Legitimacy and Legality

I have been reading Giorgio Agamben’s little book about the abdication of Pope Benedict. As always, there is much to stimulate thinking, although even in this very short work (really just two overlapping lectures) there are many subtle threads that one doesn’t quite follow.

A key point is the distinction  between legitimacy and legality. As Agamben points out, when law ‘presumes to legislate over everything’ it actually betrays ‘through an excess of formal legality, the loss of all substantial legitimacy’. This seemed to me to pinpoint key issues in the whole Brexit debate. From the point of view of many Brexiteers, the whole problem is one of unaccountable Brussels bureaucrats legislating over absolutely everything including the shape of bananas. Exactly as Agamben says this is perceived as signalling a lack of real legitimacy. From this point of view, the legality of the EU is trumped by the legitimacy of the Brexit referendum. To which the counter-argument seems obvious: what is the legitimacy of a one off vote in which less than half of the possible electorate voted to leave the EU when counted against the treaty obligations to multiple nations on multiple topics freely accepted by a sovereign government with the support of over two-thirds of voters?

But it is just this sort of issue that the Remain camp didn’t address, fixating instead on disputable and since partially falsified economic predictions (though it is now clear that ‘we’ will be significantly worse off even on the most optimistic scenarios). Even more fundamental to the legitimacy of the EU (and Britain’s being a member of it), however, is the basic reason for its existence, namely, to bring peace to a war-ravaged continent that not only came to the brink of self-destruction (as it had in the Napoleonic Wars and the Thirty Years’ War) but also drew the world as a whole into its terrible vortex. This, coupled with the commitment to building a community of nations on the basis of law and human rights, is the substantial ground of its legitimacy, a legitimacy that Britain had implicitly accepted, though, as shown by the relentless low-level polemic against the authority of the European courts, accepted only grudgingly.

Next time: what has this got to do with the Pope?

Konstanz

I am currently staying with a friend in Konstanz and yesterday morning we walked into the next village (called Gottlieben: ‘Love [of] God’), which involved crossing the border from Germany into Switzerland, leaving the EU and coming back in again. Although there was a border post, it didn’t seem to be manned – which was just as well as I hadn’t brought my passport. This is presumably how it will be – how it will have to be – with the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. If there have to be borders, let them be unmanned!

Gottlieben itself is a picture-book late medieval village, immaculately conserved with scarcely a spot of dust in the streets – but whereas in 1400 it would have been full of noise from horses, carts, farmyards, servants, peddlars, dogs, etc. today it was almost totally silent as the houses are either holiday homes or occupied by commuters to Zurich. Beautiful, but without life. On the outskirts we passed a gloomy-looking castle partly screened by old, shaggy evergreens. This was once the Bishop’s palace and it was where the Czech theologian Jan Hus, a follower of the Englishman John Wycliffe, was held captive after being condemned by the Council of Konstanz (1414-18), waiting to be burned at the stake for his ‘heresies’.

The threads of several European destinies criss-cross in this tragic episode. In our own time, John Paul II, the Polish Pope, praised Hus’s ‘moral courage’ and apologized for his ‘cruel death’ at the hands of the Church. But how could Christendom have taken such a terribly and to us obviously wrong turn? Why did it need the Thirty Years’ War or ‘s ‘Grand Inquisitor’ for churches to realize that no possible interpretation of the gospel could justify committing such violence in Christ’s name? Or for any reason? The castle is now occupied by a retired Italian opera singer, who lives alone, screened off from the world by the gloomy evergreens.

Irish and Scots in Erfurt

Last night our Centre had a pub-night, held in one of the local Irish Pubs ‘Molly Malone’s’ (yes, there’s more than one Irish Pub). It was a nice chance to hear about some of the projects of colleagues: smell in medieval mysticism, emotional capital, and human rights in India. But the pub itself was culturally confused, as the staff all wore kilts that were quite definitely Scottish and not Irish and my ‘Paddy’s’ was served in a schnapps glass that just didn’t work for whisky!

