The Gospel of John begins with, “In the beginning was the Word.” This sentence was always the methodological key to all the process of any and every decision making in the church. The will followed the reasoning of word. If it turns around and the ethos – which is the epochal understanding on any subject – what follows is the Will to power of Nietzsche, who happened to be Gospel of Nazism. Romano Guardini was teaching in the University of Berlin; he was dismissed without any explanation for he became persona non grata of the regime’s leadership.
Guardini wrote a book of liturgy, which became classical work. The book has seven chapters and the last chapter is titled: The Primacy of the Logos over the Ethos. He wrote, “What is the position of the liturgy generally to the moral order? What is the quality of the relation in it of the will to knowledge, as of the value of truth to the value of goodness? Or, to put it in two words, what is the relation in it of the Logos to the Ethos? It will be necessary to go back somewhat in order to find the answer.” The Syro-Malabar synod is mired in liturgical controversy. The majority of the bishops, clergy, religious and laity find nothing wrong with a decision that is the Will of the Synod. Was the Will followed reasoning and discourse – the logos? Did the synod gave primacy to logos? “This ‘primacy’ has been misunderstood. It is not a question of a priority of value or of merit. Nor is there any suggestion that knowledge is more important than action in human life.” Guardini wrote, “in life as a whole, precedence does not belong to action, but to existence. What ultimately matters is not activity, but development.”… “It is not in a hurry, but has time. It can afford to wait and to develop. This spiritual attitude is really Catholic.” Pope Francis wrote to the Syro-Malabar church: “Time is important than space.” He knew it being a man who took the subject: “Polar opposition as Structure of Daily Thought and Christian Proclamation”—also on the primacy of Logos over Ethos, inspired by the title of the final chapter of Guardini’s classic and by Father Sievernich’s philosophical text Der Gegensatz (The Opposition) under whom Fr Jorge Mario Bergoglio (b.1936) came to Germany to earn a doctorate in sacred theology (STD) at the Jesuit philosophical-theological college of St Georgen, which did not finish. Modernity has lost sight of a vital component of existence: listening to and obeying the inner order of being. “Contemplation of God or love of Him” is no longer deemed foundational to minds formed in primarily practical matters. Guardini thinks here not only of the large, dehumanizing factories, such as those found in the grand modern metropolises of Berlin, Paris, or London, that result in massified individuals. He is also thinking of the ideas that generated these inhuman work centres, especially those of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Will to Power. Guardini asserts already for this age and time that “the Ethos has obtained the primacy over the Logos.” “The practical will is everywhere the decisive factor,” Guardini writes, “and the Ethos has complete precedence over the Logos, the active side of life over the contemplative.” Even liturgy in the modern world becomes a practical, results-based activity. The Second Vatican Council spells out Guardini’s Christocentrism with a celebrated line in Gaudium et Spes. The Ethos became all-dominant during the ugly works and days of the Nazi Third Reich. In reaction to this ugliness, the world heralded a 1960 German film version of Goethe’s Faust. The critics reserved special praise for the German actor Gustav Gründgens’s stellar performance of Mephistophiles, the demon tempter and beguiling protagonist who urges Faust and, the German audience might say, Hitler to embrace the primacy of Ethos. Faust says: “In the beginning was the Deed.” The irony would not have been lost on either Goethe or Guardini: the human being is utterly unable to live a life “unrestrained” by the Logos. We are placed under the dictatorship of the Ethos. Leisure, a cousin of the liturgy, becomes a frightful perspective that needs to be avoided at all costs, lest one need confront the truth of being, the Logos. “In the liturgy the Logos has been assigned its fitting precedence over the will,” Guardini states.