Toward a Catholic Theology of Nationality

Toward a Catholic Theology of Nationality

Toward a Catholic Theology of Nationality

Dorian Llywelyn, S.J.

Lexington Books A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 http://www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2010 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Llywelyn, Dorian. Toward a Catholic theology of nationality / Dorian Llywelyn. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-4089-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-7391-4091-8 (electronic) 1. Nationalism—Religious aspects—Catholic Church. 2. Christianity and politics— Catholic Church. I. Title. BX1793.L58 2010 261.7—dc22 2010013275

⬁ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America



Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

1

Chapter 1

Pinning the Jellyfish: The Nation (Un)defined

21

Chapter 2

Longtime Companions

63

Chapter 3

Biblical Nations and Dogmatic Reticence

129

Chapter 4

The Value of Thisness

185

Chapter 5

Our Lady of All Nations

225

Chapter 6

From Redeemer Nations to Redeemed Humanity

277

Bibliography

301

Index

317

About the Author

333

v



Acknowledgments

Sincere thanks go to many people for their help—practical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual—in bringing this book to fruit. Many years ago, two vital conversations with then-Bishop Rowan Williams and Canon Donald Allchin planted the seeds of some of this work’s main ideas, while a lecture by Br. William Short, O.F.M., opened my eyes to the world as Duns Scotus sees it. At an early point in the book’s germination, Dr. Frances Knight, Rev. Dr. D. P. Davies, Dr. R. Brinley Jones, and especially Prof. Thomas O’Loughlin provided helpful comments. More recently, fellow-panelists at conferences at Stanford and Baylor Universities and at annual meetings of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the American Academy of Religion listened to my papers, and their questions and caveats opened up new vistas. I am profoundly grateful for the intellectual generosity and enlightened suggestions of the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. Jess Bradfield, Jehanne Schweitzer, and Melissa Wilks of Lexington Books were supportive to an exemplary degree. Editorial shears wielded expertly by James Keane, S.J., pruned away some over-exuberant verbiage and most Britishisms, while my student assistants Nathaniel Mallove and Christopher Irr helped with eagle-eyed proofreading. I have been supported by my brothers at the Jesuit Community of Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, and Toward a Catholic Theology of Nationality has been significantly improved by the acute and broad insights of my colleagues in the Department of Theological Studies there. Omnia omnesque ad maiorem Dei gloriam.

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Introduction

“What are you working on these days?” It has taken me—a Catholic Welshman and a happily naturalized American—several years to understand why my response to that question has sometimes been met with polite but glazed looks, after which conversation has rapidly turned to the weather. A puzzled colleague asked me, “What on earth has theology got to do with nationality?” My response was to point out that throughout history, many nations have sought, overtly or subtly, to sacralize themselves; further, when nations vest themselves with chasuble and stole, oppression and violence seem to follow as a matter of course. In American circles, Catholic theology and nationality are not easy nor even likely bedfellows. For a European such as myself, the connection is more obvious, and more pressing. Outside academia, the terms “nation,” “national identity,” and particularly “nationalism” can bring up visceral reactions ranging from partisan patriotism to skeptical distaste. Terms such as “our nation” and “X (national) identity” enshrine significant political, geographical, and cultural claims and evoke deep psychological and spiritual resonances. The matter of the nation has a long and respectable international pedigree of academic investigation. Historians, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, and social and political scientists have all written at length about the topic. Specialists of religious studies have produced substantial work on the connections between religion and specific ethnic and national communities. Nevertheless, when I first began thinking about the nation and its domains of nationality, nationhood, national identity, patriotism and nationalism

1

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Introduction

theologically, I was perplexed by the apparent absence of any significant Catholic theological reflection upon the nation and the comparative silence of the Church’s magisterium on the subject. Michael G. Long and Tracy Wenger Sadd point out that “U.S. Christians have not excelled in thinking theologically about patriotism in an age of terror.”1 This vacuum is particularly surprising given the fact that nationalism is “arguably the most powerful force in politics in the twentieth century.”2 This book is intended to address a significant lacuna by suggesting ways in which Catholic theology at the beginning of the twenty-first century can reflect on the phenomenon of the nation. It is also written out of the conviction that Catholic theologians can and should engage in helping all peoples to live in what The Compendium of the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church lauds as “a posture of peace, respect and solidarity with other nations.”3 Theology is ultimately a practical art rather than a theoretical science. It necessarily attempts to shed light on situations that predate the ruminations of theologians. The silence of the papal magisterium on nationality can be attributed to intellectual habits and concrete historical circumstances. The reticence of U.S. theologians reflects (among other things) the fact that for much of its history, the American Catholic Church faced a pressing practical task: how to create and maintain a religious unum out of the many-faceted cultural pluribus. The processes of globalization have birthed a greater consciousness of global cultural diversity. The Church has espoused a concomitant drive toward inculturated forms of Catholicism, and a large body of theological work on culture has emerged. There also exists an enormous literature on American national identity, dating from de Tocqueville onward. American theologians have investigated cultural diversity in its connections with ethnic identity, but American nationality (or indeed any other nationality) has been comparatively ignored. Ideological predilections may also be at work: topics such as American national identity and American values are potentially tainted by their association with Protestant right-wing politics.4 The paeans of Cardinal Spellman (“my country, right or wrong”) to the inseparable values of American patriotism and Catholicism represent a vanished and largely unmourned world. To my knowledge, only one book in English, John D. Wright’s 1942 National Patriotism in Papal Teaching, has ever attempted a systematic Catholic treatment of nationality.5 Naturally, cultural presuppositions will affect how different theologies understand nationality. According to the scholastic axiom quidquid recipitur per modum recipientis recipitur, how and who we are shapes what and how we see. Where the social component of personal identity is important, nationality is likely to be of greater theological interest. Where personal autonomy is

Introduction



3

held as a high value, nationality will be of less import. In some intellectual circles, to suggest that nationality might have a spiritual value would appear as respectable as asserting that dragons exist. A certain nervousness around issues of religion and nationality is understandable. However, theology has the ethical responsibility to investigate the value of earthly realities and place them in a hierarchy of relevance for salvation. The theological issue that underlies discussions of nationality, national identity, patriotism, and nationalism is not whether national identity is value for Catholics. Rather, it is how to understand and evaluate the role that attachment to particular nations should play in the lives of Christians, individually and as members of those nations and of the universal Church. This book treats nationality largely in cultural rather than political terms. It is true that Church teaching and theological investigation accept the objective reality of nationality and national identity. Systematic theologian Kevin Burke points out theologians have obviously been aware of the existence of diverse cultures. Yet for much of the history of theology, “cultural diversity—and even more significantly, diverse cultures—did not operate as theological terms.”6 The statement would be even more à propos if we substituted “national” for “cultural” and “nations” for “cultures.” This book is therefore intended as an exploration of the nation and its attendant domains as fully theological categories. Theology can be defined as “the attempt to expound the meaning of Christian reflection with the aid of the theologian’s age and culture, and in the light of that age’s aspirations and problems.”7 Consequently the task of a theology of nationality is to investigate the relationship between the mystery of Christ and the human experience of being a member of a nation. The exact place of a Catholic theology of nationality among the sub-disciplines, sources and methods of theology is not immediately clear. As a social matter, it could come under the umbrella of social ethics. National identity, on the other hand, exists in a complex relationship with the Church, so it is also an ecclesiological matter. Since personal identity is also involved, theological anthropology and soteriology are necessary partners in the conversation. And since this is a Christian theology of nationality, Christological and Trinitarian concerns are also germane. Constructing a theology of nationality could involve three different approaches. A dogmatic approach would begin with “traditional doctrines and interpret them in the light of the thought and problems of our time and place.”8 Second, we could take Scripture as the starting point for reflection. An anthropological method would reflect on “human experience and aspirations and show how revealed Christian truth corresponds to them.”9

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Introduction

Dogmatic, biblical and anthropological approaches are complementary, rather than mutually exclusive, and this book draws upon all of them. But theology does not reflect on words alone: faith is lived and experienced in many non-verbal ways. The approaches of the discipline of Christian spirituality, which reflects theologically on religious experience, have much to offer.10 In this method, theology not only reflects upon experience and seeks to illuminate it by faith, but also regards experience as a source of theology. The anthropological approach is encapsulated in the scholastic dictum gratia naturam supponit. According to this worldview, grace does not destroy secular realities, or demand abandoning them for religious ones. Rather, grace includes, builds upon and potentially transfigures the sphere of the natural. The implication of this is that nationality can be one of the loci where responsible intelligence can ground theological consideration. Any theology that excludes the questions and findings of the human sciences risks building a house on sand. Treating nationality theologically according to gratia naturam supponit is a hazardous venture that is necessarily inter-disciplinary. This involves crossing over into those different academic fields that have discussed nationality at length, with the aim of gleaning some useful construction materials. Inter-disciplinarity, however, is more easily praised than achieved. Most theologians do not speak like sociologists, and vice versa, and such conversations are often difficult, for they involve emerging from the hyper-specialized silos of academia. This book brings together the voices of twentieth-century sociologists, the human authors of the Bible, popes, medieval metaphysicians, and Marian visionaries around the topic of nationality. This somewhat eclectic dialogue employs a wide range of intellectual dialects, and a roadmap of the potentially unwieldy material is necessary at this point. Among scholars of nationality, defining the terms “nation,” “nationality,” “national identity,” and “nationalism” is a veritable sub-discipline in itself. Nationality has taken a wide variety of forms, and there is little consensus over what a nation actually is. Some see it as a post-Enlightenment development, the result of modernity, others trace it back to Renaissance England, and for others nationality is a foundational anthropological datum. In the broadest of terms: historians tend to stress the continuity between ancient and modern concepts of the nation, and the links between ancient ethnic communities and their modern descendants. National primordialists scour the anthropological roots of nationality. Sociologists on the whole stress the contingency of individual nations, arguing that the very concept of nationality is a modern phenomenon. The scholar of nationality Rogers Brubaker goes so far as to argue that definitions of these terms are neither necessary

Introduction



5

nor possible. What is required is to look at the assumptions—personal, historical, cultural, ideological and geographical—that underlie definitions and understandings of the nation.11 For our purposes, it is important to note that scholars invariably comment on the high affective potential of nationality. One’s own homeland and people command almost ineffable loyalty and affection, which can be directed positively or negatively. Appeals to “the spirit of the nation,” national pride, and the memory of a nation’s forefathers and foremothers are famously capable of moving hearts and mobilizing tremendous social energies, with an intensity unmatched except by religion. Not for nothing did Cicero claim that the virtue of pietas extends first to patria and then to parentes.12 Whatever the etiology of modern concepts of the nation, it is ubiquitous in today’s world as form of social organization, and nationality is an important constituent of many people’s sense of self. Moreover nationalism— which can be construed at the very least as a heightened form of national awareness—has been one of the most dominant of Western ideologies for at least the last two centuries. Nationalism takes many forms—cultural, ethnic, religious and political. Common to all forms is a moral imperative, a pressing claim on the loyalty and affections of a nation’s members. Nationalists take the existence of collective identity as an article of faith. One of the recurring questions of this book is the nature of identity, which includes the questions of collective and individual identity and the relationship between them, and the kinship between religious and other dimensions of human identity. The topic has a venerable philosophical pedigree. Identity combines continuity with change, and is fluid as well as fixed. This is especially true of the identity of a group of people. The conundrum of the ship of Theseus relates how over the course of years that venerable ship was gradually replaced, plank by plank, until nothing of the original parts remained. Was it or was it not still Theseus’s ship? In theological vocabulary, a communal identity such as nationality is a traditio, meaning something handed on. Tradition, in Catholic theology, is both the static content of what is received and the dynamic act of handing it on to others. It both shapes and is shaped by individuals. The phrase “national identity” comprises in fact two distinct notions. “The national identity of Indonesians” can refer to that part of individual Indonesians’ identity connected to their nationality—that is, their personal identity as Indonesians. It is a reasonable and largely uncontroverted assumption that someone’s nationality is likely to be closely related to her sense of self and way of relating to the world. What is far more arguable is a second definition of the phrase, which holds that there is such a thing as “Indonesianness”—a

6



Introduction

collective identity circumscribed by a series of typical characteristics, that exists independently of the current members of the Indonesian nation, and that constitutes a kind of corporate moral person. Both concepts, individual and collective, need to be included in the potential theological value of national identity. Identity is also partly constructed by differentiation. Individually, my sense of self is anchored in my body, which is physically separate from the world, and proper to me alone. Social identities are likewise created in part by differentiation from other social groups. Since they are contextual, they are also variable. According to context, someone may identify herself as a Latina, a Mexican-American, or a U.S. citizen. Collective identity is also differentiated by comparison: to be a member of X group means that I am not a member of many other similar groups. A nation may also be constructed positively, based on a sense of shared history, land and culture, and a trajectory into the future. Such constructions tend to emphasize singularity and to imagine that one nationality can be separated out from each other in an orderly fashion. State boundaries allow for separation of territories. Culture is not so easily restrained by political frontiers: in one way or another, multiculturalism characterizes all modern societies. Identity is negotiated on a daily basis, in relationship with others who are similar to or different from ourselves. Different aspects of identity may be hard to reconcile. The popular song La Guadalupana proclaims that devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is “essential” to being Mexican. Are Mexican Jews thereby necessarily less Mexican? Only with difficulty can static versions of national identity incorporate the experience of immigrants and the presence of ethnic and linguistic minorities within a given state. A pastorally useful theology of nationality will therefore need to include such dynamic notions as hybridity and mestizaje, and problematize the overly simple monocultural conceptions of nationality beloved of nationalists and politicians of left and right. Since nationality is a living form of culture, it will, like all living things, wax and wane, change over time, and be challenged by circumstance. The disjuncture between nation and state is a major distinction that needs to be emphasized, particularly for readers unfamiliar with the matter. A state, says Lowell Barrington, is “the principal political unit in the international political system corresponding to a territory, a relatively permanent population and a set of ruling institutions. A country is the territorial component of the state. Nigeria is a state (and a country); it is not a nation.”13 (This latter claim may come as a surprise to Nigerians.) Nationality studies generally have no difficulty in distinguishing between nation and a state. In com-

Introduction



7

mon parlance, even in scholarly literature there may be significant slippage between the two terms. As we will see, Church documents have been no exception to this confusion. The nation-state, in which a discrete cultural identity neatly coincides with political territory, is a convenient political fiction often attributed to the social engineering of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, at which all parties accepted the “national religion” principle (cuius regio, eius religio) of the 1555 Peace of Augsburg. If the nation and the nation-state are convenient fictions, they are just as much inconvenient ones, for a political state may be home to several ethnic groups or self-identified nations. Attempts to engineer cultural homogeneity to correspond with state borders have engendered most of the conflicts that have arisen in the wake of the end of Soviet communism. There exist many modern nation-states, such as East Timor, that have been subsumed into larger polities in the recent past. A nation may well exist outside the form of the nation-state, and cross state borders. No Republic of Kurdistan exists to correspond to Kurdish collective identity, yet the struggle for self-rule means that in the minds of Kurdish nationalists at least, the Kurdish people truly is a nation-in-waiting. The distinction between nation and state is particularly evident in those states born out of the ashes of empire. In the case of many modern states not possessed of a common ethnic or cultural substrate, the state precedes the nation, rather than the other way around. It is reasonable to argue that in the history of the United States, a proto-national Puritan identity was grafted on to a new political state. American statehood preceded nationhood and profoundly shaped the idea of the American nation. In this respect, the United States resembles those states in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere that were formerly European imperial possessions. In endeavors to build nations during the 1960s, many newly independent states consciously engaged in precisely the same “invention of tradition” as European countries during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—adopting national symbols, flags and anthems, designating or creating national vernaculars, and disseminating official versions of national history, for the sake of social cohesion within the boundaries of the new states. Emotional bonds with a state X are unlikely, for the state is a political unit. Instead, patriotic appeals are made in the name of nation X, to the X people, or to X “national spirit.” These terms have no direct connection with legislation, governance, or juridical questions. Rather, they are expressions of intimate, social relationships that reach down deep into the human heart. The difference between nation and state is of prime importance for this book. Church and state questions are as ancient as the Roman coin held

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Introduction

out to Jesus by the Pharisees in Matthew 22. The connection between the institutional functions of the Church and the legislative, juridical, and executive powers of the state has been hammered out in the forge of difficult experience and codified in a rich theological tradition and in the pages of canon law. However, the Church is a spiritual community as well as a juridical institution. If the institutional aspects of the Church are paralleled by the secular state, to the community of the Church there also correspond secular forms of social belonging, of which nationality is an important variant. The matter of church and nation raises a set of questions that are distinct from the matter of church and state. If a nation is not a state, it is not identical to an ethnic community either. Nations may well have an ethnic substrate, but they are more than that, for their members are linked not only by common culture, but also a desire to inhabit a historic homeland as their own, communal property. Common to an awareness of nationality is the cherishing of distinctiveness, particularity and singularity, to the point that the distinctive markers of a nation may come to be identified as its very essence. Nations are by nature culture-centric: even the multiculturalism and diversity venerated in today’s United States are culturally specific values. Cherishing the particular and the singular does not necessarily involve attitudes of superiority. In practice, however, a stress on the import of one’s own nationality has tended toward exclusivity and the assumption that the cultural values of one’s own nation are connaturally superior to those of other peoples. Religion is an important element in the cultural patrimony of many nations. My specific concern in this book however is not religion but Christianity, which has been profoundly influential in the development of the concept of the nation. Christian faith and national pride interact in fascinatingly complex ways, and can look remarkably alike. Nation building has frequently taken the forms, languages and practices of religion and refilled them with political content. Forty years ago, Robert Bellah’s milestone article, “Civil Religion in America,” described the use of biblical archetypes and religious values in patriotic discourse. True to form, the inaugural address of President Barack Obama told the American people that “God has called us to shape an uncertain destiny”14—an inspiring but theologically fuzzy affirmation that marries the national and religious spheres, while still just managing to keep Church and State in twin beds. It is indeed hard for contemporary national discourse to avoid borrowing from Christian vocabulary and concepts. Nation and church are both societies. Both predate our individual existence and appear to glide unstoppably into the future. Both subsist on collective memory and tradition. “Civil

Introduction



9

religions,” whether of the Rousseau or Bellah variety, typify only a few of many possible varieties of relationship. Christianity may be envisaged as a replacement for a secular cultural identity: Denise Kimber Buell convincingly argues that early Christians defined themselves as being ethno-racially different from those who surrounded them.15 Alternatively, the institutions and language of Christianity may be so closely identified with a nation that they become inseparable from each other. Christian experiences of religious and national belonging have so often affected each other that some degree of interpenetration is the norm. Many nations have applied to themselves the statement that God “has not treated other nations thus”(Ps 147:20), claiming chosen people status by a selective arrogation of texts from the Hebrew Bible.16 Where the nation itself takes on a sacral aura, it can eventually come to replace the Church. Where Christianity preaches mission, secular nationalism substitutes destiny. Nationality then can co-exist with Christianity, co-opt it or seek to replace it, and sometimes does all three together. There is in fact one particular reason why nationality and Christianity are almost fated to be intimate bedfellows. Modern nation-states on all continents, even those where Christianity has made limited inroads, bear the imprint of Christian institutions, language and patterns of thought. Felipe Fernández-Armesto holds that many forms of secular life “ape” religion,17 a pattern exemplified by war memorials and civic liturgies which express the claims of a homeland and call upon the pietas of its natives. Nationality has been constructed on a blueprint of ecclesial vocabulary and mental structures. As an “imagined community,” a nation cannot help but be a kind of secular church—but one that is not always entirely secular. Many other American presidential addresses have sounded suspiciously like homilies in their cadences and references, and there is a long list of peoples, ancient, medieval and modern, which have applied a religious hermeneutic to their national history. For Christianity, this kinship is potentially deleterious. Religious patriotism employing intimations of divine election has almost without exception involved xenophobic attitudes. Churches have sometimes lent approval to this. A good example of this co-dependence was seen in June 2009, when the Archpastoral Council of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church urged the nations of Russia, the Ukraine, and Belarus to preserve their spiritual unity. The claim that “the baptismal font of the Dnieper River is a common source of the spirituality, statehood, and Christian culture of our peoples”18 witnesses to the stubborn perdurance of a “Holy Russia” inseparable from and identified with a “Holy Mother Church.” The statement that “the unity of Holy Russia is the most precious possession of our church

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Introduction

and peoples, it is our most cherished treasure” was not only an assertion by the Moscow Patriarchate of ecclesiastical primacy over Ukraine and Belarus, but also a less-than-subtle expression of support for Russian dominance in the region. Christian nationality has historically fallen into several recognizable patterns. National election overlays the historical experiences of one nation or ethnic community on the events of Exodus. The “chosen people” pattern is more typical of Protestant societies: notable examples exist in the cases of England, the United States, and among the Calvinist Boers of South Africa. Other nations have envisaged themselves as having a religious mission and created myths of ancestry from classical and biblical figures. In France, the Christian vocation ascribed to early regal dynasties gradually evolved into a myth of national destiny out of which all explicitly Christian content was excised. The national Christianity of Poland and Russia was—and continues to be—messianic and chiliastic in form. Catholic theology is traditionally constructed by drawing on Scripture and Church tradition. These provide no crystalline teachings of nationality, and the faith of the Church requires some considerable mining to find relevant material. Biblical teaching on nationality is fraught with the potential for anachronistic eisegesis that reads modern concepts of the nation back into Israelite and early Christian history. It is also rather sparse. Ethnicity—and even something approaching modern concepts of nationality—is of greater concern to the writers of the Old Testament than to their New Testament successors. Although the pages of the Old Testament do not trace the existence of nations—not even Israel—back to creation, several origin myths do ascribe ethnic diversity to God’s action in history. Israelite particularism (Israel’s unique place as the people of God) is intertwined with universalism (the origin and destiny of all peoples as God’s peoples, and Israel’s role in bringing “the nations” to the worship of the one true God). The New Testament is certainly aware of national (or at least ethnic) identity, but gives it considerably less importance. Salvation comes through adherence to Christ, which involves membership in a new people that includes but also transcends all other social loyalties. The new dispensation, like the old, is religiously particularistic, but universalist in its ethnic or national thrust. The division of the world’s inhabitants into nations can easily appear to be such a connatural arrangement that it requires no comment. This has largely been the assumption of the meager body of overt papal reflection on nationality. Where questions of nationality arise, these fall most often, strictly speaking, under Church and State considerations. Traumatized by

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11

French and Italian attacks on the Papal States and concerned for the rights of the Catholic Church, the nineteenth-century magisterium manifested a strong reaction against all claims for national sovereignty in the realm of religious governance, emphasizing instead the universality of the Church and the central role of the papacy. In the nineteenth-century papal mindset, nationalism was connected with anti-clericalist and liberal challenges to church authority, and could not therefore gain a sympathetic hearing. Gregory XVI (1831–1846), addressing Polish bishops in his encyclical Cum primum, urged civil obedience to imperial authorities rather than support for efforts at Polish self-determination. Church teaching on nationality truly emerges very late in the history of the Church, in the first half of the twentieth century, with the encounter with aggressive ethnically based nationalism. Concerned by the apparently irresistible rise of the power of Il Duce over all areas of Italian life, Pius XI issued numerous criticisms of Fascism. The 1927 encyclical Ubi arcano Dei consilio treats aggressive nationalism not primarily as a political ideology, but rather as a sin whose origins lie in “the inordinate desire . . . to domineer over others.”19 His Divini illius magistra of 1930 criticizes that Fascist “spirit of nationalism which is false and exaggerated, as well as dangerous to true peace and prosperity” for usurping religious duties and over-exalting military discipline among youth. Pius XI censures nationalism as “an undue exaltation of the feelings of piety toward our own people.”20 Wherever the theme of the nation appears in papal documents, it is almost without exception accompanied by caveats about its volatility. Nationalism is invariably characterized as being disproportionate, self-idolatrous, and malevolent. As the authentic ethical alternative to its evil twin, papal teaching proffers fraternal patriotism. Yet loyalty to one’s own nation is a relative, not an absolute good, and the international common good overrides all particularistic concerns. Summarizing underlying primary principles, the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church affirms that the international order “requires a balance between particularity and universality, which all nations are called to bring about.”21 The fact that papal comments have generally—and frustratingly—failed to distinguish between nation and state reflects a Eurocentric mindset that takes the nation-state as a universal norm. With the demise of the great European empires and the rise of many new states, new practical questions arose. Among the many theological changes of the Second Vatican Council was a turn to culture. As the Church’s center of population shifted increasingly to the developing world, theologians became more acutely aware of

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Introduction

Catholicism’s cultural diversity. At the same time, Church doctrine cautiously edged forward in recognizing that specific cultures are potentially both loci and channels of grace. Of all the popes of the twentieth century, John Paul II insisted most on the spiritual role of the nation. For John Paul—drawing on his Polish experience—nationality and faith inhere in each other. Almost singlehandedly, the Polish Pope moved the focus of discussion on nationality away from questions of Church and State. Going beyond ethical injunctions about how nations should behave, he opened up a new theological path, considering the anthropological and salvific place of national culture in human and Christian identity, almost to the point of identifying culture with nationality. Their various limitations notwithstanding, papal comments on the theme of the nation do supply some minimum theological foundations, and display consistent basic attitudes. Catholic social teaching accepts the real existence of nationality, even if it does not provide a stable definition of what constitutes a nation. Second, the mono-cultural European nation-state is the implicit norm that underpins papal teaching on the nation. Third, with the exception of John Paul II, papal comments on nationality are focused on ethical concerns. They are also based on the presupposition that the same fundamental ethical principles apply equally to societies as to individuals. The implication of these comments is that societies can act freely and accept responsibility, as societies. Scripture and tradition then furnish comparatively little obvious, direct material for a theology of nationality. Consequently, we need to make the maximum use of the implications of what we have. It is possible to explore the Christian role of nationality from the foundational theological categories of creation and salvation. The first of these involves asking two sets of questions: whether God creates nations and nationality, and if so, in what manner and with what purpose? Examining nationality from soteriological perspectives requires us to think about the role of social identity in the salvific economy. It raises the question of whether, theologically speaking, there can really be such a thing as a “Christian nation” and what its relationship to “un-Christian nations” would be. Creation and salvation raise interesting questions but also create real aporias. They are also religiously generic, rather than specifically Christian, and salvation moreover comes in secular as well as religious flavors. The uniqueness of Christianity lies in Christ. A specifically Christian theology of nationality needs therefore to be centered on the person of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. Engaging with nationality from the standpoint of Incarnation leads to a series of knotty Christological questions that include the relationship be-

Introduction



13

tween creation and salvation. The Word takes on, with authentic humanity, a “national” identity.22 Many of the neuralgic points concerning nationality and Christianity derive from the fundamental problem of the relative values of particularity and universality. The “scandal of particularity” inherent in the Incarnation has something to say to the cultural specificity that inheres in nationality. As Colin Gunton pointed out almost twenty years ago “so much of [Christianity’s] content is linked to a particular human figure, and behind him a particular national history,” as a result of which “it has often appeared to the rational mind that there is something inherently problematic about a faith that it is . . . not a general teaching but the proclamation of historical particularities as the centre of an account of God’s being and activity.”23 The Church is one, yet at the same time made present in an infinitude of different epochs, cultures, and nationalities, and given an apostolic commission to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 25:19). The nature and work of the Church mirrors the mystery of the Incarnation, in which particularity mediates universal salvation. Yet centuries-old and broad trends in Western thought have made particularity “an offence to certain kinds of scientific mind as it is to certain kinds of political theorists.”24 The same might also be said of certain theological theorists. Exploring the connection between Incarnation and nationality involves metaphysical and theological considerations, and here the medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus throws useful if unexpected light on the matter. Differing from the theological mainstream, Scotus argues that the Incarnation was not a contingent “plan B” brought about in reaction to the sin of Adam and Eve. Rather, Incarnation was the purpose of creation, already intended in the mind of God prior to the Fall. Christ is the model of creation and all it contains. The Christiform, Christocentric universe has, like its model Jesus Christ, aspects that are spiritual and material, eternal and time-bound, universal and particular. Moreover, in the Incarnation, all foundational aspects of human identity are united with the divine, and thereby saved. I will argue that since social identity is essential to being fully human, then it can and must be saved, transfigured through the workings of the Incarnation and the Paschal mystery. Social identity is obviously not the same as nationality, but includes it. The Scotist theology of the Incarnation allows us to conceive of nationality in the abstract as a theological category. Nationality exists in the concrete, however. What about particular nations? What sort of theological value could, say, Malawi have? Scotus’s metaphysics provides useful philosophical underpinnings for understanding national collective identity, that Volksgeist beloved of nationalists but decried by skeptics with Marxist or postmodernist sympathies.

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Introduction

We may experience both our individual and collective identities privatively: to be me is, on pain of contradiction, not-you. Being them is being not-us. Scotus however argues that at the heart of every individual thing, there is an imperceptible but positive “thisness” that makes this person, this stone, this language something unique, individual and real in and of itself. Identity is not dependent on difference from all other people, stones, languages, etc. Since thisness applies to all things, a collective such as a nation is not a chimera, but truly exists. It is more than the sum of the individual “this-es” that constitute it, and exists positively, not by means of contrast. At the same time, Scotus carefully distinguishes between nature and individuality. An individual X has the same X-nature as all other X-instantiations. This commonality provides the possibility of communication. Scotus’s universe is not a random collection of monads that have nothing in common, but of individual realities, all of which are equal in being with any other reality that has the same nature. Since I share my human nature with other humans, I am not isolated from them. Scotus also points to the difference between identity and accidental characteristics. Characteristics do not constitute identity. Abstracted to our subject, Scotus’s conclusions suggest that we may well experience our own or others’ nationality privatively, even adversarially. Yet at the deepest level, there is something positive that makes a nation this nation, independent of its relationship with other nations. Collective identity is ontologically real. At the same time, the identity of a nation is not the same as a set of characteristics, however beloved, essential, timeless and inalienable these may appear. Specific territory, language, shared culture, even a particular religion may all seem to be timeless, sine qua non markers of what it is to be Malaysian or Sri Lankan. When such things are threatened with diminishment or extinction, the members of a nation may well react defensively, even justifiably so. None of these markers however, in Scotus’s scheme, would truly constitute a particular nation. Supportive as Scotus’s metaphysical speculations are, they can only be ancillary to a theology based on the person of the Incarnate God and the life of the Trinity. Scotus is most familiar to students of Catholic theology for his elaboration of the theology of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, an argument that proceeds from his essential Christocentrism. To affirm the place of Mary in the scheme of salvation is to stress the real humanity of Jesus and the importance of everything human that is taken into the fathomless union of the divine and human. The figure of Mary is of importance to a theology of nationality for several reasons. The first concerns the phenomenology of Christian nations.

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15

Whereas Protestant peoples have interpreted their communal historical experience using Exodus motifs, many Catholic and Orthodox societies have taken Mary as their particular patroness. Second, investigating this fact theologically (rather than just describing it) involves thinking about the role of Mary in the economy of salvation—corporate as well as individual. A third consideration is the style and nature of theology itself. Of all branches of theology, Mariology has a singularly close relationship with religious experience, especially popular religious experience. Vox populi is rarely vox Dei, but it is sometimes vox ecclesiae. Marian devotion is popular in appeal, and often a social as well as an individual phenomenon. Not surprisingly therefore, Mary has been invoked in battle: political strife between Christian peoples, crusades between Christianity and Islam or “pagan” religions, and culture wars between Christianity and secularism. Catholic devotions to Mary as “Our Lady of N” return us to the question of identity. Specifically, is the “us” implied by the “our” of such titles merely a sum of individuals? Or does it also refer to a collective “us” that is larger than and different from the immediate in-group, and which extends through time and place beyond our current circumstances? Where Mary is invoked as particular patroness of a city, an ethnic group, a nation or a state, how do we understand her social patronage theologically? If Mary is “our” maternal tutelary, can she also be “theirs,” particularly when that group is our enemy? Collective relations of maternity easily suggest the potential for sibling competitiveness in which a “we” claims, blatantly or latently, to be more loved, more protected, more highly favored by Mary than a rival “you” or “them.” The figure of Mary resides where faith intersects with culture, especially popular culture, which has a complicated relationship to dogma and doctrine. It is only to be expected therefore that she is a shimmeringly ambiguous personage, a partner in relationships that are sometimes religious and sometimes cultural, but most often both. More than many other branches of Catholic theology, Mariology depends on theologia prima, that “first-level theology” expressed in devotion, prayer and liturgy, and which predates the theologia secunda of systematic theological reflection or dogmatic formulation. As a result, theological discussion around Mary is “typological, metaphorical, more redolent of Bible and prayer than of school and thesis, more patristic than scholastic, more impressionistic than systematic, more suggestive than probative. In a word, it is symbolic and evocative, not philosophical and ontological.”25 By its very nature, cultural identity is particular, embodied in specific times, places, and people. As the then Cardinal Ratzinger argued in 2004, the point about particular cultures “lies in the association of culture with a

16



Introduction

cultural individuality.”26 Cultural expressions of our own national religiosity or religious nationality may be so subtle a part of the warp and weft of public and private life that they hardly seem to merit comment. Other cultures’ manifestations of that same nexus, in contrast, can seem naïve, exotic, or outrageous. In both cases, however, it would be foolish to foreclose theological discussion. Any theology of nationality that excludes or underemphasizes cultural experience is doomed to insufficiency, for by its very nature, national identity is a social matter. A “first-level” theological approach to nationality complements the abstract intellective considerations of systematic theology. It issues from a position of profound and sensitive sympathy toward people who may be culturally and intellectually different from us. It respects the religious instincts of the whole of the Church as seriously as the ratiocinations of academics. Theologia prima also demands cultivating that difficult virtues, intellectual humility, and a willingness to venture beyond parochial, if cozy, epistemological perspectives. To the question “what has theology got to do with nationality?” I wish to respond with another question: “What might popular experiences of nationality be telling academic theology?” A theologia prima of nationality takes seriously the possibility that whatever its possible excesses and superstitious elements, popular devotion might be expressing something that more formal theological investigation has missed. Where theological speculation and dogmatic speculation have feared to tread, popular faith instincts suggest that national identity and Christian faith are at some level connected, and that they have much to say to each other. A theologia prima of nationality is not enough however, and stands in need of a sturdy theologia secunda. Before his 2006 visit to Auschwitz, Benedict XVI affirmed, “I am above all Catholic, and I would say that this point is important. We must always learn that we are Catholic, and thus that one’s nationality is inserted, relativized, and also carefully located in the great unity of the Catholic communion.”27 The theological challenge and the pastoral imperative is precisely how to “insert, relativize and carefully locate” nationality within Christianity, and national identity within Christian identity. While patriotism is portrayed by Church teaching as a virtue, it remains “something of a dilemma for Christians.”28 Distaste for extreme nationalism is no reason not to examine nationality theologically. The fact that the terrain of nationality is potentially perilous may repel our theological curiosity—but equally it demands it. It also brings us into uncharted waters. Five chapters of Memory and Identity, a book that reflects the private thought of John Paul II on culture, are dedicated to discussing nationality. Mulling over whether a nation is anything more than the sum of its mem-

Introduction



17

bers, John Paul II speculates that in the final judgment pronounced on their individual members, “nations too are in some way judged.”29 The phrase “in some way” expresses the central dilemma. Understanding the religious role of social identity other than Church membership is a challenge that is as practical as it is theoretical. This book is “toward” a Catholic theology of nationality, and is intended to open discussion in what is an almost undisturbed field for theology. It is therefore only one possible theology of nationality, or more accurately, several incipient theologies. My hope is that, whether in refuting my outlines or developing them, this study will engender other theological discussions of the nation and its domains. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that “love of neighbor is inseparable from love for God.”30 Nothing, either in that statement or in Mt 22:35–40 which underlies it, suggests that love is to be exercised uniquely between individuals. Human love requires and enlivens a unique self, which is able to freely give and freely receive. Being is communitarian, and community involves generous self-giving. In interpersonal relationships, strong identity on the part of the respective individuals does not vitiate but strengthens their bond. The healthier the national identity of any one nation, the stronger its potential contribution to international peace. In a world in which “the nations so furiously rage together,”31 theological discussion of nationality is both necessary and overdue.

Notes 1. Michael G. Long and Tracy Wenger Sadd, “Why Rethink Christianity and Patriotism?” in Michael G. Long and Tracy Wenger Sadd, eds., God and Country? Diverse Perspectives on Christianity and Patriotism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 5. 2. Lowell W. Barrington, “Nationalism and Independence,” in Lowell W. Barrington, ed., After Independence: Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonialist and Postcommunist States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 1. 3. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (Washington, DC: USCCB, 2005), 67. 4. A recent welcome contribution is Christine Firer Hinze, “A Distinctively Catholic Patriotism?” in Long and Sadd, God and Country?, 129–146. 5. John D. Wright, National Patriotism in Papal Teaching (Westminster, MD: Newman, 1942). 6. Kevin F. Burke, “Thinking About the Church: The Gift of Cultural Diversity to Theology,” in Peter P. Phan and Diana Hayes, eds., Many Faces, One Church (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 33.

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Introduction

7. Edward Yarnold, “Toward a Systematic Theology of Mary,” in William McLoughlin and Jill Pinnock, eds., Mary Is for Everyone: Essays on Mary and Ecumenism (Leominster, England: Gracewing, 1997), 22. 8. Yarnold, “Toward a Systematic Theology of Mary,” 22. 9. Yarnold, “Toward a Systematic Theology of Mary,” 22. 10. See the classic article of Sandra Schneiders, “The Study of Christian Spirituality: Contours and Dynamics of a Discipline,” Christian Spirituality Bulletin 6 (Spring 1998): 3–12. 11. See Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 16. 12. Cicero, De Invent. II, 66. See Gertrude Emilie, “Cicero and the Roman Pietas.” The Classical Journal, 39, no. 9 (June 1944): 536–542. 13. Barrington, “Nationalism and Independence,” 4. 14. New York Times, January 21, 2009. 15. Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race: Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 16. On chosen nations, see Steven Grosby, Biblical Ideas of Nationality: Ancient and Modern (Winona Lake, ID: Eisenbrauns, 2002), chap. 4; Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), chaps. 4 and 5. 17. Felipe Fernández-Armesto, The Future of Religion (London: Phoenix, 1997). 18. “Archpastoral Council says that the Unity of Holy Russia is the most Precious Possession of the Peoples of Russia, the Ukraine, and Byelorussia.” http:// 02varvara. wordpress.com/2008/06/28/archpastoral-council-says-that-the-unity-of-holy-russia -is-the-most-precious-possession-of-the-peoples-of-russia-the-ukraine-and-byelo russia. 19. Ubi arcano Dei consiglio, 24. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Church documents are taken from http//www.vatican.va. These versions unfortunately almost without exception employ gender exclusive language. However, they also embody the Church’s official understanding of its editio typica Latin texts. Vatican translations employ dynamic equivalence, and frequently include large elements of interpretation. Where the English version varies from a strict translation of the Latin text, I have noted this in the text. References are to numbered paragraphs. 20. Caritate Christi compulsi, 4. 21. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 67. 22. Whether Jesus’ Jewishness constituted a “national identity” is dependent on the degree to which we can accurately refer to ancient Israel, at various points in its history, as a nation, and to the univocality of those concepts. Doron Mendels, The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism: Jewish and Christian Ethnicity in Ancient Palestine (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), for example does not problematize the matter of Jewish nationality. Grosby, Biblical Ideas of Nationality, investigates Israelite nationality in great detail and with scholarly élan.

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19

23. Colin Gunton, The One, The Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 180. Gunton’s masterly series of lectures, recorded in this book, employs particularity as a central organizing category. Gunton’s concern is with the broad field of modernity, rather than the narrow focus of nationality. Since nationality is somewhat of a problem for modernity, and vice versa, what Gunton contructs departing from Trinitarian considerations is highly germane to what I attempt to sketch out in this book in employing Christological and Mariological motifs. 24. Gunton, The One, The Three and The Many, 43. 25. Robert Taft, “Mass Without the Consecration? The Historic Agreement on the Eucharist Between the Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East, Promulgated 26 October 2001,” in James F. Puglisi, ed., Liturgical Renewal as a Way to Christian Unity (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2006), 211–212. 26. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 60. 27. John Allen, “Benedict sets about reawakening Europe’s Christian roots,” National Catholic Reporter, May 25, 2006. http://nationalcatholicreporter.org/ word/ pt052506.html. 28. Thomas Massaro, “For God and Country: Patriotism and Religious Identity Today.” Lecture delivered at University of San Francisco, September 25, 2008. http:// www.usfca.edu/ lanecenter/pdf/MassaroPatriotismText9.pdf. 29. John Paul II, Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium (New York: Rizzoli, 1995), 76. 30. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops), 1878. All references to the Catechism are to numbered paragraphs. 31. Charles Jennens, libretto to Handel’s Messiah, from Ps 2:1.

