Theology of Auschwitz by Ulrich Simon

He relates the holocaust to the fatherhood of God, the coming of the Holy Spirit and to Christ’s work and ‘person’.

Ulrich [Richard] Ernst Simon (21 September 1913 in Berlin – 31 July 1997 in London) was an Anglican theologian of German Jewish origin.

Simon had known Thomas Mann during his childhood in Berlin and Dietrich Bonhoeffer was another near neighbour. Simon’s family were non-practising Jews but their lives were at risk in the Third Reich and, after flirting with the Communists, Ulrich Simon was sent to England in 1933. His father, the composer James Simon, later died in the Holocaust. His older brother, Jörn Martin Simon, died in the Moscow Trials in 1937. His mother Anna Levy Simon, escaped to Switzerland where she died about 1975. She was the sister of noted Roman Law scholar, Ernst Levy.

Simon converted to Anglicanism and was made a deacon in 1938 and ordained priest in 1939. He was University Lecturer, King’s College London, 1945–60, Reader in Theology 1960-72, Professor of Christian Literature 1972-80, Dean 1978-80.[

There was a side of him which was deeply pessimistic. The phrase “sick humanity” occurs frequently in his autobiography, and he was deeply distrustful of liberalism, both the ineffective liberalism, as he saw of it, of his German childhood, and the theological liberalism of more recent times. Yet there was always hope, perhaps most in playing or listening to the string quartets of his beloved Haydn and Mozart; his last act, the day before he died, was to get his violin restrung.

Simon had published an essay entitled ‘Samson and the Heroic’ which looks back to the earlier conflict of August 1914 in which, he wrote, the soldiers ‘suffered a spiritual shock from which they could not recover again. There were no heroes, no bloody heroes, and if you wanted to be one you were a crazy idiot. Yet … [the literature about the war] bears witness to the astounding deeds of self-sacrifice … [and] without that brand of godly heroism a race is doomed’.

Later Simon  was to write a book on tragedy and Christianity entitled Pity and Terror in which he acknowledged that Christianity, in its preaching of the cross, has finally denied the tragic reality of the human condition.

In his A Theology of Auschwitz, he tried to ‘show the pattern of Christ’s sacrifice, which summarizes all agonies, as the reality behind Auschwitz’. For the holocaust (‘burnt offering’) ‘is no less a sacrifice than that prefigured in the Scriptures’, that is to say, in the suffering servant of the Lord. In this way, ‘the mechanics of murder were turned into a Godward oblation’, and those who gave their lives in the gas chambers became identified with ‘the supreme sacrifice by way of a sharing analogy’; they were even scapegoats, bearing the sins of the German people. But now ‘the dead of Auschwitz have risen from the dust’, and their resurrection is seen in Israel’s return to the land, in the conquest of antisemitism which ‘both led to Auschwitz and was redeemed there’, and in the contemporary Jewish witness to the world concerning the sacredness of human life and the loving brotherhood of all men.

The corn of wheat, having fallen into the ground, has borne this  fruit. Thus the sufferings of Auschwitz, Ulrich Simon claims, are ‘within the pattern of creation and redemption’. In particular, by interpreting the holocaust ‘in the light of the suffering Christ’ and by seeing its aftermath as ‘reflected in the triumph of the Crucified One’, it has been possible to give ‘spiritual meaning to the meaningless. ‘We venture to attribute the glory of the ascended Christ to the gassed millions.

Simon’s assessment of Auschwitz is still timely.  When we contemplate the horrors of the war in Syria and the obscenity that 62 individuals own as much as 3.5 billion of the poor, the evil that underlies that emblem of the holocaust is clearly still present.  As he says in his opening remarks: “Auschwitz belongs to the past, thank God.  But its multi-dimensional range of evil extends to the present and throws its shadow over the future.  It is for our purpose the comprehensive and realistic symbol of the greatest possible evil which still threatens mankind.”

To contemplate Auschwitz must be to contemplate who we are and question equally the abstractions that theology can hide behind and the metaphysical void so typical of contemporary thought and life.

Simon’s assessment of Auschwitz is still timely.  When we contemplate the horrors of the war in Syria and the obscenity that 62 individuals own as much as 3.5 billion of the poor, the evil that underlies that emblem of the holocaust is clearly still present.  As he says in his opening remarks: “Auschwitz belongs to the past, thank God.  But its multi-dimensional range of evil extends to the present and throws its shadow over the future.  It is for our purpose the comprehensive and realistic symbol of the greatest possible evil which still threatens mankind.”