In fact Erfurt has a good track record in confusing Irish and Scottish, and this confusion has even played a role in the history of philosophy. In 1915 Martin Heidegger presented his Habilitation (or second doctorate) that would qualify him for an academic career. (He’d go on to become one of the most influential thinkers of modern times.) The subject was: Duns Scotus’ Doctrine of Categories – or so it said on the title page and the supposed author of the doctrine, John, was indeed a Scot, being born in Duns, Berwickshire. Later he taught in both Paris and Oxford, his stay in Oxford celebrated poetically by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Yet ah! this air I gather and I release /He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what /He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace; /Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller.

In fact, the work is now believed to be by one Thomas of Erfurt. So how did the confusion come about? One theory is this: Erfurt then had what was called a Scottish College, the Church of which is still called the Scottish Church. However, as often in the Middle Ages, this was actually a College for Irish scholars. The manuscript of the treatise commented on by Heidegger had no name on the title page, but at some point was inscribed ‘By the Scot’ on it (that is, by someone from the Scottish College). Later, this was assumed to be by the most famous Scot of medieval theology, John from Duns.

In this small confusion of texts we see criss-crossing lines of connection between Scotland, Ireland, Germany, France, and England (and, if we add Hopkins, Wales) and a reminder in miniature of the cosmopolitan freedom of medieval Catholic Europe.

Are the darkest hours still to come?

Reviewing ‘Darkest Hour’ for Die Zeit, Sonja Hartl commented that it was a shame that Joe Wright hadn’t made any allusions to contemporary events. As she comments ‘Even in these dark hours, Churchill’s speeches always held to England’s [sic] responsibility for Europe, notably for its position as defender of democracy and freedom. Brexit, however, means precisely withdrawing from this responsibility.’ Instead of making such an application, she adds, the film indulges a kind of sentimental nostalgia such that ‘one can’t held wondering whether, in the end, Churchill really did avert the darkest hour in British history’. Ouch.

Die Zeit, incidentally, is a paper we can only envy. Even compared with the best of our Sunday newspapers, it offers serious intellectual engagement on all fronts and actually has informed and sensible discussions of big theological and philosophical topics – once, when travelling, I bought an issue that had a special Kant supplement: even the Guardian and Observer wouldn’t dare go that far. If our press was more grown-up, would we get a more grown-up country, perhaps? Or is it grown-up countries that get grown-up papers?

Suffer the Children

The Sunday newspaper leads one to strange and sometimes unsettling discoveries.

Despite having been involved in CND activities in the 1980s, I never knew or knew only vaguely about the Children’s Peace Monument at Hiroshima. This shows the 12-year old girl Sadako, who died of radiation poisoning, holding aloft a paper crane – according to Japanese legend, whoever makes a thousand paper cranes will have their wish granted. Still today paper cranes are sent to Hiroshima from children around the world with the wish for an end to nuclear weapons – this week 9865 from Germany.

I can’t imagine that the sculptor didn’t intend to evoke a Christian crucifix and this image of the child lifting a fragile symbol of a (perhaps impossible) longing and hope seems to be an appropriate interpretation of what the cross means.

However, it also made me ask  whether Britain has a monument to the children who died in the War, alongside the many, many monuments to soldiers, sailors, aircrew and other uniformed personnel (there is one, I think, to animals). I couldn’t recall ever hearing of one and  I can’t find anything on the internet, though I did learn that an East London memorial to 18 children killed in an air raid in the First World War was vandalized in 1985. In fact, it’s not easy to get statistics about the number of children killed in the war, though one rather unreliable-looking site gave 7,700 for Britain – which is probably about right as a proportion of civilian deaths. Nor is it easy to find the comparable figure for Germany, which must be much higher. Perhaps this absence says more than we might care to think about how we imagine war. Not least about what interests the community of internet users. If I didn’t believe that the time for memorials is past (and, on the whole, I don’t think they help), I’d almost suggest that a European Memorial to the child victims of our 20th century wars might be a useful and sobering project for this time of resurgent nationalisms.

One figure I did discover (from the UNICEF site) is that in the last 10 years two million children are estimated to have died in wars around the world. Can Steven Pinker be right when he argues that this is the most peaceful age in history?

 

 

Politics faraway

It is an extraordinary relief to be watching the political slow-drip-water-torture of Britain’s exit from the European union from a distance. Of course, it is an illusory detachment, since the reality of it will eventually affect me – does affect me – just as much as if I was driving myself mad by neurotically picking up every latest news update from the BBC all through the day, every day.