CHAPTER ONE



Pinning the Jellyfish The Nation (Un)defined

No “scientific definition” of a nation can be devised: yet the phenomenon has existed and exists. All that I can find to say is that a nation exists, when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.1

Few assertions can be made with controversy about nationality and nationalism, but one can safely argue that both concepts are as hard to define as it is to pin the proverbial jellyfish to a wall. However, the difficulty of arriving at working definitions of nation, nationality, nationhood, national identity, nationalism, ethnicity and ethnic identity does not prevent us from holding often-passionate convictions about such subjects. Nationality continues to be an important element in many people’s sense of identity, affecting not only how they view themselves but also how they relate to others. Scholars, too, are rarely exempt from a surprising degree of passion or a certain vagueness when considering the matter of the nation and its domain. The difficulty of finding satisfactory definitions for these concepts cannot be explained by any single reason. Some sense of having an experience of collective identity larger than that of the family or immediate kin-group seems to be a sine qua non of human experience. Under the umbrella term “nation,” we usually include, describe, and understand an infinitude of historical experiences. Such experiences stretch from the earliest stages of recorded human history all the way into a present in which the world is understood to consist of nations. Nationality also reaches into a future that promises to be one of

21

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Chapter One

unprecedented globalization, involving large-scale immigration, rapid communications, and an increasing permeability of national borders. The related experiences of patriotism and nationalism have also taken on a huge variety of forms throughout history: religious and secular, conservative and revolutionary, communist and fascist, cultural and political, diasporic and irredentist, to name only a few. Consequently, these subjects have become the object of study by an array of scholars from every conceivable field: historians of different theoretical convictions and specializations, sociologists and scholars of political science, social geographers, and philosophers, each with their own disciplinary and personal preferences. While it is just about possible to create tentative taxonomies and typologies of responses to nationality, there is little consensus even within each individual academic specialty. The need for scholarly interdisciplinarity is hampered by the diversity of definitions and instruments used in different fields, meaning that communication between different specialists can act as much as a barrier to understanding as a bridge between them. Different disciplines and studies, in other words, may well be seeking answers to different questions. Another phenomenon can help to explain the difficulty if not the impossibility of arriving at a “unified field theory” concerning these questions: opinions about nationality frequently suffer from a partiality which is the consequence of absorbing one particular historical experience and making it a universal paradigm. A pertinent example is Ernest Renan’s seminal 1882 work “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” informed as it was by centuries of French ideas about nationality.2 In such cases, historical experiences and personal predilections make objectivity ever elusive. An ancient dictum remains relevant here: quidquid percipitur percipitur secundum modo perceptoris. Each commentator writes inevitably from her or his own historical, national, personal and ideological perspectives. Consequently, arguments often depart from conclusions which then have to be proven by locating propositions which will lead syllogistically to the desired, already-existing conclusion. Simply put, this means that people often know what they think and believe, but are often less articulate, honest and self-aware as to why they hold these opinions and convictions. A hermeneutical approach that does not admit the personal experience and preferences of the interpreter is quite simply methodologically and philosophically inadequate. A whole area of social analysis deriving from Marx, for example, ignores or minimizes the “national question,” and many reasonable people regard nationalism as a purely negative force, intimately connected with racism and war, one that reached its inevitable conclusion in the horrors of Nazism. In studies of nations and nationalism, a clear division

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exists between those who seek to deconstruct the projects of both nation and nationalism and those who seek to justify, or at least sympathetically describe, the phenomenon. Both of these two major scholarly groupings are informed by personal experiences and assumptions which are often latent, and all the more powerful because of their latency. There is indeed something profoundly affecting about national identity; it is a major historical force capable of both negative and positive manifestations. The negative potential of a stress on national identity is so obvious as not to need commentary. But to claim that an awareness of national identity leads inexorably to Auschwitz is to create a blindly ideological short-circuit. The fact is that a large number of people have historically felt, and continue to experience, a significant allegiance to their nation, a feeling that produces positive as well as negative manifestations. In a world where international culture threatens to drown cultural diversity in a sea of global homogeneity, a consciousness of one’s national identity can be an exemplary value and a source of crucial resistance against the destruction of local cultures. In political states containing an amalgam of different peoples, treasuring one’s ethnic or national identity may be a matter of justice, and even of survival. There are countless ways in which national identity “makes available a fund of meanings, pleasures and rewards beyond anything we are likely to find in our individual lives.”3 Any acknowledgment that passions, desires, and a whole range of emotions typically obtain in these questions, and that they escape definition, also suggests something less pessimistic and more interesting: that the deep psychological roots of national identity reach down through the profound emotions of the personal and collective into realms of ineffability. Freud noted the psychological sources of ethnic pride within himself, admitting that his own sense of Jewishness was not rooted in religious conviction but that he was “irresistibly” bonded to it by “many obscure and emotional forces, which [were] the more powerful the less they could be expressed, as well as by a clear consciousness of inner identity, a deep realization of sharing the same psychic structures.”4 In this, national identity, ethnicity, and a fortiori, ideological nationalism are linked with religion. The connections between religious and national questions reach well beyond questions of methodology, hermeneutics and phenomenological similarities, however. It is my firm conviction that nationality simply cannot be understood fully without recourse to categories of religion. The date of the formation of the modern concept of the nation is a matter of scholarly debate, but the influence of religious language and concepts in the shaping of that idea is incontrovertible. For example, Old Testament

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Chapter One

ideas of nationality are probably the single most important influence in the development of European concepts of nationality over the last five hundred years. If it is impossible to consider the development of ideas of nationality without taking religion into account, the reverse is not so clear. Do religious studies and theology consider the impact of nationality as a facet of religious experience? In the case of Catholic theological reflection, the subject of the nation has been largely absent. The current Catechism of the Catholic Church devotes a mere two paragraphs out of a total of 2,857 to nationality, with brief references to the Old Testament post-diluvial distribution of nations and the national-linguistic myth of Babel.

Naming the Unnamable The vocabulary and concepts used in scholarly and normal discourse to talk about nationality are some of the most important sources of confusion. In the language of politicians, “nation” is sometimes equated with “state,” even though history provides many examples of states (such as the former Soviet Union) which contain more than one nation, ethnic group or people, as well as nations which have no political organization (e.g., the nineteenth-century Poles), or peoples who are found historically in territory which is currently divided between several states (e.g., the Kurdish people). In English alone, “people” may or may not be coterminous with “nation,” and “country” carries its own set of nuances. In addition, a bewilderingly post-Babelian number of terms deriving from Latin, Greek and Anglo-Saxon roots exists for describing collectivities of people larger than that of the extended kin-group. The potential for confusion is compounded by the fact that such terms as ethnos, natio, gens, populus, patria, and pagus have given rise to cognate words in modern European and other languages, words which themselves vary in nuance from language to language and from period to period. A good example is the English word “ethnic,” which is of medieval origin.5 Its source, ethnos, includes a variety of uses: in the Classical Greek of the Iliad we find ethnos etairon, a band of comrades, and ethnos laon, a large and undifferentiated group of warriors; at the same time, ethnos Achaion describes the Achaean tribe and ethnea nekron, the hosts of the dead. Pindar refers to ethnos aneron, the race of men, and Herodotus to Medikon ethnos, the Medes. Ethnos therefore may be rendered metaphorically by “swarm,” “caste,” “race,” “host,” “tribe,” “people,” and more. In cases where it is applied to groups of people, ethnos suggests an element of peripherality and foreign status, denoting social groups that are not of the Greek nation-state type; the Greeks

Pinning the Jellyfish 

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referred to themselves not as ethnos but as genos.6 Ethnikos tended therefore to be close to barbaros, evoking suggestions of moral, social and linguistic deficiency. Since about 1850, “ethnic” has been used to describe a people of shared characteristics, but confusingly was often conflated in the nineteenth century with race. To American sociologists of the 1950s we are indebted for its current usage, which suggests elements of cultural (and sometimes racial) minority status. In Latin usage, populus was reserved for the Romans alone.7 Gens tended to be used by the Romans for large civilized peoples, groups in whom it was possible to recognize certain similarities with themselves. Natio on the other hand seems to have been originally derogatory, indicating a social status significantly lower than that of a Roman citizen, or membership in geographically distant and culturally backward communities.8 Classical Latin usage of natio is related hermeneutically to such terms as the Greek ta ethne and Hebrew amamim (“those who do not belong”)9 describing a “them” who although being recognized as a collectivity, are negatively and comparatively identified as “not-us.” Genos, gens, populus, tribus, natio, barbaros, and ciuis provide then a rich and complex moral vocabulary, involving perspectives of inclusion and exclusion, dignity and disdain, familiarity and strangeness. The medieval use of natio to describe foreign university students living together in groups based on their native languages is well known. However, Susan Reynolds claims that “[there] is no foundation for the belief, common amongst students of modern nationalism, that the word natio was seldom used in the Middle Ages except to describe the nationes into which university students were divided.”10 Rather, it was “a synonym for gens . . . thought of as a community of custom, descent and government—a people,” a constellation of associations which suggests that natio included but was not limited to ethnic or linguistic definitions. Reynolds holds that the application of “nation” and “national” to medieval political communities is potentially so misleading that she eschews them in favor of “regna” and “regnal.” Translations of these terms into vernaculars were not always constant. As verbal usage evolves more quickly than print usage, gauging exact nuances in historical secular literature becomes even more difficult. Liah Greenfeld, tracing the way in which natio and its derivatives have been used with different applicabilities in the medieval and early modern periods, notes a “zigzag pattern of semantic change.”11 The King James Bible, for instance, uses “nation” 454 times, whereas Jerome’s Vulgate employs natio a mere 100 times.12 The Vulgate natio “is invariably used in relations of kin and language; it has a limited, ‘ethnic’ connotation. In distinction, in the English translation, the word nation is frequently employed as a synonym of a people, a polity and even a

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Chapter One

territory.”13 Such translations are far from insignificant, Greenfeld holds, for “the Old Testament lent itself to a nationally inspired interpretation, and helped to provide an idiom for an independently growing phenomenon.”14 Such changes make the precise evaluation of terms an area of potential confusion. Nineteenth-century translations of medieval usages of gens, natio and populus as “race”—a term of dubious respectability today—confused actual biological descent with national cultural tradition. The French patrie, not often used prior to the eighteenth century as a synonym for “nation,” was often applied to a local area of origin rather than to a national territory. Voltaire’s cosmopolitan aspiration that words such as patrie would be eradicated from the vocabulary of “men of reason” is elucidated in his phrase patria est ubicumque bene. But the Abbé Coyer restored patrie in his writings to its classical, ancestral meaning of a national territory deserving of filial loyalty, appreciated as the seat of happiness, and worthy of quasi-religious respect. This definition is included in that bible of the Enlightenment, Didérot’s Encyclopédie, and lies behind Renan’s definition of a nation as a moral body: “a great aggregation of men with a healthy spirit and warmth of heart creates a moral conscience which is called a nation.”15 A glimpse at the history of the usage of these words then reveals a frustrating lack of clear consistancy of usage, a confusion that persists in contemporary discussions. But we are in need at this point of some tentative working definitions of crucial terms. Ethnicity is considered in many scholarly accounts to be a component of nationality. Since no single word in English expresses the concept of ethnic community, Anthony D. Smith employs the French term ethnie, delineated as having: (1) an identifying name or emblem, (2) a myth of common ancestry, (3) shared historical memories and traditions, (4) one or more elements of common culture, (5) a link with an historic territory or homeland, and (6) a measure of solidarity at least amongst the elites.16 Yet ethnie is not coterminous with nation, which is defined by Smith as “a named human population sharing an historic community, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights for all members.”17 Such a definition would not of course meet with the approval of many nationalists, as it describes a social body that has already achieved some measure of political stability. Part of the emotive power of nationalism, after all, is that it is frequently experienced under conditions of “already-not-yet,” in the sense that nationalists simultaneously recognize the potential or essence of their nation, experience frustration at its lack of concrete political form, and live in the hope of its fulfillment as a nation-state.

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The modern term “nationalism,” Smith holds, encompasses various realities: the purposeful fostering of nations and national states; an awareness of belonging to a nation, along with attachment to and pride in that nation and desires for its future; and an ideology extolling the particular nation that may also include a general cultural doctrine of nationality. The usage of the term “nationalism” itself tends almost inexorably to slip in and out of these various sub-categories. However, Smith holds, modern nationalism contains some fairly constant elements. The creeds of various forms of nationalism have a number of articles in common. First, the world is divided into nations, each with its own particular character and destiny. Second, the nation is the main, if not also the sole source of political power. Third, loyalty to a nation overrides other loyalties. Fourth, if everyone is to be truly free and authentic, they must consciously belong to a nation. Lastly, to realize themselves and to secure international peace and justice, nations must be autonomous, free and secure.18 From this, we arrive at Smith’s definition of nationalism as “an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining identity, unity and autonomy of a social group, some of whose members deem it to constitute an actual or potential nation.”19 A central concern of discussions of nationality and ethnicity is the relationship between social and individual aspects of human identity. A philosophy deriving from Locke and Kant understands personhood as the form ne plus ultra of identity. Within this tradition, human identity is considered independently of the concrete particular forms of social life in which personhood actually exists. Locke distinguishes between the category of the person (conceived of in its moral, legal and rational dimensions), and that of the (merely) human. For Kant, personhood is likewise a moral category, and a person is defined as a rational and responsible being. To be a person is to be the bearer of rights and to recognize one’s fellow-persons as such. In the ontological hierarchy set up by Kant, personhood is realized by transcending the particularities of one’s merely empirical human existence. Ross Poole makes an important point in this regard: [T]he mistake generated by the tradition initiated by Locke and Kant is to conceive of the conception of self generated by the law and legalistic morality as the only or primary one available to us. . . . But the law and its attendant morality constitute only one of the frameworks of meaning within which we live our lives, and personhood is only one of the identities available to us. We are persons, but we are not just persons.20

Notions of universal, unconditional values are inevitably linked to the potential for intellectual hubris. A modern hermeneutics of suspicion would

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Chapter One

tend to question this abstracted and decontextualized notion of personhood as being informed and conditioned by its authors’ own assumptions about temperament, culture, class, epoch and gender. At the core of contemporary notions of identity is the intuition that we come to understand who we are not in spite of or independently of our social environment, but precisely in and through our relations with that environment. The source of this psychological turn is the application in the work of Erik Erikson and others of psychoanalytic categories to social, historical and political issues. Postmodernist sympathies tend to stress context (cultural, temporal, geographical, gendered) as being the prime factor in defining identity, the questions “what is this?” and “who am I?” being to a significant extent answered by “where/when this is” and “where/what/when you are.” Identity (or personhood) is in this case conceived of as being fundamentally and radically contingent, a passive response to uncontrollable large-scale givens. This view stands at a polar extreme from the Lockian-Kantian tradition in which the person is the active engineer of his or her own personhood. While postmodernist hermeneutics contain the virtue of correcting the essentialism and claims to universality of earlier philosophers, they also run the danger of dissolving into pure contextuality any permanent essence of identity whatsoever. The relations between different aspects of human identity are complex, and whatever metaphor we use to describe them will inevitably be partial and will need to be complemented and nuanced by other metaphors. Is there then a possibility of a concept of identity which would allow for both permanency and change? Such a tertium quid interpretation of identity would allow for the existence of different dimensions of the self that may be brought to the foreground of attention, while others can be placed at certain times into the background according to context. Many other metaphors for identity are available to us. In Heraclitean terms, identity might be conceived as flow: a river at any given point is both the same as and different from its sources, more than and different from the sum of its parts. Moreover, at any given time it is both the same river as in the past yet contains different water: “panta rei kai euden menei.” Yet another image of identity frequently applied to the nation is that of the individual: a sixty-year-old woman is clearly different, physically and psychologically, from what she was as a three-year-old girl, but certain formative elements remain the same; the child is mother to the woman, to rephrase Wordsworth. At heart here are philosophical issues of form and content, questions to which we will return in considering the religious “shape” of nationality. Following a change of focus from questions of truth (which are absolutist and universal in their interest, more easily assimilated to positivist and

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scientific mindsets) to questions of meaning (which are contestable, dialogic and relational, and more sympathetic to psychological and cultural ways of thinking), considerations of identity inevitably become more pressing. The Kantian homo rationalis has evolved into something approaching homo hermeneuticus, where the human being is considered in Charles Taylor’s phrase as a “self-interpreting animal.”21 Selfhood, by virtue of its inscription in diverse contexts, is necessarily an interpretative state, because it is through selfaware evaluations of ourselves and the world that we become conscious of ourselves as subjects of experience and action. An identity provides us with a way of looking at and understanding the world, giving us guidelines for how to act within that world. Taylor holds that all identities involve standards and norms that are inherited socially; each identity therefore carries some conception of its origins and of its future. Identity is constructed and temporally extended through memory and anticipation. The result of this is that different construals of identity—or different stresses on the various components of our individual and social identities—will place us in different pasts and promise different futures, and vice versa. To understand identity fundamentally as a way of being in and understanding the world also touches on the issue of social identity as in-group unity and out-group difference. An essentialist understanding of identity, in which identity is a fixed given, does not require the presence of an entity different from the individual or corporate self. In such a case, identity is considered independent of any social framework. But a conception of human identity as interpretative state presents identity both as unity with those with whom one recognizes affinity and as separation and exclusion from those whom one does not recognize as “us.” The psychological weight of the word “exclusion,” however, tends also to imply “rejection.” It is this negative connotation that underlies some reactions against nationalism. No one can deny that a stress on collective difference has often led to the formation of adversarial identity, and that nationalistic projects have sought either to highlight the gap between a national “us” and others nations’ “them.” As Ross Poole has noted, All too often nationalism has been associated with the denigration of and contempt for people of other nations. . . .That we have a certain national identity may be an inescapable part of modern life; but it seems that we should not lend this fact any moral legitimacy by deducing values from it.22

It is difficult to over-stress that the relationship between individual and social aspects of identity is one of the vital issues at work in questions of

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national identity. But how in fact do individual and social identities shape each other? The concept of identity presupposes a constitutive linkage between conceptions of the self and forms of social existence. In this sense, all identities are social.23 Accordingly, only through and in community is it possible to transcend the limits of individual experience and realize the self. The collective “we” does not eliminate the “I.” On the contrary, it is its condition of existence. Another central question is the relative importance of the national to other forms of identity (e.g., familial, class, gender, geographical, or religious). A claim often made by opponents of nationalism is that it advances the belief that national identity has a supreme claim on its members, to the extent that it eclipses all other dimensions of the person. But even if it is true that historically a focus on national identity has sometimes been used as a reason to ignore more urgent moral demands originating from outside of one’s own nation, similar condemnations could also be made of other categories of identity, such as class or religion. The nation is not the only moral community that has privileged the internally focused responsibilities and externally focused rights of its members. It is also important to state that the “inescapability” of nationality—a tenet of nationalist creeds—is a historically arguable claim. Many commentators note that cultural, even ethnic identity does not always take a specifically national form. However, modern European history has clung to the ideal of the homogenous nation-state, along the lines of cuius regio, eius religio—and eiae linguae et culturae also. Consequently, Poole notes, “the fusion of language, culture and polity defined by the nation has so entered our conception of ourselves that it becomes difficult to address the question of who we are except in terms which presuppose a national identity.”24 Simply put, there is no nation-less human, since anyone born in the modern era is born into a particular national context. Yet the belief that the world is being constituted of nationstates is far from unproblematic. The National Geographic Atlas of the World, for example, conflates nations and states, and citizenship with national identity, with no discernible constancy. Among the countries described as “nations” are the Czech Republic, France and Germany. While San Marino is named as a separate entity, neither Scotland nor Wales are. The United Kingdom is inhabited by “Britons”; in Spain, “separatist agitation based on regional differences . . . still challenges national unity, but a strong national peace movement has developed to counteract terrorist activities.”25 Whatever its taxonomic variants, a national identity is nevertheless more than a label, and indeed more than an interpretative stance. Such identity also brings with it commitments and responsibilities. In the era of national-

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ism, nationality has been politicized into a moral condition, one in which it is not possible to take one’s own nationality for granted, or as merely one of many different aspects of identity. It has become instead a special field of self-interpretation. This self-consciousness is heightened by emotionally laden encounters with members of other nationalities—not only in the experience of exile or the horrors of war, but also in the experience of colonialism and imperialism. Nationalism claims an ethical imperative for the idea of national belonging. Human authenticity, for nationalists, is attained to the degree to which each individual consciously inscribes her- or himself in her or his national community. Nationalist (as opposed to national) consciousness also promotes a group ethic that urges individual conformity to culturally sanctioned forms (such as choice of language, dress, behavior, etc.). Although being American is often held to be a value in itself, one can also be a “good” American, according to the degree of conformity to a set of norms. Where ideology vests itself in the robes of morality, there also arises the possibility of “un-American activities.” In this scheme, aspects of national identity may also include a performative element, where nationality has to be consciously and publicly acted out. This applies not only to the artistic self-enactment of “traditional” dance and music that typifies, say, meetings of exiles or state occasions. A wider sense of performativity can typify national identity, such as an urging that one’s distinctive nationality pervade and permeate all aspects of life. Ninian Smart describes nationality as a “daily sacrament.”26 In modern nationalism, there is much to be said for the claim that functionally, nationality is a kind of religion, in that it tends to imitate the postures of theistic religion. “Veneration of historic communities has, for those who belong to them, some of the attractions of life in a sect, nourishing the exclusive identity of chosen people.”27 The difference between the two lies in the fact that as a “religion,” nationality is generally less successful at evoking transcendence, in the sense of an awareness of divine, eternal realities. It is, however, highly adept at inculcating morality. The moralizing of national identity runs the gamut of quasi-moral states: national guilt and pride, shame and honor, reward and punishment. What might be a given pre-moral state (i.e., birth and upbringing into a particular nation) thus becomes a conscious option for that nationality (or repudiation of it). In short, the ontological becomes deontological. There remains one highly important aspect to consider in the relation between individual and national identities. Common sense shows that one’s nationality is one of the significant factors not only in one’s identity but also in shaping one’s personality. In nationalist ideology and common parlance,

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the nation claims an existence different from and greater than the sum of the individuals from which it is constructed. It has a past as well as a present existence, and on that basis, projects a future, being experienced as a traditio inherited from the past to be handed over to posterity. The metaphorical application of personhood or identity to the nation is a frequently recurring phenomenon in both popular political rhetoric (“England expects that each man will today do his duty”) and in nationalist philosophy. Metaphor, however, suffers from a notorious tendency to demetaphoricize itself; with regular use, terms that started out as analogies easily take on airs of literalism, and poetic usage easily slips into quasi-scientific use. Writers from at least the time of Henry Bolingbroke (1678–1751) have employed the notion of “national character.” Thus, in France (the geographical area and sometimes the state), among the French (as the inhabitants of the country), and expressed in the medium of the French language (the ancestral tongue of parts of the territory and some of the people), there arose an abstract but widely accepted characteristic called French-ness, held to be embodied in certain people, ways of living, landscapes, and especially in the French nation, which was considered to exist as a corporate personage. Whether or not identity can or should be predicated of a nation as a whole, and whether there exists such a thing as an essential, immutable national essence called French-ness, are highly moot questions. Differing notions of personal identity—whether this is understood as fixed or mutable, or essential and unchanging—have determined the notion of national character derived from them. In this sense, the particular character of a nation can be variously held to be perennial, deeply conditioned by its geography and history, or limitlessly mutable in response and reaction to the vagaries of history. Such beliefs have taken on their own dynamism. They are worthy if not of admiration, then at least of consideration as significant historical phenomena.

Inter-notional Relations The nature of national identity, its universality and connection with ethnicity or lack thereof, and the precise era of its historical emergence in various countries are all matters on which there is substantial disagreement among scholars. A majority of commentators hold that the latter years of the Enlightenment, along with the events and aftermath of the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars, are the cradle or the crystallization of European national awareness—at least in the form that it has taken over the last two hundred years. Intimately connected with the emergence of the modern

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concept of the nation is the development of modern nationalism, whose exact genesis has been dated variously to 1775 (the first partition of Poland), 1776 (the Declaration of American Independence), 1789 or 1792 (the commencement and the second phase, respectively, of the French Revolution), or 1807 (the publication of Fichte’s Reden an die deutsche Nation). Anthony D. Smith notes that “only after 1800 has it been possible for every self-aware [ethnic] and political community to claim the title of ‘nation’ and strive to become as like the nationalists’ pure type of nation as possible.”28 The writings of Johann Gottlieb Herder (1744–1803) lie at the roots of much European nationalism. Although indebted to a line of European thinkers including Vico, Bolingbroke and Montesquieu, Herder’s most immediate precursor was Karl von Moser, whose Von dem deutschen Nationalgeist of 1765 proposed that there existed a German people whose unity was based on “national character.” It is to Herder, however, that subsequent generations are indebted for such key concepts of nationalism as Nationalsprache, Nationalgeschichte, Nationaltraditionen, Geist des Volkes, Geist der Nation, and Nationalcharacter. Herder’s starting point is the human person within society. Departing from the tradition embodied by Locke and Kant, Herder admits the existence of no universal, hypothetical person. Rather, humanity can only be conceived of within the context of the naturally existing (or providentially created) specific social group, be this family or Volk, a body that he conceives of as being an extension of the extended family. Herder’s great four-volume work, Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1791), explains the diversity of nations, each of which is defined by a peculiar language, culture, religion, art, etc. The notion of “culture” was a comparative innovation, a Romantic reaction to the universalist and cosmopolitan Enlightenment value of “civilization.” His concept of culture was rooted in the value of the particular and idiosyncratic. Culture was to be discovered as embodied in particular traditions, ways of life, histories and artistic forms. Herder’s insistence on the importance of culture allowed for whole elements of poetry, mythology and folk tradition which had found little place in the intellectual rationalism of the Enlightenment. Herder himself had been raised in the tradition of German Pietism, which had elevated religious feeling while devaluing Kopfwissenshaft, a tendency that found its way into his esteem for the affective elements connected with nationality. For Herder, different national cultures are born out of the effect of such factors as climate and geography, heredity, and interaction with other peoples. But prime among the elements that define a nation is language, an idea closely tied to Herder’s understanding of the human person as a communicative being. Only language makes humankind human, and as each

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language can only be learned in a specific community, so each community has its specific mode of thought. Herder appears to have been among the first Western thinkers to conceive of language not merely as an inert and neutral vehicle for the transmission of universal ideas, but as a constituent of personal and collective identity, with a value autonomous from the ideas expressed through it. From this, Herder advanced to the idea that a language is the foremost expression of the spirit of a particular nation: the wealth of its language, considered as a treasury of unique and particular cultural values, is the abode of religious beliefs, traditions and historical awareness. His Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte (1774) introduces the idea that each people is called to play the role assigned to it by divine providence, by virtue of its having been placed in a particular environment. The moral perfection of a society consisted therefore in that particular society’s adhering to its own authentic—and providentially ascribed—nature. Herder considered modern (i.e., Enlightenment and cosmopolitan) society as an aberration. In contrast, societies of the past were held up as models of organicity, cohesion and wholeness. The elevation of the ideals of nationality propounded by Herder took on significant political form in diverse nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalisms. Equally diverse have been the evaluations of these manifestations of national awareness. One of the most notable fault lines in accounts of nationality and nationalism is between the respective approaches of historians and social scientists. The former have tended to see national identity and nationalism as emerging together, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and Holland, then spreading to nineteenth-century Latin America, South, Central and Eastern Europe and Russia, and in the twentieth century into colonial and post-colonial Africa, Australasia and the Middle and Far East. Sociologists, on the other hand, have tended to define national identity as a derivative of nationalism; often nationalism is considered in sociology as a powerful but comparatively short-lived ideology, one that emerged in the second half of the eighteenth century but which is now gradually being sunk by the unstoppable waves of globalization. Up until the 1970s, general theoretical agreement existed, if not about the desirability of national identity, then at least as to the objective reality of its existence. Earlier generations of scholars thought of nations as the basic communities of history, and national sentiment and consciousness as fundamental elements of the phenomenon. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new generation of scholars began to question the philosophical and ethical aspects of nationality: is the nation an end in itself, or a proximate value? Is the nation an ethno-cultural phenomenon, one based on ius sanguinis kin-

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ship, history and shared language (the version of nationality proposed by Herder and generally providing the basis for German traditions of nationality)? Or is it a political reality, based on territory and ius soli citizenship, in which the nation is the creation of the state (the notion of national identity that emerges from France)? Does any nation exist which is truly immemorial, connected in an unbroken line of succession to a past that fades into unrecorded history? Or are nations and nationalism rather the creation of and creator of modernity, inextricably connected to the processes of industrialization? Marx and Engels tended to exclude nationality as an engine of history from their schemata (except insofar as national sentiment might further the advancement of the proletariat), generally tending to define nations in the German Romantic tradition as cultural communities of language and descent. This type of reductive reasoning has left a strong imprint on many latter-day approaches to the study of nationalism, including even those which eschew some of the cruder forms of economic reductionism. Much modernist thought inherited Marxism’s lack of interest in the specificities of nationality and its strong preferences for class-based social analysis. Among other influences and tendencies found in the work of modernist theoreticians of nationality we find the psychology of Dürckheim, which explains away the religious elements of nationalism as manifestations of a human tendency to sacralize things beloved. For national-skeptics such as Ernest Gellner, nations are wholly modern phenomena, entirely the product of the political and social changes of eighteenth- to twentieth-century Europe. Nations, rather than primal realities, are merely the inevitable consequences of the revolutions—print, Industrial, and French—that have constituted modernity. In a sophisticated series of arguments, Gellner traces nationalism to the new role of linguistic culture in the modern world, seeking to prove that not only are national identity and nationalism the inevitable byproducts of the shift from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft,29 but that they are a constituent part of modernity. Gellner boldly holds that “nations do not create nationalism. Nationalist movements define and create nations.”30 Liah Greenfeld agrees that nationalism “appeared in one age, and it can disappear in another. But if it does, the world in which we live will be no more. The post-national world will be truly post-modern, for nationality is the constitutive principle of modernity.”31 Yet another of the shibboleths dividing theorists of nationality concerns the degree of continuity or discontinuity between ancient, medieval and modern “national” communities. Some critics hold that nationalists selectively

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quarry and make use of a pre-existing proliferation of cultural manifestations, building an entirely new edifice out of the rubble of the past. Such theories effectively deny that there exists any essential link between modern nations and the pre-modern constituencies that bear the same name. The “France” of the seventeenth century has no necessary continuity with the “France” of the Peace of Versailles, or the modern member of the European Union. However, for nationalism to succeed, a nation must appear to be timelessly authentic, and embodied in “the people.” It is in this guise that nationalism has been capable of generating messianic ardor. The 1995 Warwick Debates on Nationalism between Anthony D. Smith and his former teacher Ernest Gellner revealed two different stances toward nationality.32 For Smith, Gellner’s dismissal of the reality of nationality does not take seriously enough the human desire to authenticate the present by owning the past, selecting out of all that has been those things which are distinctive, truly “ours,” and therefore constitutive of group identity. Instead, Smith argues that human autonomy, social and individual, positively requires the possession of elements which are peculiarly its own. Part of that uniqueness, according to Smith, is ethnicity, a constituent part of any adequate understanding of nationalism. The term itself is problematic, since it is easily confounded with biological concepts of race and threatens to invoke an unsavory series of associations with racism. But the use of the word “ethnic” and its associated vocabulary is, in Smith’s usage, cultural. Ethno-history (as opposed to purely political history) is therefore essential to a full consideration of nationality, because it describes a specific cultural heritage that spreads further and more deeply beyond the fairly limited scope attributed to culture by modernist theories. Some critics seek to reduce ethno-history to the realm of construct, seeing it as the invention of cultural entrepreneurs. Objectively, this position can make sense on a case-by-case basis: but what these critics have often failed to see is that when a sufficiently large number of people hold in common what may be even a misguided opinion, that in itself becomes an objective fact worthy of consideration and even respect. Tom Nairn’s The Breakup of Britain33 argues that the rise of national self-consciousness has an economic cause. Uneven development caused by capitalism within Britain led to the marginalization of the Celtic periphery and the concomitant rise of nationalist and separatist movements in these areas, forged mainly by a disaffected native intelligentsia. Nationalism in the British and Celtic context is an elite phenomenon, a way of maintaining identity in the face of the outside forces of domination. Economic underdevelopment required cultural and mythical compensations. In the face of political assimilation by the center,

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the national distinctiveness of the Celtic nations was affirmed at a level of folk-culture, in which folkloric distinctions were adopted as a substitute for political power. A similar argument for a heightened awareness of national identity and nationalism as reactive phenomena is made in Michael Hechter’s study of the Celtic periphery in Britain, Internal Colonialism.34 Much like Nairn, Hechter ignores or treats as marginal any evidence of ancient cultural pasts, and suggests that the creation of national cultures has its roots in the expansion of the strong Tudor state in England under Henry VIII. Is there anything, apart from a Marxist bias, to which we might attribute this downplaying of the role of culture on the part of modernists? To stress the importance of particular culture would involve moving closer to the nationalists’ premise that a need for roots is of primordial psychological import. Current political strife would certainly support the notion that to stress the importance of particular cultures is to exalt them above all else, leading to an eruption of uncontrollable and atavistic historical forces. In response to such fears, we might assert the validity of human affectivity, especially insofar as it relates to territory: Ethnic nationalists . . . only desire the land of their putative ancestors and the sacred places where their heroes and sages walked, fought and taught. The territory in question must be made into an “ethnoscape,” a poetic landscape that is an extension and expression of the character of the ethnic community and which is celebrated as such in verse and song.35

Nationalism, in this sense, is itself a form of culture, one which aims at the regeneration of societies through the re-appropriation of the past—including the religious past—as the basis for future existence. A past, however putative and imaginary, is a requirement for making sense of the present. At the same time, it would be foolish to rush to condemn modernist approaches to nationalism wholesale. They usefully stress the psychological desire among nationalists to be recognized as a nation by other nations, the role of the state in promoting nationalist ideologies (as in nineteenthcentury France) and the influences of elites in creating and shaping the image of a nation. Yet the modernist insistence on the role of the intellectual classes in creating and shaping the image of a nation is usefully complemented by taking into account popular cultural experience—that set of sentiments, attitudes and perceptions that can and does reshape the messages of patriotic elites and ideologues. Prime amongst these motifs is the religious. In downplaying the wider cultural dimensions of nationality, or identifying modern nations solely as progenies of a nationalism invented ex nihilo,

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modernism can also be guilty of the same serious anachronistic projection and ideological bias of which it accuses nationalism. In doing this, it also sweeps away any serious consideration of the important role of religion in national cultures and nationalist ideology. For a study of the role of religion in national identity and of nationality in religion, Marxist-influenced modernist national skepticism is insufficient, since it is ideologically disinclined away from consideration of religious motifs. In addition, such an omission also excludes the psychological dimensions of religious experience, a serious lacuna given the strong emotions typically attached to questions of nationality and nationalism. To stress the role of ideologically inclined elites in the fomenting of national identities is important. However, it is equally as important to consider the role of demotic experience and popular affect. The positive values of national identity as detailed by those sympathetic to its creeds are mirrored by an emphasis placed on its negative, reactive affect by commentators unfriendly toward nationalism or skeptical about the reality of nationality. Some of these criticisms are often echoed in popular critiques that identify nationalism with xenophobia, accusations against which nationalist sympathizers have frequently had to defend themselves. It is often observed that a common element in nationalism is that of jealousy or odium of the “other”—generally the geographical neighbor, those of different or rival religious convictions, or the greater imperial polity from which liberation is sought. Where discrimination is perceived as being based on group membership, difference takes on complex notes of inferiority and superiority, an internal experience lying at the heart of such jealousy. Ressentiment, a term coined by Nietzsche, was subsequently defined by Max Schieler as “a psychological state resulting from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred, and the impossibility of satisfying these feelings . . . fostering particularistic pride and xenophobia.”36 Status inconsistency between internal consciousness (i.e., what “we” are, know ourselves to be, or hope to become) and external evaluation (i.e., what “they” perceive us to be, have made of “us,” or seek to prevent “us” from becoming) is for many writers the emotional power which lies behind intellectuals’ championing of nationalism, which has been described by Isaiah Berlin as “an inflamed condition of national consciousness, which can be, and on occasions has been tolerant and peaceful. It usually seems to be caused by wounds, some form of collective humiliation.”37 The psychological reaction to such collective injuries, in Berlin’s opinion, is “a pathological exaggeration of one’s real or imaginary virtues and resentment and hostility toward the proud, the happy, the successful.” Clifford Geertz, in describing the primordial human need to belong to a larger body than that of one’s immediate kin-

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group, notes that “the demand to exist and have a name is to a great extent fired by a humiliating sense of exclusion from the important centers of power in world society.”38 Greenfeld, noting that Romanticism itself derives from the experience or fear of failure in Enlightenment society, claims that being a member of nation “allows one to partake in the dignity of a far greater, stronger, and more perfect being, the brilliance of whose virtues has the power to blind one to one’s own failings.”39 Such psychological insights are important, for they help us to understand the particular power of nationalist feeling. Yet once again, they understand national feeling to be merely or primarily a reactive phenomenon. In psychological terms however, reaction-formation differs from response-formation, the former being characterized by a greater element of neurotic transference and projection. Response, on the other hand, involves greater elements of rationality and healthy psychological integration.

The Changelings: Political and Public Religion If we classify nationalism as being merely reactive, we obviate questions of justice. To respond to the forces of “the proud, the happy, the successful” may be ethically justifiable and even obligatory when such happiness has been achieved at the expense of the unhappy, the humiliated and the unsuccessful. Such was the experience of the waves of peoples struggling to free themselves from colonial domination in the middle part of the twentieth century. In describing this pattern, theorists of “political religion” identified a phenomenological similarity between religion and many forms of nationalism. The nationalism of newly independent states was identified as a puritan ideology of mass self-sacrifice, a surrogate for religion. Where the nation took the place of the deity, the one-party state (or the body of citizens to which it claimed to be identical) was garlanded with the characteristics of a church, and the political regime stood in for the Christian notion of the Kingdom of God. In this model the nation was considered as a pure and uniform community, one that demanded total obeisance, if not also worship, from its citizens. Behind such observations lay the conviction that nationalism was a mass, reactive phenomenon. Traumatized by the encounter with westernization and capitalism, in which stable groupings and traditional values had collapsed, humans turned to the nation as the only available substitute for a disappearing or lost sense of traditional rootedness in extended family, neighborhood and religious community. Elie Kedourie traces the intellectual genesis of this idea to the 1808 Reden an die deutsche of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814).40 Applying Kant’s

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doctrine of the person (to the effect that personal authenticity demands autonomy) to the national community, and marrying this with Herder’s cultural particularism, Fichte’s lectures articulated a philosophy according to which the key to national identity and regeneration was language. The linguistic purity of the German language was not only a sign of the unique and authentic human identity of the German nation, but also a privilege to be guarded against foreign influence. The use of Kantian rationalism (the freedom to use one’s reason in religious matters, i.e., to doubt and criticize established religious dogma) proved in the long term to be a Trojan horse for a tragedy of the greatest magnitude. Following from Fichte, Schleiermacher proposed German national sentiment as a new religion. This he claimed to be the true heir to the Reformation, a pure form of morality, shorn of superstition and irrationality. Such para-religious national sentiment turned almost ineluctably into xenophobia, providing the ground for the horrors of German national anti-Semitism. Herder’s understanding of ethnic and national identity was indeed exclusive: all nations perforce include some individuals but do not include others. Yet it was not exclusivist, for it did not propose a hierarchy of nationalities, but indeed championed the spirit of the Slav, in the same way as Rousseau spoke out for the rights of the Corsicans. Herder’s successors abandoned this cultural relativism: Germany became the only true nation, and the standard by which other peoples were judged. A sense of German national identity as an internal linguistic and cultural unity was complemented by a sense of difference vis-à-vis other nations. The West—most specifically France—became the German anti-model, the source and incarnation of all the undesirable, universalistic values of the Aufklärung. Fatefully, “the Jew” began to be considered as cosmopolitanism incarnate. Not only was he attached to an atavistic religion, he was fundamentally nation-less and his loyalties to German-ness suspect. The signal identity of “the Jew” was ethnic, irrespective of all other considerations. In previous centuries European Jews had been blamed and sometimes persecuted for perceived religious heterodoxy. In the militantly nationalist scheme, Jewish difference was perceived as a sin against national unity. Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and those who followed them are the intellectual ancestors not only of Nazism, but also the many generations of nineteenth-century European and twentieth-century Asian, South American, and African nationalists. Influenced by the Enlightenment doctrine of popular sovereignty, disaffected young nationalists and specialists in philology and folklore spearheaded movements based on ethnic, cultural and above all linguistic considerations. In the imperial colonies of the twentieth

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century, where traditional religious authority and customs had been eroded through westernization and its demands for mass literacy in the languages of the colonizers, nationalism emerged as a psychological byproduct of this experience of cultural trauma. The appeal by native intellectuals to the ancient forces of indigenous tradition, for all its potential irrationality, was essentially an imitation of the European rationalist idea of progress. (From a psychological point of view, this development confirms the insights of Frantz Fanon, according to whom the experience of colonization tends to produce within the politically abused colonized party a radical internalization of the colonizer, to the effect that the oppressed parties necessarily must replicate the attitudes and actions of the oppressor. Understood in this way, anti-colonial nationalism was a violent reaction to colonialist violence.) Kedourie is explicitly hostile to all manifestations of nationalism, which he regards as specious. Nationalists, he maintains, manipulate the past to “subvert” the present, to the extent that their historiography, if accepted, “must lead to a contorted, paradoxical, untenable picture of the past.”41 Nationalism is the poisonous fruit of the seed of secularist rationalism, a secular religion. This doctrine of the collective will, originating in Descartes by way of Kant, hubristically seeks moral perfectibility in a world of necessary imperfection. The links between religion and nationalism, Kedourie holds, are not only those of a phenomenological similarity. Nationalism, with its call to national homogeneity, has deep and ancient roots in European Christianity itself. He identifies a tendency dating from the Edict of Milan, traceable through the Crusades and the Wars of Religion, to the “civil religion” proposed by Rousseau and visible in Fichte’s Reden, to demand uniformity of belief amongst the members of a polity. In secular form, this Weltanschauung fostered a Romantic belief that it is history (rather than religion) that provides the basis for social identity. By the 1830s, most of Western Europe was caught up in a Romantic quest for ancient national origins. While the search for ancient national beginnings long predated Romanticism, it received a particular impetus from James McPherson’s magisterial volume of antiquarian fakery, The Poems of Ossian, Son of Fingal. A Europe-wide Zeitgeist of myth-formation was united politically by a common ideology of nationalism, as a vehicle for rapid social change. Nationalism of this stamp, according to Kedourie, fostered a “dangerous” love of the ancient past as the source of authenticity and autonomy—dangerous because it was founded on a hatred of the present. Kedourie holds that history provides an unbroken chain of instances of a “fanatical” belief in progress. These exist in both secular and religious garb, and are frequently heavily colored by religiously derived messianism and

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millenarianism. The golden age of the future understood as a historical reality to come in this world can be traced, he argues, as far back as thirteenthcentury Europe. The Everlasting Gospel of Gerardo de San Domino, published in Paris in 1254, was inspired by the fervid imaginings of Joachim di Fiore (1132–1202) who speculated that this age would yield to a “new heaven and a new earth.” Millenarian heresies, with their tendencies to take political form and engender considerable public energies (at least in the short term), were for Kedourie also responsible for such varied events as the Anabaptist rising of 1534 and the Taiping rebellion of 1850–1861. Kedourie classifies these historical, nationalistically tinged events as heterodox, antinomian and fanatic. We should note, however, that there is a significant difference between millenarianism and most forms of nationalism. The former seeks to abolish the past and present and replace them wholly by the future. In contrast, many forms of nationalism seek to create a future in the image and likeness of the past. Yet it is possible to agree with Kedourie that “political religion”—the elevation of the nation to a quasi-religious status—is one of the frequent results of the meeting of religion (and Christianity in particular) and national politics. The Christian component in early modern national identity may well be so significant as to be essential. A wider focus than Kedourie’s examination of the processes of decolonization suggests that the roots of this connection lie deep within a perennial phenomenon in the history of Christianity: the relation between religious and secular identities, which takes political form in the relationship between church and state. Already visible in the theology of Eusebius (c. 275–339) and articulated in Augustine’s De civitate Dei, this tension resulted during the French Revolution in a triumph of the secular over the religious sphere. In the new Republic, religious substance was ejected from traditional religious forms, which were maintained but supplied with new political content. The religious heritage of France was supplanted by the quasi-sacral creed of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, necessitating the invention along the way of a host of new national symbols, sacraments and liturgies, including enthroning (briefly) a statue of the goddess Reason in the Cathedral of Notre Dame. In international affairs, France’s Christian preeminence in Europe under its rois très chrétiens morphed into a universal mission to depose tyrants and liberate nations. The French Revolution and its aftermath stand as a classic example of a kind of messianism in which “the great, united nation in which the struggle is being waged, is the bearer of universal values, beneficial for all mankind, which give this nation a divine mission or confer on it a moral or cultural superiority over all others.”42 (This claim suggests, incidentally,

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that nationalism and imperialism, far from being opposed to each other, are in fact closely related; both may be equally guilty of the xenophobia and ethnolatry of which they accuse each other.) The marriage of religious form to political content continues to thrive. In many states today, overt nationalism may be veiled, yet it exists as a belief-system that hints during politically expedient times that as the source of social unity and existential direction, national belonging can provide the answers to central ontological human questions. Smith argues that “in every continent, the nation has become the norm of political organization, and nationalism has become the main legitimating belief system.”43 Civic ceremonies, the respect accorded to national heroes, monuments to fallen soldiers, the cult of national flags, and religio-patriotic creeds (“one nation under God”) are among the most salient examples of this secular political religion. This generally accepted cult of the nation provides a sense of continuity, identity, dignity and destiny—themes of both salvation religions and overt political nationalism.