To contemplate Auschwitz must be to contemplate who we are and question equally the abstractions that theology can hide behind and the metaphysical void so typical of contemporary thought and life

He speaks of Jewish martyrs who “substituted themselves for others in going to death… they regarded their lives as a ransom, their sin offerings, their death as redemptive – that’s seeing Jewish thinking in Christian terms.

He also says: From the blood of Abel to the present day there runs a red thread of meaningful sacrifice through the history of men. – meaningful for whom?

He claims that ‘the Passover abolishes further killing’  – is he confusing it with atonement?

 Quotations:

‘Theology speaks of eternal light, Auschwitz perpetuates the horror of darkness. Nevertheless, as light and darkness are complementary in our experience, and as the glory and the shame must be apprehended together, so the momentous outrage of Auschwitz cannot be allowed to stand, as it has done, in an isolation such as the leprous outcast used to inspire in the past. The evils that we do live after us; unless they are understood they may recur.’

Not for them are the strains of the Requiem aeternam, not for them the absolution from sin and the enjoyment of bliss… The chant to the king of tremendous majesty for pity, for salvation, cannot be sung for them. No archangel descends to collect their souls in the world-wide offering of sacrifice and homage. In the darkness the shades blend with the blackness until complete indifference engulfs them. May they never arise again.

Hence, however much we may choose to mint phrases, the cold fact remains that Jesus at his arrest is prototype of all arrested against their essential nature of freedom.

The theologian is, in fact, so used to the initiative in atonement, which the fourth Gospel attributes to Jesus himself, that at times the Passion narrative reads like the account of a charade.

This theological framework, though uniquely couched in terms of Messianic self-giving, has done good service in accounting for individual martyrdom, Christian or otherwise.

They know that by handing over their body their only remaining freedom lies in the obedience which turns the arrest into a voluntary dedication in sacrifice. Thus they achieve a theological interpretation by their intention and imitation of Christ.

But this interpretation founders when we survey the scene when a German SD detachment rounds up men, women, and children of a typical ghetto outside, say, Kiev or Riga. This is not so because the victims are Jews, but because they are human beings who, however miserable their conditions, existed like plants rooted in a poor soil. They were attached to it, for from it they got their living. The businesses they carried on, the little property they owned, the tradition they had inherited, could not prepare them for a heroic freedom in adversity. The nature of human society is to endow its group organism with normalcy, in which births and deaths occur as a matter of course. It is not its business to shoulder a deep destiny. The only ‘must’ of group existence is to ensure a continuity of life.

The arrest of Christ makes sense in the terms of the whole Passion narrative; the arrest of our contemporaries makes no sense morally or spiritually, since they are torn away from their moorings, hurled together without dis­crimination and concession.

This, then, is not the arrest of Christ re-enacted. Instead of the amazing awe, which even the captors seem to have felt at Gethsemane, there is only brutal terror on the one hand, and trembling fear on the other.

Yet it is in the darkness of the hour of arrest that a 1 reflection of the light of Christ can be seen despite the wired fence and the towers manned by machine-guns. The arrivals are also innocent and unarmed. It is true, their lack of preparedness in most, though not all, cases has been cited as an accusation. In view of what hap­pened it has been held that no men should ever find themselves unarmed.

A theology of Auschwitz cannot be written unless its findings issue in prayer, for we can face the horror only by coming to terms with it liturgically. Thus we are bidden to re-enact the arrest of the innocent.

THE PASSING FROM capricious despotism and mob rule to law is the epoch-making achievement of men of the second rnillenium before Christ

The priests and their minions aim from the start at a death-sentence and therefore arrange a trial which is wholly illegal. The people act as the mob which finally yells for the prisoner’s life. The Roman governor is by comparison only weak and his soldiers are merely tools.

The people destined for Auschwitz share with Jesus the immediacy of their destruction after their arrest. The camps were merely designed for transit. The people were kept on the move.

But the king rat, who establishes a corner in supplies and erects a hierarchy of lesser rats to administer the life and death of all under arrest, did no rule among those on trial before Auschwitz. In th transit camps this system of Antichrist had no time develop. Moreover the moral character of the people countered the conditions with the unselfishness which alone could keep alive the weak, the sick, the very old and the very young. Despite the stunned state of the prisoners they performed notable deeds of humanity.