But what distance does enable me to see is just how little each latest carefully coded intervention by an ex-minister, Remainer, Brexiter, or French President really makes to the bigger picture, the shape of which has been fairly clear for some time. All through last year we were led on with the illusion that Britain wasn’t going to pay anything when it was obvious ‘we’ would – and so on. Perhaps this is true of many political processes and clear to all those who find the right point of view to see it from (usually not the actors at the centre).

Tolstoy saw Napoleon as carried along on the tide of massive events over which he had no control and the virtue of the Russian General Kutuzov, who faced Napoleon down at Borodino (at the cost of 80, 000 human lives), was that he knew himself to be powerless and merely let what had to be happen around him.

Yet there is always the hope that the political process, a word, an argument will turn events around; always hope that the new and unexpected, even the impossible might happen. And it might.

In Memory of Karoline G.

At the weekend I saw a small exhibition at the local church on ‘Homelessness in the Third Reich’. As you can imagine, the NS authorities didn’t take a benign view of beggars, tramps, or what they called ‘asocial’ types. Beggars were already being sent to concentration camps in autumn 1933 (this was reported in newspapers, with approval, and the camps were indeed referred to in the headlines as ‘concentration camps’).

There had been some regulation of tramps before this time, and ‘gentlemen of the road’ could get passbooks to gain access to special hostels up and down the land, but this was rapidly curtailed in the Third Reich, limiting them to various routes, closing down many of the hostels, and eventually stopping any special provision.

The wanderer is, by definition, an unsettling presence. Paul Tillich, himself in exile from the Nazis in America, said that what people saw in refugees such as himself was an image of their own mortality and vulnerability, since the refugee showed how easily we could be uprooted from everything familiar by events beyond our control: it could happen to anyone, anytime. And perhaps something similar can be said of the wanderer. We put so much effort into making our lives secure and stable that it is disturbing to encounter someone who apparently gets by without home, family, employment, or any kind of security. But the refugees and the homeless are still with us, and still disturb us – and perhaps, behind anxiety about jobs and overcrowding, is also this deeper sense of unease. And this won’t be solved by closing the borders.

The story that stays with me, however, is that of Karoline G. a nineteen year old young woman (still, in those days, referred to as a ‘girl’), a runaway, rather cheeky-looking, who was from a regular home but disappeared for days, sometimes weeks on end, and was known to hang out with soldiers. When temporary imprisonment didn’t work she was sent first to Ravensbrück concentration camp and then to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in April 1945: not a good girl, very possibly a bad girl, but victims aren’t always saints and even the unsaintly should be remembered too.

Second Sunday after Holy Three Kings’ Day

Here’s something completely different.

Over breakfast I was listening to the radio and heard a traditional Hebridean folk song called ‘Oran an Roin’ or the ‘Song of the Seals’. According to one legend seals were actually children of the King of Norway but had been placed under a spell by an evil witch though still, from time to time, were restored to human form. On one occasion fishermen from one of the islands caught some seals and killed them for food. As they were preparing them for eating, they heard from the sea the song of the seals, lamenting their dead kin. As you can imagine, it is a mysteriously haunting and tragic lament, sung in an expressive language that few of us today (few of us even in Scotland) can understand. In such songs we hear the last echoes of a lost world that liners on the outer edges of collective memory.

Returning to my theme of Europe, the story also suggests how once the lines of division between human and animal and between one human community and another were drawn quite differently. The legend mentions Norway, others have ascribed the origins of legends about Silkies (seal-people) to sightings of inuit dressed in sealskins or Sami (Lapps) or even dark-skinned Spaniards washed ashore after the disaster of the Armada. Such ‘explanations’, however, seem completely to miss what is most eloquent and true about these legends, that there is a deeper blending of human and animal worlds than our conventional categorizations allow us to see.

Like many other old Gaelic songs, this was collected by Revd William Matheson, a Church of Scotland minister, whose obituary tells how he was ‘invited’ to come from his parish to teach Gaelic at Edinburgh University in the 1950s. His life seems to have belonged to an era of life in Church and University that is perhaps becoming as remote as the world of island fisherfolk and their legends. A wonderful life, it seems.