The Cult of Culture If nationalism can take on cultural as well as political forms, we might ask whether along with “political religion” there exists a corresponding “cultural religion.” Scholars Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson represent a different variety of modernist refutation of the historical and moral authenticity of nationalism. Both move the social analysis of nationality firmly into the realm of culture, and both understand nationality and nationalism as central “texts” of modernity that (with differing emphases) they seek to deconstruct. For Hobsbawm, nationalism is a historical phenomenon of the period of high to late capitalism: [T]he crucial phase of nationalism came in the period 1870–1914 when the mass civic democratic political type [of nationalism] was transformed into an ethnic-linguistic type . . . The efflorescence of ethno-linguistic nationalisms was the product of the conflation of “race,” language and nationality, the rise of new classes and the resistance of old classes to modernity, [and] the unprecedented migration of peoples in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.44

Hobsbawm’s fundamental conviction is that modern nations are a contingent construct, a complex of purely “invented traditions.” At a time when rapid social change was threatening established social patterns, European elites sought to invent (or rediscover) affectively charged signs and symbols

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of group identity, in order to maintain their hegemony and social stability. These new national traditions were vague in their content, but emotionally powerful in their ability to generate a sense of overriding obligation. Hobsbawm does not explicitly argue for a creation ex nihilo for modern nations. Rather, he uses the term “proto-national bonds” to describe premodern ethnic communities. But he does not consider modern nations as the progeny of these. Only in the case of Russia, where there existed over centuries a popular myth of a “holy land” and a “holy people” which furnished the subsequent basis for a nation in the modern sense of the word, is Hobsbawm willing to concede the continuous existence of a national identity. Nor does he agree that nationalism and national consciousness are significant historical forces. A clear antipathy toward cultural particularity—quite possibly influenced by his early upbringing in the Austria of the Anschluss as well as by his Marxist sympathies—means that Hobsbawm pays little attention to the psychological and spiritual import of myths, memories, symbols and traditions. His verdict is both minimizing and negative: Time and time again, [nationalist or ethnic politics] seem to be reactions of weakness and fear, attempts to erect barricades to keep at bay the forces of the modern world . . . more similar to the resentment of Prague Germans pressed into a corner by Czech immigration rather than to that of the advancing Czechs.45

Above all, the amount of scholarly interest directed toward nationalism is for Hobsbawm a sign of its imminent demise, an example of Hegel’s owl of Minerva flying out at dusk. In response to this, Anthony D. Smith points out that “to imagine that nationalism’s day is drawing to its end is to close our eyes to the continuing impact of older ethnic structures and beliefs which modern nationalism has revitalized and which contemporary globalizing forces are actually spreading and recycling.”46 It is important to note, as a sed contra to Hobsbawm’s claims, that there exists a significant list of peoples who have a sense of belonging to a longlived nation. In many of these, religion has been the nexus of an abiding collective identity. Amongst such peoples, we might include Jews and Armenians in their diasporas, the French from their earliest days under the Merovingians and Capetians, Greeks, Poles, Czechs, English, Swiss, Welsh and Finns. A hyper-rationalist view fails to take seriously the objective fact that historically enduring, cross-class fervor typically characterizes such bonds. To generalize to the extent that Hobsbawm does the “invented” nature of national identity is to ignore the complex interweaving of old and new cultural traditions. There has to be something familiar, recognizable

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and meaningful in “invented” traditions if neo-national identity is to attain popular significance. It is clear that the Polish state brought into existence in 1918 was not the same entity, geographically or historically, as the Poland of Jan Sobieski, yet neither was it totally different from it. Religion above all functioned as the guardian of a sense of distinctive Polish national identity, and popular, ancient sentiments were the substratum on which intellectuals built to heighten the Poles’ sense of being a “chosen people” with their own Catholic land. Poland presents an evolutionary nationality, a historical process that includes both constancy and change. In this model, the “invention” of nationality is not a spurious project, but rather a creative, recurrent and continuous process of reinterpretation, along the lines of the Gestalt first delineated by Herder. A corrective to Hobsbawm’s downplaying of the culturally dynamic elements of nationality is provided in Benedict Anderson’s hugely influential Imagined Communities.47 As the title suggests, Anderson understands nations to be subjective realities, but he writes from a less doctrinaire and crudely materialistic perspective than that of Hobsbawm. By “imagined” Anderson means not imaginary or faked, but rather commonly held to exist. The Lacanian term imaginaire describes an associative matrix of values, institutions, and symbols that define a social group as a group. It simultaneously implies elements of illusion, an ambiguous ontology, along with the possibilities of easy intellectual seduction and political manipulation. Anderson’s definition raises the important question of the relative claims of subjectivity and objectivity. It is not so much what is objectively true that affects how people behave, but rather what is commonly held by the members of a polity or a collectivity to be objectively true and important. A commonly held subjective opinion therefore becomes a datum which must be considered as owning an element of truth, even if it is not based on historical reality. A narrow definition of truth as being those things which can be empirically proven excludes most significant human affective experiences. Human imagination is necessary in the forming of communities wider than the immediate circles in which humans encounter each other. National and religious identities may easily coincide by virtue of the fact that the religious collective, just as much as the national, is also in some sense imaginary. Since humans live by imagination, Christianity is in itself a product of the human imagination. Shared existential needs will tend to frame responses in similar forms. Nineteenth-century essentialist imaginings of the nation are echoed for example in nineteenth-century ultramontanist ecclesiology. Yet how might we distinguish between the imagined national community and the imagined religious communities, if both function in similar ways?

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Anderson finds the distinctiveness of national communities vis-à-vis other types of community not in their content but rather in the style in which they are imagined, namely as being one amongst a comity of equal nations, a defined and sovereign entity. Drawing on a broad range of history and geography that includes Latin America and Indonesia, Anderson proposes that the rise of nations and nationalism is due to a change in three cultural conceptions: (1) the waning of “sacred script communities,” (2) the decline of “sacred monarchical high centres,” and (3) the replacement of a cosmological sense of time by a merely chronological sense. All three involve religious considerations. In the first case, the gradual refinement and re-classicization of Latin under the influence of Renaissance humanists removed it as a working language from the social classes who were not familiar with the new learning. In due course, the development of Reform Christianity with its stress on access to the Bible required a familiarity with the vernacular translations—a requirement that exploited the potential of print technology. As part of this process, capitalism standardized print languages and established approved vernacular forms of languages, fields of communication which had less international currency than Latin, yet more than local spoken dialects. A sense of homogeneous national belonging almost spontaneously developed as shared language and religion also graced vernacular tongues with an air of sanctity, in that the Word of God was now expressed in them. The imagined community of Christendom was replaced by a patchwork of Christian nations. Deriving ultimately from a Mesopotamian model, and brought into Christianity through the application of Old Testament models of kingship, divinely sanctioned monarchy carried its own theology of automatic legitimacy and political rights. Following the conversion of Constantine, Christian versions of kingship had arisen in both the Western and Eastern empires, in which the emperor was considered to be a religious dignity, the earthly mimesis of the ruler of the heavens. (This model owed not a little to the Roman practice of deification of the Emperor: dives Augustus seems to have been as much an influence as the Davidic dynasty in Eusebius’s theology.) Centuries later, the monarchies of Catholic France, Orthodox Russia—the self-confessed “Third Rome”—and Protestant England each attributed to themselves an aura of sanctity, and elements of the pattern were also found in many other countries, including the empires of Spain and Portugal. The decline of sacral kingship involved the gradual transference of transcendental myths from the king to the state, and ultimately to the nation. From its Merovingian beginnings, the French monarchy in particular had claimed a quasi-sacral mission, a religious instinct that survived for more than a millennium. Yet long before the execution of Louis XVI in 1792, the theology and practice of

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sacral kingship had been in decline. Gradually, self-evident legitimacy passed to the apparatus of the national state, and eventually to “the people,” who were perceived as the mouthpiece if not of the divine, then at least of the truth. In the process, the legitimization of political power evolved from being a matter of divine dictate to the self-evident doctrines of popular sovereignty and common liberty, equality and fraternity. A process of secularization also obtained in the change of notions of temporality. Anderson details a religious concept of time which experiences both past and future as being mirrored in an eternal present. The processes of modernity—capitalism, standardization, state centralization, scientificism—replaced this religious idea of time with a notion of “empty, quantitative time,” which was experienced sequentially, and in which events of past and present might be connected accidentally but not ontologically. This change dealt a deathly blow to notions of providence as well as to the typological understanding of history as an eternal playing-out of biblical events. In this new scheme, God might be understood as acting within time, but not through the processes of history. In the quantified cosmos of modernity, there still remained nevertheless an existential human need to link the dead and the unborn. It was the nation which stepped in to fill the vacuum of transcendence. Nations, says Anderson, “always loom out from an immemorial past, and still more importantly, glide into a limitless future. It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny.”48 Anderson’s psychological and cultural insights certainly question the integrity of concepts of the nation that nationalism espouses. However, what remains unanswered by Anderson is why affection for one’s own nation has remained so compelling for so many people, long after the change in cultural factors that originated the modern turn to the nation. We are also still left with a large number of questions concerning the relationship between nationality and religion. The modernist paradigm generally recognizes the presence of some variety of religiosity in national awareness, and certainly in nationalism. Does the presence of religion however necessarily make nationalism a political religion, “the secularized god of our times”?49 In an orphaned universe in which God is dead (or at least no longer micro-manages the cosmos), is the nation only a reactive substitute for God or the community of the faithful? Or can there be other, more positive elements which help explain the continuing appeal of nationalism, the survival of nationhood as the basic political structure of our world? And is religion merely the forerunner of national belonging, ready to wane when nationalism waxes? Or rather is the relationship more complex? I believe that the nation evinces mass devotion and willingness to selfsacrifice at times of crisis because our interests and survival are intimately

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bound up and embodied in it. Behind this affect lies an often-inchoate belief that in ways which are difficult to articulate, the nation provides a bulwark against personal diminution, if not also against mortality. The affective element in national belonging suggests its connections with religiosity. Nationalism as an ideology and practice has a religion-like capacity to bring together the dead, the living and the yet-to-be-born in a single community, promising something approaching immortality through conscious insertion in a coetus perfectus. But similar promises are latent in all experiences of nationality, even where these do not seek an autonomous political form. Both organized religion and a sense of being a member of a nation provide adherents with assurances of identity and purpose. In both, a strong corporate identity provides an experience of community wider than that of the immediate locale and extended family. Both religious and national communities promise a measure of survival for the individual within a wider time frame, whether in the religious form of the afterlife or the national form of posterity. So close is the affinity that it can become difficult to separate cause from effect. Some commentators almost reverse Max Muller’s claim that in their origins all religions are nationalities, to the effect that all nationalisms are ipso facto religions. Carlton Hayes, writing in the early 1930s, wrote: Nationalism, like any religion calls into play not simply the will, but the intellect, the imagination and the emotions. The intellect constructs a speculative theology or mythology of nationalism. . . . The emotions arouse a joy and an ecstasy in the contemplation of the national god who is all good and all protecting, a thankfulness for his benefits, a fear of offending him, and feelings of awe and reverence at the immensity of his power and wisdom; they express themselves naturally in worship.50

The admixture of religion in one form or another in the experience of nationality is universal. So long-lived is the alliance between the two that it is not only legitimate, but an intellectual responsibility, to wonder whether religion alone inheres in humanity, as some theologians would hold, or whether nationality itself is also in some sense an equal anthropological necessity. To the homo religiosus of phenomenologists of religion, does there also correspond a homo nationalis?

Essential Nationality, National Essentialism The many myths of nations and ethnic communities, essayed generally by their members, respond to what is a universal existential need to know and to recite “where we came from, who we are, where we are going to.” The mod-

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ernist skepticism about nationality arose in reaction to earlier assumptions that the world—whether by explicit divine design or naturally—consisted of discrete nations. The Abbé Sieyès, for example, in the late eighteenth century affirmed that “nations exist in the state of nature, and are the ultimate source of power, will and law.”51 In the trajectory of European thought, it was the German Romanticists who most strongly articulated this generalized, natural-law account of nationality. The notion that nations simply exist ex sese continues to have wide popular currency, and also finds scholarly adherents. The sociobiologist Pierre van den Berghe interprets nations and ethnic communities from a Darwinian perspective, suggesting that ethnic groups and nations are extensions of kin groups.52 Modern nations are the result of adding political form to structures of “inclusive fitness,” and are built up from the same nepotistic, survivalist base as smaller clans and extended families. In the same way that membership of a shared-resources group enhances individual chances for survival, so smaller groups are also protected by membership of a larger collective. The links between kin-group and nation can be reasonably ascertained. Both are collective aspects of identity, both are capable of engendering huge amounts of passion and energy, and both provide possibilities of existence and survival beyond what is possible for the individual. Arguably, too, all human beings are inserted in kin-groups and nations, at least in the contemporary world. However, van der Berghe’s notion tends to confuse actual biological kinship with myths of common ancestry, whose emotional power is distinctly not biological, but rather psychological in origin. The emotional dynamism which powers questions of allegiance is not so much a matter of objective reality, but rather of human interpretation. Anthropology promises to provide other explanations for the “givenness” of ethnic groups and nations. A cultural primordialism emphasizes the power of the ties attributed to the givens of human identity: speech, custom, territory, religion, and biological kinship. Edward Shils holds that modern, secular nations, in their symbols and civic ceremonies, manifest the universal importance of primordial links of kinship and commonly held religion.53 Clifford Geertz, basing his theories on fieldwork in Africa and Asia particularly, stresses how fundamental are such attachments as being born into a particular community, speaking a particular language or dialect, and following particular social practices. These congruities of blood, speech, custom . . . are seen to have an ineffable coerciveness in and of themselves. One is bound to one’s kinsman, one’s neighbor, one’s fellow believer,

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ipso facto, as the result not merely of personal affections, practical necessities, common interest or incurred obligation, but . . . in great part by virtue of some unaccountable absolute import attributed to the very tie itself.54

Many theorists hold that the nation is a community like any other, with the distinguishing note that it appears to be immemorial to its members. Geertz is not a proponent of primordial nationality. Yet in describing how social membership functions and includes a psychologically “unaccountable import,” his insights are valuable. That nationality also functions as a deeply rooted system (rather than being merely the fruit of the fervid dreaming of nationalistic elites) is suggested in the work of Joshua Fishman, who understands nationality as being co-extensive with ethnicity. Nationality largely expresses itself as “being,” which Fishman defines as “the untutored and largely unconscious ethnicity of everyday life.”55 In pre-modern, localized societies, this national dimension of human life is mostly unrealized in political form. Significantly, the experience of ethnicity or nationality is also expressed in this scheme as “doing” and “knowing.” Nationality thus understood involves matters not only of ontology (i.e., what degree of existence we can attribute to a nation); ethical and epistemological considerations also inhere in the question. This dynamic element widens the passive concept of organic, national identity embraced by the more essentialist, “blood-and-soil” forms of nationalism. Moreover, according to Fishman, the acts of being, doing and knowing can intermingle with each other, for the active expressions of ethnicity are “often linguistically encumbered, dependent and expressible only within traditional ethnic networks. They are viewed and fully available only through the linguistic systems to which they are related.”56 Fishman’s characterization of ethnicity as “knowing” opens up a number of more complex questions, including the linguistically based incommensurability of ethnic and national identities: For perennialists, every perennial nation is a unique phenomenon, incommensurable and sui generis. From an internal standpoint, each nation is necessarily unique and perennial. It is the members who view the nation in this light, and their view is privileged. We as outsiders are in no position to challenge that view. We can only have a superficial, schematic and distorted understanding of each nation.57

National “knowing” may function as a frontier of identity. According to whether or not they are members of an ethnic group, different people will possess different knowledges and vice versa. The relationship between cogni-

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tion and identity is mutual, as in-group membership is defined by a particular interpretation of the world and vice versa. This view imagines the nation as a “text” for which valid interpretation is limited to insiders, the only ones who know, experientially, its code and register. This leaves us, however, with two significant ethical problems. First, is it possible to say anything at all of value about any particular collectivity of which we are not a member? Second, what is the role of power relations in received versions of the truth? As a human community, the nation is “a hegemonic site of ideological contestations [which] selectively authorizes particular formulations of national memory within certain codified rules of inclusion and exclusion.”58 There exists a danger in asserting that its members have authority to speak about a national or ethnic group. The fact that the interpretations of people from outside the particular ethnic group or nation will be limited does not necessarily mean that their statements are a priori invalid. In relations with other nations, to stress the incommensurate element of the experience of a particular nation leaves its members open to accusations of exclusivity—effectively, an epistemological analogue of divine election. While it is true that personal, subjective experience may frequently contain elements of incommensurability, it is not by any means clear that the same degree of ineffability applies to groups. This, however, would be the view of nationalist doctrine in its most rigid and essentialist form. Such concepts tend toward cultural conservatism. They perceive all change as a threat to the status quo and construe it as a decline from a golden age of cultural purity and innocence. In contrast, a more fluid, nuanced concept of ethnic or national culture allows for elements of constancy and rupture, evolution and radical innovation. The perennial, deeply rooted sense of belonging attributed to ethnic societies is inherent—yet at the same time it is preserved in and through change. Although nations may appear to be timeless, they are in fact, according to Josep Llobera, also “pierced by discontinuities: an image of immutable ideological core and adaptable periphery, but both core and periphery are constantly redefining . . . [W]e tend to perceive the same image where there are in fact different realities.”59 The Heraclitean river continues to flow.

The Nation as Symbol Recognizing that all human identity, both individual and corporate, combines permanence with flux allows us to break through the intellectual logjam of the opposition between Romantic historical essentialism and modernist insistence on the purely constructed nature of national identity. Anthony

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D. Smith proposes an “ethno-symbolist” perspective as an intermediate position. He describes the nation as “a subcategory and development out of the ethnic community, which is [itself] a development out of the ethnic category. . . . Certain processes of ethnogenesis give rise to ethnies. Shared birth is essential.”60 There exist, Smith holds, significant parallels between modern ideas of national identity and their precursors in pre-modern eras, for example in Mesopotamian and biblical distinctions between different peoples, or in Greek and Roman attitudes toward their own cultures and those of foreigners. Common to both ancient and modern concepts is a belief in collective identity in which “the self is viewed through the prism of symbols and mythologies of a community’s heritage . . . and the modes and goals of identification are given by the group and its past experience as they coalesce into a collective ‘tradition.’”61 Caution and nuance are needed in any discussion of the connections between ethnies and modern nations. Etienne Balibar talks of “fictive ethnicity,” claiming that no nation possesses an ethnic base naturally, but as social formations are nationalized, the populations in them are ethnicized—represented as if they formed a natural community possessing an identity of origins, culture and interests that transcends individuals and social conditions. . . . How can ethnicity be produced? There are two great competing routes to this: language and race. . . . Both express the idea that national character is immanent in the people.62

If the nation is, as Smith teaches, a development of the substrate of the ethnic community, does this necessarily make modern nationalism merely an updated form of ethnic particularism? To assert this would be to exclude the long philosophical pedigree of cultural and political forms of nationalism. The origins of political and cultural nationalisms may be traced, respectively, to Rousseau and Herder, and to the philosophical traditions and histories of France and Germany. Friedrich Meinecke, writing in 1908, distinguishes between Kulturnation, the passive cultural community, and the Staatsnation, the active, self-determining political nation.63 Political nationalism, John Hutchinson argues, envisages the nation as “a civic polity of educated citizens united by common laws . . . like the polis of classical antiquity,” while for cultural nationalists, “the essence of a nation is its distinctive civilization, which is the product of its unique history, culture and geographical profile.” 64 Cultural nationalists may envisage themselves as moral innovators reviving an ethnic vision of the nation by an appeal to the symbolic legacy of the national past, found variously in myths of origin and divine election, dynastic

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legitimation, notions of sacred language and territory, and ideals of a past heroic golden age and a glorious destiny, as well as in the more folkloric elements favored by Herder and his successors. In reality, the two paradigms of political and religious nationalisms have tended to merge over time. The nineteenth-century fusion between political and cultural aspects of nationalism was expressed in terms of ethno-linguistic consolidation, exaggerated expressions of national pride, and grandiose prospects for the future of the particular nation-state. The intermixture of politics and culture rendered nationalism capable of wide emotional appeal. Indeed, it is fair to say that much nationalism is characterized by an inherent ambiguity: at one moment, the nation may be portrayed as political community, and at others as a community of cultural identity. Fredrick Barth treats group identity itself as a symbolic transaction, a process in which boundaries between groups ensure the survival of the ingroup.65 As groups interact, the symbolic “border guards” that divide and mark out identities are subject to continual renegotiation. Among these markers, particular languages have a signally high affect potential. A national language may be thought of as containing and protecting important elements of identity—confirming Heidegger’s notion of “language as the house of being.” Close physical proximity to and the experience of warfare and territorial dispute with neighboring peoples, particularly when conflicts involve religion, are further elements that have historically heightened a sense of symbolic differentiation: For Castilians and Ottomans, frontier championship of their respective religions became the main component of their constitutive myths. For the Hapsburgs, Byzantium, Poland, Hungary, Russia and Aragon, frontier defense became a major element in their mythomoteur. . . . The frontiersmen tended to perceive themselves as “chosen” or superior to other populations of the same faith . . . [and] developed a precocious national identity within the broader national identity.66

Such antemurale distinctions function to create a sense of inner unity by stressing identity as difference. With the gradual agglutination of Wales, Ireland and Scotland to an English core, the unifying factor in the development of a common Britishness was adherence to Protestantism. British nationality was defined in opposition to perceived threats which were simultaneously religious and political, and most often personified by Catholic France and Spain.67 In the psychology of such antemurale societies, the real enemy to the survival of the group may come not from the outside, but from within, in

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the form of in-group diversity and plurality which is felt to threaten social solidarity. If all experiences of national identity are constructed partially on a sense of otherness vis-à-vis other nations, nationalist creeds are particularly prone to stress all forms of national distinctiveness, working “through a framework of real or imagined oppositions to other nations. . . . In some cases, a sense of national identity has been sustained almost entirely by an opposition to and the exclusion of some alien other.”68 Such alienation can be particularly poignant in exile and diasporic communities, which tend to enhance strong group self-consciousness—particularly where a sacred language also symbolically enshrines national and cultural memory. The role of political exiles in the development of nationalism is notable. From the writers of the Old Testament in exilic Babylon through to Sun Yat Sen in San Francisco and England at the turn of the nineteenth century or Ayatollah Khomeini in a Parisian suburb during the 1970s, such figures have frequently acted as the symbolic foci of national aspirations, their awareness of their own nationality sharpened by the pain of exile. The Jewish and Armenian communities are the classic exempla of longue durée exilic consciousness, but exilic nationalism is found among many immigrant groups, particularly where religion and distinctive linguistic use are united— as in the case of Greek and Russian diasporas or Muslims living outside the traditional geographical homelands of Islam. In such circumstances, the exiled group may experience differing degrees of alienation from the host society, and ethnic or national singularities may be cultivated to the point of becoming the defining markers of collective identity. Even at the earliest stages of recorded human history, we find already firmly in place the experience of adversarial identity, where groups identify themselves in terms of in-group unity and exo-group difference from a historical enemy, e.g., Elamites and Babylonians, Assyrians and Urartians, or Greeks and Persians. The linguist Emile Bénéviste affirms that every name of an ethnic character in ancient times was differentiating and oppositional. There was present in the name which a people assumed . . . the intention of distinguishing itself from the neighboring peoples, of affirming the superiority derived from a common intelligible language. Hence the ethnic group often constituted an antithetical duality with the oppositional group.69

In the literature of the English Middle Ages, the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish and the French are all portrayed as being different peoples from the English, often the butt of disparaging stereotypes, or sometimes even as

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sub- or non-human.70 Modern European history provides a host of cases of paired antagonists where identity is defined to a significant extent by a long-lived sense of difference from a close neighbor. Indeed many modern nationalities show patterns of ethnic persistence, which is carried in longlived myth-symbol complexes, including territorial and genealogical senses of identity, and in which distinctive languages and cultural traits take on significant symbolic importance. The nonpareil study of the complex relations between cultures in the formation of identities is Edward Said’s Orientalism, which magisterially illustrates the degree to which European civilization has defined itself in opposition to an imagined, exotic Other, namely the Orient. Frantz Fanon’s work complements the insights of Said, in his elucidation of the political and psychological effects of colonialism from the point of view of the colonized. Fanon details how Western-originated concepts of colonized peoples as “the Other” became internalized within the colonized population, resulting in confusion and conflict over authentic national identity in newly independent states. In these cases, national identity was perforce constructed partly in the image and likeness of the nation as created by its former colonizers. The appeal by native intellectuals to the apparently ancient forces of indigenous tradition has been essentially an imitation of the Enlightenment idea of progress. All national identities are relational, but the specific tragedy of post-colonial identity is that it seems fated to remain conditioned by and reactive to the former colonizers’ projections—and thus compelled to repeat their violence. The “symbolic boundary” approach stresses context as the form of differentiation between nations. But is there any truth to the Romantic claims that nations differ one from another also in terms of content? Romantic nationalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries inherited much of Herder’s theory, but tended not to include either his cultural relativism or his understanding of culture as a Gestalt. Instead, national cultures tended to be considered as static, essential realities—and it is this tendency which popular contemporary nationalism has inherited. However, current cultural theory stresses such elements as contestation and hybridity, understanding culture not as essence, but fundamentally as a struggle for hegemony. Such convictions are logically inimical to claims for the permanent essence of any particular nationality. The primordialist assertion that ethnic groups are based on distinctive cultures with unchanging cores seems difficult to sustain in the current intellectual climate. Do such features have any continuous existence in reality, apart from mere collective consensus?

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Conclusion: The Effect of Affect Accepting ethnosymbolist approaches to nationality involves understanding and accepting the degree to which national symbols both create and are generated by attitudes. But in order for such attitudes to have any import, they must find embodiment over a long enough period of time for their symbolic value to become widely accepted, and largely unquestioned. At that point, concrete forms come to express a core identity: Culture is an intergenerational repository and heritage or set of values, and an active shaping repertoire of meanings and images, embodied in values, myths and symbols that serve to unite a people with shared experiences and memories, and differentiate them from others.71

To claim that difference is constitutive of identity, particularly of ethnic identity, raises the specter of the relative value of cultures. If we agree with the ethnosymbolists that there exists a connection between ancient ethnic communities and modern nations, does this make ethnocentricity, with all its potential for moral myopia, a constitutive element of national identity? There after all is no shortage of modern nations that, like Smith’s pre-modern ethnies, “combine a sense of uniqueness and centrality” in which “the group stand at the centre of their moral and physical universe” and where “the sentiments and attitude of group members are normally focussed on the group itself to the exclusion of outsiders.”72 At work here is the question of relative centers and peripheries. It seems almost inevitable that each ethnic group and nation should tend to regard itself as the center of its moral universe, and as the standard by which others are judged. A hermeneutics of suspicion offers the possibility of discovering innumerable examples of ethnocentricity in almost every field of human endeavor. Cartography reveals the way in which the center point of any map (the Greenwich meridian, the Mediterranean or Jerusalem) is a matter not only of physical geography but also of the relative importance attributed to the earth’s inhabitants. Given the inevitable relationship between cognition and emotion, ethnocentricity might seem to inhere in any sense of national belonging—unless, of course, a different perspective with a concomitant moral imperative also urges recognition of the equal dignity of all other peoples. Among the most neuralgic points of questions of national identity and nationalism are the questions of exclusivity and entitlement. Notions of exclusivity quickly take on unpleasant overtones of self-seeking superiority. However, to affirm difference and distinctiveness is not necessarily to claim

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a superior status, or a conscious desire by one group to exclude or undervalue members of another group. It is rather to understand that cultural and ethnic differences have value in a world which increasingly fosters monoculturalism. A tradition deriving from Herder expresses a profound belief in the unique, exclusive values of individual cultures and ethnic groups. The current American fetishizing of inclusivity and diversity as inherent values has arisen in response to a heightened awareness of the many and subtle ways in which whole groups of people have been ignored by canonical history, reduced to silence and invisibility. Nevertheless, it has been argued, sometimes vociferously so, that the inevitable result of national exclusivity is that hierarchization of nations which arose from the dreams of nineteenth-century Romantic nationalists and their twentieth-century progeny. In the face of the abominations of nationalist imperialism, the strains of the Internationale could begin to sound like a particularly attractive melody. It is evident that being member of a particular nation is not only, or even primarily a legal or political issue. Rather, membership of one’s own nation can have profound psychological resonances involving intense affect, particularly in the experiences of exile or political repression, or in geographical proximity to a politically dominant neighbor. In the words of the Ukrainian philosopher and poet Valentyn Iakovich Moroz (1936–), imprisoned for his protests against the Soviet regime: A nation can only exist when there are people who are prepared to die for it . . . only when its sons believe that their nation is chosen by God and regard their people as its highest creation. I know that all people are equal. My reason tells me that. But at the same time I know that my nation is unique. My heart tells me so.73

To describe nationality as ethnosymbolic is to make important assertions. First, even though nationality may contain elements of fictive and wishful thinking, it is also based on some degree of objective reality. Nationality may be imagined and invented, but it is not only imagined and invented. Second, as a potent symbolic reality, the experience of feeling national identity remains partly ineffable, extending beyond the reach of human language and analysis. Phenomenologists of religion have taught us that the symbol evokes far more than it can actually express explicitly. The inchoate dimensions of the experience of nationality touch on some of the most intimate aspects of

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human existence, the source of the seismic emotions sometimes raised by the experience of devotion to one’s own nation or hatred of another. These dimensions also move us in the direction of quarrying the religious dimensions of national identity, and the sacred or quasi-religious status so often attributed to it. That the nation has a religious perspective is held both by those for whom nationality is a chimera and those who believe in the objective reality of nationality, as a longue durée historical force. Both points of view raise the question of the value and nature of this religiosity. Amongst the frequent biases of nationalism is to assume that a particular nation has either a permanent affiliation to a particular religion (e.g., Orthodox Russia, or Protestant England), or that the nation is in some way a kind of religion to which filial piety is owed. At the other end of the spectrum, the preferences of Marxism highlight class and power considerations at the expense of cross-class cultural bonds, and treat religion merely in relation to its connections with power. For a consideration of the religious element in nationality, such extremes are methodologically insufficient, though they do act as mutual correctives. National-skeptics usefully elucidate the historical, philosophical and cultural forces which have gone into the shaping of modernity; primordialist approaches to nationality stress the fundamental human experience of membership of a group larger than that of the family or immediate kin-group, and which is defined by geography, language, culture or ancestry. In analogy with the dictum gratia naturam supponit—grace presupposes the existence of nature and builds on it—insights from the secular sciences are the foundations on which a theological investigation of the nature, values and anti-values can be constructed. The next chapter takes us forward into a more focused consideration of the historical patterns of interactions between ethno-national and religious identities. Separation between church and state has been legislated into the constitution of many modern democratic states. We will see that nation and church have a more intimate and complex relationship.

Notes 1. Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the Politics of Nationalism (London, Methuen, 1977), 5. 2. Ernest Renan, Qu’est-qu’une nation? (Paris: Calman-Levy, 1882). Renan’s work was a patriotic riposte to the boastings of Heinrich Gotthard von Treitschke, who had claimed in his five-volume Deutsche Geschichte im 19. Jahrhundert a moral superiority for the German people based on the place of the German nation in the rise of Protestantism.

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3. Ross Poole, Nation and Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 69. 4. In John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, eds., Ethnicity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 72. 5. Hutchinson and Smith, Ethnicity, 4. 6. Anthony D. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1986), 21–24. 7. Hutchinson and Smith, Ethnicity, 4. 8. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 4. 9. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 4. 10. Susan Reynolds, Regnal Sentiments and Medieval Communities: Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 15. 11. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 5. 12. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 52. 13. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 52–53. 14. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 53. 15. In Hutchinson and Smith, Nationalism, 18. 16. Anthony D. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation (London and New York: Oxford University Press), 8. 17. Smith, Myths and Memories, 6. 18. Smith, Myths and Memories, 101–102. 19. Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991), 73. 20. Poole, Nation and Identity, 55. 21. Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 45. 22. Poole, Nation and Identity, 75. 23. Poole, Nation and Identity, 65. 24. Poole, Nation and Identity, 69. 25. Carl Mehler, ed., The National Geographic Atlas of the World, 7th. ed. (Washington: National Geographic, 1999), 71. Emphases added. 26. In Josep Llobera, The God of Modernity: The Development of Nationalism in Modern Europe (Providence, RI: Berg Publishers, 1994), 143. 27. Fernández-Armesto, The Future of Religion, 7. 28. Smith, Myths and Memories, 114. 29. As defined by Tönnies. 30. In Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 28. 31. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 487. 32. Nations and Nationalism 2 (3), 1996: 357–370. 33. Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neonationalism (London: Verso, 1981). 34. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (London: Routledge, 1975).

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35. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 63. 36. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 15. 37. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Knopf, 1991), 13. 38. Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” chap. in idem, ed., Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa (New York: The Free Press, 1963), 108. 39. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 490. 40. Discussed in Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 98 ff. 41. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 98. 42. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, 88. 43. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 115. 44. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 122–23. 45. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 124. 46. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 141. 47. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). 48. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 12. 49. Llobera, The God of Modernity, 312. 50. Carlton J. H. Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1960), 164. 51. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 3. 52. Pierre van den Berghe, The Ethnic Phenomenon (New York: Elsevier, 1979). 53. Edward Shils, “Primordial, personal, sacred and civil ties,” British Journal of Sociology 7 (1957): 13–45; also idem, “Nation, nationality, nationalism and civil society,” Nations and Nationalism I, 1 (1995): 93–118. 54. Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution,” 110. 55. In Hutchinson and Smith, Ethnicity, 63. 56. Hutchinson and Smith, Ethnicity, 65. 57. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 206. 58. Stuart Allan and Andrew Thompson, “The Time-Space of National Memory,” in Kevin J. Brehony and Naz Rassool, eds., Nationalisms Old and New: Explorations in Sociology (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 37. 59. Llobera, The God of Modernity, xi. 60. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 104. Smith explains his use of the French term ethnies as a convenient short-hand for “ethnic communities.” 61. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 14. 62. Etienne Balibar, “The Nation Form,” chap. in Etienne Balibar and Emmanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 96. 63. See Smith, National Identity, 8. 64. John Hutchinson, Modern Nationalism (London: Fontana, 1994), discussed in Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 177ff. 65. Fredrick Barth, “Introduction,” in Fredrick Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969).

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66. John Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 91. 67. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 68. Poole, Nation and Identity, 33. 69. In Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, 5. 70. Llobera, The God of Modernity. 38. 71. Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism, 91. 72. Smith, Ethnic Origins, 47. 73. Valentyn Iakovich Moroz, Report from the Beria Reserve: The Protest Writings of Valentyn Moroz, trans. and ed. John Kolasky (Chicago: Cataract, 1974), 54.

