problem into a liturgical problem and as a result divided the Church into two factions. Cunningness came into play to destroy the Church by digging up an issue that had been buried by the former Major Archbishop. In 1999, there was a unanimous decision to have uniformity in liturgical celebration of the Eucharist. But that decision could not be put into practise. The present Major Archbishop now exhumes that decision using a letter of Pope Francis and arbitrarily imposes it without any discussion. Neither was the letter of the Pope obtained in a transparent manner nor was it translated honestly. The Pope was cunningly dragged into the controversy. In spite of the Nuncio advising caution, there was no discussion on the topic. A minority of more than 15 bishops were opposed to imposition of uniformity. Despite that, the majority imposed their will without even holding a discussion on the matter. The Synod has taken a decision knowingly or unknowingly to give priority to their authority and will over logos and dialogue.
3. A Chimera Called Conscience
In the dialectics of secularization the question of ethos and logos is discussed. Cardinal J. Ratzinger’s advocacy of a generous extension of reason represents the far surer guard against terror. In 2001, Jurgen Habermas signalled a remarkable change of direction and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger engaged in constructive dialogue with him. Habermas put this principle into practice not only in the debate with Ratzinger, but in a further colloquium with the German Jesuits. Ratzinger in Caritas in Veritate, wrote: “Love and Word. Because it is filled with truth, charity can be understood in the abundance of its values, it can be shared and communicated. Truth in fact, is logos, which creates dia-logos, and hence communication and communion. Truth, by enabling men and women to let go of their subjective opinions and impressions, allows them to move beyond cultural and historical limitations and to come together in the assessment of the value and substance of things. Truth opens and unites our minds in the logos of love.” (nos.3-4) For Ratzinger, totalitarianism is the existential question of our age, because the destruction of conscience has always been the precondition for totalitarian obedience. Ratzinger expresses the indispensability of conscience for the health of democracy in his essay ‘Conscience in its Time.’ He speaks against the backdrop of Germany’s totalitarian nightmare, in which it was Hitler’s self-declared aim to liberate people from ‘a chimera called conscience and morality’ and in which Göring could proudly proclaim ‘I have no conscience! The name of my conscience is Adolf Hitler.’ Conscience is the only true safeguard against tyranny and totalitarianism, just as the abolition of conscience is always totalitarianism’s top priority. The message is that conscience ‘ceaselessly disturbs the peace of those whose power comes at the expense of others’ rights.’
The synod’s will may look like the self-imposed moral law in Kant. As H. Arendt noted in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Kant’s identification of the will with a self-imposed moral ‘law’ was all too easily assimilated by the cliche´d, unimaginative thinking of a conformist like Eichmann, who ‘in one respect… did indeed follow Kant’s precepts’, translating Kant’s practical reason, the principle behind the law, as the ‘will of the Fuehrer.’ Rejecting any form of practical reason that is not humanized by judgement, prudence, and imagination as they negotiate the sensus communis, Arendt rejects the moralistic Kant as one of those ‘professional thinkers’ whose speculations are based on the thinking ego. It is Kant the moralist, in retreat from the messiness of human phenomena, who is more pleased, when considering phenomena such as the will, with necessity rather than freedom. Kant was a Protestant who gave primacy to will of faith than reason. This leads the triumphalism of ‘official history’ and instead attempted to transform the pathos of the historical ubiquity of genocide into a universal legacy for mankind. We are entering into field of the abdication of reason and even morality. Thus the church leaders becoming neutral amoral cogs in the machine. This is what Arendt meant by banality of evil – the Faustian principle. Leadership is a collective, relational, endeavour. Ongoing scandals in the corporate, as well as the political arena, it was widely felt that people were losing confidence in leaders. Authentic leadership was perceived as the potential “antidote” that would offer a guide to assuage leaders’ wrongdoings.” Yet what began as an ethical inquiry into leadership malpractice has rapidly turned into a prescriptive theory that does little to explain fully why authenticity might be valuable to leadership praxis. Authentic leadership exhibits a kind of worldlessness, since it is founded on abstract ideas that fail to convey the complexity of human experience. The notion of the strong, isolated leader is a myth, since it is only by working together that we accomplish anything. Over time, however, leadership defined as collective action became forgotten. The leader is no more than primus inter pares, that is, first among equals. The failure of Adolf Eichmann and other Nazis to take responsibility for their actions, this way of thinking about leadership has fatal consequences.