The Ecce Homo before Pilate brings to a fine point the dignity of Man and the unspeakable horror of sin. The children at Auschwitz  similarly convict us of an undefinable darkness, to which words like ‘trespass’ or ‘rebellion’ simply cannot give expression.

They evoke a standing still in contrition, a con­templative gaze, and a dirge of pity. But the voices from the final station admonish: ‘Weep not for us, weep for yourselves

‘Caressed to the end, nursed and loved, and ultimately in a state of felicitious unconsciousness, with friendly salutations to bid us farewell, and with spiritual en­couragement to speed us on our journey, we are ready to take our departure. For to depart is to arrive.

Not so at Golgotha, nor at Auschwitz. The account of Jesus’s arrival at the place of the skull, scourged, ‘bruised, mocked, and faint, excels in matter-of-fact brevity.

This human condition overwhelms all men. The Lord’s `I thirst’ reproduces the cry of anguish which thousands uttered on lifting heavy weights, and, above all, dragging their emaciated bodies on sore feet against which the ill-fitting clogs rubbed until the fever set in and ter­minated labour and life. This ‘I thirst’ immediately induces the parallel cry of despair: ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’

The peril of theological speculation is to speak too soon, too confidently, as if to cash in on the unknowable experience of Grace. There is no doubt that for some the climax to suffering is not the dreaded deadlock, but the heroic act of self-transcendence, the entry into the divine harmony, not by an illusory mirage born out of a feverish delirium, but an inward conviction. The theo­logical confidence, however, is soon shaken by the fact that only the few and elect can pass thus from the extreme negation to the infinite affirmation. This passage is best illustrated by the head crowned with thorns and the body pitted with spikes, the mouth open with flowing saliva and the skin green with incipient putrefaction—as shown in Griinewald’s famous Isenheim altar piece —and the highly stylized, royal and self-possessed Lord whom Raphael and his school portray in many versions.

All Christian acts and interpretations of martyrdom ! have followed this pattern. Yet at Auschwitz it would I seem to break down, not only because the victims were for the most part not Christians nor willing martyrs. Rather, the nature of the guilt makes it extremely questionable whether even this interpretation of forgive­ness can still be morally upheld. We are in the extra­ordinary position that our moral feelings tend to be outraged even by talk of forgiveness in this connection.

If there is an impersonal law of cause and effect, then no one is guilty. Murderer and murdered are but victims of their circumstances. If there is justice it demands a vindication which is inconceivable. Revenge does not restore life; recompense in the life after death is too I uncertain. If suffering is necessary for eternal harmony,

the evolution of the best of all possible worlds, then the price is too heavy because it is immoral. Solidarity of sin explains nothing. What then is to be done? Is a celestial amnesty the answer in which the heroic share, by forgiving too?

Perhaps the ‘treasury of merit’ includes the prayers of such saints as suffered at Auschwitz without any longing for revenge. Thus we know that the inter­cessions of Edith Stein have come to the aid of SS men after the war.

I do not myself believe that there can be forgiveness for Auschwitz, and I do not think that the words of apply here. Not only the monstrosity, but also the impersonal ‘nothingness’ of the evil render this remission immoral and impossible. There is a sin against Man and Spiritt which Christ declared to be unforgivable, and Auschwitz is this sin against Man and Spirit. It is the supreme act of blasphemy, and the men and tools who used it neither desire nor can receive the forgiveness of their sin.

Ignoring the mythological overtones of this picture, however, its central teaching also runs into trouble after Auschwitz. It is seen to eternalize the state of affairs which defies the laws of humanity. It_seems barely con­ceivable that God should decree an eternal Auschwitz so that, by way of reciprocation, the sins of Auschwitz be satisfied. This would take the doctrine of vindication to an extreme metaphysic of reversal, and thus saddle the Kingdom of God with a counterpart, the Satanic realm. Symmetry prevails in this case over the alleged sovereignty of the good and loving God.

The inadequacy of the stark alternatives, Heaven and Hell, has been mitigated in the past by the creation of Purgatory, where the middle souls, for which the either-or of Heaven and Hell makes no provision, may continue their upward ascent of cleansing. Strictly speaking, these are the souls of those whose sins are forgiven, but whose recompense of wrong-doing is lacking. Their lack leaves a stain which needs to be burnt away. It is not material to our argument that Protestants have steadfastly refused to accept this compromise, mainly on the grounds that it created the abuses, such as indulgences and prayers for the dead, which the Reformation sought to abolish. Far more material is the realization that the world of Auschwitz simply does not move in in a world of gradual ascent, of souls being made perfect by processes analogous to the refinement of precious metals.