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Almost without exception, religiosity is a companion to experiences of nationality. Their relationship is sometimes warring, sometimes amicable, and sometimes more than a marriage. Allegiance to Christian faith and to one’s native soil and its inhabitants can easily engender volatile energies, positive and negative. Indeed, “perhaps only religious attachments have rivaled national loyalties in their scope and fervour.”1 Among the more obvious reasons why the relationship between Christianity and nationality is of practical importance is because both religious faith and nationality continue to be normative elements of people’s sense of self in most cultures. Many religions assert the importance of corporate belonging as part of their worldview. The qahal Yahweh of the Old Testament finds parallels in the Christian ekklesia, the Islamic Jum’aa and the Buddhist Sangha. All are expressions of a conviction that human individual identity is more fully realized (in Christian terms, “saved,” or “redeemed”) within and through the larger body. In both secular equivalents too, a consciousness of being inscribed in a larger, defining collective can bolster a potentially fragile individual identity. Implicitly or explicitly, both Christianity and national belonging promise a perpetuation of the individual. Many faiths teach the survival of the soul, and the nation can also suggest something similar: through being inscribed in a corporate memory that will persist beyond the deaths of the people who currently compose it, the individual is given an intimation of immortality. Other ideologies, even those atheistic or inimical to nationality, offer similar promises. It is quite possible to interpret Marxism broadly as a

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salvation religion. The same could also be said of soi-disant secular forms of nationalism. Among the prime examples of soteriologically flavored nationalism are the cult of the state invented by Revolutionary France, and the seductively spectacular rituals of Nazi Germany at the Nuremberg Rallies of 1923–1938. Echoes of the sacrality with which nationality tends to invest itself are also to be found in many less sinister forms. The Pledge of Allegiance, written by socialist author and Baptist minister Francis Bellamy in 1892, was shaped along the lines of the public testimony of faith in Christ that Baptists make prior to receiving baptism, and can be easily read as a public statement of faith in the ideals of the Republic. Indeed, in describing the emotive aspects of nationality, it is hard to avoid borrowing religious vocabulary. The theodicy of national suffering expressed by Ernest Renan exemplifies a whole genre of quasi-religious patriotic literature: “National sorrows are more significant than triumphs because they impose obligations and demand a common effort. A nation is a grand solidarity constituted by the sentiment of sacrifices which one has made and those that one is disposed to make again.”2 The connections between particular forms of Christianity and concepts of the nation are of labyrinthine complexity. The anthropological studies of nationality and religion discussed in the previous chapter note that in both religious faith and an awareness of national identity, a sense of history exists in which collective memory is crucial, for it is a major hermeneutic of current existence. Only in the light of the past can present experience be understood, and that interpretation itself shapes the direction of future experience. Memory, especially formal commemoration in the shape of ritual and cult, is obviously at the heart of Christian (or at least Catholic) experience, since the central act of the Eucharist is an anamnesis of the death and resurrection of Christ. This religious memorialization is rooted in a particular existential substrate, namely an essential human need for memory: Human identity is not merely a matter of sameness through time . . . but also of reflective consciousness of personal connection with the past. On this basis arises a shared culture, the product of the common historical experiences that give rise to shared memories [which are] very often transmitted through the oral transmissions of the community and its religious specialists.3

The same pattern may be found in many nationalist endeavors, where “only by recovering the history of the nation through all its triumphs and members can its members rediscover their authentic purpose.”4 Typically, these histories take on the form of classical mythical patterns of birth, death

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and re-birth, alienation and redemption. Nationalist intellectuals may consciously foster such archetypal patterns. However, in order for nation building to function, it has to have, in the opinion of Tom Nairn, “a sentimental culture sufficiently accessible to the lower strata.”5 This summary description would also easily apply to the work of Christian evangelization from its earliest years. Examples of different approaches to different ethnoi are found, for example in the different emphases of the four Gospels. “Popular religiosity” or “folk religion”—that is, religion as defined as “how you behave,”6 with doctrinal emphases not necessarily in line with official teaching—has traditionally arisen from lower strata of society, as an expression of “sentimental culture.” In the “Folk Church” movement in early twentieth-century Sweden, for example, appeals to popular culture served as the medium of evangelization.7 In like manner, we might talk of “popular nationality” as the appropriation of the teachings of nationalist intellectuals by their less educated compatriots. Religions that profess to be the bearers of divine revelation also conceive of themselves as the exclusive bearers of absolute truth, and only with difficulty accept a degree of religious plurality. To all intents and purposes, these religions see their own ethical imperatives as being the most authentic or the only way of living. Similarly, particular nationalities share a characteristic tendency to assume a higher (if not supreme) value for their own group and its ethical norms. To this extent, a nation can be defined, inter alia, as a hermeneutic standpoint rooted in the experience of a particular group of people. Since nationality and religious faith share certain ambiguities and similarities, it is also important to note their differences. In the case of Christianity, one of the most obvious dividing marks between religion and nationality lies in their differing attitudes toward territory. As we have seen, ethnic communities and the modern nations that derive from them have a historic link with a homeland as an obvious and essential constitutive element. Judaism is distinguished by a relationship with a particular geography: for the Jewish people, the land of Israel is the content and the expression of the covenant between God and the people of Israel.8 Early Christianity, on the other hand, was distinguished by its territorial non-specificity. The Jewish inheritance of holy land as expression and content of the covenant was reinterpreted as a spiritual and eschatological reality. Indeed, it is possible to claim that the territorial aspect of the Abrahamic promise was totally ignored by Paul. In Romans and Galatians, the Law and covenant, with their connection to the land of Israel, are seen as being peculiar to the people of Israel. In Christ, the notion of holy land has become rearticulated as the community of persons

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who are the Body of Christ. The experience of God is mediated no longer by the temple nor the land of Israel or the Law, but by the Spirit. Paul, writing to the Philippians around 60 AD, teaches them that “our true home is in heaven” (Phil 3:20). The second-century Epistle to Diognetus defines Christians as distinguished from the rest of men neither by country nor by language nor by customs . . . For nowhere do they dwell in cities of their own; they do not use any strange form of speech or practice a singular form of life. . . . They pass their days on earth, but they have their citizenship in heaven.9

Such “citizenship in heaven” reveals a defining tension at the heart of Christianity, which preaches an incarnate God in whom human and divine natures are united with one another, yet also distinct. This foundational paradox lies at the heart of the difficulty of reconciling spiritual and temporal realities, religious and secular spheres, and state and church. With the conversion of Constantine to Christianity around 313 and the adoption of Christianity as the unique state religion of the Roman Empire in 324, both Church and empire faced the new challenge of integrating two potentially conflicting aspects of social and personal identity. The relationship between national and religious claims on territory continues to be a source of tension, particularly where competing jurisdictions are involved, and where religious allegiance is not co-extensive with citizenship. Eastern Orthodoxy—direct heir to a Byzantine theology of solidarity between church and state—is particularly prone to such difficulties in this matter: Nation building through construction of a sense of ethnic community brought to the fore the fundamental antimony between the imagined community of religion and the imagined community of the nation. . . . One of the greatest anachronisms of Balkan and Eastern European historiography has been the injection of national content into traditional religious distinction.10

It may well be “futile and unrealistic to separate religion and ethnic identity [since] many individuals behave as if their ethnic affiliation and professed religion are one and the same: to be born Croatian is to be born Catholic.”11 Yet it is worth emphasizing the differences between ethnic and religious identities. If all Croatians are Catholic—and in the light of the tragic events of the 1991–1995 war of Croatian independence, it is clear that not all the inhabitants of what is now the Republic of Croatia were either Croats or Catholics—it is certainly not true that all Catholics are Croatians. Despite the adoption of the culturally homogenous nation-state as the ide-

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ational norm of social and political organization throughout Europe, and the principle cuius regio, eius religio of the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, religious and ethnic homogeneities, in Europe at least, coincide neither with each other, nor with state frontiers. This has been a particularly tragic reality in the history of Eastern Europe, at the meeting points of Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity, and Islam. Nineteenth-century nation-builders in Eastern Europe adopted a model of nationhood ill-suited to the complex religious realities of those areas, with their fluctuating political borders and different religious affiliations and national self-definitions.12 Differing attitudes toward territory are but one branch of a larger fault line separating national and Christian conditions, namely the particular claims of the former vs. the universal claims of the latter. The belief that “in Christ there is no Jew or Greek” (Gal 3:28; also Rom 10:12) is expressed in the 1872 condemnation of “phyletism” (nationalism) by Anthimos IV, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople: In the Christian Church, which is a spiritual communion, predestined by its leader and founder to contain all nations in one brotherhood in Christ, racism is alien and unthinkable. . . . We renounce, censure, and condemn racism, that is, racial discrimination, ethnic feuds, hatreds and dissensions within the Church of Christ as contrary to the teaching of the Gospel . . . which supports the holy Church and the entire world, embellishes it and leads it to divine godliness.13

The denunciation was made in the context of the claims by the churches of Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania for autocephaly. It illustrates the tension between two forms of social identity and loyalty, spiritual and temporal. It also reflects the Orthodox hierarchy’s belief that church unity has a superior and prior claim to secular national autonomy. The Patriarch’s denunciation can be read as pastoral concern, but quite equally expresses a potential power struggle between church and state. Nor has Catholicism been a stranger to such tensions. Notwithstanding the universalist thrust of Christianity, and despite the “imagined community” of Christendom, the papacy has found itself for most of its existence at the mercy of pressures from different Christian polities. Embodying a universal mission within the realpolitik of the secular world has proved to be a perennially difficult task, especially when state-church relations were posited along the lines of a policy in which the local churches were spiritually subordinate to Rome, but temporally under the jurisdiction and protection of the national sovereign. The formal, religiously oriented designations of national

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leaders (France’s rois très chrétiens, the reyes católicos of Spain, English monarchs as “Defenders of the Faith”) did not prevent them from employing their religious missions to seek political pre-eminence. Where European dynasties had sought to portray themselves as church protectors, their republican successors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, influenced by the trends of secular nationalism, however tended to set themselves up in open competition with the universalist claims of Christian churches. Yet that the notion of Christendom, or the imagining of Europe as a specifically Christian entity (and therefore unity) is far from dead is witnessed by the efforts of Pope John Paul II to ensure that Christianity be mentioned in the European Constitution: “It is indispensable that the Europe of today safeguard its patrimony of values, and recognize that it was above all the force of Christianity that was capable of promoting, conciliating and consolidating them.”14 The first general audience of his successor, Benedict XVI, heard the German pope talk of the “inalienable Christian roots” of European culture and civilization—a belief he has continued to proclaim. Another signal distinction between national and religious claims concerns questions of transcendence versus transformation. A stress on nationality in the composition of the self—as fostered by nationalists—implies the promise of somehow transcending the limits of individual human existence. Although the individual will die, the nation that has formed part of her human identity and of which she has been a member will continue into the future. This soteriology lends a sacral aura to many varieties of patriotism and political nationalism. However, such promises remain theologically ambiguous. This vagueness is politically useful, for it can bring together in one national embrace a range of people whose religious affiliations differ considerably one from another. Despite the intimations of immortality which nationalism implies, nationalism is in fact radically different from Christianity, in that rather than worshipping the divine, nationalism finds within the nation itself its own source of authenticity. John Breuilly opines that “nationalists celebrate themselves rather than some transcendent reality, whether this be located in another world or in a future society, although the celebration also invokes a concern with the transformation of present reality.”15

Fusions and Confusions: Christian Nationality and National Christianity In this study, nationality is largely considered as a particular form of culture, one closely akin to, although not identical with, ethnicity. There is a significant difference between the phenotypical category of race and the

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cultural phenomenon of ethnicity. Yet popular understandings of ethnicity continue to include racial considerations. It is worthwhile considering the racial components of ethnicity and nationality in their connections to and distinctions from religious identity. Clearly, people have no choice as to their racial origins. What is more arguable is the possibility that individuals can change their sense of ethnic identity, when this is regarded under the aegis of culture. Yet even the notion of ethnic identity is far from unquestionable. Jean-François Bayart’s The Illusion of Cultural Identity denies the existence of fixed cultural identities, and identifies them as politically expedient fictions.16 Culture then becomes a matter of flux, fragmentation and constant hybridity, and individuals constantly negotiate which aspects of a given cultural practice are germane to them at any given moment. Understood this way, cultural (and therefore ethnic or national) identity would be merely a matter of individual subjectivity. To focus on the subjective elements of ethnic and national belonging is to stress the element of freedom of choice. The proliferation of “identity politics” and the rise of “hyphenated Americans” over the last twenty years witnesses both to the volitional element in such self-definitions, but also to the difference between ethnic or national identities on one hand, and civic citizenship on the other.17 While it is obviously possible to change one’s citizenship and acquire a passport of a different state and country, the degree to which people can transform their ethnic or national identities, particularly when these are connected to place of birth, religion and language, seems to be more questionable. Paradoxically, exile and emigration actually tend to strengthen both religious affiliation and ethnic-national identification. In matters of religion, however, it can be argued that a significantly greater freedom of choice is available. While it is true that at a popular level, particularly in places of ethnic and religious homogeneity, religion might be considered a “given” (e.g., “to be born Croatian is to be born Catholic”), it is still possible for people to abandon a set of beliefs for another or none at all and to change their religious identity, even though their national or ethnic identities do not fundamentally change. Yet a change of religion, particular when this involves abandoning a majority or an ancestral faith, inevitably affects people’s sense of their own ethnic or national identity. Hispanic Protestants or Muslim Frenchwomen may well experience significant dissonance between their ethnic and religious affiliations. These tensions alert us to the fact that, for all these notional separations and differences between the secular and the religious, in reality, there exists a more ambiguous but vast field in which nationality and religion are intimately linked—even to the point of fusion.

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This murky tertium quid proves as hard to classify and define as the nation itself, which, “endowed with a quasi-sacred character equaled only by and derived from religion . . . is either the modern secular substitute for religion, or its most powerful ally.”18 This statement compactly summarizes important claims: that in an age of declining religious belief, a heightened awareness of nationality can be an ersatz form of religiosity; that equally possibly, nationality and religion have worked, and continue to work, hand in hand; and, as a reflection of both these insights, the fact that “quasi-sacredness” continues to have a role in contemporary experiences of national identity. However, the disjuncture “either . . . or” should also be complemented by “both . . . and.” In the matter of nationality and religion, substitution and alliance are not easily distinguished. In practice, frequently both patterns are simultaneously at work. Mid-twentieth-century commentators on nationalism (especially those of Marxist sympathies) tended to see modern nationalism in its post–French Revolution manifestations merely as a substitute for religion. Elie Kedourie identifies nationalism as “secular millennialism arising from Kantian notions of autonomy,”19 in which politics takes the place of religion as the key to salvation. Understood thus, nationalist doctrine would be a matter of calculated substitution of political content. In this sleight of hand, nation-builders strategically employed forms originating from Christianity, while voiding them of religious content and conveniently refilling them with nationalist ideology. According to this analysis, the nation in the modern world would be the focus of the emotional attachment previously afforded to the Church: “There is much to be said for the view that the increased fanaticism of nationalists is causally connected to the decline of religious belief. Nationalism has become an ersatz religion. The nation, as understood by the nationalist, is a substitute god. Nationalisms of this sort might be called ethnolatry.”20 Writing on Hindu-Muslim conflict over the destruction of the Ram Mandir mosque in order to build a Hindu temple, Madhu Kishwar goes one step further, identifying such ethnolatry as a Christian pattern and indicting Hindu nationalist leaders of “semiticizing Hinduism and making it resemble those aspects of Christianity which in their view helped [it] become globally powerful.”21 She notes the “invention” of a political deity called Bharat Mata (Mother India), whose worship above that of all other gods is actively encouraged by the Sangh Parivar movement. Perhaps the most famous example of the conscious invention of a quasireligious cult as a substitute for Christianity was the French Revolution. In actively seeking a complete break with the past, the Republic replaced public religious ritual with state ceremonial. Such manifestations of “civil religion”

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were manifestly anti-Christian, and intended as a new religio licita for a new state. The invention of public liturgies, the cult of la patrie, and the mass production of public memorial monuments all reflect Hobsbawm’s “invented tradition.” In this case, innovations were patterned on what they sought to replace. Throughout the stormy history of nineteenth-century France, with its various revolutions and restorations, its anticlerical and royalist partisans, state and church vied for control—often in competition with each other, but sometimes in syncretic alliance, too.22 The decline of Christianity and the filling of the resultant existential gap by the cult of the nation and political nationalism were interrelated processes caused by philosophical and political changes that had centuries-old roots. Enlightenment rationalism nurtured confidence in the reach and abilities of human thought, with the result that progress replaced salvation as the dominant ideal. Consequently, the realm of the strictly religious shrank more and more into the private, domestic and individual domains of morality or transcendental aestheticism. Hand-in-hand with the demise of traditional theodicies, science and statecraft were claimed as autonomous, secular domains. This was the Enlightenment background for the development of the later Romantic view that the religious traditions of individual peoples were not the act of God but the creation of “national genius.” One of those salient dimensions which makes nationality appear similar to religion is, as we have noted, its potentially unlimited emotional power—a human energy which nationalism has frequently been accused of hijacking for its own ends, inspiring “the fanaticism which in earlier periods was reserved for religious conflicts.”23 Given that recent history on almost every continent provides obvious examples of nationalist fanaticism (often justified by appellation to religious motifs), it is easy to understand the vituperative tone of William D. Pfaff, for whom nationalism “occupies the moral and emotional ground otherwise held by political ideology and often that which has been yielded by religion. It promotes a worship of the nation which is implicitly, if not explicitly, blasphemous.”24 Pfaff asserts that it is a political duty to react against any redemptive or eschatological assumptions which nationalism may take up, and to fight for democracy, to which Pfaff believes nationalism to be inherently inimical. In the view of both Seton-Watson and Pfaff, the ersatz quality of nationality and nationalism involves more than a mere replacement of one equally valid ideology by another. More than being the heir of religious faith, nationalism represents a distorted simulacrum of it, so ravenous for allegiance that it destroys true religiosity. Under nationalism’s malicious influence, Pfaff believes, religion may enter into the life of a nation only as the quasi-religion of national idolatry. To combat this deviation, it is

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incumbent upon religious believers to contest any quasi-religion that would seek to make the state or nation any more than it is, namely, “a historical community like any other.”25 Examples of such “quasi-religion” might be found in the nineteenthcentury patriotism of France and England, the two nations that have been among the most influential models for other peoples aspiring to nationhood. Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century French nationalists of both right and left justified their positions with a free use of the religious terminology that lay conveniently at hand. The poet and philosopher Charles Péguy (1873–1914), whose Christianity was of a particularly nationalist bent, preached his own blood-and-soil patriotic beatitudes: “Heureux ceux qui sont morts pour des cités charnelles!”26 Victor Hugo eschewed orthodox Christianity, yet also interpreted contemporary French history and politics in religious terms, as an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good (republicanism) and evil (monarchy, church, and clerisy). The national education system imposed by the Third Republic insisted on the values of patriotism with a conviction equaled only by religious faith. Such was the success of this endeavor that by the beginning of the twentieth century, there existed amongst the French populace a common ground of belief in a sacral or quasi-sacral role for the French nation and language.27 French citizens of opposing political and religious convictions might interpret differently the religious content of the language used to describe this role, yet the form of expression had a sufficiently comprehensive appeal as to be able to embrace all parties. The quasi-sacred penumbra attributed to the French language found its visual and performative equivalents in artistic representations of national history inspired by the historian Jules Michelet, and in a proliferation of national symbols and ceremonies that had begun to be consciously fostered in the early years of the French Revolution. In the work of Rudyard Kipling we find the expression of a British (or rather, English)28 quasi-religious nationality, in terms both populist and comprehensive. During the high era (c. 1880–1920) of the British Empire, it was such poems as “Recessional” (“O, all our pomp of yesterday, is one with Nineveh and Tyre! Judge of the Nations, spare us yet. Lest we forget—lest we forget!”) and “The White Man’s Burden” which moved the public imagination and contributed to a popular self-image of the British people and their history. The population of Britain and its dominions included an intelligentsia fully aware of the implications of Darwinism and the religious plural inheritance of humanity that was evidenced by the translation into English of non-Christian sacred scriptures. England was also home to a middle and lower-middle class whose faith was more or less still firmly entrenched in

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simple religious certainties. The biblical allusions found in Kipling’s poems could be read as a religious statement. However, they were also part of the general cultural inheritance of a wide range of people, and did not require a formal assent to Christian faith in order to be understood. There was, A. F. Walls holds, “no real theology attached to Kipling’s idea of [British] chosenness. It involved the application to Britain of a series of images of old Israel, but they were still manifestly poetic images, metaphors at most, in which a wide range of theology and ideology could be imported.”29 The vague dogmatic content of religious-national rhetoric points out the importance of its form. A style that is both allusive and elusive is most likely to appeal to a broad segment of the population. To this extent, it may be argued that the real transcendental referent of patriotic Christianity (and indeed, the true object of worship) has been the nation itself. This worship, however, was purposely “imprecisely formulated; it represented exactly that combination of sentiment and ethical rigor, ‘morality tinged with emotion,’ that Matthew Arnold saw as the heart of religion.”30 The growth of nationality-as-religion involves a historical process which moves with glacial slowness from the cultural universalism but doctrinal particularity of Christianity to a belief system which is less particular and more inclusive and relativistic in terms of its creed, but culturally more particular. From this intermediate stage it is then only a short distance to a national mindset which is religious in outward appearances but out of which religious content has been siphoned completely. At this point, belonging to a nation is the only experience in which eternity can be experienced, in the form of “national memory.” With Christianity’s continuing decline as the accepted religion of Europe, memorialization and a selective fetishizing of history have become increasingly necessary and useful tools for defining national identity. In their classic study of the coronation of Elizabeth II, Edward Shils and Michael Young31 describe the coronation as a “national communion,” a ritual which expressed and confirmed the sense of national identity and national values. The Queen’s vows represented a generalized religious reference, while popular celebration was an experience of idealized national bonds. Shils and Young do not however incorporate an analysis of some of the more obvious political implications. The coronation also affirmed the British class system and claims to ageless political hegemony, the subsuming of alternate Scottish, Welsh, and English identities into a generic British one, and the central place of the Established Church within British social and political structures. A symbolic act of national unity could serve as an opiate of the people with equal efficacy to religion.

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The phenomenology of national religiosity is clearly seen in war memorials. The massive loss of life in World War I was followed by a need to recognize and express the trauma of that experience in a corporate, national way—“lest we forget.” London’s Cenotaph, built in 1919 for the first anniversary of the Armistice, is a religiously non-specific monument. The Remembrance Service held annually on November 11 at 11am commemorates the British Empire and Commonwealth servicemen who died in the two world wars. This national liturgy is supported by both church and state. Its overt religious referents come in the forms of hymns and prayers that focus largely on the act of remembrance. Many elements of the ceremony are unmistakably Christian in flavor, yet there is little mention of the central Christian belief in the Resurrection. Instead, a variety of religious beliefs—and presumably none at all—are absorbed into a more inclusive identity. Under the aegis of the British Commonwealth, this pan-religious embrace relativizes all other nationalities and ethnicities (Irish, Welsh, Scottish, English, Australian, Canadian, Gurkha, etc.). The marriage of religious externals with the foregrounding of national identity as the most important social bond is repeated in national memorials throughout the world. In almost every case, national pride is connected with sacrifice, warfare and loss of life in battle. In architecture and ritual, such manifestations of national religion express the typical themes of Romantic nationalism: authenticity, identity, freedom and dignity. The Victor Emmanuel II Monument in Rome, dedicated to the memory of the king who achieved the unification of Italy, is in effect a national temple, built precisely on the edge of the ancient Roman forum. It also contains the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, honored with an eternal flame. As such, the monument expresses the claims of the secular Italian nation-state to be the inheritors of ancient Roman civilization—in contrast to the more historically cogent claims of the Roman Catholic Church. A good modern example of national religiosity exists in one comparatively new (and increasingly cosmopolitan) state that is still in the process of building a cohesive national identity. Noting the close links between nationalism and Australian identity, Bruce Kapferer holds that the religion of the Australian nation has taken over the rites and symbols of religion (or more specifically, Christianity).32 Ceremonies commemorating Australians killed in wars and the cult of the national flag express what is effectively a civil religion. In the national anthem “Advance, Australia fair,” the hope of and belief in divine providence in the life of the nation has been replaced by an exhortation to national progress. Australian identity-building and national unification however, contain a darker side. Until recently, the civil religion sanctioned by the Australian state has glorified one particular interpretation

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of Australian history. A decidedly Eurocentric focus has tended to ignore the difficult relations between whites and Aborigines that have marked two centuries of Australian history. To distinguish true religion from the quasi-religion of nationalism or ethnolatry might well appear to be a moral duty. Equally, to fight to maintain both nation and state as God-free zones, as Pfaff would have us do, might also be attractive methodologically, for it promises to separate out these categories into neat, mutually exclusive piles. In reality, however, there is considerable ambiguity and mutual influence between the secular and the religious—and in ethical terms, the secular and the religious simply do not exist in hermetically sealed spheres of operation. There are of course, no self-confessed advocates of the “quasi-religion” of nationality and nationalism. The difference between religion and quasi-religion may be no more than a matter of perspective. Only from the distance of time or from a viewpoint of claimed objectivity can expressions of patriotism such as national propaganda, cult and ceremonies appear to be secularity vested with transcendence. To their adherents, they are self-evidently real. The work of anthropologists who treat social interaction under the aegis of ritual suggests that not only nationalism but indeed all self-evident expressions of nationality can be viewed as religious realities, at least in a broad sense. Catherine Bell, for example, discussing the invention of the modern Olympic Games by Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937) finds in Coubertin’s project “a decidedly secular and rationalized form of religion that could still evoke the emotional appeal of religious symbols and rituals.”33 This secular religion also takes as one of its tenets the existence of nations, while also claiming a supra-national world order, a fellowship of common humanity. It also should be noted that the Olympics do not distinguish between states, nations and ethnicity. Scots athletes cannot win medals for Scotland; members of the Kwakwaka’wakw or Wuikinuxv First Nations compete as Canadians. Felipe Fernández-Armesto identifies a tendency for secular life to imitate religion. This influence ineluctably travels in both directions, for religions tend also to “ape the world,” by mixing faith and worldliness, in that “most ways of life which their adherents represented as religion have been thisworldly, more concerned with satisfaction or survival in this world than with salvation in the next.”34 To what can we attribute the persistence of the tendency to sacralize the secular? Conrad Cherry attributes nationality’s inclusivity and emotional power to its mythic aspects: The logic of an empowering myth . . . ranges across the experiences of a people, scoops up dominant images, and blends them into a compelling worldview.

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We are most likely to mine the mythic national worldview from hortatory literature that is addressed to a wide segment of the population. In these sources resides the blending of religious vision and national ideals devised for popular consumption, constructed for the purpose of calling citizens to action, and bent toward the justification of national causes.35

Such is the strength of the fusion of religion and nationality, even when its specifically religious elements have finally been eroded, that echoes of religion’s emotive charge remain in a nation’s mythic power of will. The nation’s protean religiosity is part of its very appeal and longevity. These are two clear ways of apprehending the relationship between religion and nationality—either as the fusion of religion and nationality into an ambiguous but undifferentiated whole, or as the development of modern concepts of the nation as a substitute for declining Christianity. However, in practice, things may not work out so neatly. Given the inherent instability of concepts and forms of the nation, and the diversity of historical forms of Christianity, fusion and substitution may operate simultaneously in any one situation. The mythic elements, forms, concerns and content shared by systems of religious beliefs and expressions of national belonging suggest that both can be seen as responses—albeit in different modes—to fundamental human questions about existence and needs for meaning and community. We may easily find in nationality (and especially in nationalist creeds) a derivative or descendent of Christianity. Equally, national concerns have been intimately connected with the growth of Christianity and the lived experience of faith. Similarity, analogy and substitution are not mutually exclusive mechanisms, but are best understood as potential perspectives from which to view the meeting of religious and national identities. It is difficult to overemphasize the importance of Christian categories of thought in the genesis of modern concepts of nationality and nationalism. It is not surprising that European thinkers, even rationalists, deists and atheists, made use of and were influenced by Christian themes, categories, and language. This has, after all, been a dominant and long-lasting worldview. For many centuries, Christendom, or at least Protestant, Roman Catholic and Orthodox versions of Christian civilization, was the “imagined community” which European thinkers inhabited. The development of the modern category of the nation can only be considered in connection with Christianity. Whether we consider them as substitutes for Christianity, as successors to it, as being in rivalry with the Church or in cahoots with it, modern concepts of nationality and most forms of nationalism—including non-Christian nationalisms such as Zionism—originated in Christian contexts.

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It is a scholarly commonplace that concepts of the nation also bear the deep imprint of European Romanticism. Some of the roots of the emotional style of Romanticism lie in eighteenth-century German Pietism, a devotional current which stressed that personal experience of divine bliss was the proof of personal election, to the point that emotionalism came to be synonymous with faith. From there, under the influence of the Aufklärung—which tended to empty the experience of its specifically religious content—passion and heightened emotion of any sort gradually became appreciated as values in themselves. This shared psychological preference made for an easy, if not obvious, transference of religious concerns to national ones. In the secular patriotic poetry of the Pietist poet Johannes Klopstock (1724–1803), epithets previously applied to Christ are bestowed on the proto-German national hero Arminius.

God’s Treasured Possessions No influence exerted upon writers, artists, preachers, philosophers and nation-builders in the Christian tradition can claim greater pervasiveness than the Bible. And it is the direct model of biblical language and categories which underlies what has probably been the most common form of religious nationality—namely, divine election: To be chosen in this sense is to be singled out for special purposes by, and hence to stand in a unique relationship to, the divine. Persons or groups who are chosen are marked off from the multitude, often at first by a divine promise, to enable them to obey and perform God’s will. They are required to stand apart, to follow a designated path, which is part of that promise, and they therefore play a unique role in the moral economy of global salvation.36

The belief that God enters into a special relationship with a people, an ethnic group or a nation has evident origins in ancient Israel. The central Israelite belief is that God has chosen one particular people as the focus of his interest and designs for the whole of humanity. The favor of God—and its concrete manifestation, the tenure of the land of Israel—is conditional. Failure to abide by the terms of election leads to a withdrawal of favored status or at least of its benefits: “Now therefore if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all peoples. Indeed the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly people and a holy nation” (Ex 19:5–6). Divine election is the constitutive element par excellence of the Israelite sense of collective self. Israelite national identity is founded on the concept

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of liberation by God, a relational act which involves spiritual, material and political realities, as the people of Israel are brought out of bondage in Egypt, adhere to Yahweh through the covenant, and are given the Promised Land. Such basic Israelite creeds as Deut 6:4–9 (“Hear, O Israel”) and 26:5–10 (“We cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm”) are simultaneously theological statements and ethnic myths. They express the belief that the people of Israel is the treasured possession of God in a distinctive way. Israel is called to maintain an internal purity, avoiding allegiance to foreign gods or external kings. Israelite notions of election itself may well have been influenced by neighboring Near-Eastern cultures such as Sumeria and Egypt, where national election was vested in the figure of the king. The Israelite concept of election was taken up as a central element in Christianity, but reshaped to reflect a new religious reality. The New Testament includes complex and evolving attitudes toward the relationship of Israel to the new Christian community. In the eyes of some, the failure of Israel to live up to the conditions of divine election caused the covenant to be superseded and God’s favor to be transferred to the new ethnically mixed church, which was seen as “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation” (1 Pe 2:9). On the other hand, through the death and resurrection of Jesus, Israelite election could also be presented as being brought to a previously unsuspected perfection. Theologies of supersession or universalization would have significant bearing on the relationships between Jews and Christians for the next two millennia. There is at the very least an analogous relationship between the divine election of Israel and the attribution (loosely or strictly) of a religious vocation to other ethnic communities or nations. Developing Christian nations could find in biblical Israel some parallel to their own experiences. But it is no difficult task to illustrate the direct borrowing of concepts of the nation from Old Testament Israel in ancient and modern nations. The universalism of Christianity did not destroy ethnic consciousness. Instead, in many cases it supplied ethnic communities with a new, transcendental referent. From an early point in history, individual ethnic groups claimed for themselves a particular Christian status. The earliest of these appears to have been Armenia, where a rich myth of election emerged after the conversion of the country to Christianity in 310, in which Armenians came to identify themselves as “the first Christian nation” and their national heroes as successors to the warriors of the Old Testament. First their Arsacid rulers and subsequently the whole of the aristocratic class claimed Jewish lineage, tracing their ancestry back to

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temple dignitaries. Armenia is indeed the most signal and complete case of national identification with Old Testament Israel, and Armenians can with some justification claim to be members of a truly national community which has survived for millennia. The similarities with Israel are striking. Armenians and Jews share the tragedies of diaspora and holocaust, and through the medium of a distinctive religion with a sacred script and liturgical language and a millennial attachment to an ancient homeland, both succeeded in maintaining a strong collective identity. With the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, Christian thinkers were led to consider the relationship between religious and civil spheres. Eusebius, court theologian to Constantine, sought to explain the new relationship between church and state. In Eusebius’s mind, the Roman Empire necessarily had a place in God’s providential scheme. In the same way that the sins of Israel had been the cause of its downfall, so the Church had been punished for its sins by persecution, in which the pagan empire had been God’s agent. Persistence and reformation had led to the reward of imperial acceptance of Christianity and the concomitant flourishing of the Church. Just as the patriarchs of ancient Israel had been, in their way, proto-Christians avant la lettre, so Constantine was a new Moses—the patriarch, representative and embodiment of a people now fully dedicated to God’s service and calling. In like vein, Paulus Orosius (fl.415) constructed a history of Rome modeled on biblical Israel but with Roman events as its central concern. For these early writers, Israel was succeeded by Rome, which provided universal evidence of the peace it brought: Pax romana and Pax Christi coincided. With the gradual collapse and fragmentation of the Christian Roman Empire, new Christian nations emerged, each with their own specific claims to preeminence. Probably the most notable example of such exceptionalism was France, where from an early point in its history the self-understanding of the nation was closely imbued with a sense of religious mission. The Capetian dynasty, who had inherited Germanic traditions of kingship from their Frankish predecessors, became the political allies and staunch defenders of the popes. The main exemplars of a full-blown sense of national election, firmly identified with Old Testament Israel, are found however not among Roman Catholic nations but among Protestant ones. This is not to say necessarily that the theological emphases of Reformation Christianity in their origins were proto-nationalist, for “even though German nationalism may well have helped to make Germany receptive of Luther’s message, the message itself was not nationalistic. Luther’s aim was to reform the universal church, not

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to establish a separate national German church.”37 Rather, Luther’s concept was that of the “invisible church,” a community of believers that could not be identified tout court with the structures of the visible hierarchical body, let alone of the nation. However, independence from both spiritual and temporal aspects of papal control meant that individual kingdoms could no longer consider themselves to be part of the spiritual-temporal imaginary of Christendom. This change led to the rise of new “imagined communities,” united now by a particular version of Christianity, freedom from Roman control, and a growing sense of linguistic unity. The Reformers’ dictum of sola scriptura meant that reading and hearing the Bible inevitably took on a greater prominence. Translations of the Bible into vernacular versions created new print and spoken languages for intellectual and religious discourse, and proto-nations quickly began to invest their own vernaculars with a degree of sacrality. When the Scriptures are the only or the primary reading material of a people, it is inevitable that biblical language and concepts enter all levels of consciousness. Among the early desert monks of Egypt and Syria, reading, hearing and memorizing of the Bible had defined and shaped the perceptions of their monastic experience: Biblical texts filled the day-to-day existence of the desert monks, providing a horizon of meaning in light of which they understood their ongoing quest for salvation: the Scriptures were experienced as authoritative words which . . . illuminated them concerning the central issues of their lives, protected and comforted them during dark times of struggle and anxiety, and provided practical help in their ongoing quest for holiness.38

Thus reading, hearing and memorizing the Bible and the Sitz im Leben of the monks provided mutually influencing viewpoints; the monastic life in its desert setting affected how they interpreted the Bible, and vice versa. The same relationship toward Scripture might be posited, mutatis mutandis, of individual Christians reading the Bible at any period. It is also easy to see how a whole people might come to experience that the Bible offers comfort during times of collective “struggle and anxiety.” The coexistence of national concerns and Protestant biblicism was abetted by a reading of the Old Testament as the primary source of teachings concerning particular nations. This was but a first step to envisaging a religious role for the new, Protestant, nations. However, the direct application of biblical passages to particular nations (rather than to the Church) is far from being a theological given. For a biblically driven Christianity, the place of societies other than the Church is

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problematic, as the New Testament provides different theologies of worldly engagement from those of the Old Testament. The “world” into which the Word came but which “did not know him” (Jn 1:10) is considered in Johannine theology as all that is opposed to the body of Christian believers. On the other hand, the description of the disciples as “salt of the earth” (Mt 5:13) and Jesus’ final command to “go and make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19) suggest a different relationship to the world, one in which the Gospel can embrace social identities. We have seen that one of the major differences between national and ethnic belonging on one hand and Christian faith on the other involves attitudes toward land. Given that the New Testament de-territorializes the Covenant and universalizes redemption, and if we accept that territory is essential to nationhood (and cherished particularly by nationalism), we could easily hold that Christianity is inherently inimical not only to nationalism but even to nationhood itself. Yet biblical literalism has in fact coexisted happily with claims of special status by many nations, and innumerable artists, poets, philosophers, nationalist ideologues, and politicians have generously applied biblical imagery to their own peoples. One particular element of the Reformation especially favored the growth of Protestant nationalism: the rejection of allegorical readings of the Bible and the championing of its literal sense as the essence of Christianity. Among the effects of this was a renewed interest in those parts of the Old Testament that referred to the nation of Israel. Arguing that “the Old Testament is full of nationalism and divine legitimation of nationalism,” Conor Cruise O’Brien argues that such passages were “read literally by people already predisposed to nationalism.”39 In the development of religio-national consciousness in Protestant cultures, the influence of literal readings of the Old Testament was of far greater significance than similar readings of the New Testament. Early Christians had interpreted their experience of Jesus in the light of those writings which held authority in the historical Israelite community and which for them (in their new, Christ-centered community) were increasingly seen as the “Old” Testament. An important tool in such readings was typology, in which events of the past are seen as foreshadowings of later occurrences. Despite the official teaching of Protestant theologians and their disapproval of “frivolous” hermeneutics, in the new, self-consciously national churches of the Reform, a new application of typology developed, “taking the Old Testament as prefiguring, no longer Christ, but whichever nation happened to be talking about itself.”40 For a whole series of nations and peoples affected by the Reformation, typological identification with the sufferings and triumphs of Old Testament Israel was an almost inevitable step. Hedva Ben-Israel points

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out how easily ancient Israel served as model for “elect nations,” Catholic as well as Protestant: The theorists of nationalism . . . had already pointed to ancient Israel as the prototype of a nation. It had a national territory designated by God, a common religion, a sense of mission, a unique culture and God-given laws and institutions. Rousseau . . . pointed these out to the Poles in his advice to them on how to preserve their own nation. The natural borders proclaimed by the French in wartime were later transformed into divine borders. Mazzini wrote that God created nations, each in fact with its own promised land.41

“Chos’n before any other” The classical “promised land” theme of election is of course most prominent in those Protestant nations that saw themselves directly as “new Israel.” The biblical account of the conquest of Canaan, in which the land occupied is shown to be fruit of the covenant, lent itself effortlessly to a typological justification for conquest and imperial expansion, as states sought to claim or re-claim land which was “theirs.” The classical link between divine election and territorial claims finds expression in Gen 13: 14–15: “The Lord said to Abraham, after Lot had separated from him, ‘Raise your eyes now and look from the place where you are, northwards and southwards and eastwards and westwards; for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring for ever.’”42 God’s promise is to make Abraham a mighty nation so that “all nations on earth may be blessed in him” (Gen 17:18). This combines particularism (God’s choosing of Abraham, forefather of Israel) with a universalized destiny (“all nations may be blessed in him”). The tension between these two tendencies is found throughout the Old Testament. In the theology of the “Suffering Servant” of Isaiah, applied in midrashim to the whole people of Israel, election is not a national claim to an inalienable or ontological superior status.43 Rather, acceptance of the Torah involves responsibility and a willingness to undergo suffering as part of the nature of election. O’Brien notes that the “internationalist” passages of the Old Testament are “remote, vague and contingent,” whereas the “nationalist” references (which highlight Israelite particularism) are “immediate, vivid and practical.”44 Clearly the covenant with God is contingent, not unconditional. Indeed, the Old Testament can be read as the ongoing cyclic relationship of divine reward and punishment of Israel in response to Israel’s performance (or not) of covenantal terms. Correspondingly, the basic hermeneutical framework of all those nations and peoples who have consciously identified

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themselves with Old Testament Israel and felt themselves to be in some way chosen is reward for fidelity and punishment for disobedience. Rev. Jerry Falwell’s claim that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were God’s punishment on the United States for the sins of homosexuality and abortion was certainly outlandish. Underlying his statement was however a conventional theological scheme—an assumption that God works in history to reward the good and punish the bad, collectively as well as individually. Falwell’s jeremiad implied that America is a Christian nation, if a morally deficient one, whose religious affiliation is more than the sum of its parts. Yet the very motif of “chosen people” itself may turn out to be more of a Christian designation that arises from applying Old Testament models to Christian nations and peoples. Paul Mendes-Flohr argues convincingly that Israel’s understanding of itself as God’s elect is not identical with the concept of chosen people sponsored by Christianity, and that the term is a New Testament reading back into the Old: “the term ‘chosen people’ is not found in classical Jewish sources and seems to have entered Jewish discourse only with Jewry’s encounter with the modern world. . . . [It] was apparently borrowed from the Christian vocabulary as a lexical equivalent of the expression Jews traditionally used to refer to their relationship with God.”45 Deut 7:6 employs ‘am segulah, a term denoting a people who are a special treasure to God. The King James Bible however renders the phrase as “an holy people,” and the Contemporary English Version as “a chosen people.”46 The phrase is repeated in the Prologue to the Ten Commandments: “If you will obey me faithfully and obey my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession. Indeed all the earth is mine, but you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Ex 19:5–6). The Old Testament records Israel’s many attempts to escape from the terms of the covenant while keeping the gift of the land, thereby assuming unconditional status as a holy nation. Similarly, those modern nations who have identified themselves with Israel have tended toward presuming absolute chosenness for themselves, with a concomitant pre-eminence in other spheres of life. Perhaps nowhere is this identification clearer than in the case of England, where the “holy nation” motif received a tremendous boost from the fostering of a specifically Protestant national historiography, beginning with the efforts of Henry VIII and his Chancellor Thomas Cromwell, and later developed by English Puritans. For many scholars, the case of England is of paramount importance in the study of nation-formation, since “the birth of the English nation was not the birth of a nation. It was a birth of the nations, the birth of nationalism.”47 Historians find as early as the eighth century the origins of an English

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consciousness that progressively asserted itself over more than a thousand years.48 Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum had already applied Israelite imagery to the English nation. (The motif was borrowed from the earlier writer Gildas, who had referred to the native Christian Britons as praesens Israel. Bede’s supersessionist theology supplies a religious justification for the Anglo-Saxon conquest of native British territory, according to which God’s blessing was removed from one faithless people and given to another, in order that they might inherit the responsibilities of mission along with the rights deriving from election.) Ælfric (fl. 990–1020) advised his fellow Englishmen that “[the book of Judith] is set down in English as an example to you people that you should defend your land against the invading army with weapons,”49 an indication of religiously informed national sentiment. During the first third of the sixteenth century a new reading of English history, secular and religious, emerged. The subjects of Henry VIII witnessed an abrupt separation of England from Christendom, or rather a reformulation of the notion of Christendom, one no longer coextensive with the Roman Church. The Act in Restraint of Appeals of 1533 forbade appellation to papal courts; the 1534 Ecclesiastical Appointments Act gave Henry absolute right in the appointment of bishops, while the Act of Supremacy of the same year declared Henry to be the “only Supreme Head on earth of the Church of England, called Anglicana Ecclesia.”50 It was not these legal steps toward the establishment of a state autonomous in its religious affairs which reshaped popular national consciousness. The new sense of Englishness was wrought by Tudor apologists’ retelling of the “story of the nation.” The long-term identification of Protestant and national causes was the most important contribution of Christianity to English identity, an identification that had its historical continuation in the new Protestant polity of Great Britain, the development of a cultural Britishness, and the project of the British Empire. Two themes lay at the roots of this religious-national tradition: the idea of an ancient, autochthonous British Church, and the concept of the English as a (if not the) people of God. For Edwin Jones, the origins of British national historiography lie in the Tudor fascination for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum britanniae,51 the source of the originmyth of the descent of the British from Troy and imperial Rome via Aeneas’s grandson Brutus. Under the tutelage of Henry VIII and two of his children, and freed from allegiance to Rome (with the exception of the reign of Mary Tudor), sixteenth-century England began to see itself not only as a country but also as an empire that existed in conscious opposition to the political and religious hegemony claimed by the Holy Roman Empire and the papacy. Court historians and popular propagandists sought to develop a mythic liter-

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ature of founding British origins, to emphasize England’s historical autonomy and persistent national and original purity. Polydore Vergil (1470–1555) was commissioned by Henry VIII to write a History of England. In a few strokes of the quill, Henry was conveniently furnished with Christian imperial progenitors, as Vergil’s Anglicae Historiae traces Henry’s imperial lineage not from Aeneas, but from the Christian emperor Constantine and his mother Helena, reputedly born in Britain. The fluctuations of Tudor history meant that historians were frequently pressed into national service. The age of Elizabeth I in particular saw a great flourishing of propagandistic antiquarianism, which strengthened the national narrative and the sense of England as a historical, autonomous entity: A succession of scholars, collectors and antiquaries . . . grew fascinated by England itself, its history, language, customs, topography, local monuments and antiquities. Scholars . . . came to have their doubts about this or that feature of the legend . . . but they did not question the general outlines or the essential truth of a legend so apposite to the continuing crisis in which Elizabeth and her people found themselves.52

The preambles to Tudor legislation had employed explicit and implicit appeals to tradition to justify innovative political action. Henry’s Act in Restraint in Appeals had justified English legal autonomy by a vague appeal to “divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles.”53 Similarly, the first move to extend the power of English state apparatus over neighboring peoples, the 1536 Act of Union claimed that “the Dominion, Principality and Country of Wales, justly is and ever hath been incorporated, annexed, united and subject to and under the imperial crown of this realm as a very member and joint of the same.”54 It was inevitable that Elizabethan religious changes should also seek legitimation by referring to tradition. Following Elizabeth I’s Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity of 1559, Matthew Parker (1504–1575) was appointed as Archbishop of Canterbury. An antiquarian and scholar, Parker put his learning and talents to work in the invention of a new national story of continuity, tradition, and timelessness. In this way, as Roland Barthes might express it, Parker’s work “turned history into nature.”55 Extending the concerns of the Anglican Church retroactively into Anglo-Saxon history, Parker elaborated the myth of an early national Church that existed completely independent of Romish oversight. The religious autonomy predicated of this “ancient British Christianity” reflected a general Elizabethan concern for national independence in all fields. (French Gallicanism was to claim similar exemptions from papal control.)