4. Thoughtlessness Men
In 1961 Arendt went to Jerusalem to cover the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker magazine. In the course of her trial report Arendt was: “struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer [Eichmann] that made it impossible to trace the incontestable evil in his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer – at least the very effective one now on trial – was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no… firm ideological convictions or specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic… was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.” Eichmann’s evil was banal, not because it was ‘commonplace’, but because he was ‘commonplace.’ Thus Arendt, by emphasising Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, challenges the traditional view that a perpetrator who habitually commits evil must necessarily have a diabolical character or pathological psychology. Arendt employs the term ‘thought’ with an essentially Socratic methodology in mind. In The Life of the Mind Arendt writes: “clichés, stock phrases, adherences to conventional, standardised codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognised function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention which all events and facts arouse by virtue of their existence…the difference in Eichmann was only that he clearly knew of no such claim at all.”
According to Eichmann’s interpretation of the Nazi categorical imperative, to “act in such a way that the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it”, he had no wrong, but only his ‘duty.’ Thus, Eichmann had a conscience, and indeed it would probably have spoken up had Eichmann done other than his perceived duty. The problem was that Eichmann’s conscience answered not to thought or reason, but to the dictates of Hitler’s will. Eichmann’s crimes and by extension, those of the Nazi regime as a whole as essentially motiveless… Accordingly evil loses its depth and dimension and becomes simply banal.” “It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme and that it possessed neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay to waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality” (The Nazi State was inspired by dialectical Hegel): “The self-conscious moral substance is the State; it is the rational, divine will that has so organized itself. Its Constitution is the heart of justice. The State realizes the idea of the highest freedom on earth, it is God on earth, and therefore it has the highest right against the individual for whom it is the highest duty to be a member of the State and totally to sacrifice himself to it.” Arendt’s Eichmann so shocking is his ordinariness. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
She showed herself ready to dispense with the Devil, ready to face the problem of evil in entirely secular terms. “Evil is not a principle, because it is sheer absence, and absence can be stated “in a private and in a negative sense”… Because of its privative character, absolute or radical evil cannot exist. No evil exists in which one can detect “the total absence of good.” Evil is a fungus or surface phenomenon that can parasitically only live on the good and has no depth or reality of its own. Thus, given this, it would follow that absolute or radical evil cannot possibly exist, because an evil that is the complete absence of good is the very ontological definition of non-Being. In the human crisis, which we are experiencing today, these two have become questionable—the person and the truth. The faith in the power of reason – the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power is lost in this church. “Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences. Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom. Thinking does not solve the riddles of the universe. Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act,” Wrote Martin Heidegger. Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in that he did not bother about thinking, he had the will to act and he did. In the beginning was deed, is the creed! Unfortunately he was one who sold his soul to his leader. What former times called the dignity or the honour of man is lost. Only one who believes oneself right can judge another; thus, judgment presupposes a certain authority and superiority. The judge must have a feeling of distinction, what Nietzsche calls a “pathos of difference,” in order to arrogate to himself or herself the right to judge. We are in a darkness that no amount of Aufklärung can ever completely dispel. A darkness in which nothing is hidden. And that is what the metaphor of darkness stands for. Where does this all lead? A church in tragedy. But I believe in the Imago Dei in man as Aquinas taught is reason. I take it upon myself to answer before mankind for every thought means to live in that luminosity, in which oneself and everything one thinks is tested. Pope Benedict XVI spoke: “Not to act “with logos” is contrary to God’s nature.”’ With Arendt may I conclude, “I have always believed that, no matter how abstract our theories may sound or how consistent our arguments may appear, there are incidents and stories behind them which, at least for ourselves, contain as in a nutshell the full meaning of whatever we have to say.” We see tragic abdication of reason. For the Synod has withdrawn from the Logos, i.e language. They have got shut up in the Deed, their collective Will to power!