George Steiner’s autobiography Erratta: An examined life concludes with this confessional statement. “But I am unable, even at the worst hours, to abdicate from the belief that the two validating wonders of mortal existence are love and the invention of the future tense. Their conjunction, if it will ever come to pass, is the Messianic.” The invention of the future tense is what many authorities in the Church get involved in. We continually speak of the future, of a better tomorrow. Whenever as a pastor I meet people sick with afflictions of body and mind, I encourage them and speak of a cure and a better morrow. A Church leader is one who exudes hope and courage needed to face the challenges of every-day life. A leader’s role is that of a prophet, an inventor of the future, and therefore an ardent anti-fascist. Fascism thrives on fate and fatalism. For the Fascist, nothing new happens in the world, everything repeats to the utmost tiresome drudgery of life. A fatalist is a fascist rooted in the earth like a tree. There is hardly any movement, every day omits its tomorrow. There is no dream to fulfil and there is no promise to accomplish. The fascist seeks his greatness in his birth, and so they are racists. They have nothing to achieve, because they see determinism everywhere. They are chained to their biology.
This danger of fatalist fascism is real in the consumerist world of ours. Nietzsche made a world of the Will to Power. It became the slogan or the Gospel of Nazism, which is fascism wedded to paganism of nature. What is primary for the fascist is the fateful ‘will’ to which everything will have to bow. Primacy of the Word over ethos comes from the first sentence of the 4ht Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the word.” In Goethe’s narrative of the Western myth of Dr. Faustus, who sold his soul to the Mephistopheles, this verse of the Gospel is changed as, “In the beginning was the deed.” It bears the signature of the devil, a temptation everyone may face to start everything with the immutable will. The almighty will of the ego rules every one. The fatality of Being sends its fiat to the world to be blindly followed: “It is not in a hurry, but has time. It can afford to wait and to develop.” We give primacy to dialogue and monologue. The language of the Bible is dialogical. M. Bakthin wrote: “More to the point would be its juxtaposition to Biblical and evangelical dialogue. The influence on Dostoevsky of Job’s dialogue and several evangelical dialogues is indisputable …In its structure Job’s dialogue is internally endless, for the opposition of the soul to God—whether the opposition be hostile or humble—is conceived in it as something irrevocable and eternal”
This spiritual attitude is truly Catholic. And if it is also a fact, as some maintain, that Catholicism is in many aspects, as compared with the other denominations, “backward,” by all means let it be. Catholicism could not join in the furious pursuit of the unchained will, torn from its fixed and eternal order… this is the primacy of the Logos over the Ethos, and by this, harmony with the established and immutable laws of all existence.”
A Christian always has a horizon of becoming and always creates the future tense. In language, its is done with words. So, there is always the primacy of word over ethos.The 7th and the last chapter of Romano Guardiani’s famous book The Spirit of Liturgy is “The Primacy Of The Logos Over The Ethos.” The Catholic Church always gave the Logos precedence over the ethos. Absolute priority was assigned to the contemplative life over the active life. The Church has constantly viewed with the deepest distrust every ethical conception of truth and of dogma. Any attempt to base the truth of a dogma merely on its practical value is essentially unCatholic. The Church represents truth-dogma as an absolute fact, based upon itself, independent of all confirmation from the moral or even from the practical sphere.What ultimately matters is not activity, but development. The roots of and the perfection of everything lie, not in time, but in eternity.