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More significant was the idea that the church described by Parker was Protestant in its essence. The national church motif held that doctrinal and political allegiance to Rome, brought about by the appointment of Augustine of Canterbury by Pope Gregory the Great in 596, was followed by ever-deepening Roman interference in English affairs, and a general religious decadence. Arguing along the lines of post hoc ergo propter hoc, the new Anglican Church was presented as being no more and no less than a return to English Christianity’s original purity, after almost a millennium of degeneration. Parker’s myth proved to be astoundingly long-lived. Edwin Jones notes that the reading of post-Reformation assumptions into medieval history was a characteristic of English historiography until well into the twentieth century. (The trope of the “ancient British Church” continues to thrive in popular notions of the “Celtic Church,” anachronistically imagined as an ecclesiological Shangri-La free of Roman narrowness.) However, neither legislation nor the work of scholars alone can create or reshape national identity: for that, the services of more popular media are required. John Bale (1495–1563), employee of Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell, playwright, and former Carmelite friar, propagated the myth of the ancient British Church with enthusiasm. Bale’s play The History of King Johan (1538) had adopted the view of English identity propagated by Cromwell. To this, Bale added the legend from the chronicler William of Malmesbury (c. 1095– 1143) that the initial evangelizers of England were none other than Joseph of Arimathea and the followers of St. Philip. The English Church could thus claim a direct connection with the early apostles, one that did not derive from Peter or Rome. In the legendary figure of King Lucius, Bale found an English counterpart of the Emperor Constantine. Bale’s 1548 history of England, Illustrium majoris britanniae scriptorum, portrayed a valiant native people heroically defending true Christianity, whose doctrinal enemies ranged from heathen Saxon invaders from Germany, to Normans whose conquest brought monks and friars, and Roman and papal agents. All these religious interlopers were also invaders of English soil. The champions of both England and the True Faith were the native kings of the isle of Britain. In Bale’s view, Englishness is identified as being coextensive with Protestantism, and nascent English nationalism is clothed in a religious idiom. So colored was the history of the Reformation in England by considerations of England’s position on the European stage that it became impossible to distinguish between those who were political enemies and those who held differing religious convictions: heresy was simultaneously treason. In their political struggle, the English people were encouraged to see themselves as chosen supporters of Christ against the idolatrous French or Spanish. Hugh Latimer

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(1485–1555), executed for heresy during the reign of Mary Tudor, had spoken of “the God of England.”56 The Elizabethan bishop John Aylmer, in his A Harborowe of True and Faithful Subjects, had taught that “God is English. . . . God and his angels always fought against [England’s] foreign foes.”57 Parker and Bale had both been exiles in Protestant Europe during the reign of Mary Tudor. Nostalgia for an idealized homeland may account for some of their notions of uncorrupted British Christianity. The most significant mythmaker of English chosenness was Bale’s fellow exile, friend and collaborator, John Foxe (1516–1587). A precursor to Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of the English Church (known to posterity as “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs”) was published in Strasbourg in 1554, as Commentarii rerum in ecclesia gestarum. Foxe did not originate the constitutive parts of the new Protestant-national historiography, but rather provided it with a cogent narrative expressed in a readable idiom. Foxe’s project married the history of the English Church with an apocalyptically inspired reading of recent history, focusing on the inseparable political sovereignty and religious responsibility that had devolved upon England’s Queen Elizabeth I. By the time the final version of the Acts and Monuments appeared in 1563, the book incorporated the work of antiquaries, theologians and politicians. It is thus more of an expression of the spirit of the age rather than of the individual genius of one author. Foxe’s work made an articulate statement about the unity of English identity and Protestant interests. Graphic descriptions of the sufferings of Protestant martyrs under the Catholic Mary Tudor ensured a powerful populist appeal to patriotic Protestantism. The Elizabethan government sought to maximize the impact of the book by ordering a copy placed in all cathedrals for public reading. Four editions were issued in Foxe’s own lifetime, and nine by 1684. As “The Book of Martyrs,” it appeared in several eighteenth-century editions, while four further editions saw the light of day during the nineteenth century. During his exile in Zürich, Foxe had come into contact with strains of apocalyptic Protestantism that sought to make sense of religious strife by applying the book of Revelation to current difficulties. Using this hermeneutical key to understand the history of England, Foxe claimed that it was divine providence that had led the Tudor dynasty to the throne of England. God had appointed Henry VIII and his son and daughter to lead the English people out of bondage into freedom, so that England could be experienced freely once more as a Promised Land. The Calvinist doctrine of predestination became applied to a whole nation. William Haller identifies Foxe as the original propagator of English chosenness.58 Subsequent scholarship however has indicated otherwise. Kathleen

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Firth notes that Foxe’s conception of the church as the congregation of the elect is in fact spiritual rather than political, and universal rather than national.59 The English were held by Foxe himself to be a part of the invisible and mystical Church not by virtue of their nationality, but due to their faithful adherence to Protestantism.60 It was therefore not Foxe himself, but rather the wide influence of selective readings of Foxe in subsequent generations that engendered the emphasis on the national rather than the religious element in English chosenness. Seventeenth-century Puritans in particular found mythic identification with Old Testament Israel highly attractive: Oliver Cromwell described the English as “a people that have the stamp on them from God.”61 Other later writers accepted the elaborations of Parker and Foxe as historical fact, adapting them to their own needs. James Ussher (1580–1685), archbishop of Armagh during the reign of James I, is probably best known for his proposal that the world was created on the evening of Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC. Equally improbable is his assertion that the early “British Church” was independent of Rome in governance, Protestant in its doctrine, and—countering the claims of Puritanism for the equal priesthood of all believers—episcopal in form.62 The most complete and unambiguous identification of England (that is, Protestant and Puritan England) as a chosen people is found in the propaganda of John Milton, who reached the conclusion that the prophecies of the book of Revelation were being fulfilled exclusively in England. As God’s predestined elect, the English had both chronological and ontological primacy in the work of God. Already knowing the reasons why, Milton’s Areopagitica asked “Why else was this nation chos’n before any other, that out of her, as out of Zion should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of reformation of all Europe? What does [God], but reveal himself . . . as his manner is, first to his English-men?”63 Areopagitica was the first of a number of revolutionary tracts Milton wrote between 1640 and 1644, all aimed at teaching his compatriots the lessons of scripture and divinely led history, and urging them to obey God’s decree, “even to the reforming of reformation itself.”64 Even within Milton’s own lifetime, the course of English history would sorely disillusion him. However, the sense of English uniqueness and mission that was part of Milton’s political theology would long survive him, not least in the association of religiously oriented chosenness with the theme of empire. In later centuries, the legacy of English Protestantism was to be found primarily not in the overtly theological field, but rather amongst “a plethora of preachers, writers, poets and public men, adventurers and states-

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men, speculators and politicians, explorers and planters of colonies, men with an overweening and often unreflecting confidence in themselves and the rectitude of their own intentions.”65 Walls locates the origins of British imperialism in English religious chosenness. By the late Victorian era, Britishness was—at least for the English—almost identical to Englishness. England’s elect status was extended to the whole of Britain and its endeavors. Walls discovers a gradual evolution in the content of this religio-political identity: “From the 1880’s onwards, ideas of British chosenness inevitably have to do with Empire. Before that, they had more to do with insularity—with sea-girt security, with freedom from invasion and warfare, and with the defense of the true religion and the Protestant faith.”66 The “Whig myth of progress,” beloved of nineteenthcentury historiography, represents a de facto secularization of the apocalyptic pattern articulated by Foxe. A mythomoteur, which originally justified radical religious developments in England, evolved into a ethnocentric psychology that powered the political development of the British Empire, all the while retaining some vestiges of its origins. The unity of English church and state (and of national and Protestant religious identities) legislated by Henry VIII has proven to be a long-lasting phenomenon, for the Church of England remains the Church of England, with the English sovereign as its Supreme Governor. Yet to what extent can the association of English national identity with the Protestant cause still truly be called “religious”? The many English writers, preachers, teachers and orators who drew on Foxe’s work did not necessarily subscribe to Calvinist theology of predestination. This is to suggest that the motif of English chosenness, although it has made use of theological categories and biblical tropes, is in fact only metaphor. The survival of English (or later, British) chosenness, with its union of political and religious identities and the assumption of cultural superiority, is striking. Its continuity in time is matched by its broad cross-sector appeal. Indeed, “the most uninhibited assertions of British chosenness were to be found where lay and working-class influence was strongest.”67 To describe this English sense of chosenness, as does Edwin Jones, as a “great myth” is highly apt. Jones’ use of “myth” is pejorative (as synonymous with fabrication) and his argument that the apparently religious roots of Englishness as described in the “great myth” are in fact merely political and cultural is persuasive; in this case, the English “chosen people” motif could be classified as an untruth, built on a convenient misappropriation and partial reading of the theology of the covenant. Yet in light of its perdurance and continuing appeal, the trope of English chosenness may also be understood as myth in

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an anthropological sense: as sacred story of the origins of a people and its relationship with its divine protector. Whether such national myths are based in literal truth is not a particularly important element of their import, for myths “have their own logic. Persuasive myth, like effective propaganda . . . is governed by the power of broad, inspiring explanation rather than the principle of rational consistency.”68 To make a clinically neat separation between myth and propaganda, between historical facts and their imaginative reconstruction for the purposes of the present is neither intellectually satisfactory nor methodologically possible. Nationalist intellectuals may well be “missionary romantics” and “cultural archaeologists” whose project is the “rediscovery, reinterpretation and regeneration of the communal past in order to reconstruct the modern nation, and to locate it in time and space on firm and authentic foundations.” 69 So too, however, are legislators, historians and tabloid journalists and the populations they seek to address.

Out of Egypt, Into Africa In England, the territorial aspect of the Israelite experience could be applied only in a spiritual or ideological sense, or by harnessing its inherent expansionism to the project of empire. By contrast, the arduous experiences of escape from oppression and emigration to a new territory seem to be enough in some cases to suggest the existence of a divine covenant: New nationalities like those of the Canadians and the South Africans, which had not existed before their encounter with a new physical environment forged them into nationhood, seemed to be highly sensitive to the surrounding natural environment. The process of nation-building in a certain landscape was telescoped for the settlers into a lifetime’s experience. The confrontation with mountainous waterways, arid veldts or deserts against a religious background made pioneer settlers and their descendants all the more receptive to the notion of God’s guiding hand.70

Another long-lived ethno-cultural myth, in which religious identity was shaped into the contours of a theology of election, existed among the Afrikaner people. Prior to the 1838 Battle of Blood River, which resulted in the defeat of Zulu forces and secured Afrikaner presence in Natal, the Voortrekker military force had made a conditional covenant with God. In return for divine assistance in obtaining victory, they promised to build a church and to keep the day of victory as an annual celebration in perpetuity. The vow certainly suggests that the Voortrekkers had developed some degree of

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sensibility of divine chosenness. Calvinism was the religious background of the majority of Afrikaans-speaking people of Dutch descent in nineteenthcentury South Africa, especially in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Calvinism was also the backdrop against which the events of Afrikaner history were understood by later generations. Seton-Watson for example argues that amongst the Dutch-speaking Calvinists, “a passionate conviction existed that they had been called by God to a special mission, to spread Christian civilization in Africa, overcoming the hostility of both savage black pagans and godless liberal materialist Englishmen. The Trek and Blood River were commemorated as great acts of God through his faithful servants.”71 The diaries of the Boer people were commonly taken as evidence of their identification with the tribes of Israel wandering in the desert in search of the Promised Land. In the historical events of the Great Trek of the 1830s, Boer farmers could see the liberation of their people and their journey as both a material and spiritual replaying of the foundational events of Israelite identity. It has been commonly held that the Voortrekkers themselves took the Great Trek and the 1838 Vow and Battle of Blood River to be proof of divine election, shown in a pattern of exodus, salvation, and victory against overwhelming odds. The compression of the legendary biblical forty years of Israelite wandering into the comparatively few years of the Trek turned those territories into a holy land—one of Anthony D. Smith’s ethnoscapes, which distill into one place a whole sequence of collective memory. This interpretation of history holds that Afrikaners constantly interpreted their history through the lens of the biblical Exodus. Revisionist historiography suggests however that Afrikaner chosenness appears to be, like English chosenness, a myth. It was untrue of the people it was predicated of, but attributed to them by later generations and accepted as historical fact. In the case of the Voortrekkers themselves, historians are dealing with people “most of whom left no record of what they felt about these matters. All that we know is that, in certain circumstances, they responded in large numbers to appeals coming from leaders and the molders of opinion.”72 André du Toit’s investigations show that Afrikaner chosenness does not date as commonly claimed, from the direct experience of the Trekkers themselves. The interpretation of Afrikaner identity as an isolated survival of sixteenth-century beliefs, translated into a divinely legitimated right to subjugate Africans and occupy their land, turns out to have a surprising source: the writings of David Livingstone.73 His accounts of Afrikaner life, written in the 1850s, were colored by his own British religious and political concerns, yet influenced the nineteenth-century literature that was the direct source of Afrikaner nationalism of the twentieth century. As propaganda, the Calvinist myth was

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brought vigorously into play especially after the introduction of apartheid in 1948.74 Clearly then, contexts affect the appeal to election. Claims for divine chosenness are likely to ebb and flow according to changing national needs: “for the various people who have . . . identified themselves as chosen peoples, the idea . . . tended to become explicit and urgent only at times of national crisis.”75 In Northern Ireland, Ulster Protestants only began to celebrate the Battle of the Boyne widely nearly two hundred years after the event, in response to Gladstone’s first Home Rule Bill of 1886. In repetition and reflection, myths tend to grow in size, complexity and self-sureness. Election, although felt to be given by God to a people as a gift of faith, becomes something that has to be proven to be genuine by works. Empire is the evidence of divine favor. Afrikaner chosenness clearly originated in a sense of distinct cultural identity, expressed as a sense of moral superiority vis-à-vis both Zulus and Englishmen. A transcendental element was agglutinated to this basic psychology, later expressing itself as a claim to land and to independence from British imperial control. The alliance of Christian mission and empire in the “civilizing mission” of the late nineteenth century contains an ambiguity that is written into the very structure of the idea of national election. Where Christian mission and identity is predicated not of the Church as a whole or of individuals, but rather of nations and states, evangelization and expansion easily fuse.76 From the moral high ground of retrospection, the appropriation of the biblical idea of covenant as justification for imperialism appears self-evidently unChristian. At the time of religious expansion, things may appear differently. Eusebius’s Life of Constantine notes without irony Constantine’s awareness of Christians who lived beyond the unity of the secular-religious imperium: “The emperor, having heard that there were many churches in Persia and that large numbers were gathered into the fold of Christ, resolved to extend his concern for the general welfare to that country, as one whose aim it was to care for all alike in every nation.”77 Chosenness, in its original Israelite version, involved a range of covenantal responsibilities, which include respect for the rights of others. Yet the responsibility of Christians to evangelize all peoples, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Mt 28:19–20)—and to ensure their rights to eternal salvation—can also obviously serve as an opportunistic mask for legitimizing political ambition. Under the theology of “outside the Church there is no salvation,” the uniting of political and missionary motifs seems to be the rule, rather than the exception. Evangelization and colonization necessarily

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worked hand-in-hand, and could be practically synonymous. Even for those imperial forces which did not possess a myth of national election, the bringing of “civilization” could be taken at least to imply a sacred aura. Yet there are myths and myths. In South Africa, two rival alliances of Christianity with a particular people co-existed. The marriage of the British Empire with Christian mission did not go unquestioned by Dutch Christian leaders. By the late 1880s, the Afrikaner press had begun to note the similarity between Dutch supremacist attitudes and British imperialism, noting that such attitudes could just as easily be turned against the Afrikaners themselves. The proximate cause of the emergence of the Afrikaner myth of chosenness seems therefore to have been the potential threat of British political and linguistic supremacy. The Reverend S. J. du Toit, a leader of the Cape language movement, attempted to graft together the principles of linguistic and national identities with the idea of a divine calling. His 1879 Genootskaap, a “History of Our Land in the Language of Our People,” expressed a vision of God’s choosing of the Afrikaners as a particular people with its own fatherland and language. The Afrikaans language was “from the start and by its nature political, an expression of a race’s political destiny, and, more narrowly, of its resistance to Anglicization.”78 Religious concerns were coopted by political aims. In 1915, Cornelius Spoelstra of the Dutch Reformed Church published a history of Afrikaner religious life, in which the guiding principle was a particular ethnic calling to evangelize Africa. The Trekkers were portrayed not as economic emigrants, but rather as bearers of a divine commission where mission was a cornerstone of the covenant. These ideas were articulated and favored by members of the educated class who were influenced by the Dutch intellectual climate: at the end of the nineteenth century, a neo-Calvinist revival in the Netherlands had promoted Calvinism as the core of Dutch national identity. The events of the Boer War of 1889–1902 provided a further impetus for Afrikaner ressentiment. Conditions were ripe for the emergence of religious nationalism. The Dutch Reformed Church assumed the role of a volkskerk almost identical to Afrikaner society, and it was its ministers above all who made use of the Trekker Covenant myth and biblical language to express the concerns and needs of their people: The Afrikaner leaders were professional politicians and Calvinist predikants, who regarded social organization largely from a theological point of view, and believed that political and social order must be based on God’s word as they understood it. They believed that the Bible had clearly laid down a position of permanent inferiority and helotry for the children of Ham.79

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Yet if the predikants were exact in their theological terms, professional politicians were not. Afrikaner nationalists found in the language of preachers a rich source of rhetoric and made a generalized, indeterminate use of concepts of chosenness. Determining to what degree such imagery was merely rhetorical frosting and to what extent it was truly believed is methodologically almost impossible. The reconstructions of historians are defined by the sources they have at hand. However, it is reasonably safe to assert that the myth of Afrikaner chosenness was produced in defensive response to social change, a reaction against modernity. The religious-political alliance to which it gave birth was the fruit of a siege mentality, a desire to perpetuate and increase identity by stressing national exceptionalism.

With Liberty and Justice for Some The chosen people motif of the English and Afrikaner peoples has found a parallel development with its own peculiarities in North America. “All nations . . . have long agreed that they are chosen peoples; the idea of special destiny is as old as nationalism itself.”80 The American experience was an important outgrowth of the English myth so central to the development of nationalism. The passengers on board the Mayflower sailed to the North American continent in search of a more perfect and religiously oriented realization of Protestant-English election. As in South Africa, but differently from England, a belief in divine election involved exodus from oppression and the appropriation of a promised land. The establishment and early history of the United States coincided with the period in which the ideology of modern secular nationalism was formed: 1776–1815. This ideology inevitably shaped to some degree the sense of the national identity of the people of the new republic. The formal separation by 1833 of the last vestiges of the unity of church and state in the United States81 meant that prima facie religio-national identity was no longer a legal reality. In practice, though, this constitutional separation was challenged repeatedly because of the inherent tendency of nationality to ally itself with religiosity. The two roots of American self-understanding as an elect people were biblical in inspiration. Early Puritan identification with ancient Israel meant that the country could be portrayed as a haven of religious freedom, and its inhabitants as a Christian nation, missioned with an exceptional role to play in bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth. Yet after the first years of the Pilgrim Fathers, it is arguable to what extent Americans truly subscribed to the religious element of this myth. The Founding Fathers, seeking to estab-

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lish the free exercise of religion for people of all faiths or none, rejected any exclusive association between the new state and a church. In doing this, they also sought to separate out nationality from collective religiosity, thereby relegating the role of faith to the sphere of personal and individual choice and the exercise of morality. Yet such was the weight of cultural inheritance that the notion of American chosenness simply could not disappear. Instead, from an early stage in the history of the United States, divine election came to be expressed in terms of territory, geography and exploration.82 Under these circumstances, it is easy to see how expansion and conquest could merely make a generic use of biblical language to explain and legitimize itself. The rhetorical use of biblical metaphors allowed for ambiguity and slippage, as the same terms could mean different things to different audiences. The tension between a more generic use of election to evoke specialness, exceptionalism, etc., and a sensu stricto understanding of religio-national identity and mission came to the fore in the issue of slavery, over which both country and Christian denominations were literally torn asunder. However, it was not slavery, but the arrival of millions of new immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, mostly Jewish and Catholic refugees from the Irish famine and the European revolutions of 1848, which brought the tensions of American identity into painful relief, as the once Protestant nation started to become religiously pluriform, multicultural, and multilingual. Senator Charles Boynton’s 1847 address to the Cincinnati Native Americans expressed his belief in American providentialism, tracing a direct line of election beginning with the Hebrew nation, and ending up with the American “Christian, Protestant, Democratic State,” via a series of societies—the medieval European church, Germany, and England—each of whom had been entrusted with the covenant and eventually found wanting in the balance.83 But is it fair to say that nineteenth- and twentieth-century American patriots found an explicit biblical warrant for their understanding of national providentialism? James Moorhead concludes that in the minds of most Protestants, analogies and comparisons could be made between America and Israel, but generally such correspondences were not felt to be exact. Instead, the meaning of America was loosely allied to the development of the Kingdom of God, a reality, like the new nation, also in a process of growth. According to this theology, “the Kingdom appeared wherever men and women submitted to the rule of Christian ideals and principles.”84 The Kingdom of Heaven and the United States could thus be seen to co-exist, sharing territory and history, yet without being exactly identical with each other. Anti-Catholicism was one of the elements at play in the dispute over true American identity. The Order of the Star-Spangled Banner, dubbed the

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“Know-Nothing” Party, was a secret society founded in 1849 to support antiCatholic candidates for public office. The Know-Nothings sought among other things to deprive recent immigrants of the right to vote and advocated for obligatory daily readings of the King James Bible in public schools. While this explicit program of xenophobia and religious prejudice enjoyed only a short-lived success, the Anglo-Saxonism and sense of cultural superiority that it also championed had longer legs. Following the demise of the movement, some members of the anti-slavery branch of the Know-Nothings went on to join the Republican Party. Indeed, well into the twentieth century, American Catholics tended not to vote for the Republican Party, since it was popularly felt to be anti-Catholic. A long history of religious nativism precedes the contemporary American debates concerning language policy and immigration. Increasingly over the nineteenth century, as the western frontier moved toward the Pacific and industrialization characterized the new cities, Americans developed a cult of the land. In literature and painting, the American landscape was celebrated as a natural and unspoiled paradise. In the absence of any grand historical monuments like those of Europe, national parks expressed a developing national identity. Yet the cult of American landscapes involved an ethical and aesthetic ambiguity toward its aboriginal inhabitants. Even at the same time as American literature and art was beginning to celebrate Native Americans as picturesque survivors of a primitive Eden, tokens of a noble but rapidly disappearing past, they were also being deprived of their tenure of “the land of the free and the home of the brave” by newly arrived settlers, under the justification of “manifest destiny.”85 Aestheticism and injustice were complementary. In the same way that English religious chosenness fed into the British imperial project, American chosenness also developed territorial and ideological forms of mission. At the end of the Spanish-American War, by the terms of the 1898 Treaty of Paris, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam all were gathered under the sheltering wings of the Republic. Meanwhile, in New York harbor, the beacon of the “Mother of Exiles” continued to “glow world-wide welcome” and Ellis Island received the “huddled masses”86 of the Old World. Post–World War I immigration raised the specter of a Roman Catholic threat to the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance. In a debate over immigration, a representative from Maine told Congress that the United States was “God-intended to be the home of a great English speaking people, a white race with great ideals, the Christian religion, one race, one country”87—a claim which effectively excluded unassimilated immigrants, Jews, people of color, and Catholics.

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Though the theme of America as the Promised Land and the American nation as a chosen people was originally most often sung by white Protestants, the chorus of voices grew to include Americans of other faiths. Reverence for their new homeland also flourished among immigrants, including European Jews and Orthodox and Catholic Christians. Members of these groups brought with them a faith in a holy nation and homeland, yet also managed to transfer their affective attachment, at least in part, to their new home. Parallel and sometimes conflicting variants of chosenness and identity developed among different populations and different generations. For newly arrived immigrants, language and religion were cultural markers. In Little Italys or New Warsaws, religious and ethnic identity could be experienced as one. Second-generation immigrants however, experienced a tension between different levels of religious, ethnic and national belonging. If immigrants were to succeed in planting roots in new soil, they inevitably had to contend with and eventually comply with Americanization, including their faith. The pattern is seen clearly in the “Americanism” of Cardinal Spellman that was directed against communism, viewed as the enemy of both America and the Catholic Church alike.88 Spellman’s spectacularly patriotic piety (“I believe in America, For the blood in the veins of America, our heart’s blood, comes from the wounds of many peoples, chaliced in humanity’s name upon the altar of liberty”)89 echoed the sensibilities of a whole Catholic generation. The Mass Preface for Thanksgiving Day in the United States Catholic Sacramentary is a fascinatingly ambiguous appropriation by the American Catholic hierarchy of the Puritan Exodus myth. Blending salvation and American history, it addresses God, telling him that Once you chose a people and gave them a destiny, and when you brought them out of bondage to freedom, they carried with them the promise that all men would be blessed and all men could be free. What the prophets pledged was fulfilled in Jesus Christ . . . It has come to pass in every generation for all men who have believed that Jesus by his death and resurrection gave them a new freedom in his Spirit. It happened to our fathers, who came to this land as if out of the desert into a place of promise and hope. It happens to us still, in our time, as you lead all men through your Church, to the blessed vision of peace.90

Similarly, the red-baiting accusations of Joseph McCarthy could be interpreted in part as an attempt by mid-twentieth-century American

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Roman Catholicism to prove to its Protestant peers that Catholics were more American than the Americans (that is, Protestants)—a project which involved a nimble translation of the national anti-Christ from the Vatican to the Kremlin. At an early point in American history, what had begun as a theological understanding of the new society began to express itself as confidence in national providentialism. Directly or otherwise, American chosenness has justified wars against Native Americans and Mexicans in the nineteenth century, the use of violence in the Civil War, and America’s participation in two world wars. One could also argue that the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war at least implies a certain religious mandate, according to which the American people, under the aegis of an all-powerful state, would be the defender of oppressed peoples everywhere. The influence of Calvinism in the development of American civil religion lies not strictly speaking in theology but in Calvinism’s emotional psychology. In American international belligerence, it is possible to identify the influence of the “hot zeal” of English Puritans. Direct scriptural influence is less important than the pervasive biblicism that perdures in American political rhetoric.91 The United States was not the only North American entity to incorporate a belief in national election. In the “other America,” in French-speaking Canada, a specifically Catholic “Promised Land” myth also arose, one of the few examples of substantial Catholic borrowing from Exodus motifs: Why is it, wrote a French Catholic priest in the 1860s, that God allotted to certain French families “a particular territory wherein to grow and develop a national identity”? His answer comes from the Bible. God created the nations, assigned them territories and guided their migrations. Just as he sent Abraham to Canaan, which had been defiled by its inhabitants, so he sent families out of France to bring faith to the beautiful St. Lawrence valley.92

The biblical allusions above are impressionistic, rather than scholastically precise. It is implied, rather than openly stated, that the Québécois, by analogy with ancient Israel, are not merely one nation among many. Royalist-minded émigré French priests and nuns who had fled to Québec following the fluctuations of nineteenth-century French politics encouraged the conviction that the French Canadians were a people chosen by Providence and uncorrupted by liberalism and republicanism. Louis François Laflèche, bishop of Trois-Rivières, Quebec, published a manifesto claiming national status for French-Canadians. His 1886 Quelques considérations sur les rapports de la société avec la Réligion et la Famille claimed that since France had lost

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her original divine commission in the Old World through her atheism and infidelity, the mission of French Canada was to be the Catholic center of the New World. Underlying these affirmations was a supersessionist theology. French Canadians were taught that in North America they bore the specific responsibility of disseminating the values of French and Catholic civilization through the medium of the French language. Patriotic poetry portrayed the Québécois as a people set apart, “une race” which excelled their Anglophone neighbors by virtue of their fidelity to their ancestral French peasant traditions, their language, and above all their Roman Catholic piety. Since French-Canadian nationalism was both religious and cultural, it is not surprising that it was also supported by the Catholic Church. French-Canadian patriotism was preached from pulpits, and through church-run education, nationalist values were handed down from generation to generation. The French language held a key role in this messianic nationalism. The French-Canadian poet William Chapman (1850–1917) explicitly linked the French language to the pillars of fire that had led the Israelites to their Promised Land. For Henri Bourassa, a turn-of-the-century nationalist politician, the English language was imbued with heresy, corruption and materialism, while French was the language of literature and philosophy, of the mind and of the noblest human sentiments. Through its inseparable connection with the Catholic religion, the French language could express the right balance between heart and mind. Father Lionel Groulx, writing in 1934, taught that God had assigned a particular role to each generation and each people. While les anglais (i.e., English-speakers in Canada and the United States) excelled in trade, French-Canadians were to be preeminent in the religious and cultural sphere, by continuing to be inseparably French and Catholic.93 The work of the Québécois poet Gaston Miron (1928–1996) expresses another side of Canadian chosenness: the evocation of Israelite exile, used to describe alienation and the social inferiority of French-speakers vis-àvis their Anglophone compatriots. Identifying with the Israelites in their wanderings, and alluding to the Suffering Servant of Isaiah (although in a personalized style also affected by French existentialism), in one poem Miron sees the map of Québec as the face of the suffering Christ: . . . let your love sing within me and I will crave your face and carry the seeds of your hope watchman, sentry, runner and hailer of your coming these things I’ll be, your man for the prosecution

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your man planed and jointed with your patience and with your boundless pity94

Others of Miron’s poems refer to the French-Canadian experience as a via crucis. Where nationalist sentiments are the fruit of ressentiment, claims of divine favor can act in two ways: as justification for and a hubristic exaltation of national superiority, or as a source of meaning at times of crisis. Frequently, these two themes are intertwined. Identification with the sufferings of Israel rather than its glories reveals that the chosen people motif “contains within itself not only national pride, but also humility, anguish, fear and guilt. The chosen people can be rightly punished and God can use other peoples as instruments of their punishment.”95 Identification with the vicissitudes of Israel contains within itself the hope of redemption. As such, it easily compliments the mythic elements present in ethnic consciousness, and can fire national claims to “unredeemed” territories on the grounds of historical or ethnic association. The Israelite myth is highly adaptable to any people, but particularly to dominated groups. Moreover, different peoples, even those inhabiting the same territory, may make simultaneous use of it—a fact that throws into relief the tensions inherent in the myth. Albert Raboteau details how African-American self-understanding as a chosen people provided an alternative and subversive view of American chosenness to the version originating from Puritan tradition. Over centuries, “black preachers, writers and leaders have defined a distinct identity and a providential destiny in terms that have contradicted racist doctrines of black inferiority and called into question the national myth of American chosenness.”96 Nineteenth-century AfricanAmericans adopted the story of the Exodus as an interpretative framework for their own history, understanding liberation not only in spiritual but also in concrete social and political terms and employing a literalist understanding of Scripture. This socio-political literalism increasingly distinguished African-Americans from many of their white fellow-Christians. For this latter group, over the course of the nineteenth century the idea of divine favor began to evolve into theist rather than Christian terms. Gradually, as America became established “from sea to shining sea,” the moral aspects of chosenness waxed while territorial considerations waned. “Freedom” for white Americans was equated with liberation from sin. Subverting the racist propaganda of the dominant culture, African-American preachers and orators made use of imagery from the book of Exodus. In their interpretation, white America was identified not

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with the chosen people, but rather with the Israelites’ Egyptian overlords. “Canaan” to the slaves signified not merely internal salvation but also legal status, and “Exodus” was experienced as escape to these states where slavery had been abolished. By this ethno-particular identification with Israel, slaves and free blacks alike affirmed that they too were a special, divinely favored people—a religious claim which stood in stark contrast to their civil status. By the end of the nineteenth century, the United States was already beginning to carve out a global role. As a “redeemer nation,” it was called to share its freedom by encouraging other peoples along the same path of liberal democracy. In parallel with this (and partly in reaction to it), some African-Americans developed their own version of the idea that they too were called to a universal mission. Psalm 69 (“Princes shall come out of Egypt and Ethiopia shall soon stretch forth her hands unto God”) became a prime source text for sermons on the place of Africa and people of African descent in the drama of world salvation. This idea was sympathetic to racial, rather than national messianism. The “Second Song of the Servant” of Isaiah 49 includes the promise of a universal role that will extend beyond the confines of Israel: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel. I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of earth. Thus says the Lord, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, to the slave of rulers.” The image of the Suffering Servant, combined with notions of universal mission, long dominated African-Americans’ understanding of their own identity as being partly religious in nature. The African-American version of election is distinguished however, by a tendency to maintain its religious referents. In the rhetoric of white statesmen of the second half of the twentieth century, the religious echoes of the chosenness became increasingly muted, allusive, metaphorical and implied. In contrast, the language of the civil rights movement of the 1960s was so biblically tinged as to suggest an essential identification with Christianity. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech, delivered on August 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, ends with a classic allusion to the events of Exodus: We’ve got some difficult times ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountain top . . . and I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.97

King refers to Deut 34:1–4, the account of Moses climbing Mount Nebo from which he views the Promised Land. The struggles of African-Americans for racial equality are linked with the settlement of Canaan described in the

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Book of Joshua. King’s rhetoric arguably exemplifies how individual leaders may co-opt the language of religion for political goals. King was not only identifying himself with Moses (and therefore the civil rights movement with biblical Israel). He was also intimating publicly that he might also die before his people entered into a land of equal rights for all—a prophecy that was to be fulfilled tragically. A general pattern can be observed in the development of notions of election. Myths of ethnic or national chosenness begin with a specific identification with Old Testament Israel. Subsequently, images from the New Testament are co-opted, sometimes involving supersessionist motifs or a close identification of that group with the Church or with the religiously elect. At a later stage, salvation becomes indistinguishable from the assertion of the special status of the group, or from national progress. In this final state of elective consciousness, a condition of generalized concern for morality becomes a matter of social convention rather than a specific faith commitment. In 2004, dismissing the legal challenge of Michael Newdow, an atheist, to the inclusion of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance in U.S. public schools, one of the Supreme Court judges argued for the retention of the phrase on grounds that it represented “conventional civic deism,” and that it did not therefore breach the terms of the First Amendment. Even more à propos is Salazar vs. Buono, a pending case concerning a cross in the Mojave National Preserve, set up as a war memorial in 1934. During the oral arguments, Justice Antonin Scalia stated his opinion that the presence of the cross on federal land does not violate the First Amendment, since the cross was not a specifically Christian monument, but a war memorial, an all-inclusive symbol that honors all the war dead, regardless of religious identity. The civil religion of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Newdow case proclaims the unity between American national culture and an undifferentiated religiosity. What remains of the origins of the myth—Israel’s faith in its God—is merely a close association between another social group and its culture. Catherine Bell explains that “sociologists of religion . . . formulate the differences between two basic types of religious community—a worldmaintenance community in contrast to an other-worldly perspective. Thisworldly, world-maintenance religions are relatively undifferentiated from the dominant culture of a regionally-defined population.”98 The latter stages of American chosenness—“conventional civic deism”— exemplify the fact that traditions of national election frequently do not necessarily involve true transcendence. Rather, they can be a sleight-of-mind in which the emotional aura of religiosity is employed to serve political or social

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interests, consciously or unconsciously. Like the famous drawing which can be perceived as a duck or a rabbit, this cultural religion can appear at one moment as one thing, and in a different context, as another. The problem as well as the power of the evocation of election is its very ambiguity. Writing on the “holy land” motif in modern nationalism, Hedva Ben-Israel points out the slipperiness of national-religious language: How did lands become holy in the vocabulary of nationalism? Rhetoric, as we know constitutes power . . . The problem is whether this potential of land to be regarded as holy in the discourse of nationalism is embedded in the concept of nationalism, or emanates from the strategies of states, churches, or national movements, or from other sources such as human nature.99

Certainly, if being a religiously elect people implies superior status, then applying a theology of pre-destined election to any group of people holds limitless possibilities for the abuse of power under the justification of divine right. Moorhead notes the contradiction in this “ascription of universal significance to the inherently limited experience of a single nation,” adding that this difficulty is endemic to any myth of a chosen people. Unless the myth places people at the center of a sacred cosmos, it loses its power to inspire or to bind. Unfortunately, such mythology also cloaks parochialism under a false universality and thus contributes to the incalculable mischief done by religiously motivated nationalisms in the modern era.100

However, the concept of election is not univocal. National chosenness is not necessarily identical to election of the Old Testament kind. The identification with ancient Israel in many nations which claim a special status may be “sporadic or casual, if it comes up at all.”101 O’Brien describes a scale of different intensities of “holy nationalism”: firstly, “chosen people,” where election is conditional on the moral comportment of the people and its fidelity to God; secondly, “holy nation” where the nation is considered as intrinsically holy; and finally, “deified nation,” in which the nation becomes the object of worship.102 Only the second and the third of these degrees are inherently toxic. Yet such is the psychological drive of the first version that the conditionality of election tends to become lost under pressure or over time.