 

 

January 12th

Yesterday I posted a picture of a romantically charming courtyard that was part of the monastery complex where Luther lived as a monk before moving to Wittenberg, the city that is today sometimes referred to as ‘Luther-city’. Not all of the complex survived, however. Today’s picture shows a contemporary conference facility built on the site of what had been the monastery library, where Luther would have studied and, we might imagine, worked at preparing his university lectures. The library was not, however, destroyed by Protestant iconoclasts, peasants in revolt, or the backwards and forwards march of the armies of the 30 Years’ War. It was in fact reduced to rubble on the night of 25th February 1945 in a bombing raid by the British RAF. This not only caused the loss of a significant historic building. Worse, the library basement was being used as a communal bomb shelter and the direct hit led to the loss of 267 lives, mostly women, children, and old people.

In our own time we have become used to the phrase ‘collateral damage’ and the near-inevitability of airstrikes from time to time hitting civilian and military targets. Of course, in the wars of words that accompany all conflict, when ‘we’ do this it is a regrettable accident, although when ‘they’, e.g. the Russians do it, it is clearly deliberate (though I’m not saying that this is always false). Whether the civilian areas of Erfurt were deliberately targeted on that night I do not know, although it seems that the RAF was planning a massive blanket bombing attack for April, involving over 800 bombers – averted only because of the proximity of US ground forces. Even in the British Parliament, questions were raised at the time about the morality of such attacks and whilst some decried doubters as ‘traitors’ many aircrew probably shared their doubts.

What is clear is that whether or not any particular attack on civilians is deliberate or accidental, the nature of modern warfare is such that even when those on the ground seek to avoid them there is a near-inevitability that they will happen. This, we must suppose, is part of the responsibility of those who initiate any war. Whatever the moral dimensions of such issues, they highlight the inescapable possibility of tragedy that continues to haunt human life. As Paul said, there are times when we can only weep with those who weep. That the new building is specifically dedicated as a reconciliation centre is perhaps cause for hope.

Back in Erfurt

January 11th

Stepping off the tram at the Fish Market in Erfurt, I was hit by what felt like a solid wall of silence. During the day, it is bustling enough, but the lack of traffic – other than the quietly gliding trams – makes for a lack of urban sound that I don’t know from anywhere else (and this is a city of 200, 000 people, larger than either Oxford or Cambridge). It is, of course, typical of Eastern Europe that due to a combination of ideology and economic torpor the old pre-war tramways were never got rid of in favour of car-friendly traffic systems – and now they are reaping the rewards. A dynamic that has or will perhaps repeat itself many times in the history of technology as the rush for the latest and greatest great idea turns out not to be so great after all.

But there’s much more to be said about Erfurt than its trams, marvellous as these are. As a visitor, I just delight in its old town, with a wonderful and extensive ensemble of medieval and early modern buildings, including the Kraemerbruecke, a bridge that, according to tourist guides, is the last bridge north of the Alps still to have residential housing on it – although now these 4-5 storied half-timbered dwellings most have bijoux shops and galleries at ground level.

Last year, the 500th anniversary of the start of the Protestant Reformation, there was no escaping the fact that Martin Luther had spent a crucial part of his life at Erfurt, where he took monastic vows, was priested, and taught in the university (the picture shows the monastery where he lived). The connection was marked by a series of musical events, plays, lectures, and – of course – commemorative services. The last couple of weeks of October saw a huge swell in groups of visitors having the history explained by guides, many in 16th century costume. The Church nationally seems to have lost a lot of money on the celebrations. Although the posts proclaim 500+, one wonders what the heritage of the Protestant Churches in Europe will be in 500 years’ time. Although in some ways the Church here clearly plays an important role in public life and perhaps more so than in the UK, mainstream Protestantism seems to require a set of social competencies and a particular kind of cultural literacy that are increasingly lacking. Although Luther’s Bible translation remains readable by contemporary Germans, his thought-world seems to have become alien to all but a cognitive minority. That is not a value judgement (Luther is one of history’s great teachers of freedom) – but it is a problem. I have no predictions.

The monastery itself, like so many ancient sites in Europe, is also witness to other aspects of European history, and tomorrow I’ll say something about that too.