The contribution to the doctrine of hell is therefore a clear-cut refusal to grant perpetuity to horror and nothingness.

Could the true God still be seen as the omni­ent and blessed Father after his Son had tasted the bitterness of defeat? The one Greek word `Tetelestai’—It is completed!—enforces the final Credo, a cosmic assertion that the Word does not return void in itself, to void, and for nought. The victim contradicts the open spectacle which he, naked and already putrefying at his wounds on which the flies settle, gives to the world. He is his own evidence against the evident sight of the victory of the chaos. He sustains, though dying, the belief in a reality of goodness and love in the Divine Being.

After the First World War, when death had been found chancy and meaningless, traditional feelings and statement about ‘immortal sacrifice’ came to be regarded with increasing cynicism. Seen in the light of the indiscriminate slaughter a wave of bitter­ness sprang up which regarded even Christ’s crucifixion as all sorts of things, mainly political, rather than the life-giving death which the New Testament proclaimed. Among the thoughtful the search for a meaningful life continued in directions opposed to atonement. A mean­ingful death becomes the property of individuals. ‘Die your own death,’ writes Rilke, in language reminiscent of the Christian desire but averse to the cross. The saving reality is now the integrity of each person and in that sense I am my own saviour and my death crowns my individuality. There is no enemy, there are no demons, as long as I can come to terms with my own fantasies.

The holocaust of Auschwitz seems, however, stub­bornly inexplicable in terms of the well-worn thought‑forms of a non-sacrificial background. Even the sacrificial terms ‘holocaust’, or the Hebrew `Churban’, are used

They could not but manifest the tragic be­wilderment which is expressed by the little girl who stood next to her mother, clutching a doll to the last. In the absence of recorded evidence we, the survivors, can only remotely enter into the experience of death at Auschwitz. We are in a position similar to that when we contemplate the death of Christ and countless martyrs. We observe first of all that this death cannot be equated with the common mortality of man. The knowledge that all men must die simply does not square with this death. The reason is not the physical phenomenon but the intention which causes death. Accordingly we rightly distinguish between death from natural and unnatural causes.

impossible to make out a case for the unique­ness of ‘my death’. The whole method of extermination, the mechanism working on conveyor belt principles, rules out the majestic individuality of the personal death. It impresses upon all the old truth that in death we are all involved together.

No doubt such despair prevailed among many. No doubt a burning hatred to the last remained the legacy of many. Others knew, however inarticulately in the any languages assembled there, that they were wit­nesses to God, that they died for God, his law, the prophetic message, the wisdom from of old. They drowned their resentment in holding on to a trans­cendental cause. They could commit themselves to Truth with a ‘It is finished’ which espied the dawn, the beginning of a better age.

The claim is that all these, at the point of life-giving, enter into the supreme sacrifice by way of a sharing analogy. As it was said that human rites before Christ prefigured his perfect consummation we now maintain that our holocausts are also deeply related thereto.

The ritual of the bitter herbs and sweet food accen­tuates the ambiguity of Passover. It is terrible and delightful, the Cross and Auschwitz reveal the depth of the darkness to be crossed, but the meal of the un­leavened bread also brings out the deathlessness and joy of the communion of the Passover. It is not only a feast of remembrance, but also a firm resolution to have done with darkness and despair. Though sacrificial, it is really and the Christian is bidden to celebrate the feast use ‘Christ our Passover is sacrificed.’ The casting of the leaven symbolizes the decisive ethical step not submit to natural fermentation and corruption. Thus the Cross and Auschwitz are not meant to hand on the future patterns of unending cruelty, but rather ending of the torment. Just because they have endured to the end like sheep for the slaughter they plead

the abolition of the malice and wickedness, the old leaven of the old man.

The dead of Auschwitz have risen from the dust. They proclaim not only their only ordeal and the wrong of the past. They address the present generation of scientists and moralists. They voice the challenge of sin and of righteousness, asking: ‘Where are you? Who are you? Whither your way?’ The legal files may close, but the moral quest grows in volume: `Tua Res agitur I’ , say the dead. ‘Look to us, learn from us !’

The dead have risen up in the return of Israel from the diaspora. The creation of the State after heroic fighting would have been impossible but for the threat and the example of Auschwitz.