Heavenly Tongues, Holy Dynasties Closely related to myths of election modeled on Israel are myths of national descent. Christian nations or their leaders have frequently claimed descent

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from classical and biblical figures. The list of originating ancestors includes the “lost tribes of Israel,” but another frequent paradigm is the Noahite myth. From Augustine through to Isidore of Seville, the sons of Noah (Japheth, Shem and Ham) were identified respectively as the ancestors of Europeans, Asians, and Africans.103 Welsh humanists traced Welsh national ancestry back to Gomer, son of Japheth, son of Noah.104 A mythical Irish progenitor was Milesius of Spain, a legendary descendent of Adam, while a Scots descent-myth claimed Egyptian heritage in the person of the Egyptian princess Scotia.105 French ancestry was, like British, traced back to Trojan and even Phoenician roots.106 The search for ancient roots should not be construed simply as a response to a genteel antiquarian curiosity about origins. The search for the answer to “who are we?” also involves the legitimization of power. Myths of descent frequently emerge during periods of social change or threat, and their appeal is generally sequential: initially to the intellectual classes, then to the professional echelons, and finally to the masses.107 Just as Elizabethan historians and churchmen claimed chronological primacy for the “ancient British church” as the justification for juridical independence from Rome, classical pedigrees are at the very least as an allusive rhetorical decoration to political power. More importantly, they serve imperial pretensions. Ancestry myths link past communities to future models of states, involve claims on territory and provide the impulses for political action. Given the importance of the heritage of classical antiquity and the Christian imperium instituted by Constantine, ancestry in both imperia would be a desirable commodity. Inhering in both biblical and classical myths of descent are intimations of God-given heritage and peculiar vis-à-vis surrounding peoples. One important variant of descent-myth is the tracing of national languages to antique roots. Linguistic purity can easily translate into notions of cultural and even ethnic purity. Fichte’s description of the “purity” of the German language—conceived of as an absence of loan words and Romance elements—formed an important element in his claim for German cultural preeminence. Old Testament concepts of the holy understood as a separating-out of an object, person or group from the sphere of the secular are analogous to these linguistic notions, and congenial to them. Linking ethnicity with language, antiquarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought to identify the ancient ethnic roots of their nations in their ancestral languages. Caryl Davies holds that the genesis of modern comparative linguistics in the eighteenth century was a religious search for the original, pre-Babelian universal human language, the language of Paradise through which God spoke to Adam and Eve.108 Significantly,

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the search for the Ursprache coincided with both the Enlightenment and the beginnings of modern European concepts of the nation. The linguistic particularism championed by Herder was reflected in the concerns of patriots of other countries. By virtue of supposed linguistic similarities with Hebrew or other ancient languages, patriotic intellectuals claimed special privileges for their particular nations. Although the pre-Babelian language was often identified with Hebrew, by the eighteenth century “the vernacular languages of Europe also claimed to be the Ursprache, or at least connected with it.”109 The Die Sprechen des Paradieses of the seventeenth-century theologian Anders Pederson Kempe discussed the Swedish claims of descent from Magog, the son of Japheth. Although Kempe’s claims that in Paradise, Swedish was the language of God and Danish that of Adam and Eve, while the serpent spoke French, seems to be a satirical blow against the supposed illiteracy of the Danes and the immorality of the Catholic French, Kempe also refers, apparently seriously, to the work of two Swedish scholars, Georg Stiernhielm and Olof Rudbeck, who claimed Sweden as the place of origin of humanity, and Lappish as a form of Hebrew. The dismantling of the literal truth of the myth of Babel over the course of the eighteenth century occurred in the context of gradual secularization of the sciences and a concomitant move away from the Bible as the authoritative, legitimizing source of all truth. In the field of linguistics, as religious references waned, national and political concerns took their place. The father of modern comparative linguistics, Sir William Jones (1746–94), was a scholar of ancient and modern Middle-Eastern and Asian languages. His scientific work identified the Indo-European (rather than Semitic-biblical) roots of modern European languages. The historical context of this enterprise, Edward Said reminds us, was the period of French-English rivalry in India during a period of imperial expansion. Jones was also a legal historian and a successful judge in British India. Upon his appointment to a post there, he began the course of personal study that was to gather in, to rope off, to domesticate the Orient and thereby turn it into a province of European learning. . . . To rule and to learn, then to compare Orient with Occident were Jones’s goals, to subdue the infinite variety of the Orient to “a complete digest” of laws, figures, customs and works.110

Jones’s work retained the post-Babelian notion that languages develop from historical roots but recast it in different terms. Biblical, ethno-linguistic ancestry was replaced by the Indo-European family tree. Scientific discovery and the belief in the march of history lent themselves to political use, with

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the same flexibility as religious myths. Whereas a myth of antiquity could be of value in justifying political prerogative (i.e., the claims of one nation against another), quite equally the myth of progress could serve, when necessary, to promote the interests and claims of an imperial mission to modernize or civilize less advanced peoples. Another such intellectual evolution, taking centuries, can be observed in the matter of kingship. Frazer’s The Golden Bough attributes to ancient sacral kingship a number of functions, claiming that “royal personages in the Pacific and elsewhere have been supposed to live in a sort of atmosphere highly charged with what we may call spiritual electricity, which if it blasts all who intrude into its charmed circle, has happily also the gift of making whole again by a touch.”111 Such “spiritual electricity” involved the regal functions of assuring fertility by transmitting the blessings of the divine sphere upon a people or a land. In the myth of the Golden Bough, the king’s health and youth is closely connected with the welfare of the kingdom. The motif is found in a number of ancient societies, including China and Ancient Egypt.112 If we accept Frazer’s reconstructions, the institution of kingship itself dates from an epoch when the two spheres of the saeculum and the sacrum were considered to be inseparable. In this worldview, the political order of a society was believed to derive its form from a heavenly model. Indeed, Frazer argues that the kingly role was, if anything, originally more religious than political, day-to-day government being left to the warrior and noble castes. Such historically broad theories can be seductive. They contain however much speculative reconstruction, and should thus be applied to pre-modern societies only with a considerable caveat. Ernest Kantorowicz notes that sacral kingship may be a stratum remotely underlying the medieval European institution of kingship. More immediate and obvious influence may be found in the Germanic origins of French royalty, through which we make contact with a deposit of extremely ancient ideas and institutions. . . . The concept of royalty among the Teutons . . . was deeply impressed with a religious character. Tacitus had already observed . . . a distinction between the temporary leaders in warfare, freely chosen for their personal valor, and the kings, who were taken solely from certain noble families, [and] considered as divine beings or at the very least as descended from the gods.113

In this pattern, it was the dynasty itself that was the object of a people’s fealty, and divine origin of kings was the source of that loyalty. Dynastic succession provided a people with a political and social stability. As long as he

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came from the same dynastic origin, the king could change: le roi est mort, vive le roi. Pagan Germanic origins are one possible source of the religious nature of European kingship. Yet the most obvious influence was Christian. Following the acceptance of Christianity as the official cult of the Roman empire, the imperial court took on a Christian role. The emperor, according to Eusebius, is “invested with a semblance (mimesis) of heavenly authority, directs his gaze above, and frames his earthly government according to the patterns of that divine original, feeling strength in conformity to the monarchy of God.”114 In Eusebius’s understanding, earthly imperial rule is a typos of the rule of God. From this derive other correspondences: the emperor as God’s representative, the imperial court and palace as a reflection of the court of heaven, and court rituals as an echo of the liturgy of heaven. These typological associations point to a fundamental ambiguity within the institution of Christian kingship. Theologically speaking, it is not the empire, even a Christian one, that is a reflection of heaven, but the Church. In the chaos of late antiquity, the popes inherited a political mantle, which they were to wear for over a millennium. St. Damasus I (366–383) was the first of the successors of St. Peter to be called pontifex maximus, a title previously borne by emperors. The Eastern Church continued to attribute a great degree of sacrality to the role of the emperor, but in the Western Church, the functions of temporal and spiritual leadership were separated into the two offices of emperor and pope. However, in the volatile circumstances of medieval European history, the temporal and spiritual aspects of both secular and religious rule were inextricably mixed. The Church and its leaders were significant political players, while emperors and kings continued to invest themselves with an air of sanctity. With the conversion of the Frankish king Clovis to Catholicism in 496, the papacy gained an important political ally against the Arian Visigoths. The special status of the French church centered particularly on the figure of the monarch. In time, Clovis would be canonized and recognized as the founder of a réligion royale, a cult of kings, which was the basis of the Christian origin-myth of the French kings and the kingdom of France. With the demise of the Merovingians, Charlemagne and his successors inherited the ecclesial role of the antecedent dynasty: the defense of the Church and of the papacy. The coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800 was a potent gesture that united political and religious claims to the point of inseparability. A particular symbol of the religious role of the French kings was le sacre, the rite of anointing, which formed part of the coronation ceremony. In the

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theology of the first millennium and beyond, the word sacramentum was often used to describe any act that brought a person or an object into contact with the sacred. Royal unction could thus be easily classified as a sacrament. Since the only other people anointed in this way were priests and bishops, anointing could easily be seen as a sacrament investing kings with priesthood. According to some canon lawyers, since bishops administered the anointing, le sacre was a public performance of the supremacy of the spiritual power. Ambiguity persisted as to the precise meaning of the rite, and arguments were closely related to the rivalry between the projects of the Roman Church and the Holy Roman Empire. From the thirteenth century onward, theologians included ordination in their tabulations of the sacraments but excluded royal unction. At the same time, just as the Roman pontiffs made claims to political power, the emperors sought to affirm their spiritual responsibilities and rights. The tension lay in the fact that “a genuinely sacerdotal kingship would have been incompatible with the religion which prevailed throughout Western Europe. The kings . . . were not therefore in the strict sense priests. But still less were they pure laymen. It is difficult to express clearly conceptions by their very nature opposed to logic.”115 The ordo for the coronation shows an attempt to assimilate the position of the emperor, temporal head of Christendom, to that of sub-deacon. The theological nature of kingship and the meaning of liturgical royal unction carried considerable political weight. Related to both the Christian rite of anointing and the pagan Germanic roots of kingship was the notion that French kings could cure certain diseases by touch. This was but one of a number of legends, beliefs and superstitions which gradually gathered around the figure of the French monarch. The archbishops of Rheims, the place of royal consecration, claimed from the ninth century to possess a sacred chrism brought down from heaven by a dove for the anointing of Clovis. In concert with the cult of the French kings, the coronation liturgies themselves gradually increased in splendor. The fleur de lys, originally associated with the Blessed Virgin Mary, was adopted as a symbol of royal authority, “confounding the images of the Mother of God and the Kings of France . . . enveloping [them] in Mary’s dignity.”116 Since sanctity was concentrated in a privileged manner in the figure of the king and the dynasty, there emerged a political theology of the sang royale. The idea that God had chosen a particular lineage emerged with force in the late thirteenth century during the reign of Philip IV (1285–1314). In 1297, in a gesture aimed at reducing tension between the papacy and Philip over the matter of taxation of ecclesiastical incomes, Boniface VIII (1294–1303) canonized Philip’s grandfather, Louis IX. Philip, who sought to cultivate an image of himself as an equally pious monarch, eagerly promoted his cult.117

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It was at this time too that writers began to extend the attributes of piety and devotion from the French king to the French people. The notion of a country called “France” and a people called “the French” arises as a result of this process. Colette Beaune notes that “little by little the title ‘most Christian’ developed into a reason for their glory and pride, justified their very being, and brought with it the calming certainty that France would always play an important role in God’s plan for the order of the world.”118 This is the religious background of the religious-national heroine Joan of Arc, and of the thirteenth-century chronicler Jacques de Vitry, for whom “there are many nations, the first among which is France. The French are pure Catholics.”119 Despite his frequent spats with Philip IV, Boniface VIII proclaimed that “like the people of Israel, the kingdom of France is a peculiar people chosen by the Lord to carry out the orders of Heaven.”120 In the literature of the Crusades, Greenfeld says, “the gens francorum . . . are represented as a people who epitomize Christianity.”121 In a society where almost all were Christians, it is easy to see how the unity of king, state and nation could lead to an instinct that a particular people was inherently sacred. Kenneth Stow explains that Medieval Europeans used or exploited sacred theologies for self-definition. Christians [inhabited] a communis patria, a term that originally referred exclusively to the Church. Royal possessions . . . were part and parcel of the corpus mysticum, the civic embodiment of the Corpus Christi.122

During this period, the term patria was interpreted both as “heaven” and as “place of birth.” At this time too, Parisian French, the langue d’oeil, began to take on a central role in French identity, and the French land itself was represented in literature as a paradise of exceptional beauty. The notion of the holiness of the French nation evolved out of the nation of holy dynasty—sacred because of its close association with the papacy and the Church. This form of holiness was associated not with an Israelite myth, but rather with a rich panoply of suggestive associations, accumulated over centuries: divinely appointed kingship; the protection of particular royal saints such as Clovis and Louis, and quasi-biblical figures as St. Denis, associated with the Dionysius the Areopagite; the particular role of France as eminent protector of the Church; and the sanctity of the French language and land. The trajectory of French particularity stands as a shining example of the combination of constancy and change involved in the formation of national identity. It can be traced from its origins in proto-French kingship through to the doctrine of the divine right of kings, and is visible in the Gallican controversies in which the French church sought to maintain her privileges

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vis-à-vis the papacy. A further step was the transformation of the image of France as a Christian realm and Christian nation into the notion of France as the king’s state. Loyalty to the king evolved into loyalty to the state. The Enlightenment secularization of these ideas issued into the French Revolution, which itself exalted to quasi-transcendent status the values for which France republicanism stood. Finally, over the stormy course of the nineteenth century, the royal nation gave way to the people’s republic—but not without a recrudescence of the religious aspect of French chosenness, often centered on the Virgin Mary, the cult of the Sacred Heart, and royalism.123 The myth of French particularity survived both the Bourbon and the Napoleonic dynasties: “No longer tied specifically or exclusively to the Church or the Revolution, but based at the same time on an understanding of the past as a call to action, a sense of mission informed French nationalist attitudes in 1914 and beyond.”124 Precisely how far beyond 1914 that sense has survived is a matter for speculation. However, the abiding power of myth suggests that Clovis, St. Louis, and Joan of Arc function as sporadically important markers in French national identity even to this day.125 France’s peculiar mission civilatrice has probably lost its political energy, but French governments continue to actively promote worldwide francophonie and Francophile endeavors.

The Redeemer of Nations and Redeemer Nations Another important variant of chosenness is national messianism. One of the most problematic elements in claims of divine election concerns the exclusivity of the elect group and its relationship to other groups. An assumption that exclusivity or particularity leads inevitably to airs of superiority colors mistrust of any emphasis on nationality. A distinct identity or role is not necessarily a superior one, yet claims by any one people of particular relationship with God have indeed tended to infer that other nations are inferior. Seton-Watson notes that amongst the characteristics of movements for national unity are a sort of Messianism which transcends the normal pattern of nationalistic rhetoric and arrogance, a conviction that the great united nation for which the struggle is being waged is the bearer of universal values, beneficial for all mankind, which give this nation a divine mission or confer on it a moral or cultural superiority over all others.126

Bearing “universal values” involves a grey area lying between religious and political missions. Spiritual distinctiveness easily degenerates into triumphalist imperialism.

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The concept of collective messianism is not one that any group of people is likely to attribute to itself, even if it thinks of itself and acts as such. The description is a criticism implying political hubris and religious idolatry. Yet a brief examination of the figure of the Messiah himself offers some illuminating insights. In Jesus of Nazareth, early Christians found the fulfillment of a combination of two prophesies, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah and the long-promised Messiah, the anointed savior. This juxtaposition united in one person the themes of suffering and triumph. Christian discipleship included accepting a measure of suffering, but the meaning of suffering was transformed by the Paschal mystery. The life, death and resurrection of Jesus easily gave rise to group identification with Jesus. As Christian faith gave particular peoples comfort in affliction and identity at times of bewilderment, collective suffering for the sake of the collective glory which lay ahead could be accepted, even to the point of death: “Nationalist martyrdom is by far the most effective mimesis of religion.”127 Two European nations in particular, Ireland and Poland, have invoked this aspect of national messianism. In both, during centuries of official national non-existence, adherence to Catholic faith embodied national identity and enshrined claims to future nation-statehood. Ben-Israel analyses the 1916 Easter Rising in Ireland as a “programmed martyrdom,” a strategized act of self-sacrifice calculated to resurrect Irish national consciousness. Pádraig Pearse understood the language of religious imagery, and made use of it to invoke the affect of the masses. His writings convey a conscious understanding of himself as nationalist savior, with nationalism as a new religion.128 The prima facie identification of Irish nationalism in the Easter Rising with the Paschal mystery, in which, as Conor Cruise O’Brien holds, “Pearse saw the Rising as a Passion Play with real blood,” is an outstanding example of how the Church’s liturgical cycle may become identified with modern historical events.129 Importantly, Irish nationalism does not seem to have included an element of messianic mission toward other nations (perhaps because religious mission was being adequately catered for by the Irish Catholic Church, which sent priests and female religious over the whole world for a century or more). Nor does Irish nationalism contain expressions of “moral or cultural superiority” over other peoples. Polish national messianism is of a different strain. The poet and statesman Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) found himself in exile in Paris after a failed uprising against the Tsar. In 1832, Mickiewicz wrote The Books of the Polish Pilgrim, an epic gospel of national religion that directly associates the fate of the Polish nation with the Passion of Christ. Taking as his model the patriotic writings of the French historian Michelet, Mickiewicz also acknowledged the

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debt of Polish messianism to the Jews, another people of exile who did not own their own land: “They who have not ceased to await the Messiah, and this faith of theirs has undoubtedly influenced the character of Polish Messianism.”130 Understanding the land of Poland as a corpus mysticum, Mickiewicz saw in the gradual dismemberment of Poland a direct parallel with the Passion story: “And they crucified the Polish nation, and laid it in its grave . . . but the Polish nation did not die . . . but on the third day the soul shall return again to the body and the nation arise and free all the peoples of Europe from slavery.”131 For Mickiewicz’s Catholic readers, these phrases would inevitably evoke suggestions of the Eucharist, in which Christ’s Passion is sacramentally made present “for you and for all.” As Jesus had redeemed his fellow-humans, so too Poland would be a redeemer of other nations through the mystery of vicarious suffering. Mickiewicz was not the only poet to express such sentiments. Rather, his work seems to express a zeitgeist, which if not widely spread within Poland itself, found favor amongst nationalist Poles in exile. A poem by Kazimierz Brodinski (1791–1835) similarly expresses the idea that by virtue of its sufferings, Poland is the “Christ among nations”: Hail, O Christ, thou Lord of men! Poland in thy footsteps treading, Like Thee suffers, at thy bidding, Like Thee too, shall rise again.132

Given that the Jewish Messiah was expected to usher in a new and final age, and that Jesus was defined as the one who “makes all things new,” national messianism is closely related to millennialism. English and American Puritans had understood that God’s election was a harbinger of the eschatological era. End-times theology lends itself particularly to national particularism, especially where millennialism does not strictly entail a belief in the thousand-year earthly reign of Christ, but rather functions as a psychological perspective that views current history in apocalyptic mode. Typical of the apocalyptic vision is disillusionment with the belief that the world as it is can provide salvation. Redemption is reserved for some future existence, and the apocalyptic vision of the future provides sufficient hope and consolation to make this transitory world habitable for the time being. In this worldview, diametrically opposed and conflicting forces are engaged in cosmic struggle—in the book of Revelation, that of the Lamb and that of the Beast. The textbook case of the application of millennial imagery to national concerns is Russia. The lifetime of the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–

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1948) spanned Tsarist autocracy, the Russian Revolution, and the rise of Stalin. Noting that in Russia an apocalyptic mentality affected intelligentsia and peasantry alike, Berdyaev claims that “the Russian people, as a people, in accordance with their metaphysical nature and vocation in the world, are a people of the End.”133 Berdyaev’s philosophy shows a rich mix of influences, including patristic literature, Western philosophy, and the nationalistic currents of nineteenth-century Russian thought. In his writings on “the Russian soul,” Berdyaev lauds the perennial essence of Russian identity. Soviet Russia, however atheistic, still bears the indelible stamp of a thousand-year-old connection between Orthodoxy and the Russian narod: The common Russian Orthodox sense has worked out the type of Russian man, with his . . . gentleness of soul, with his dislike of the might of the world, and with his struggle towards the other world, towards the end. . . . The soul of the Russian people has been nourished not so much upon sermons and doctrinal teaching as upon liturgical worship and the tradition of Christian kindliness which has penetrated into the very depth of the soul’s structure.134

So deep is that union of Christianity and Russian identity for Berdyaev that it could not only survive even the official demise of Russian Christianity, but was even present in the minds of “Russian revolutionaries, anarchists and socialists, who were unconscious Chiliasts; they expected the thousand years’ reign. The revolutionary myth is a chiliastic myth.”135 Berdyaev holds that Russia—whether in secular or religious guise—has a particular role to play within the salvation of the whole world, or rather “not Russia itself but that which Russia brings to the world, above all the brotherhood of man and freedom of the spirit.”136 Russian identity was associated with Christianity from its early beginnings with the conversion of Prince Vladimir of Kiev in 987. With the invasion of Moslem Tatars and their gradual expulsion, Russian Christianity developed an antemurale psychology, an awareness of being a people living on a religious frontier with a responsibility for maintaining it. The capture of the Byzantium by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, along with the establishment of an autocephalic patriarchate in Moscow in 1448, promoted the idea that Moscow was the inheritor of the mantle of the Christian imperium. In contradistinction to its Catholic Polish and Lithuanian and Lutheran Swedish adversaries, the Russian populace was defined not merely as a Christian (i.e., not Moslem) nation, but also as a specifically Orthodox nation, “the only orthodox land in the world . . . the only source of salvation for mankind.” Such was this grave responsibility that “the future of the whole world depended on the

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faith of the new Russian tsardom.”137 Religious differences actively promoted the development of Russian national consciousness, for “encounter with the West made Russia aware of itself as a nation. The West was an indelible part of Russian national consciousness.”138 Writing in 1511 to a representative of Prince Vasilij III of Moscow, the monk Filotheos articulated the doctrine of Muscovite religious and imperial pre-eminence, claiming that the city was the final heir to ancient Rome and Constantinople: For know well, those who love Christ and who love God, that all Christian empires will perish and give way to the one kingdom of our ruler, in accord with the books of the prophet, which is the Russian empire. For two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and there will never be a fourth, according to the Great Evangelist.139

For all the rhetoric, an ambivalence concerning the West endured in Moscow. On the one hand, by virtue of its self-understanding as “the one Orthodox land” Russia could claim spiritual pre-eminence. On the other hand, Russian material backwardness in comparison to the West was a cause of shame. The tension was expressed by ecclesiastical reactions to the thoroughgoing attempts at modernization of Peter the Great, as a result of which the Russian Church split into Old Believers and supporters of tsarist autarchy. Attempts to define a specifically Russian identity arose in the nineteenthcentury conflict between political and religious views of the nation. “Westernizers” sought to bring Russia resolutely into the orbit of Western European culture, which they considered superior to indigenous Russian culture. Opposing this view were the Slavophiles, whose Russia was a sui generis reality, a people with a divine mandate which inhered in their very identity as a nation.140 In reality, the roots of Slavophile national enthusiasm were also Western, for this intellectual current was profoundly influenced by German Romanticism and held in special esteem Herder’s chapter on Slav identity in his Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit. Slavophile ressentiment recast a perceived deficiency as distinctiveness and even glory, interpreting Russian material inferiority to mean spiritual preeminence. Nationalist-minded linguists proclaimed other languages to be inferior to Russian and Orthodox liturgy as excelling over Catholic worship, since in it people used their national language.141 (Church Slavonic had, in fact, long been restricted to liturgical contexts.) Slavophile intellectuals, making a virtue out of necessity, elaborated the vision of an essential Russia, existent in the past and yet to exist. “Western” Enlightenment values of reason were rejected in favor of

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such essential Russian characteristics as “the inexpressible, the unlimited, the hyperbolic, spontaneity, the unexpectable.”142 Applying ecclesiological concepts to the nation, the Slavophiles imagined the Russian narod as a great, collective, moral self: “It is a Russian idea that individual salvation is impossible, that salvation is corporate, that all are answerable for all.”143 The “Russian man” of Berdyaev is the idealized Russian peasant, the embodiment of Russian piety and a peculiarly Russian holiness, “the repository of truth, purity and wisdom.”144 At a far extreme to this stood the aristocracy, so corrupted by the individualism that typified Western thought that they no longer possessed that Russian “national, collective awareness of Christianity. . . . With all their advantages in education and sophistication, they were morally far below the Russian peasant masses.”145 Moreover, the Christianity of the Russian peasantry was synonymous with the Russian Orthodox Church, and Orthodoxy itself as the embodiment of sobornost (Berdyaev’s “brotherhood”), a “multiplicity in unity.” This term expressed the service of Russia in showing the way to all humanity, for “the Russian people is not a people. It is humanity.”146 Hermetically sealed categories of secular and religious spheres are alien to the Russian and Orthodox contexts. From the very beginnings of Christian Russia, the religious function of its rulers had been emphasized with an intensity unmatched by second-millennial Western Christianity. The sons of St. Vladimir, Boris and Gleb, murdered in a struggle for the throne, were given the epithet Strastoterptsy (Passion-sufferers), dying “not for Christ, but in Christ.” Their secular martyrdom was interpreted religiously.147 Despite his violence, their father Vladimir likewise received the title “Apostle-like,” a title that Russian Orthodoxy also accords to New Testament saints such as Mary Magdalene who were not officially apostles but who had a particularly close association with Jesus. The fact that most early canonized Russian saints were also royal points to the functions attributed to the saintly princes, who “performed the same function after death as they did in life—the protection and care of their subjects and lands.”148 In the West, tensions between the secular and religious aspects of Christian monarchy were resolved by separating the person and office of the king. In Russia, the human nature of the prince was held to be as exalted as his divine, protective office. Gradually, the image of a Russian ruler evolved from that of saint-prince to the “Pious, Most-Gentle and Orthodox Tsar” upon whose personal piety “depended the salvation of Russia as a state and thereby the salvation of the whole world.”149 Batiushka (little father) was a familiar term for the rural village priest. The title was also applied to the Tsars, who were by analogy the priests and pastors of their nation.

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The temporal fatherhood of the Batiushka Tsar was paralleled by the most common epithet for Russia, Matushka Rus (Mother Russia). Both epithets were frequently used, along with the expression Sviataia Rus’ (Holy Russia). Michael Cherniavsky notes that the myth of a holy land was paralleled by such expressions as “Blessed Lady Spain,” “Virginal Ireland” and “the holy realm of France,” but that in Russia it received an intensity and width of acceptance found nowhere else. The Russian land was consecrated not only by contact with the blood of the royal martyrs but also through the collective vocation of its inhabitants. While Palestine was holy because it had been the locus for the possibility of salvation, “Russia could be holy . . . if it had a unique and exalted role in the economy of salvation, if in it, and in it alone, Christ still walked, in spirit if not in person.”150 Oleg Tarasov notes that Russian identity was sacralized in part through visual manifestations of Orthodoxy, especially the cult of icons: “The interior space (the house) and the exterior world were often constructed as if they made up one sacred space, a Great Icon, called on to symbolize no more nor less than Holy Russia, the special protection of Rus by heavenly powers, the ubiquity of Christ’s image in it.”151 Muscovite devotion in particular concentrated on the holiness of Russia as “Great Icon.” The Old Believer Semyon Denisov (1682–1741) compared Russia to a “second heaven,” a terrestrial image or presence of the eschatological Kingdom of Heaven, in the same way that the Tsar was the icon of Christ.152 Yet Holy Russia was not coextensive with the Tsarist state. Instead, it could function as a standard against which both ruler and its current inhabitants could be judged. The Old Believers’ rejection of the reforms of Peter the Great and the culture wars between Slavophiles and Westernizers were a struggle between those for whom myth and reality should be inseparable, and those who were able at least to live with a difference between the two. The name used for Russia in liturgy and literary works is Rus.153 In state documents, a later form, Rossiia, came to replace Rus. The tension between the myth and the reality was expressed in the fact that Sviataia Rus persisted as the common epithet, whilst the phrase Sviataia Rossiia never came into use. The two names distinguish the temporal Russian state as it existed in fact at any given point from the “Russian Idea,” a spiritual, eternal Russia considered as being more real and compelling than the realities of daily life. For Berdyaev, “the Russian Idea is not an idea of flowering culture and a powerful monarchy. The Russian Idea is an eschatological idea of the Kingdom of God.”154 The Russian people is not only a cultural reality but also—perhaps primarily—a theological one. Such is the weight of this instinct that in seeking to articulate a universal theology of salvation, Berdyaev inevitably reserves a special place for the Russian land and nation:

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The Russian people, in accordance with its eternal Idea, has no love for the ordering of this earthly city and struggles towards a city that is to come, towards the new Jerusalem. But the New Jerusalem is not to be torn away from the vast Russian land. For this, the way is being prepared in Russia.155

Conclusion: Messages and Media, Forms and Functions Once religious chosenness is established as part of a national mythomoteur, it proves to be an almost indestructible element, capable of surviving the diminution or even the death of its overtly religious content. Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the medium is the message”156 expresses the ambiguity between the form of nationality’s religious components and their content, particularly in the context of nationalism. If nationalism “offers a kind of collective salvation drama derived from religious models and traditions,” and “provides humanity with a secular version of immortality,”157 does this mean that nationalism (as its critics claim) is in fact a kind of religion in and of itself? The relationship between transcendental religion and national belonging can be understood in two ways. First, from a theoretical perspective, religious faith and conscious national belonging are analogous. In differing ways and with differing emphases, both offer answers to fundamental existential needs, individual and collective. Analogy combines similarity with difference. Where similarity is dominant, the forms and functions of religious faith and nationality inevitably influence each other. However, when we examine some concrete historical examples of interaction, a second perspective appears to be more common—namely filiation. From this perspective, modern-day nations are the progeny of their Christian past. In the words of Anthony D. Smith, “the ancient and medieval history of surviving ethnies and nations today is invariably a religious history, because a salvation religion has furnished the inspiration and forms of their communal experience, as well as the modes of their self-understanding and self-renewal.”158 The forms of religion persist in modern nationhood. This is particularly the case where, as in Europe and North America, nations have a long history of association with forms of Christianity. Since modern states in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, even in non-Christian cultures, have adopted the imaginaire of the nation-state, they too are Christian-shaped to varying degrees. Through the long and intimate association between Christian and national, thoughtpatterns, the conscious and semi-conscious experience of being a member of a nation has become tinged with transcendence. Another twentieth-century catchphrase offers insight into the nature of “religion-shaped peoples.”159 Deriving ultimately from the work of the

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eighteenth-century Jesuit architect Carlo Lodoli,160 the notion that “form follows function” became the central tenet of the Bauhaus movement. The aphorism alerts us to the similarities between religion and Christianity, in both “contemplative” and “active” forms. The contemplative tradition of Christian spirituality stresses ontology rather than agency; it gives priority to aesthetic experience, and stresses the timeless and transcendental rather than the mutable and contingent. This religious style corresponds to essentialist attitudes toward nationality and ethnicity: in such views, nations simply are.161 However, modern nationalism does not only celebrate national essence, but also stresses the active role of nationality. As a nation is called to become what it “really” is, its being takes on a deontological urgency. A nation makes moral demands of its members. Mazzini, the ideologue of Italian unification, understood that while elements such as ethnic descent, language, historical events, religion, and geography “might determine much of the character and situation of the nation, political action and popular mobilization was necessary for the re-awakening of the nation to its sacred mission.”162 Active nationalism is entrepreneurial: it involves political and cultural innovation, frequently described under the metaphors of rebirth, reawakening, restoration, and redemption. The theological analogue of the relationship between form (“the character and situation of the nation”) and function (“political action and mobilization”) is that classic bone of contention of the Reformation: the relationship between faith and works. Political “works” exist not only in the form of political action to secure or consolidate the borders of a state at times of crisis or expansion. Long-established states foster public “works” to foster pride in the nation. These include state pageantry, national sports teams and international competitions, national parks and landscapes, and national anthems.163 Nineteenth-century Romantic nationalists sought to discover or remake boundary-markers of identity such as “folk” songs and dances and “national” costumes. The category of folklore with its Romantic origins and its easily lampooned “folksiness” points to the performativity of many such manifestations. Jon Lackow and Natalia José Truszkowska describe gender performativity as the process of “individuals’ repeating and mimicking [of] societal markers of gender, which . . . shows gender to be constructed.” The authors distinguish performativity from expressivity, which “implies that the features of the body, or the things that the body does, are expressions . . . an identity that people see coming ‘before’ its expressions.”164 Cultural nationalism requires that nationality be consciously and collectively acted out in time and place, in order that the nation may be proved to have an identity that pre-exists its expression.

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National-skeptics deride nationalism as a quasi-religion, and it seems indeed evident that the psychological stance of modern nationalism has religious overtones. However, the distinction between performativity and expressivity alerts us to some major differences between nationality and Christianity and the related pairs of nation and Church, national and religious identities, etc. The “works” that express the essence of Christianity include moral actions. Yet the existence of Christianity is not dependent on such actions. Similarly, although eternal salvation becomes ritually accessible in the liturgical celebration of the sacraments, the transcendent does not require such liturgical action in order for it to exist. With the nation, however, things are different. Carefully distinguishing between nation and state, we can argue that it is the political state that carries out “works” such as the defense of its borders. To this extent, it is the state that must be “performed” in order for it to exist. And in the same way, nationality (at the very least in its cultural aspect) must be performed in a panoply of forms, in order for the nation to persist. Despite their phenomenological similarities, there is a massive ontological difference between civic ceremony and sacramental rites, one that lies in their respective ultimate origins. God makes the Church, the medium of the sacraments, but the Church does not precede God, since God is its origin. On the other hand, people make nations, and precede them ontologically. The nation is a human artefact, and as such can arise and persist over centuries. Nations also can—and do—cease to exist. Although the Church finds its ultimate source in God, it is not merely the creation of God. Its existence also involves human freedom and choice, which are exercised necessarily in a delicately balanced relationship with the world. The encounter of Christianity with the world happens in many contexts and has many variations. At one extreme, Christianity may be so identified with immediate context that it becomes identical to it (along the lines of “to be born Croatian is to be born Catholic”). At the other pole, Christianity may become so otherworldly in its habits and discourse that it risks being consigned to the lumber-room of irrelevance. A total separation of Christianity and nationality runs the risk either of nationality turning into an exaggerated nationalism and usurping the place of religion, or of Christianity becoming so absorbed with the things of heaven that it cannot find a place for the earthy messiness of cultural diversity. In the encounter of Christianity and the world, some degree of co-option is likely, on both sides. Yet particularly where states and Church have united, the marriage has historically tended to end up at the expense of the Church, which has found its universal mission compromised by the ambition

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of its secular partner. In the forging of new nations out of the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, Orthodox appeals to doctrine failed to stem the break of up the oikumene of Eastern Christianity into a number of independent churches, based now on national and linguistic identities. The fragmentation was fostered by the new states, which were keen to enlist the powerful support of Christianity. As a result, “religion came last in the struggle to forge new national identities, and did not become a functional element in national definition until the nation-states had nationalized their churches.”165 Despite the dangers of subsuming the religious into the national or vice versa, it is probably impossible to totally separate them. Religion and nation are composed, after all, of a host of individuals in each of whom different aspects of identity coexist. Indeed, in varying manifestations and with different emphases, social religiosity is a perennial feature of human life: Religions come and go . . . but mostly they come and stay, changing all the time, but never transforming religion itself out of existence. By religion I mean a system of belief, shared in a framework of social relationship . . . [and] which must include what Schleiermacher called “a sense of and taste for the infinite and eternal.”166

Despite its apparent atheistic universalism, Soviet Marxism had deep nationalistic preferences, and while it was fundamentally anti-religious, it also partook of the mindset of Christian millennialism. Similarly, Nazi ideology took on the form of religious doctrine, as it reshaped Herderian love for the Heimat into a racist greed for empire. The sacralizing of national land, in benign as well as malignant forms, bears witness to the tendency of humans to make numinous what they hold most dear: “Even where there are no pre-existing traditions of sacred lands, nationalism itself seeks to sanctify a nation’s homeland.” Once nationalism has conflated ideas of religion and ethnicity with territorial aims, “older religious beliefs and sentiments . . . can feed and overflow the political goals of elites.”167 The interpenetrative, dynamic relationship between religion and nationalism suggests that something similar may in fact occur in all manifestations and experiences of nationality. The theological term perichoresis describes the mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity, that process and flow through which each person co-inheres in the others. In constant movement in and out of each other, each expresses itself in and with the others. In the Trinity, divinity exists and is expressed only as the three persons, each of whom require the existence of the other two persons, in order that they may be themselves. Perichoresis supplies a conceptual model of one kind of relationship between the religious and ethno-cultural aspects of nationality. A perichoresis of nation-

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ality and religion would suggest that both religious and national identities need each other: in order to exist, to be distinct from each other, and to express themselves in a healthy manner. Religious identities that claim to be a-national or supra-cultural and national identities that exclude religious considerations are equally incomplete and potentially life threatening. In the vacuum created by the absence of the other, Christianity and nationality can acquire bad faith and perform damaging works: the nation-as-church is as problematic as the church-as-nation. Equally toxic is the tendency of religious and national identities to merge. Since this pattern has been historically more prevalent than a radical break between nationality and Christianity (or between ethnic and religious identities), maintaining the distinction between Christian and national identities, and between nation and Church has generally been a more pressing practical task than bringing them together. The universalism of Christianity distinguishes it from the particularistic focus of national consciousness. The nations who adopted election as their mythomoteur took Old Testament Israelite religion as a base mode. Yet the universalist thrust of biblical election (which included concern for other peoples) was often outweighed in other “chosen peoples” by an almost exclusive concern for their own national particularity. Yet particularity need not necessarily be a vice. Since Christian faith is inevitably experienced and made manifest in particular contexts, ignoring the specifics of the social realities in which the Church exists will lead to a decline in Christianity’s effectiveness. At the extreme, an exclusive concern for the values of the particular context will lead to Christianity becoming co-extensive with secularity, and losing its religious remit. Fernández-Armesto warns that “when religions become absorbed with the world, they cease to be religions. When they ignore it, they cease to be effective.”168 Integrating the universal values of Christianity with here-and-now values of peculiarity, including cultural, ethnic and national particularities, is a perennial part of the challenge of “earthing the Gospel.” To evangelize a nation without nationalizing the Gospel remains a permanent challenge. Inherent in that challenge is the need to delineate an appropriate role for national identity—personal and collective—in the life of individual Christians and in the Church as a whole.

Notes 1. Hutchinson and Smith, Nationalism, 4. 2. Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? in Hutchinson and Smith, Nationalism, 1. 3. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 208.

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4. Hutchinson and Smith, Nationalism, 123–24. 5. Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis in Neo-Nationalism, in Hutchinson and Smith, Nationalism, 75. 6. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, The Future of Religion (London: Phoenix, 1997), 11. 7. Steven A. Mitchell and Alf Tergel, “Chosenness, Nationalism, and the Young Church Movement: Sweden 1880–1920,” in William R. Hutchinson and Hartmut Lehmann, eds., Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 231–49. 8. See W. D. Davies, The Gospel and the Land: Early Christianity and Jewish Territorial Doctrine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); also Walter Brueggemann, The Land: Place as Gift, Promise and Challenge (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977). 9. Quoted in Davies, The Gospel and the Land, 368. 10. Paschalis Kitromilides, “‘Imagined Communities’ and the Origins of the National Question in the Balkans,” European Historical Quarterly, 19:2 (1989): 181. 11. Cynthia Enloe, “Religion and Ethnicity,” in Peter Sugar, ed., Ethnic Diversity and Conflict in Eastern Europe (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 1980), 355. 12. See, for example, John Himka, Religion and Nationality in Western Ukraine: The Greek-Catholic Church and the Ruthenian National Movement in Galicia, 1867–1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999). 13. Kitromilides, “Imagined Communities,” 181. 14. Homily delivered at St. Peter’s, Rome, December 11, 2003, during meetings of European heads of state to discuss the future European Constitution. 15. John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1982), 56. 16. Jean-François Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity, trans. Steven Rendell et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 17. See John Papajohn, ed., The Hyphenated American: The Hidden Injuries of Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1999). 18. Llobera, The God of Modernity, ix. 19. Smith, Nationalism and Modernity, 47. 20. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, 4. 21. Madhu Kishwar, Religion at the Service of Nationalism and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 250. 22. See Thomas Kselman, “Religion and French Identity: The Origins of the Union Sacrée,” in Hutchinson and Lehmann, Many Are Chosen, 57–80. 23. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, 4. 24. William Pfaff, “Nationalism and Identity,” The Way 34 (January 1994): 6–16. 25. Pfaff, “Nationalism and Identity,” 14. Emphasis added. 26. Conor Cruise O’Brien, God Land: Reflections on Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 21. 27. Kselman, “Religion and French Identity,” 76.

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28. On the historical and terminological confusion between “England” and “Britain,” see Norman Davies, The Isles: A History (London: Macmillan, 1999). 29. A. F. Walls, “Carrying the White Man’s Burden: Some British Views of National Vocation in the Imperial Era,” in Hutchinson and Lehmann, Many Are Chosen, 35–36. 30. Walls, “Carrying the White Man’s Burden,” 49. 31. Edward Shils and Michael Young, “The Meaning of the Coronation,” The Sociological Review, I (1953): 251–77. 32. Bruce Kapferer, Legends of People, Myths of State: Violence, Intolerance and Political Culture in Sri Lanka and Australia (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1988), passim. 33. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press), 232. 34. Fernández-Armesto, The Future of Religion, 16. 35. Conrad Cherry, “Response,” in Hutchinson and Lehmann, Many Are Chosen 110–11. 36. Smith, Chosen Peoples, 48. 37. O’Brien, God Land, 24. 38. Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert: Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism (Oxford University Press: New York and Oxford, 1993), 4. 39. O’Brien, God Land, 26. 40. O’Brien, God Land. 27. 41. Hedva Ben-Israel, “Hallowed Land in the Theory and Practice of Modern Nationalism,” in Benjamin Z. Kedar and R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, eds., Sacred Space: Shrine, City, Land (London and Jerusalem: Macmillan and Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1998), 283. 42. See also Gen 26:1–5; 28:1–5; 35:11–12. 43. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “In Pursuit of Normalcy: Zionism’s Ambivalence towards Israel’s Election,” in Hutchinson and Lehmann, Many Are Chosen, 204, notes however that later Jewish folklore has as a frequent trope the moral and intellectual superiority of Jews vis-à-vis goyim. 44. O’Brien, God Land, 2. 45. Mendes-Flohr, “In Pursuit of Normalcy,” 204. 46. The NRSV at this point translates ‘am segulah as “a treasured possession.” 47. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 23. 48. David Keep, “Cultural conflicts in the mission of Saint Boniface,” in Stewart Mews, ed., Religion and National Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 56. 49. In Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 170. 50. Edwin Jones, The English Nation: The Great Myth (Stroud, Gloucs: Sutton Publishing, 1998), 34. 51. Jones, The English Nation, 38.