The resolution of the Vatican Council on the Jews could never have been passed before Auschwitz—would that it had!’ The Lord’s people are no longer accused of Deicide, a meaningless and yet nastily provocative charge. Jews and Christians form councils on which they in a common cause. A great rapprochement has place as a reply to the horrors of the past. The corn of wheat which after so much torment fell the ground is thus bearing fruit which no one could e predicted between 1942 and 1945.

AUSCHWITZ appears as the huge perversion of the human race because of the triumph of hatred. The absence of all grace and mercy is the great confirmation that life with­out grace and mercy is impossible for the human kind. But Auschwitz issues also the warning that the divine gift is as precious as in the past and not part of the mechanism of existence. It is, given the circumstances, easier to hurl babies into an oven than to look after them by hiding them and feeding them. The sharing of food, the caring for the sick, the identification with the other man, demands a firm stance in the divine covenant where grace is received for grace to be given.

The resurrection from Auschwitz is, therefore, still more a demand than a given fact. The test of its reality is, as after the resurrection of Christ, the love of the brethren as shown by the deep interchange of mercy. Earthly acts of mercy, as Auschwitz has shown, are mirrors of eternal Grace. They demand not only the training in continual awareness but a restraint of self.

By turning an episode in history into a unique, one might say, sacred cause, we take a step of great trans formation. We claim that God reigns throughout the catastrophe and dismiss the pessimistic view, expressed by Emerson, that ‘things are in the saddle and ride mankind.’ We venture to attribute the glory of the ascended Christ to the gassed millions. We deny that the dead are dead still. We oppose the cynical thesis that all things remain as they have always been and that it is best to be a guard rather than a prisoner, to eat well rather than to starve in the godless circus.

Unless God can be seen to bring recon­ciliation to the irreconcilable, to make man’s lost cause and ruin his own and gain, the here and now casts its spell over the future as well as over the past. Without the great transcendental ‘Nevertheless’ non-existence Overtakes being. Theology, so long a prisoner to history n’ lid earthly evidence, must step out of its secular walls.

in our repudiation of sin and unreality, which is t, the first step in faith. To say ‘No’ to Auschwitz is already to say ‘Yes’ to our ascent in faith, hope, and love. With

Luther we may state the common experience that unless we had perished we should not have believed. Thus the work of the divine Grace arises within the camp’s walls. There we realize not only what we are, but also what we may become because God is and acts.

Our humanity depends on the divinity of the in­carnate Lord as the assurance of the meaningfulness of ‘the meaningless. Without the God-Man Auschwitz – would stand as a nightmare, the culmination of un­reason and malice. Owing to his divine status alone there is no suffering which remains outside the orbit of meaning mediated by him : ‘In order to atone for the sins of all men Christ suffered the most profound sadness, but not so great that it exceeded the rule of reason’ (St. Thomas Aquinas, S.T.Q. 46).

The logic of existentialism is irrefutable. It locates the om for transformation in the individual. Like a’s K. the existentialist proceeds into the castle of own consciousness. There he can ignore the world. e can remain free even at Auschwitz by erecting a ce around himself to fence in his freedom in slavery. utside Auschwitz the Organization Man cannot touch him. He touches life at the point where he contracts out of life.

The modern hermit, like his traditional forbear, adjusts himself to conditions, but does not transform them. As he stands on his own pillar he makes a bid for his own transformation. His endeavour is as heroic as e social ways of perfection. His freedom is not sapped y secularization and institutionalization, but it is not he freedom gained by the Cross of ‘other people’ which comes to fruition here. It is a transcendent answer to Auschwitz, but it is not the freedom of the ascension. Yet the failure of the ways of self-transcendence by the sword, by the build-up of institutions, by the permeation I of the secular world, and by retrenchment decision, only indicates the magnitude of the task of transformation. All these ways are valid, but none achieve their end, for the vocation of man transcends world and self. ‘The Word of the living Jesus Christ is the creative call by which he awakens man to an active knowledge of the truth and thus receives him into the new standing of the Christian, namely, into a particular fellowship with Himself, thrusting him as his afflicted but well-equipped witness into the service of His prophetic work.”