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52. William Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation (London: Cape 1963), 225. 53. Jones, The English Nation, 34. 54. Jones, The English Nation, emphasis added. 55. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 129. 56. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 57 57. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 60. 58. Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 243. 59. E. Kathleen Firth, The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 82. 60. Jones, The English Nation, 53–54. 61. O’Brien, God Land, 26. 62. Jones, The English Nation, 46. 63. “Areopagitica,” in C. A. Patrides, ed. John Milton: Selected Prose (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1989), 236. 64. Patrides, John Milton, 237. 65. Haller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, 243 66. Walls, “Carrying the White Man’s Burden,” 37. 67. Walls, “Carrying the White Man’s Burden,” 43. 68. Cherry, “Response,” 110. 69. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 176. 70. Ben-Israel, “Hallowed Land,” 287. 71. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, 207. 72. Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Response,” in Hutchinson and Lehmann, Many Are Chosen, 142. 73. André Du Toit, “The Construction of Afrikaner Chosenness,” in Hutchinson and Lehmann, Many Are Chosen, 118. 74. Du Toit, “The Construction of Afrikaner Chosenness,” 115. 75. O’Brien, “Response,” 143. 76. See Torben Christensen and William R. Hutchinson, eds., Missionary Ideologies in the Imperialist Era: 1880–1920 (Aarhus: Aros, 1982). 77. Quoted in S.P. Brock, “Christians in the Sasanian Empire: A Case of Divided Loyalties,” in Mews, Religion and National Identity, 1. 78. Paul Birt, Cerddi Alltudiaeth: Thema yn Llenyddiaethau Québec, Catalunya a Chymru (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997), 40. Translation my own. 79. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, 236. 80. Russel B. Nye, This Almost Chosen People: Essays in the History of American Ideas (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1966), 14. 81. Richard Carwardine, “The Know-Nothing Party, The Protestant Evangelical Community and American National Identity,” in Mews, Religion and National Identity, 461.

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82. See Albert K. Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansionism in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1935). 83. Charles Boynton, Oration [delivered on the Fifth of July, 1847, before the Native Americans of Cincinnati] (n/p, Cincinnati, 1847), quoted in Mews, Religion and National Identity, 450–51. 84. James Moorhead, “The American Israel: Protestant Tribalism and Universal Mission,” in Hutchinson and Lehmann, Many Are Chosen, 146. 85. On the ambiguity over Native American land and rights in the American Constitution, see Jack Rakove, ed., Interpreting the Constitution: The Debate over Original Intent (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990). 86. Emma Lazarus’s poem, The New Colossus, inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. 87. Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, vol. 2, The Noise of Conflict, 1919–1941 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 60. 88. Not to be confused with “Americanism,” a liberal movement amongst Roman Catholic clergy which was condemned in 1899 by Leo XIII. 89. Francis Cardinal Spellman, Prayers and Poems (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1946), 1. 90. The Roman Missal: The Sacramentary Approved for Use in the Dioceses of the United States (New York: Catholic Publishing Company, 1985), 541. 91. See Robert Jewett and Robert S. Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil: The Dilemma of Zealous Nationalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), 59–60. 92. Ben-Israel, “Hallowed Land,” 287 93. Birt, Cerddi Alltudiaeth, 45. 94. “Compagnon des Amériques,” in Gaston Miron, Embers and Earth (Selected Poems), trans. D.G. Jones and Marc Plourde (Montréal: Guernica Editions, 1984), 37. 95. O’Brien, God Land, 41. 96. Albert Raboteau, “Exodus, Ethiopia and Racial Messianism: Texts and Contexts of African American Chosenness,” in Hutchinson and Lehmann, Many are Chosen, 175–76. 97. Martin Luther King, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), 286. 98. Catherine Bell, “Ritual Tensions: Tribal and Catholic,” Studia Liturgica 32:1 (2001): 20. 99. Ben-Israel, “Hallowed Land,” 278. 100. Moorhead, “The American Israel,” 146. 101. O’Brien, God Land, 20. 102. O’Brien, God Land, 41–42. 103. Llobera, The God of Modernity, 12.

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104. Llywelyn, Sacred Place, Chosen People, 193. 105. Llobera, The God of Modernity, 40. 106. Colette Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of the Nation in Late Medieval France, trans. Susan Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 54. 107. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 82. 108. Carole Davies, Adfeilion Babel: Syniadaeth Ieithyddol y Ddeunawfed Ganrif (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), passim. 109. Davies, Adfeilion Babel, 9. Translation my own. 110. Edward Said, Orientalism, revised ed. (London: Penguin, 1995), 78. 111. James Frazer, The Golden Bough, in Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 29. 112. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 32. 113. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 30–31. 114. Eusebius of Caesarea, “From a Speech on the Thirtieth Anniversary of Constantine’s Accession,” in Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan, eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 60. 115. Marc Bloch, Les Rois Thaumaturges (Paris: Gallimard, 1924), 380. 116. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 95. 117. See Elizabeth Hallam, “Philip the Fair and the Cult of St. Louis,” in Mews, Religion and National Identity, 210–214. 118. Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology, 193. 119. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 92. 120. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 59. 121. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 92. 122. Kenneth R. Stow, “Holy Body, Holy Society: Conflicting Medieval Structural Conceptions,” in Kedar and Werblowsky, Sacred Space, 151. 123. Kselman, “Religion and French Identity,” 60–69. Also Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). 124. Kselman, “Religion and French Identity,” 79. 125. On the differing reactions by French Church and State in 1996 to the fifteen hundredth anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, see Wil van den Berken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe: East and West in the Ideology of Russia, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1999), 81. 126. van den Berken, Holy Russia, 89. 127. Ben-Israel, “Hallowed Land,” 288. 128. Ben-Israel, “Hallowed Land,” 292. 129. See Llywelyn, Sacred Place, 131–32. 130. In Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (London: Harper Collins, 1995), 33.

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131. In Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of Poland, vol. II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 8–9. 132. In Norman Davies, Heart of Europe: A Short History of Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 202. 133. Nikolai Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, trans. R. M. French (Hudson NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1982), 208. 134. Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, 231. 135. Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, 215. 136. Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, 231. 137. Michael Cherniavsky, Tsar and People: Studies in Russian Myths (New York: Random House, 1969), 106. 138. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 253. 139. Quoted in van den Bercken, Holy Russia, 146. 140. Cherniavsky, Tsar and People, 162. 141. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 241. 142. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 256. 143. Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, 215. 144. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 134. 145. Cherniavsky, Tsar and People, 165. 146. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 263. 147. Cherniavsky, Tsar and People, 6–7. 148. Cherniavsky, Tsar and People, 13–14. 149. Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature 1861–1917 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 217. 150. Cherniavsky, 107. 151. Oleg Tarasov, Icon and Devotion: Sacred Spaces in Imperial Russia, trans. Robin Millner-Guland (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 38. 152. Tarasov, Icon and Devotion, 117. 153. Cherniavsky, Tsar and People, 119. 154. Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, 157. 155. Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, 268. 156. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1995), 1. 157. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 140. 158. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 121. 159. Smith, National Identity, 62. 160. John Rykwert, “Lodoli on Function and Representation,” Architectural Review 1976 (July): 21–26. 161. See Llywelyn, Sacred Place, 3. 162. Smith, Nationalism and Modernism, 11. 163. On anthems, see Davies, The Isles, 1120–1168. 164. Jon Lackow and Natalia José Truszkowska, www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/ lit105/Class_Dictionary/Performativity.htm.

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Kitromilides, “Imagined Communities,” 208. Fernandez-Armesto, The Future of Religion, 2. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 156. Fernandez-Armesto, The Future of Religion, 14.

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Biblical Nations and Dogmatic Reticence

Were there such a thing as an anachronism risk index, it would reach its maximum alert status whenever theologians, preachers, scholars and others attempt to interpret biblical material on nationality in any precise and authoritative way. Prospective interpreters should be aware that the field lies wide open for assumptions, transference, and the subtle effect of emotional predispositions. This risk is compounded by the obvious fact that the New Testament is not interested prima facie in the role of ethnicity in the economy of salvation. Salvation is dependent solely on adherence to Christ, and being “in Christ” involves membership in a new society which transcends the limits of family, class, gender, ethnic group, or nation. The Christian scriptures nevertheless accept nationality as a category of classification. For the writers and redactors of the New Testament, humanity is divided into what (to modern eyes) appear to be national groups. Even if the scriptures relativize the importance of any bonds other than those which bind Christ’s followers to him and to one another, they do not question that taxonomy. This is not sufficient evidence, however, to support a claim that Christian holds or does not hold nationality as a good. Scriptures after all portray and assume many other norms and viewpoints (e.g., the position of women, the existence of slavery, illness as a result of demonic infestation) which are merely particular to the time and place of its composition. From such apparently incidental norms as ethnic identification, we cannot safely extract ethical imperatives.

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Both Old and New Testaments list large numbers of distinctive peoples, and the Hebrew and Greek scriptures contain numerous words to describe these kinds of groups. A minutely detailed analysis of the use of the words commonly translated as “nation,” “people,” “tribe,” etc., is beyond the limits of this book. Yet an attempt, however summary, to note the porosity of nationality terms as they appear in original texts is necessary. Translation offers a barrier to interpretation. The application of Israelite conceptions of nationality to modern peoples has occurred not through precise reference to the original texts, but through vernacular translations that may have no direct lexical equivalent to ancient Hebrew or first-century Palestinian terms. Steven Grosby notes a cleavage between scholarly attitudes toward ancient Israelite nationality. Many biblical scholars take for granted that ancient Israel was a nation, whereas the general consensus of social scientists is that nationality is a modern phenomenon.1 If the sociologists are correct, translating terms referring to the social and ethnic groupings of the ancient world as “nation,” “people,” “tribe,” “clan,” etc., can only be done tentatively, and with the understanding that these references may have little relevance for modernity. Another caveat concerning interpretation is appropriate here. Mario Liverani warns us that in approaching Israelite national identity, scholars may use statements contained in the books of the Old Testament “as bits of evidence for the times to which they refer.”2 A more critical hermeneutics will tend to see such statements primarily as a reflection of the situations in which the texts were written. The imagined past may have little connection with the true reality of the periods that biblical texts purport to describe. Naturally, we would not expect the Bible to provide us with a fully articulated scholarly disquisition on nationality. Even after we apply considerable deduction, the Scriptures are comparatively reticent about the nature and purpose of nations. The various strata of the Old Testament correspond to several different theological traditions, and reflect differing historical situations and existential needs. The Hebrew Bible contains no one clear paradigm of nationality, nor even a constant terminology of national or quasi-national identity. Of these terms, leom—sometimes confusingly translated as “race”—derives from a Semitic root denoting togetherness, i.e., the collective identity of a people, an idea which includes but is not limited to kinship. In Gen 25:23, Rebecca is told that two leummim are to be “separated” from her, i.e., two distinct groups of people with distinctive characteristics. The idea of leom underscores the notion that humanity as a whole is divided into diverse peoples, each with its own identity.

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The focus of the Hebrew scriptures is the history of the people of Israel, which is not referred to as leom, but most frequently as ‘am. The word derives from the root ‘amam, meaning “to include,” and is semantically related to words meaning “with” and “among,” and the name ‘immanuel.3 The unique nuance of ‘am is one of perspective, for it denotes “a group of people as viewed by one of themselves.”4 The word denotes two important characteristics: relationships sustained within the group, and the group’s internal unity, both of which are expressed in religious and ancestral ties. Yahweh is first identified as using the term “my people” (‘ammi) in speaking of the descendants of Abraham whom he has chosen (Ex 3:7ff), a relationship which is ratified and intensified in the covenant. The term itself is not limited to biological or ethnic kinship: the universalist strands of Old Testament theology promise that people from Egypt and Assyria and from other nations will also be included in God’s ‘am (e.g., Is 19:25; Ps 87). Goy, the other commonly occurring Hebrew term denoting social identity, can generally be taken to mean “a defined body or group of people, or some specific large segment of a given body.”5 Although sometimes used to refer to Israel as a politically organized people with a territory of its own (e.g. Gen 12:2; 17:20; 21:18), it is mainly applied to the political, ethnic, or territorial groups of people surrounding Israel “without intending to ascribe a specific religious or moral connotation.”6 The plural goyim is used for those groups whom Israel dispossesses from Canaan, or the neighboring peoples among whom Israel lived, mostly on adversarial or subaltern terms. Once the descendants of Abraham began to perceive themselves as being a distinct people in a covenantal relationship with Yahweh, goy and goyim developed into referents for non-covenantal, non-Yahwistic peoples, i.e, “heathens.” Nonetheless, the goyim too, through the ‘am Israel, are ultimately destined to receive the blessing of God. In rendering the Hebrew scriptures into Greek for the use of Jews in the diaspora, the translators of the Septuagint had to seek equivalents for terms of cultural and political organization of a different age and culture.7 The Septuagint, following the differentiation between ‘am and goyim, generally translates these respectively as laos and ethne. The Septuagint laos describes people considered not as a mass, but as a defined unit, i.e., as a people, although not necessarily as a national or proto-national group. In Gen 19:4, laos is a city and in 49:16ff a tribe which includes the dead. Laos theou, as a frequent epithet and synonym for Israel, refers to Israel’s distinctive and privileged religious position vis-à-vis other laoi. Only Israel is God’s property. Other nations are allotted to the care of angels. Yahweh liberates Israel alone from alien domination and gives it a unique covenant.

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Ta ethne, on the other hand, are those peoples who do not belong to the laos theou. The division of humanity into ethne is divinely ordained (Gen 11; Deut 32:8). In Jewish piety, however the specificity of these peoples is merged into a generalized “them,” religious and cultural otherness being expressed by ethne. By the post-exilic period, ethne-goyim takes on a derogatory sense, referring to Gentiles living in Israel (Ez 10:2; Neh 10:31). This negative evaluation coexists nevertheless with a universal theology according to which all ethne will receive salvation, an aspect favored by the emphases of the Septuagint.8 As the nascent Christian community developed a self-understanding separate from its Jewish matrix, its terminology for describing different kinds of social and religious groups took on new and complex meaning. Of approximately 160 instances of the word ethnos in the New Testament, forty are quotations from the Old Testament.9 A major shift in theology is denoted by the application of the term laos (the Septuagint rendering of ‘am), to the Christian community (e.g., Acts 15:14; Rom 9:25–26; 1 Pe 2:9–10; Heb 4:9). What was previously an ethno-religious laos has expanded into a laos defined only by faith. What previously applied to Israel is now applied to the Church: In the Old Testament, tension arises between the national and religious aspects of laos which are meant to be in harmony. Prophecy announces judgment on the national laos, but also additions to the laos from the laoi or ethne. This finds fulfillment in the church with the rise of a purely spiritual laos. . . . This is one laos; it transcends all the frontiers of the laoi, although not eliminating them. . . . Paul contends for the unity of the new laos simply on the basis of faith. Nationality is not a condition of belonging to God.10

The New Testament use of ethnos-ethne carries a theological charge different from the Old Testament. In approximately one hundred passages (e.g., Mt 6:32), ethne denotes an identity separate from that of Jews. However, given the early Church’s self-understanding as the true Israel, all non-Christians logically become ethne (1 Cor 5:1; 1 Pe 2:12). In this, an important Christian innovation is made: ethnos too becomes redefined as a theological rather than an ethnic epithet: “The Old Testament influences this primarily ethico-religious distinction. The Greeks . . . often use ethnos disparagingly to describe non-Greek peoples, on the basis of cultural differentiation, not theological.”11 The uses of ethne to describe two groups of people—non-Jewish nations, in contradistinction to the Jews (e.g., Lk 21:24; 1 Cor 1:23), or those who do not follow Christ (Mt 6:7; Eph 2:4)—correspond to two ways of understanding the relationship of the Christian community with the non-

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Jewish world. To define as ethne those who do not follow Christ is to evoke a whole universe of inclusion or exclusion based on religious allegiance instead of any other social identity. Scriptural terms for national or ecclesial belonging contain condensed and significant theological claims. The particulars of their era are “reflected in them, consciously or not; their concepts and statements are marked by conditions which theology does not create itself and from which it cannot remove itself at will.”12 Precisely because theological statements inevitably reflect social and intellectual contexts, a biblical hermeneutics of suspicion requires that we be aware of the political and social Sitz im Leben of the formulation or reformulation of theologically oriented histories which employ these terms. With those caveats in mind, it should be noted that the Bible leaves largely unaddressed two “national” questions: does God create or form particular nations? If so, what is the nature of their relationship to God and to other nations? Even if we were to take Israel as the paradigm for all other peoples, to talk of the “creation” of Israel would be a misnomer. The Scriptures do not trace the Israel’s origin back to Eden but to several salvific events which eventually cohere into a “national” myth. One of the main roots of Israelite identity is found in Gen 10:2–11:9. This table of peoples is “without parallel in ancient literature, for this interest in the nations reflects accurately the biblical emphasis on history as the vehicle of revelations and the nations as the object of God’s redemptive purpose.”13 The story is also an etiological explanation of the fact that humanity is divided into “national” groupings, a differentiation that comes about with the passing of the generations (toledot). Noah, party to a divine proto-covenant, is portrayed as the father of all humanity, which is seen as consisting naturally of distinct nations (goyim). The groups descending from Japheth in particular are defined by their own languages and lands. The spread and diversity of the nations is the result of God’s blessing Noah and his sons, and their obedient response to his command to “breed, multiply and fill the earth” (Gen 9:1). The other myth of national origins, Babel (Gen 11:1–9), also seeks to explain linguistic and cultural diversity. Here however, the fragmentation of humanity into a diversity of peoples and languages is explained as divine punishment. This onomastic tale centers on an etymology that derives the name Babel from bll (confusion).14 Humanity is punished for the sin of “making a name for ourselves” (v.4), the tower of Babel being seen as a symbol of humans’ resistance to being “scattered abroad on the face of the earth.” As in Eden, the sin consists of seeking equality with Yahweh by human effort

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rather than through divine gift. Linguistic differences and mutual incomprehensibility are God’s retribution on humanity. The historical and prophetic books of the Old Testament detail the formation of the people of Israel. Liverani locates the historical roots of Israelite national identity in the early Iron Age, at a point when Middle Eastern tribes (among them the nucleus of what would later be Israel) were self-identified as “sons” (bene) of an eponymous ancestor, and associated with a ruling dynasty (bet) and a tribal god. At a later point, stories of the conquest of Palestine and of the period of the Judges helped to solidify a sense of Israelite unity rooted in the covenant and the worship of Yahweh. In the literary formation of “national” Israelite identity, several historical moments should be highlighted. During the high point of the monarchic period, the reigns of David and Solomon, court theologians grafted a new theology of national dynastic monarchy on to a primitive cultus of Holy War. During much of the rule of the Davidic dynasty however, national unity existed only as a legend of a glorious past accomplished by Saul and represented by the reigns of David and Solomon.15 Historically, the Solomonic “nation” was in fact no more than an alliance of the northern tribes, and the relationship between Israel and Judah no closer than that which existed between other peoples such as Edom and Moab. However, the ideal of national unity remained as a religious and political model, and came to play a key role in hopes for a messianic restoration of the Davidic monarchy. The so-called “Deuteronomistic History” dates from the reign of Josiah (640–609 BC).16 During this time, following a period of toleration of the gods of other nations, the kingdom of Judah witnessed a marked return to an exclusive cult of Yahweh. This reformation included a promulgation of divine law and the reconstruction of national historiography. These developments came about in the shadow of the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom. Significantly therefore, Israel’s coherent self-identification as “the people of Yahweh” emerged out of and was shaped by the threat of dissolution. The stress on the religious component of Israelite national identity was a strategic salvage operation, a defensive reaction against the fragility of political sovereignty. Dreams of the restoration of the Davidic empire ended with the death of Josiah, the conquests of Nebuchadnezzar (605–597 BC), the destruction of Jerusalem, and the deportation of the royal court to Babylon. As is often the case, the experience of exile and the psychology of ressentiment begat strong patriotic impulses. Exile sharpens a sense of distinct identity and creates in the minds of those who are absent from home an idealized form of their native world. The nation as imagined from afar becomes the repository of a host

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of desires. To this, ressentiment adds the power of frustration and hostility. The classical expression of national nostalgia and anger is Psalm 137: By the rivers of Babylon we sat mourning and weeping when we remembered Zion. On the poplars of that land we hung up our harps. There our captors asked us for the words of a song; our tormentors, for a joyful song: “Sing for us a song of Zion!” But how could we sing a song of the Lord in a foreign land? If I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand wither. May my tongue stick to my palate if I do not remember you, if I do not exalt Jerusalem beyond all my delights. Remember, Lord, against Edom that day at Jerusalem. They said: “Level it, level it down to its foundations!” Fair Babylon, you destroyer, happy those who pay you back the evil you have done us! Happy those who seize your children and smash them against a rock.

In exile, nationality can only be experienced as nostalgia or hope or an admixture of both. Israelite self-identification as a people came about as a reaction against vicissitudes and conditions conceived to destroy any national feeling in the melting pot of the imperial state. Features were privileged in the shaping of the nationality—the unity of cult (the Solomonic temple was never so important in Israelite ideology than when it was destroyed), the common law of divine origin, the historical traditions (providing a model for national recovery) and the assumed ethnic unity. Land and kingship were projected toward the future. All the differing attempts which took place in the post exilic period . . . were conceived of as a restoration of the past, and necessarily produced the myth of a lost national identity and history. . . . Israelite nationality assumed its form in the very period of its disintegration, as something projected in the past and in the future, but undergoing “presently” a state of crisis.17

For the prophetic tradition, history had been the medium and platform of God’s revelation. However, the parlous circumstances of Israel now called those very prophecies and divine promises into question. With the destruction of Jerusalem in 587, prophecy could no longer be linked to the temple and royal court. The focus of prophetic discourse changed from contemporary political history to eschatology, a direction which would lead to an apocalyptic mentality. The latter prophetic literature was not aimed at shaping foreign policy, but rather generating hope for the future by preserving the collective

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identity of the people of Israel. The apocalyptic worldview reinterpreted the earlier prophetic utterances by looking for their realization in divine actions beyond history. Throughout the Old Testament, with differing emphases corresponding to different circumstances, God is portrayed as both the God of Israel and Lord of all nations. Old Testament understandings of nationality, according to Benedict Thomas Viviano, may be read as “a dialectical movement between universalism and particularism.”18 On the one hand, God is the creator of all humanity. But the Old Testament also relates the unfolding of Israel’s particular election. Originating in Abraham, the promise was extended to the people of Israel, which subsequently developed into the kingdom of Israel, inhabiting a God-given land of its own. Since in the monarchic period Israel’s very existence was bound up with larger polities, Israel’s identity could no longer be understood in isolation from other nations. Thus it was also within the context of crisis that the theological consideration of the role of other nations arose. Pre-monarchic traditions of holy war had pictured Yahweh as divine warrior, entering into battle with Israel against other nations. However, Yahweh gradually became pictured as sovereign deity not only of Israel but also of all nations. The particular tribal god, previously bound to clan and dynasty and the land of Israel, was now understood to be the unique Lord of universal history, capable of using “the nations” to chastise Israel. Assyria is “the rod of Yahweh’s anger” (Is 10:5).19 The “March of Conquest” (Is 10:27–34) describes the approach of the Assyrian troops on Jerusalem, and invokes the figure of the Divine Warrior who, rather than fighting on Israel’s side, now threatens Zion with destruction. Although the main concern of the passage is the remnant of Israel, the oracle also promises the advent of a shoot from the stump of the hewn-down tree of Jesse, to be a “signal for the nations” (Is 11:1–10). Separation, the Old Testament epithet for holy election, cannot be understood as isolation, for the fate of Israel is connected with the destiny of all nations.20 Zephaniah projects his message into a distant future in which the powers of the world will submit themselves to Yahweh (Zeph 2:11. Cf. Jer 49:38). Deutero-Isaiah foresees the “survivors of the nations” as returning to Israel from exile (Is 44:1–5; 45:22–25; 49:12–20; 53:10). This vision is taken up in Zechariah, according to whom “people and nations of every tongue” are to join the returning Jews (Zech 8: 21–23). Even former enemies will receive the blessings of the covenant. Israel will be a blessing on the earth along with Egypt and Assyria, “whom the Lord of hosts has blessed, saying, ‘Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of my hands, and Israel my heritage’” (Is 19:24–25).

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In the literature of the exile and return, the symbolic role of the city of Jerusalem expands from being the locus of Israelite identity into the axis mundi. As the “the holy mountain” (Is 56:7; Ez 5:5; Jer 3:17; Dan 2:35; Ps 87), Zion will be the place of the eschatological pilgrimage and the messianic banquet at which “all nations” will become children of Abraham and inherit the Promised Land. It is in the exilic period that one motif of Israelite identity appears which millennia later would have considerable appeal for some Christian peoples. The figure of Israel the Suffering Servant, the nation despised by others, is a theodicy which expresses a desire to discover a deeper meaning in current vicissitudes. The eschatological vision presents a reversal of fortune in which kings and rulers will bow down to Israel as well as to Yahweh, and serve the Servant people (Is 14:1; 49:7, 22–23; 60: 1–3, 10–18). Current suffering could thus be understood to guarantee future glory. Universalist theology is strongly evident in the “New Israel” of prophetic oracle, which foretells that “Israel” will expand to include the nations—an idea which represents a “sustained challenge to a narrow nationalistic conception.”21 The Book of Job expresses the universal sovereignty of God, and the goodness and faith under straitened conditions of Job himself. Even though he is a foreigner from Uz, the conclusion of the book places him amongst the Israelite patriarchs. Likewise, the author of Ruth portrays the Moabite heroine as an Israelite matriarch by adoption. This theological strand stresses the universal lordship of God, with a concomitant open attitude to what constitutes Israelite identity. All who swear allegiance to Yahweh, whatever their origin, are Israel, “the people of Yahweh from among all the nations” (Is 19:2). Following the return to Israel, projects for political unity and national autonomy were in fact largely unsuccessful. The books of Ezra and Nehemiah reflect the difficulties of re-establishing cultural and religious identity in changed circumstances. The Judean exiles in Babylon had maintained and sharpened their collective consciousness. What had been distinctive notes of identity vis-à-vis their Babylonian neighbors became the defining notes upon their return to their ancestral lands. Political policy was intimately bound up with a renewed emphasis on two theological elements: the sanctity of the land (now concentrated in the cult of Jerusalem and the Temple) and the Law. The comparative failure of the restoration, along with continued domination by larger imperial bodies, forced the religious element to the fore as the sine qua non of Israelite identity. From the ashes of statehood, Judaism evolved. Since its ideologues were intimately involved with the life of the temple, being Israelite increasingly became a religious matter. In the absence of real political power, religion took on the weight of responsibility for the

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survival of Israelite identity. The distinctive features of national identity in the exile (attachment to a divinely given land, a loose canon of holy scriptures enshrining law and traditions, and the worship of Yahweh) now became the notes of religious identity, which was simultaneously limited ethnically as never before.22 As a result, Israel’s identity became defined negatively, as being not like other nations. The word goyim now denoted non-Jews, who were considered as adversaries. The themes of holy war and Israelite particularism and superiority reappear in the post-exilic literature, but in new form. The domination of Israel over all the nations is expressed eschatologically in Daniel, where the stone “cut out by no human hands” becomes a great mountain which fills the earth and “shall never be destroyed, nor shall its sovereignty be left to another people” (Dan 2:34–35, 44; 7:13–14). The apocalyptic mode “reveals the enmity between the Jews and the nations, and the cry for revenge and vindication by direct intervention of God, born of intense suffering.”23 The bitter experiences of diaspora and repression meant that particularistic Judaism necessarily triumphed almost completely over interest in the religious role of other peoples. Yet however muted by circumstance, the universalist call remained within the sacred scriptures themselves: “The dialectic within the prophetic literature of the Old Testament in terms of nationalism and universalism is part of the very structure of the canon itself. It is not to be removed by scholarly reconstruction of the biblical text, nor it is to be explained away by semantics.”24 Israelite universalism was centered on questions of faith and morality, for it stressed the importance of ethical behavior in response to Israel’s election by Yahweh. In contrast, particularism focused more on Israelite identity.25 The tension between universalism and particularism, and faith and identity is evidenced in the opposing soteriologies, respectively universal and national, of Jonah and Nahum-Habakkuk. The missionary remit of the book of Jonah is clear: righteousness is to be found outside the framework of Israel. Yahweh has a right to show compassion toward Israel’s enemy Assyria. Jonah’s own anger at Yahweh’s compassion for Nineveh is represented as being dangerous. On the other hand, Nahum and Habakkuk employ an older theology of taunt against Israel’s enemies, yet they too struggle with the issue of theodicy (Nah 1; Hab 1 and 3). In short then, the tension between the particularity of Israelite nationality and the universality of God’s sovereignty is not easily resolved in the Hebrew scriptures. Being God’s ‘am does not necessarily preclude the existence of other favored peoples. Nor does it necessarily imply the superiority of Israel. Trying to understand national identity on the model of ancient Israel alone will therefore likely create more problems, theological and pastoral, than it solves.

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Dual Citizenship: Ethnicity and the New Testament Shifting focus from the Old Testament to the New does not easily resolve the role of ethnicity and nationality within Christian theology or praxis. Viviano notes that as a theme of biblical theology, nationalism has not been sufficiently studied.26 The same is true of New Testament teachings on ethnic or national identity. In fact, given that at first glance, any kind of social identity other than the religious seems to be a very minor consideration in the New Testament, it might easily appear that nationality is only a very minor theological topic. The Church of the apostolic and sub-apostolic eras was after all concerned with the pressing issue of its relationship toward Judaism, and the question of how to live in the world in the expectation of the prompt coming of the parousia (e.g., Mk 9:1; Mt 16:28; 1 Cor 15:50). We might also argue that the Christian de-emphasis on ethnic belonging was a specific, intentional reaction against Jewish ethnic concepts of chosenness, reflecting a desire to create a new Israel no longer limited by place of origin or social identity. Yet at the time of the composition of the New Testament ethnic or quasinational identity continued to be one of the fundamental ways in which people distinguished each other. The eschatological judgment scene of Mt 25 considers people as individuals and as members of ethnic groups: “All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate them [i.e., individuals] one from another” (Mt 25:32). These identities were not tied specifically to religious adherence, a fact witnessed by the list of the national origins of the hearers of the disciples at Pentecost described in Acts 2. The list of the peoples of the Mediterranean given there appears to depend on “an ancient astrological calendar . . . in which the peoples were attached to signs of the zodiac and listed in their order. Luke must have taken it over as a handy description of the world of his day.”27 If this is true, no particular Christian value can be ascribed to that division of peoples. The fledgling Church inherited from Judaism a universalist focus and an eschatological understanding of the world suffused with elements of apocalypticism. The language, metaphor and style of the New Testament obviously have deep Israelite roots. Christian writers (and possibly Jesus himself) also significantly reinterpreted that language, effectively de-nationalizing covenantal theology. Nevertheless, the New Testament contains more than a vestigial interest in ethno-religious identity. The Gospels present a Jesus who is acutely sensitive to “national” belonging.28 Jesus initially rebuffs the approaches of the Syro-Phoenician woman of Mk 24 and Mt 15 with a particularistic rejection. He instructs the Twelve to go “nowhere among the

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Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but . . . rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Mt 10:5–6). On the other hand, Matthew represents the universality of Jesus’ ministry as prefigured in the visit of the Magi (Mt 2:1–12). In the episode of the Presentation (Lk 2:22–38), Simeon prophetically recognizes Jesus as a “light for revelation for the Gentiles and for glory of your people Israel,” an evocation both of Israelite particularism and Christian universalism. Jesus begins his ministry not among the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but rather in the “Galilee of the nations” (Mt 4:15). The different geographical, linguistic and religious origins of the Gospels account for differing attitudes toward Jews and foreigners. Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem portrays him as the fulfillment of the prophecies of Zech 9:9–10 concerning the Messiah who will bring peace to the nations. The faith of the Roman centurion, as opposed to the incredulity of the Jewish leaders, is attested in Mt 8:5–13, Lk 7:1–10, and Jn 4:46–54. A Roman centurion confirms Jesus’ identity as the Son of God (Mk 16:39). The mission of the Seventy is “to the nations” (Lk 10:1–6). The Jesus of the New Testament embodies in one person several different theological events and figures: the Abrahamic promise, the Sinaitic covenant, the Davidic and messianic traditions, and the Suffering Servant. All of these theologies implicated the whole people of Israel. Yet all of them also have a universal remit. As the first Christians scoured the Hebrew scriptures for guidance in understanding the meaning of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, they found the universalist emphases particularly sympathetic. Jesus’ farewell commission to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19) expresses the Church’s faith that the promises of the Old Testament were fulfilled in the life and saving work of Jesus. Yet that fulfillment was also a transformation. According to Viviano, “the nationalism of the kingdom of Israel is simultaneously canceled and elevated to the higher plane of the worldwide kingdom of God by passing through the narrow point of the death and resurrection of Jesus and the ever-widening Church.”29 Viviano’s phrase “simultaneously canceled and elevated” indicates the heart of the problem, reflecting theological binaries which are not easily reconciled: continuity and discontinuity, completion and supersession, particularism and universalism. A theology of covenantal completion sees Jesus as fulfilling the Hebrew scriptures and the universality of the Church as a God-given outgrowth of Israelite particularity. In contrast, a theology of supersession portrays Israel as being as unable (or unwilling) to accept Jesus as Messiah, as a result of which the covenant is taken away and handed over to another people: the Christian Church. These pastoral theologies arose in response to the difficulties of extending the primitive Church to both Jews

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and Gentiles, and remain delicately in balance. Mt 12:41–42 shows Jesus bemoaning Israel’s “hardness of heart” and proclaiming a judgment that will be carried out “by the nations.” Matthew’s Jesus does not claim to abolish but rather to fulfill the Law and the Prophets (Mt 5:17). The Jesus of the Apocalypse, on the other hand, comes to “make all things new” (Rev 21:5). In Acts 13:4 Paul quotes Isaiah in referring to a supposed divine judgment upon the Jews for rejecting their mission to the nations. Paul, teaching that “in Christ Jesus, the blessings of Abraham might come upon the nations” (Gal 3:14), attributes to divine providence the disobedience of Israel according to the flesh—a felix culpa that subsequently made it possible for the nations to inherit God’s favor. Over the course of the apostolic and post-apostolic generations, Christians increasingly came to understand themselves as being rooted in Judaism yet as different from those who did not recognize Jesus as Messiah. This difference is mirrored in the prophecies placed on the lips of Jesus in Mt 23:34 and Mk 13:9, and the “anti-Jewish” texts of John (e.g., Jn 20:19). Given the spread of the Church in the Jewish diaspora and amongst Gentile sympathizers, cultural universalism inevitably grew to be a distinguishing feature of Christianity. This development brought in its train a reinterpretation of those elements which had come to define Judaic religio-political identity. Hebrew texts on the Promised Land were now interpreted eschatologically (cf. Phil 3:20). The temple, particularly following its destruction in 70 AD, was understood typologically as a prefiguration of Jesus (e.g., Jn 2:19–22). The Law and the Prophets are seen in Lk 24 as being fulfilled in Jesus. The final appearance of the people of Israel in the New Testament is in the book of Revelation, with the 144,000 members of the tribes of Israel who have been sealed with the blood of the Lamb (Rev 7:4–8). These represent the “true Israel” (cf. Gal 6:4) that has remained faithful to Christ. In a combination of religious particularism and ethnic universalism, membership in Israel is defined by allegiance to Christ. They are accompanied by “a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (Rev 7:9), the Christian martyrs who are now in the heavenly Jerusalem of the seer’s vision. Likewise, the recipients of “the eternal gospel” will be people of “every nation and tribe and tongue and people” (Rev 14:6). In certain strata of the New Testament, “the nations” play the Old Testament role of paradigmatic adversary. The Son of Man is to be handed over “to the nations” (Mk 10:33); “all nations” are at enmity with the disciples of Jesus (Jn 15:18–20). With different emphases, the Passion narratives portray

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collusion between Jewish religious leaders and Roman political overlords, a pattern which is perpetuated in the persecution of the followers of Jesus (Acts 12:1–5; 16:10–24). The place of “the nations” in the apocalyptic drama is twofold. On the one hand, they are the objects of Christian mission (Rev 22:2). Conversely, they are the enemies of God (Rev 11:2). Satan, who had deceived the nations (Rev 20:3), is to be imprisoned until the age of the saints. The final apocalyptic battle will destroy “the nations” (20:9). At the same time, in fulfillment of the prophecy of Isaiah 60:3, the “wealth of the nations” will come to the new Jerusalem. This triumph of good marks the ingathering of all the nations within the kingdom of God. The fact that “the nations” are involved in the cosmic drama even at the Last Judgment could easily suggest therefore to the literally minded that nationality is a divine given. Yet the New Testament is, as Viviano points out, “for the most part dominated by the perspective of the kingdom of God.” So wide is the embrace of the Kingdom that it “goes beyond all narrow nationalisms: it includes all people in their nations [cf. Dan 7:13–14; Acts 17:26]. Nations are not destroyed but perfected and harmonized in a higher unity and synthesis.”30 A theology in which the Kingdom “perfects and harmonizes nationality” sees all secular realities as potentially being convertible, their whole being capable of being transformed through the death and resurrection of Jesus. God can transform the identity of any single nation, or indeed the experience of nationality itself. Yet the New Testament is reticent about any other allegiances or social identities other than religious ones. The episode of the challenge to Jesus in Mt 21 concerning the relative authority of the political and religious results in the famous phrase “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” This logion has sometimes been employed to justify a radical separation between the spheres of the secular and the sacred. From there, it is only a small step to an anti-cosmic theology. The Johannine literature refers to everything that is inimical to and outside of the reign of God as “the world” (e.g., Jn 1:10; 14:27–30). In this view, discipleship would require that one become “a pilgrim buttressed by the church, which serves as a bastion against the world and its allurements. Society is corrupt, lost and of little or no value except as a place of pilgrimage and purification for the sojourner.”31 Such a theology clearly has no place within its schemes for nationality, for it belongs to the realm of the unredeemable. Although Christianity did not adopt ethnic particularism, it inevitably adopted elements of the Israelite mental framework. Denise Kimber Buell argues that “early Christian texts used culturally available understandings of human difference, which we can analyze in terms of our modern concepts of

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‘ethnicity,’ ‘race,’ and ‘religion’ to shape . . . a religious tradition and to portray particular forms of Christianness as universal and authoritative.”32 The New Testament presents the Church—metaphorically at least—as a kind of nation (1 Pe 2:9), a society that is separated out from other groups of people not along ethnic lines but by its members’ acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah. The historical circumstances of the growth of Christianity meant however that individuals’ membership in the “people of God” inevitably coincided with their membership in other social groups—family, clan, tribe, ethnic community, and people—and their civic status as subjects of various realms. Inevitably, when a large enough number of individual members of a nation had become Christian, then the relationship of those two loyalties became a matter of interest and potential conflict.