Our theological conclusion, therefore, must be against all the deceits of progress, the lures of a social Gospel, the worship of culture, and the evasion of quietism. The regeneration through the ascended Christ spills over into these external and inward spheres of the complex human situation, without ever terminating the process of transformation; but the Kingdom of God can never `be’ on earth. The expectation provides the dialectic between eternity and history, but it does not lessen the reality of both. Rather, the tension makes such demands as can only be met by human decisions which go beyond their immediate terms of reference. Tillich is right when he discerns in the ultimate concern the authority for temporal decisions with eternal significance. Only thus actions qualify for the ‘history of salvation’.

The celestial Christ is the eternal High Priest of mankind whose prophetic word and action come to fruition in self-oblation. The pattern of priesthood answers thus to the problem Hof of prophetic weakness, and especially the death of the prophets in their witness. It bestows inalienable rights nd dignity to the witness and takes his regeneration beyond the contingency of events and the power of Antichrist. Yet this pattern also presses now, in the light of our experience, for a definition of priesthood in realistic terms.

Modern ethical theories illustrate the erosion of moral conviction, formerly based upon the freedom of the will. They go a long way towards justifying Auschwitz and preparing for another hell. They implicitly deny that the ‘ good is absolute, can be known, and may be done. No action can be commended on a priori grounds. Broad’s

academic dictum ‘We can no more learn to act rightly by appealing to the ethical theory of right action than we can play golf well by appealing to the mathematical theory of the flight of the golf-ball’ is now seen in a different light, because born out by history. There is no authority for a categorical imperative but merely an analysis of possible courses of action.

The mentality which cries for ever ‘The Temple of the Lord’ as an answer ‘To what shall I do?’ certainly finds plenty to do for idle hands, but it fails in the task of liberation. It is not the priestly side of religion, as is sometimes assumed. The oblation of self-giving to God by Christ in the Spirit requires no man-made temples. Indeed, they often stand in the way of the priestly office of reconciliation. The mentality which never escapes from the here and now achieves little in the here and now. It fails to bring even to secular institutions a whiff of freedom since every self-perpetuating office repudiates the transcendence of the spirit. But institutionalism as a home for charismatic creativity aspires towards God’s pattern of action and stands over against the world.

The old problem of the Kingdom and the world, or of Israel and the heathen, or of Church and State, has become more acute and complex with every passing century. If Augustine ultimately failed to relate the two worlds—and thereby yet made his greatest contribution to both the City of God and the city of this world—it is improbable that we shall succeed in our day. Auschwitz has, however, enabled us to see that whilst the earthly city may become, as the prophets and the gospels per­ceived, a veritable hell, our condemnation of this hell does not imply a withdrawal from the world. Similarly the apparent glories of the state in welfare and education and the abundance of material goods must not be taken as the forerunner of the Kingdom of God. The two worlds remain distinct, and a secular Christianity is a contradiction in terms. The secular world succeeds because it owns no power but its own. The kingdom stands against the world since it repudiates its power and its glory. But men belong to both worlds and discover in their dual role the inevitable conflict. We must ‘do’ in this present world, even within the framework of its institutions, though we have here no abiding city. We act here in the light of what we are to become. We endeavour to sow humane feelings and build humane institutions because they attest the spiritual worth which the world does not know and without which it devours itself.

After Auschwitz it may be said that all other ethical problems derive from this insoluble impasse. It is a lesson of despair which had to be learnt during the war when traditional freedoms had to be violated. For example, the dilemma of the Swiss Government then met the tragic givenness of the situation in that had it admitted all the Jewish refugees who might have crossed the border to safety it would have imperilled this very safety since a German invasion would certainly have followed.’

Hence we must reluctantly oppose the presumption of what has become known as ‘situation ethics’. Here the attempt is made to regulate conduct not according to objective principles but with reference to ‘calculated 1 love’. Whilst we agree that the person outweighs in importance any action we cannot reduce the scope of to such a nebulous concept as love. Even before anarchy became mob government Dean Inge that ‘Love of God is talked about more often than ‘ The same is certainly true of human love, which not normally control conduct, if only because real favours aggression and does not present us with a unity of interest. The situation, therefore, generally contradicts the factor which is meant to regulate it.

Clinical research pricks the bubble of situational love-ethics, for it confirms the prophetic analysis of our sickness. It is an affront to reason and experience to shelve the problem of love by playing a false trump-card, such as ‘Love God—or man—and do what you like’. Even the support of a few Biblical texts cannot alter the fact that we cannot love as we would and that our inability to love is text-book stuff in every clinical log­book.

Liberation is not a matter of words but of power.

Libera nos, Domine. . . !

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