The Silence of Tradition: Catholic Teaching on Nationality In seeking to understand their own circumstances, Christians of all generations have searched the scriptures, prayed, preached, and meditated on them, written commentaries on particular biblical passages, and sought to delineate the precise meaning of difficult ideas. The Christian scriptures are fundamentally pastoral documents whose content consists of responses to particular historical problems. The doctrinal formulations which subsequently derived from the Church’s reading and understanding of the scriptures also address concrete situations. If, as the theorists of primordial nationality or ethnosymbolic identity hold, nationality (or at least ethnic consciousness) were a perennial human experience, we would naturally expect to find some theological reflection and doctrinal pronouncements on the subject. Given the rise of the nation-state, the growth of the category of nation as a universal taxonomy, and the ubiquity of modern nationalism, the comparative lacuna in Catholic theological tradition concerning these matters is striking. The absence of intellectual speculations on national identity per se in the writings of the Fathers and in the dogmatic deliberations of the early Church councils is not surprising, for the practical concerns of the Church of the first few centuries involved many other more pressing issues. The connection between national and religious identities is a subset of the relationship between saeculum and sacrum inherent in Christianity, a tension which derives from the nature of the Incarnation itself. Within this macro-relationship, it is not nationality and Christianity which has been the main subject of theological discussion, but rather another subset, namely church-state relations. The absence of commentary is explained by the fact that for many centuries, the Catholic Church was concerned not so much with nations

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as with states—and the rival claims of temporal and spiritual sovereignty. The tension between sacerdotium and imperium, church and state, and their respective competencies with respect to the other were questions that arose out of the very real difficulties inherent in the coexistence of two worldviews and two potentially competitive jurisdictions.33 This is not to say however that awareness of nationality is totally absent from Catholic theology. For Aquinas, the basis of most Catholic theology until well into the twentieth century, the essence of a natio is linguistic.34 In the High Middle Ages, natio and lingua were frequently coterminous. Natio appears sixty-one times in the Summa Theologica,35 most frequently in biblical quotations in which the use of the term is merely incidental, e.g., Prima Pars, q.19, a.7, “Whether the will of God is changeable.” Q.98, a.4 of Prima Secundae, “Whether the Old Law should have been given to the Jews alone,” concerns the question of universality and particularity, and refers to Is 49:6 and Acts 10:34–35 in support. Thomas’s teaching that “on all nations He bestows temporal goods, which are of less account with God than spiritual goods. Therefore He should have given the Law also to all peoples,” shows that he makes no particular distinction between nationes and populi, but merely follows biblical usage. Prima Secundæ, q.105, a.2, in the statement that “it is of the essence of a nation that the mutual relations of the citizens be ordered by just law,” treats natio as a political entity. Article 1 of the same question discusses “the right ordering of rulers in a state or nation.” According to the Old Testament norms, which Thomas applies to Christian peoples too, God determined two points: “First, that in choosing a king they should wait for the Lord’s decision; and that they should not make a man of another nation king.” In Prima Secundæ q.106, a.4, Thomas notes that “the preaching of the Gospel may be understood as extending throughout the world and producing its full effect, so that, to wit, the Church would be founded in every nation,” a paraphrase of Mt 28:19. Two interesting references to the existence of national guardian angels are found in Secunda Secundæ, q. 52, a.3 and Supplementum Tertia Partis, q. 72, a. 3. In both, Aquinas quotes Gregory’s exegesis (Moralia xvii), of Dan 10:12–13: “The lofty spirits that are set over the nations never fight on behalf of those that act unjustly, but they justly judge and try their deeds. And when the guilt or innocence of any particular nation is brought into the debate of the court above, the ruling spirit of that nation is said to have won or lost in the conflict.” Aquinas does not develop the subject of celestial national patrons further. Although it cannot be safely assumed that modern concepts of nationality had any equivalent intellectual currency in previous ages, cultural and geo-

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graphical partialities played a part in some early theological controversies.36 Aquinas’s usage of natio differs considerably from later European concepts of the nation, and employs soft boundaries between ethno-linguistic and political conceptions of nationality. As a result, Aquinas’s comments do not offer much material for engaging with contemporary debates about nationality. The Angelic Doctor accepts that as part of a “natural” dispensation humanity is divided into large groups, an arrangement which is so obvious that it requires no particular commentary. Within the parameters of scholastic theology, the nation simply cannot be a theological category.

The Popes and the Nations Aquinas’s assumptions about the connaturality of nationality characterize much of Catholic teaching—up to and including the present day.37 The long silence of the magisterium on national issues reflects a set of theological habits of thought and cultural assumptions. Scholastic theology tended to concern itself with universal truths, rather than the particularity inherent in national considerations. The supra-national nature of the Church produced a clerical culture which was comparatively uninterested in national concerns, since these were often closely associated with state powers. The imagined community of European Christendom, the last formal vestige of which was formally dissolved by Francis I of Austria’s renunciation of the title Holy Roman Emperor in 1806, continued as a memory and mission, even into the beginning of the twenty-first century. The notion that the business of the Church is primarily the spiritual realm was reflected in the teaching of the two powers. In discussing the Christian constitution of states in his 1885 encyclical Immortale Dei, Leo XIII took the classical position that there exist two powers, “the ecclesiastical and the civil, the one being set over divine, and the other over human things.” In the relationship between them, there must be “a certain orderly connection, which may be compared to the union of the soul and body in man. . . . One of the two has for its proximate and chief object the well-being of this mortal life; the other, the everlasting joys of heaven.”38 According to this, questions of the Christian state in its relationship with the Church are the practical corollary of the metaphysical relationship between the spheres of the temporal and the spiritual. In any consideration of the Church’s understanding of nationality, we are forced to make a significant jump from the early centuries to modernity. The body of documents referred to as “Catholic social teaching” began to develop in the nineteenth century, as fruit of the Church’s encounter with “modern industrial society with its new structures for the production

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of consumer goods, its new concept of society, the state and authority, and its new forms of labor and ownership.”39 This period also saw the development of fully articulated nationalist movements in Europe. If nationalism developed, as Gellner and others hold, in response to the crisis of modernity, then we might expect that papal documents would address nationalism. Yet Roman Catholic social teaching “has almost nothing to say in response to nationalist crises in the world.”40 This silence may be explained in part by a nineteenth-century papal reaction against nationalism. French and Italian state nationalism posed particular threats to papal power: in 1791 the French Republic confiscated the papal territories in France, while nineteenth-century Italian nationalists sought to abolish the remnants of the papal states in Italy. With the defeat of the papal armies by the forces of Garibaldi in 1861, Pius lost the entire papal territories with the exception of the city of Rome. In 1870 Rome itself finally became Italian territory, leaving the popes as “prisoners in the Vatican.” Consequently, papal teaching of the period reflected a strong bias against liberal ideas, among which was the secular nationalist impulse. The Church’s conservative mindset was expressed in the Syllabus of Errors, which explicitly condemned the radical separation of church and state, and the establishment of “national churches.” Yet if papal documents rarely comment on the nation directly, other related categories do in fact provide some possible building blocks of a theology of nationality. Aspects of nationalism are sometimes discussed under the aegis of the question of church and state. “Civil religion” is sometimes used as a paraphrase for nationalism. While this is understood as a form of national idolatry, and is therefore without exception condemned, patriotism—referred to as patriae caritas—is commended as a virtue in the encyclicals of Leo XIII (1878–1903).41 The papacy of Achille Ratti, Pius XI (1929–39), coincided with the rise of Soviet totalitarianism and extreme racist nationalism in Germany and Italy. During his tenure as papal representative in newly reestablished Poland, Ratti had witnessed first-hand the expansionist tendencies of Soviet Communism. As pope, Pius consistently and openly opposed the youth activities of the Italian Fascist movement. In 1931 he finally published the encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno, which preached the mutual incompatibility of Fascism and Catholicism. Seeing in Fascism the embodiment of nationalism, Pius defined this latter as an ideology which “clearly resolves itself into a true, real pagan worship of the state—a statolatry which is not less in contrast with the natural rights of the family than it is in contradiction to the supernatural rights of the Church.”42

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In Germany, the Nazi regime continually meddled with church activities, persecuted clergy, and tried to convert German Christians to the new faith in Nazism. With Mit brennender Sorge, his 1937 encyclical on the Church and the German Reich, Pius resoundingly denounced these incursions, and along with them any claims of racial superiority. The document condemns the pro-Nazi German National Church as “a seduction . . . a denial of the one Church of Christ.”43 Indeed, the very notion of national churches is anathematized for “their paralysis, their domestication and subjection to worldly powers.” Instead, the encyclical urges Christian universality, as a reflection of God’s universal sovereignty: “None but superficial minds could stumble into concepts of a national God, of a national religion; or attempt to lock within the frontiers of a single people, within the narrow limits of a single race, God, the Creator of the universe, King and Legislator of all nations.”44 In its mission and composition, the Catholic Church is both diverse and universal: Faith in Christ cannot maintain itself pure and unalloyed without the support of faith in the Church . . . The Church founded by the Redeemer is one, the same for all races and all nations. Beneath her dome, as beneath the vault of heaven, there is but one country for all nations and tongues.45

The phrases “all races and all nations” and “all nations and tongues” could be merely biblically inspired metaphors, glosses for “universal and perennial,” without necessarily implying any religious role for nations in the modern world. However, Mit brennender Sorge does mark the beginnings of papal discussion of the theological value of nationality: The Church’s maternal heart is big enough to see in the God-appointed development of individual characteristics and gifts, more than a mere danger of divergence. She rejoices at the spiritual superiorities among individuals and nations. In their successes, she sees with maternal joy and pride fruits of education and progress, which she can only bless and encourage, whenever she can conscientiously do so. But she also knows that to this freedom limits have been set by the majesty of the divine command.46

Rerum novarum, the 1891 encyclical on capital and labor of Leo XIII had mentioned “national character” in passing.47 By predicating agency to nations, Mit brennender Sorge develops this notion. Such statements are a considerable nod to Romantic notions of Volksgeist, and the document contains further Herderian resonances. The nationalization of morality (in which the state becomes the absolute arbitrator of values) is a “sin against the destiny

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of a nation.”48 As possessors of “spiritual superiorities,” nations are endowed with a certain degree of corporate selfhood. Like individuals, they can exercise freedom and are subject to divine command. Moreover, with the affirmation of “spiritual superiorities” as being God-given, a further space is opened up for a specifically theological discussion of national identities. Summi pontificatus, the first encyclical of Pius XII (1939–1958), was written at the outbreak of the Second World War. Subtitled “On the Unity of the Human Race,” the document reaffirmed the universal nature of Christianity and the Church’s opposition to racial hostility, while opposing any exaltation of the political state as the supreme value. Pius XII’s letter contains arguably the first attempt in a papal document to discuss the import of national belonging in the constitution of the human person. Individuals, Pius wrote, “do not feel themselves isolated units . . . but [are] united by the very force of their nature and by their internal destiny, into an organic, harmonious mutual relationship which varies with the changing of times.”49 Moreover, all nations are unique and individual, for each people “has its own genius, its own qualities, springing from the hidden roots of its being.” National particularities are lauded for their potential spiritual value: “The Church of Jesus Christ is certainly too wise to discourage or belittle those peculiarities and differences which mark out one nation from another. It is quite legitimate for nations to treat those differences as a sacred inheritance and guard them at all costs.” The description of these collective characteristics as a “sacred inheritance” moves attention away from the unity of Christendom and toward an awareness of the reality and value of distinctive nationality. In fact, Pius reiterates, unity and particularity share the same purpose. Particular cultures have a universal remit, for they “are not destined to break the unity of the human race, but rather to enrich and embellish it by the sharing of their own peculiar gifts.” Consequently, cultural diversity is far from being inimical to Christian universality. The Church therefore “hails every method of guidance and care which aims at a wise and orderly evolution of particular forces and tendencies having their origin in the individual character of each race.”50 The organic understanding of culture evoked by the encyclical is tantalizingly Herderian in resonance. The existence of nations as cultural units is accepted as a phenomenon whose origins lie in natural law: “A disposition, in fact, of the divinely sanctioned natural order divides the human race into social groups, nations or States, which are mutually independent in organization and in the direction of their internal life.”51 Yet that distinctive “internal life,” whether cultural or political, is not an absolute good. To prevent diversity from dominating over the value of unity, humans must make use of their

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freedom responsibly. People are bound together “by reciprocal ties, moral and juridical, into a great commonwealth directed to the good of all nations and ruled by special laws which protect its unity and promote its prosperity.”52 The encyclical also evokes the spirit of Mickiewicz, in Pius’s concern for the fate of “Our dear Poland,” which “has a right to the generous and brotherly sympathy of the whole world, while it awaits, relying on the powerful intercession of Mary, Help of Christians, the hour of a resurrection.”53 It is difficult to discern the theological normativity of the encyclical’s more lyrical passages. It is no easy task for example to determine the exact meaning of sentences such as: “As well as the happiness and the fortunes of nations, [God] holds in His hands human counsels and sweetly turns them in whatever direction He wills.”54 The use of more evocative and poetic language points in the direction of a theology which is less dominated by philosophical concepts and closer to the praise-language of both liturgy and popular religiosity—a tendency which would be developed to a startling degree by John Paul II, in his comments on nationality and culture. Taken together, the two documents Mit brennender Sorge and Summi pontificatus demonstrate an implicit acceptance not only of the objective existence of different nationalities, but also of more benign forms of national pride. Both are documents directed at particular situations, written to a certain extent in the register of nationalist rhetoric. Both insist on the supra-nationality of the Church. Significantly, both evidence a growing appreciation of the role of nationality, both in the human constitution and in the divine economy. The encyclicals thus lay the ground for considering national identity from the viewpoint of theological anthropology and soteriology. The assumption of cultural diversity as a natural good continues in the teaching of John XXIII (1958–1963). Addressing a political climate very different from that of his predecessor, John’s 1961 encyclical on Christianity and social progress, Mater et magistra, is focused on the needs of developing nations newly liberated from colonization. It notes in passing (in another Herderian nod) that these nations “have certain unmistakable characteristics of their own, resulting from the nature of the particular region and the natural dispositions of their citizens, with their time-honored traditions and customs.”55 Distinguishing carefully between uniformity and unity, the encyclical promotes a unity “determined and kept alive by that supernatural love which should be actuating everybody; she does not aim at a uniformity which would only be external in its effects and would cramp the natural tendencies of the nations concerned.”56 What such “natural tendencies” might consist of, and what their role is, is not explored.

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Pacem in terris (1963), John XXIII’s influential encyclical on world peace, deals not so much with the classic European question of church-state relations, but rather with relations between states. Accepting the division of the modern world into nations, it once more confuses the political state with the nation, taking as it does the European model of nation-state as the norm of social organization (“Since all nations have either achieved or are on the way to achieving independence, there will soon no longer exist a world divided into nations that rule others and nations that are subject to others. Men all over the world have today—or will soon have—the rank of citizens in independent nations”).57 States (or “nations,” in the undifferentiated terminology of the document) have moral agency and freedom, given that they “cannot lawfully seek that development of their own resources which brings harm to other states and unjustly oppresses them.”58 The same moral law that governs interpersonal relations “serves also to regulate the relations of nations with one another.”59 The collective right of peoples includes self-determination—a self which must in this context be a corporate one. In describing independence movements across the world, Pacem in terris introduces the category of ethnicity into doctrinal vocabulary. Noting the socio-psychological impact of global decolonization upon the individuals who compose societies, the encyclical advises that no one wants to feel subject to political powers located outside his or her own country or ethnic group. Thus in very many human beings the inferiority complex which endured for hundreds and thousands of years is disappearing, while in others there is an attenuation and gradual fading of the corresponding superiority complex which had its roots in social-economic privileges, sex or political standing.60

It is not only however individuals who are subject to emotion: “Nations are wont to be very sensitive in all matters which in any way concern their dignity and honor, and rightly so.”61 While care for internal minorities, their language, their customs, and their economic accomplishments is advised, the document also notes the reactive superiority which can result from the experience of ressentiment: [M]inority groups, either because of their present situation which they are forced to endure, or because of past experiences, are often inclined to exalt beyond due measure anything proper to their own people, and to such a degree as to look down on things common to all mankind as if the welfare of the human family must yield to the good of their own ethnic group.62

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Thus although the value of ethnic particularity is recognized, the common good of the whole of humanity continues to be affirmed as a superior value.

Vatican II and the Cultural Turn The spirit of aggiornamento called for by Pope John XXIII in the Second Vatican Council made the Church dramatically more willing to pronounce on social realities from a truly global perspective. The sixteen main documents of the Council cover a range of issues pertinent to the contemporary life of the Church, ad intra and ad extra. Within the documents, no specific treatment of nationality or nationalism is found. However, an analysis of the terminology of the Council shows a varying use of the word “nation” and its derivatives. This instability reflects both scholarly and popular usage, but is also a result of the fact that the documents are the work of many different hands. “Nation” occurs frequently in direct biblical quotations (e.g., Lumen gentium 1: “Christ is the light of the nations”), or as a synonym for “people.”63 Frequently, “nation” and its derivatives are to refer to what is in fact the political state, and nationality is treated in both ethno-cultural and territorial aspects. Ad gentes, the decree on missionary activity, uses “nations” (gentes) in New Testament form, in contradistinction to “Christians.”64 Within the documents of the Council, the term nationalismus appears once only, and in a negative tone, where it is coupled with racial prejudice as the anti-values to good citizenship and true patriotism.65 The Council continues to assume that humanity is divided naturally into nations, who all have their own “nature and . . . genius,” “their own national way of thinking and acting.”66 These characteristics are referred to parenthetically as “the life of communities,” “the wisdom received from ancestors,” “the character proper to each people.”67 The phrases all suggest that cultural nationality that Summi pontificatus celebrates as being God-given. The concept of moral agency of nations also reappears in conciliar documents. Nations are subject to divine law and have both will and a collective responsibility: “Wherever there are people in need, there Christian charity should . . . help them with appropriate relief. This obligation is imposed above all upon every prosperous nation and person.”68 Although references to issues of nationality occur sporadically in other documents, it is primarily Gaudium et spes, one of the four Constitutions of the Council, that is most relevant for a theology of nationality. Its famous opening words express the spirit of the whole document: The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and

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hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.69

Gaudium et spes is relevant for a theological investigation of nationality largely for its consideration of culture. The constitution, which has been described as the document in which “the Church as a totality becomes conscious of its responsibility for the dawning history of humanity,” 70 discusses culture as a subset of the relationship between the “the men of this age” and the “followers of Christ”—what Richard Niebuhr described as Christianity’s “enduring problem.”71 One historically important manifestation of this problem has been the chronically tense relationship between church and state. Yet another, equally important corollary of that same problem is the relationship between religious and other social identities. Ad gentes for example notes the potential tensions involved in simultaneous loyalties to localized culture and the supra-national Church. While the faithful “belong to the nation in which they were born,” they simultaneously belong to Christ, “because they were regenerated in the Church by faith and by baptism.”72 Gaudium et spes posits no Johannine diametric opposition between the Church and “the world” but points out that the Church and world share the same concerns. John O’Malley notes that the document is “unique in the annals of conciliar history not only in that it tried to deal with a broad range of social issues . . . but that it addressed ‘all persons of good will,’ not just Roman Catholics.”73 In addressing “all persons,” the Church was inexorably faced with questions of culture: “Since it is the total man/woman who is addressed by the Church and since culture is an essential element of the human, the encounter between the Church and modern culture was at the heart of . . . the Council.”74 Indeed, “distinctive of the aggiornamento of Vatican II in all its aspects was a keener awareness of cultural differences . . . than any previous conciliar reform.”75 Paragraph 53 of the Constitution furnishes a broad understanding of the notion of culture: The word “culture” in its general sense indicates everything whereby man develops and perfects his many bodily and spiritual qualities. Throughout the course of time he expresses, communicates and conserves in his works, great spiritual experiences and desires, that they might be of advantage to the progress of many, even of the whole human family.

Fritzleo Lentzen-Deis notes that this catchall summary sidesteps defining culture, thus avoiding the differing emphases of philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists and ethnologists.76 Yet difficulty arriving at a formal defini-

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tion of a subject does not preclude discussion. Gaudium et spes understands culture to be both plural and particular, i.e., it is not only interested in culture, considered abstractly, but in cultures. According to Roberto Tucci, the Constitution’s statements on culture “imply a favorable attitude to cultural pluralism.”77 Humans are culturally located in specific historical, social and ethnic frameworks: Different styles of life and multiple scales of values arise from the diverse manner of using things, of laboring, of expressing oneself, of practicing religion, of forming customs, of establishing laws and juridical institutions of cultivating the sciences, the arts and beauty. Thus the customs handed down to it form the patrimony proper to each human community. It is also in this way that there is formed the definite, historical milieu which enfolds the man of every nation and age and from which he draws the values which permit him to promote civilization.78

According to Lentzen-Deis, Gaudium et spes presents a “dynamic, historical view of humanity in the process of building itself up . . . both individually and collectively.”79 Culture-formation is understood as a form of obedience to the primal divine command to have dominion over the world (Gen 1), a task which calls for free and responsible engagement. Humanity reaches its fullness only through and in culture. As we have seen, papal documents place nations in the “natural” order. Wherever human life is involved, “nature and culture are quite intimately connected one with the other.”80 Culture—“cultivating the goods and values of nature”—would therefore include developing and perfecting the anthropological substrate of nationality, channeling its energies constructively, and continually purifying it of its more volatile elements. Yet this work is not a purely natural or totally secular activity. Within a Christian economy, culture reflects the Paschal mystery: “Gaudium et spes sees this approach to earthly realities . . . as revealed in the person of Jesus. It presents Christ as the revealer of truth about humanity and humanization.”81 If nationality is one of a series of natural goods—one form of inculturated nature—then it is at least a potential good and can contribute to building up the Kingdom. Placing national identity in a necessary but subsidiary relationship with human solidarity, it becomes evident that each particular nationality must have a universal goal. Although it is a value, it cannot be an absolute one. Luigi Rulla claims that the principle of the fundamental equality of all persons, stated in Gaudium et spes 29, means that human institutions also “must aim at the goal of a self-transcendence centered on God.”82 If this God-centered self-transcendence is to be integral, it must

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involve communal aspects of identity as well as individual ones, and apply collectively. Seen in this light then, the fomentation of particular cultures is not necessarily solipsistic. Nor does the championing of one’s own nation necessarily involve a claim that any other nation, ethnic community, or group of people is intrinsically inferior. Rather, these social institutions provide the “definite historical milieu” out of and in which each human person expresses the call to universal fraternity. Article 28 of the Constitution, discussing relations with “those who think or act differently than we do in social, political and even religious matters,” urges respect and love as fundamental imperatives for relations between groups as well as between individuals. The family is “a kind of school of deeper humanity,”83 which fosters the praxis of love and respect, and humanity is “the family of nations.”84 One of the scholarly skirmishes on nationality concerns the very nature of national identity, skeptics stressing its historical and contingent elements, while primordialists and nationalists emphasize the continuities which bind people together as a nation. Volksgeistlich national essentialism goes in search of immutable characteristics which define nation N as a particular, distinct group of people. Where identity is construed instead as a dynamic process, the bond between individuals is strengthened by an authentic and altruistic sense of self. Taking interpersonal relationships as an analogy, it becomes clear that the greater the sense of integrated and healthy selfhood of a culture, ethnic group or nation, the greater the possibilities of healthy relations with other similar groups. National sibling rivalry is not a foregone conclusion. Distinctiveness is the condition for unity, for it is the arena in which loving respect can be concretely practiced. Gaudium et spes indicates that specific culture is the condition for universal brotherhood, and therefore a concrete medium of salvation: There are many ties between the message of salvation and human culture. For God, revealing Himself to His people to the extent of a full manifestation of Himself in His Incarnate Son, has spoken according to the culture proper to each epoch. Likewise the Church, living in various circumstances in the course of time, has used the discoveries of different cultures so that . . . she might spread and explain the message of Christ to all nations, that she might examine it and more deeply understand it.85

Tucci explains that “grace also calls for culture, because this constitutes the normal point of insertion of grace in human life.”86 The paragraph above discusses culture in a more narrow sense, i.e., as art. Yet the principle also applies to a wider, anthropological notion of culture. Rather than being adversarial to grace, culture is one of the loci in which grace is received from

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and handed on to the world. The fact that Christianity has an eschatological focus “in no way decreases, rather it increases, the importance of [Christians’] obligation to work with all men in the building of a more human world.”87 The theological assumption at work here is that of the dictum gratia supponit naturam et eam perficit. The Council explicitly affirms the “legitimate autonomy of human culture.”88 Although autonomous, the various enterprises which constitute culture can also be gathered into “one vital synthesis with religious values, under whose supreme direction all things are harmonized unto God’s glory.”89 In the meeting of the secular (“cultural endeavor”) and the sacred (“religious values”), there exist several typical paradigmatic attitudes. In an oppositional relationship, the secular world is seen as extraneous and irrelevant to the world of the sacred. This stance has historically produced paradigmatic behaviors of withdrawal from the world, as in the case of religious sects (although this spirituality also has many orthodox manifestations). On the other hand, a tactic of accommodation sees the world as having “cultural patterns that are uncritically accepted as morally correct. The role of the Christian thus demands that a true believer become a good citizen, unquestioningly accepting the norms of society. Society, or the nation, becomes the ultimate definer of religion.”90 Neither extreme is accepted by Gaudium et spes: They are mistaken who, knowing that we have here no abiding city but seek one which is to come, think that they may therefore shirk their earthly responsibilities. . . . Nor, on the contrary, are they any less wide of the mark who think that religion consists in acts of worship alone and in the discharge of certain moral obligations. . . . This split between the faith which many profess and their daily lives deserves to be counted among the more serious errors of our age. . . . Let there be no false opposition between professional and social activities on the one part, and religious life on the other.91

Instead, Christian life partakes of and contributes to culture, but is not identical with it, in that “the earthly and the heavenly city penetrate each other.”92 The philosopher J. R. Jones’s concept of interpenetration is that of a process involving two differing realities, “when one runs as it were totally through the other; when one goes as it were into the other, without merging, but rather creating an interior relationship which does not come about when substances are merely joined together.”93 The interpenetration of the sacred and the secular derive from the innate dignity of the human person as image and likeness of God and from the God-given nature of human activity. These provide “the foundation for the relationship between the Church and the world.”94 In other words, the secular and the sacred subsist in each other.

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The theological and pastoral approach proposed by Gaudium et spes is then one which is profoundly incarnational. In Christ, the Word and the world are hypostatically united. All christic realities participate in that anthropological-divine unity, which exists, in the definition of the Council of Chalcedon, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.” Consequently, Gaudium et spes sees the Church as being in a necessarily intimate union with the world—a process which requires of both partners a sense of self and relative autonomy. The autonomy of human culture is not however absolute. Gaudium et spes 56 asks how cultural autonomy may be “recognized as legitimate without generating a notion of humanism which is merely terrestrial, and even contrary to religion itself?” (The question is relevant to “civil religion” and to the noxious varieties of nationalism.) If human culture is to avoid the extremes of secularist reductionism and atheistic ethnocentricity, it must be subject to divine law, concretized in the common good and in the rights of the individual and the community. Cultural freedom does not include freedom from ethical responsibility. Like all created goods, each culture is a means rather than an end, ordained toward the full realization of humanity, in both individual and social dimensions. Cultures therefore have a certain salvific teleology. While Gaudium et spes encourages dialogue between the Church and culture, it does not present them as equal partners. Rather, the Gospel which the Church preaches “constantly renews the life and culture of fallen man; it combats and removes the errors and evils resulting from the permanent allurement of sin.” In this sense, the Church, “in the very fulfillment of her own function, stimulates and advances human and civic culture.”95 Metaphors of renewal, purification and strengthening suggest the sacraments of initiation—baptism, confirmation and Eucharist—by which a person is inducted into the life of the Spirit. Notably, the object of the Gospel’s administration described here is collective: “humanity” and “peoples.” The sacraments do not destroy identity but bring it to perfection, in a process of transformation combining constancy with change.96 Rather than destroying or superseding culture, the Gospel reveals the true nature of culture, and enables it to fulfill its purpose. The implication of this is that a particular culture (and within that portmanteau concept, a national identity also) cannot meet its true aims without the assistance of Christian faith. The sacraments are channels of radically gratuitous grace with which the receiver may, or may not, cooperate. Grace is not imposed from without, but requires conscious assent and free cooperation. Gaudium et spes is not irenic about the difficulties of the encounter between the Gospel and culture: “Although the Church has contributed much

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to the development of culture, experience shows that, for circumstantial reasons, it is sometimes difficult to harmonize culture with Christian teaching.”97 Prime among these “circumstantial reasons” is the fact that culture is invariably localized, historically conditioned, and particular. Particularity provides the necessary foundation on which universality may be built. Yet in the same way that cultural particularity is not an absolute value, neither is universality. The universality of the Church is presented as a value, but only as a function of its mission, which is “service to the cause of man, and of bringing about unity among men.”98 The value of Christian universality then is not that it is universal, but that it is Christian. Jesus gave His Church no proper mission in the political, economic or social order. The purpose which He set before her is a religious one. . . . Moreover, since in virtue of her mission and nature she is bound to no particular form of human culture, nor to any political, economic or social system, the Church by her very universality can be a very close bond between diverse human communities and nations.99

Moreover, the Constitution singles out for particular criticism secular forms of totalitarianism which have universalist pretensions: the “appetite for political supremacy,” “militaristic calculations” and “machinations for the sake of spreading and imposing ideologies.”100 The ferment of the years immediately following the Council saw many conscious attempts to inculturate the Gospel in “diverse human communities and nations.” The Catholic Church’s basis of population was shifting increasingly toward the developing world. Populorum progressio, the 1967 encyclical of Pope Paul VI on world development, reiterated papal insistence that moral responsibilities obtain collectively. For the sake of the whole of humanity, “the same duty of solidarity that rests on individuals exists also for nations: advanced nations have a very heavy obligation to help the developing peoples.”101 Populorum progressio also marks one of the rare appearances in official Vatican translations of the word “nationalism”: There are other obstacles to creation of a more just social order and to the development of world solidarity: nationalism and racism. It is quite natural that nations recently arrived at political independence should be quite jealous of their newfound but fragile unity and make every effort to preserve it. It is also quite natural for nations with a long-standing cultural tradition to be proud of their traditional heritage. But this commendable attitude should be further ennobled by love, a love for the whole family of man. Haughty pride in one’s own nation disunites nations and poses obstacles to their true welfare.102

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The Latin text however employs of suae nationis gloriatio, a far more generic idea than “nationalism”; the Vulgate term gloriatio may also be translated as “boasting” (e.g., 2 Cor 1:14 and 7:16). The “boasting about one’s own nation” criticized here is therefore not that nationalism defined by Anthony D. Smith as “an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining identity, unity and autonomy of a social group, some of whose members deem it to constitute an actual or potential nation.” Rather, since it is coupled and paralleled with racism (cum propriae civitatis gloriatio tum suae cuiusque stirpis veluti cultus) it refers to a collective psychological attitude of superiority—akin to exclusivist ethnocentricity. This attitude is not the exclusive property of new nations. Nor is it only a ressentiment-based reaction to the trauma of being colonized. As a form of avarice, ethnocentric and racist gloriatio is a sin more characteristic of technically advanced societies.103 Paul VI’s 1976 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii nuntiandi includes a pertinent discussion of the question of the relationship between the Church and cultures, a matter of particular resonance at the time. The end of colonialism and the establishment of new states resulted in a need to establish markers of national identity. In Latin America, theologians and church leaders took a decidedly economic and labor-based interpretation of the conciliar documents. The 1968 gathering of the Latin American Bishops’ Conference in Medellín, Colombia, which met to discuss the implementation and implications of the reforms of the Council, produced a scathing attack on economic injustice. In response to the postconciliar debate over social structures that contribute to poverty, Paul VI rejected forms of evangelization that were limited to improving material welfare or at the other extreme, to an otherworldly piety. Instead, “what matters is to evangelize man’s culture and cultures (not in a purely decorative way, as it were, by applying a thin veneer, but in a vital way, in depth and right to their very roots) . . . always taking the person as one’s starting-point and always coming back to the relationships of people among themselves and with God.”104 The phrase “culture or cultures” is noteworthy, for it reflects a growing theological awareness of cultural diversity. Paul VI develops the teaching of Gaudium et spes regarding the asymmetrical relationship between church and world, noting that the Gospel always takes a form which is shaped by history and culture: The Gospel, and therefore evangelization, is certainly not identical with culture, and they are independent in regard to all cultures. Nevertheless, the kingdom which the Gospel proclaims is lived by men who are profoundly linked to a culture, and the building up of the kingdom cannot avoid borrowing the elements of human culture or cultures. Though independent of cultures, the

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Gospel and evangelization are not necessarily incompatible with them; rather they are capable of permeating them all without becoming subject to any one of them.105

“Not necessarily incompatible” signals that evangelization can be countercultural. It includes overturning “mankind’s criteria of judgment, determining values, points of interest, lines of thought, sources of inspiration and models of life, which are in contrast with the Word of God and the plan of salvation.”106 Despite the difficulties involved, “every effort must be made to ensure a full evangelization of culture, or more correctly of cultures. They have to be regenerated by an encounter with the Gospel.”107 Evangelii nuntiandi identifies the ambiguity and tensions which exist beneath the surface in the mission of the Church: in a world-affirming faith, the Gospel runs the danger of becoming identified with cultural forms (Turner’s “tribal religion”). Yet to deny the importance of cultures produces a disincarnate and denatured Christianity.

The Polish Pope: Integrism Redux The dialectic between Christian identity and ambient culture was a major theme in the writings of John Paul II, a native of a country where Catholic and national identities are closely intertwined. The childhood and early adult years of Karol Wojtyla were spent in the shadow of two anti-Christian ideologies. The totalitarian and expansionist powers of both Nazism and Soviet Communism had denied Poles free and independent expression of their national culture and Catholic faith. Six of his major encyclicals include comments of interest to the theme of nationality. Redemptor hominis (1979) set out the major outlines of John Paul’s theological anthropology. Here, for the first time in a major papal document, nationality is treated as a clearly theological category. The encyclical recapitulates his predecessors’ application of moral personhood to nations. The growth of social love, of respect for the rights of others—“for every man, nation and people.”108 Social love involves an “authentic love of country.” This attitude stands in contrast to the anti-value of nationalismus exacerbatus, which is “the propensity to dominate others beyond the limits of one’s legitimate rights and merits, and the propensity to exploit the whole of material progress . . . for the exclusive purpose of dominating others or of favoring this or that imperialism,”109 and coupled with selfishness. Nationalism and imperialism are explicitly grouped together, as variations on the same theme of self-idolatry.

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John Paul suggests that there is an inseparable link between the individual, the family and the nation, all of whom have innate responsibilities and rights. “Violation of the rights of man goes hand in hand with violation of the rights of the nation, with which man is united by organic links as with a larger family.”110 We should note the reappearance in this phrase of the Herderian-flavored word “organic,” an echo of Pius XII’s Summi pontificatus. Noteworthy too are the explicit assertions of national rights, the emphasis on the social aspect of human identity, and the analogy of nation to family, another Herderian note. These themes, all of them favored topics of Romantic nationalism, would turn out to be key Wojtylan topics. The 1981 encyclical Laborem exercens, one of John Paul II’s major writings on socio-political questions, addresses the question of nationality at length. Repeating the analogy that exists between nation and family, but considering both of them in the context of work, the encyclical presents the family as an incarnational reality. Endowed with aspects which are divine and human, sacred and secular, the family is at the same time both God’s gratuitous gift and the arena for exercising freedom in response to that gift. Presenting the family as the basic building block of society, the encyclical then turns its attention to the great society to which man belongs on the basis of particular cultural and historical links. This society—even when it has not yet taken on the mature form of a nation—is not only the great “educator” of every man . . . (because each individual absorbs within the family the contents and values that go to make up the culture of a given nation); it is also a great historical and social incarnation of the work of all generations. All of this brings it about that man combines his deepest human identity with membership of a nation.111

John Paul’s assertions here represent considerable innovations in papal teaching, not least in his evolutionary view of social development, the culmination of which is the nation. The most startling statement, however, is his acceptance of the national identity of each individual person as an objective reality, and its connection with each person’s “deepest human identity.” John Paul’s interest here is not so much in nations, but in the role of the national in the human constitution. The matter of the nation is thus separated from church-state relations and placed firmly in the field of theological anthropology. Similar assertions are made in one of the most personal encyclicals of the Polish pope, his 1986 Slavorum apostoli. Written during the final decline of Polish communism and the rise of pro-democracy movements in all of the Slavic countries, it asserts the value of the Church’s catholicity: “Perfect communion

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in love preserves the Church from all forms of particularism, ethnic exclusivism or racial prejudice, and from any nationalistic arrogance. This communion must elevate and sublimate every purely natural legitimate sentiment of the human heart.”112 This oikumene however, consists of a variety of cultures: The Church is catholic because she is able to present in every human context the revealed truth . . . in such a way as to bring it into contact with the lofty thoughts and just expectations of every individual and every people. Moreover, the entire patrimony of good which every generation transmits to posterity . . . forms as it were an immense and many-colored collection of tesserae that together make up the living mosaic of the Pantocrator, who will manifest himself in his total splendor only at the moment of the Parousia.113

This trenchant paragraph contains some intriguing associations and implications, for it associates the panoply of “every individual and every people” explicitly with the Incarnation. In Pauline theology, the Body of Christ is composed of individual Christians, with Christ, the “image (eikon) of the unseen God” (Col 1:15) at the head. The “living mosaic of the Pantocrator” eloquently evokes the icons of the Eastern Church and its practice of venerating images of Christ and the saints. In the theology of the Eastern Church, the icon is a quasi-sacramental presence of what it represents. Analogically, as the body of Christ, the Church can be said to be an icon (“the living mosaic”) of Christ. The total effect of this paragraph is to bring together the spheres of nation, church and icon. It suggests poetically—without ever explicitly stating so—that the Church, the image of Christ, is made up not only of individual Christians, but also of a diversity of national cultures. The paragraph also posits a relationship between the whole (the mosaic of the Pantocrator) and its constituent parts. Within these parts, cultural diversity is championed (within a theology of gratia supponit naturam) as the bearer of those “things which every individual, people and nation and every culture throughout history recognizes and brings into being as goodness, truth and beauty.” Refuting the idea that faith has nothing to do with culture, John Paul insists that Gospel and nation have something to say to one another, for the Gospel strives to assimilate and to develop all these values, to live them with magnanimity and joy and to perfect them. The concrete dimension of catholicity, inscribed by Christ the Lord in the very make-up of the Church, is not something static, outside history and flatly uniform. In a certain sense it wells up and develops every day as something new from the unanimous faith of all those who believe in God. This dimension issues quite spontaneously from mutual

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respect proper to fraternal love—for every person and every nation, great or small. . . . All individuals, all nations, cultures and civilizations have their own part to play and their own place in God’s mysterious plan and in the universal history of salvation.

Laborem exercens had discussed the role of national identity within the constitution of the human person. Here, in contrast, the emphasis is on the mission of every nation within the unfolding of the Kingdom. The assertion itself of the salvific role of “all nations” represents a significant development in teaching. As in Pacem in terris, however, caveats are placed around the value of cultural particularity. To counter the danger of fragmentation into ethnic, national or regional solipsism, John Paul II insists that the demands of nationality must be counter-balanced by the value of universality—a conviction that was reflected in his recentralization of Church authority in Rome. Each local church, he stresses, “must remain open and alert to the other Churches and traditions and, at the same time, to universal and catholic communion” lest it become “impoverished.”114 John Paul II ends the encyclical with a direct address to God. In a combination of prayer and cultural encomium, he thanks God “who called the Slav nations into the communion of the faith, for this heritage and for the contribution made by them to the universal patrimony”115—a clear suggestion that God deals not only with the individual human soul but also with nations. Whether or not this is merely a literary turn is of course open to debate. It certainly reveals the pervasive influence of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury concepts of nationality, derived from biblical models but somewhat reformulated by Romanticism. Given the importance of Mary as national symbol in Poland, it is not surprising that John Paul II’s 1987 Redemptoris mater should refer to national aspects of Marian piety. A notably devotional register characterizes this Marian encyclical. The document begins with a recognition of the universal significance of the Virgin Mary, whose “exceptional pilgrimage of faith represents a constant point of reference for the Church, for individuals and for communities, for peoples and nations.”116 The theme of pilgrimage is taken up in one particularly striking paragraph which makes reference to Marian shrines, “where not only individuals or local groups, but sometimes whole nations and societies, even whole continents, seek to meet the Mother of the Lord.”117 While theologically imprecise, the idea of “meeting the Mother of the Lord” evokes powerful emotions. It draws not from academic theological reflection, nor even primarily from the Bible, but rather evokes the practices of popular piety—a return to the theological voice of parts of Summi pontificatus.

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Some significant elements in popular Marian devotion—intense affect, widespread appeal, a tendency to accruing legends, superstition, connections with political and social movements, and ties with specific shrines and geographical localities—are tantalizingly similar to expressions of patriotism. It is not surprising that veneration of the Virgin Mary can easily take on a national tone. A paean to Mary’s universal maternal care, concentrated in numerous places throughout the world, evokes this religio-national nexus. The motherhood of Mary is the message of the Land of Palestine, the spiritual homeland of all Christians because it was the homeland of the Savior of the world and of his Mother. . . . This is the message of centers like Guadalupe, Lourdes, Fatima and the others situated in the various countries.118

Each of the shrines mentioned has been adopted as potent national symbols. The Marian apparitions or miraculous events connected with them have had significant political ramifications, often involving competition between church and state.119 John Paul goes on to refer to the way in which such shrines are places of encounter with the sacred: One could perhaps speak of a specific “geography” of faith and Marian devotion, which includes all these special places of pilgrimage where the People of God seek to meet the Mother of God in order to find, within the radius of the maternal presence of her “who believed,” a strengthening of their own faith. For in Mary’s faith, first at the Annunciation and then fully at the foot of the Cross, an interior space was reopened within humanity which the eternal Father can fill “with every spiritual blessing.” It is the space “of the new and eternal Covenant,” and it continues to exist in the Church.

Once again, in typical Wojtylan style, a rich and striking interplay of metaphors is at work, drawing connections between the spiritual (Mary’s internal disposition, her kenosis, the figure of Mary as paradigm of the Church) and the physical (her physical motherhood, the “geography of faith”). Each of the named individual Marian shrines which constitute John Paul’s “geography of faith” is at the same time an ethnoscape, that “poetic landscape” which Anthony D. Smith calls “an extension and expression of the character of the ethnic community.” In these places, religious and national considerations have been so closely associated as to be inseparable. With his next encyclical, Sollicitudo rei socialis (1987), John Paul returned to questions of social morality. Earlier papal documents had been signally imprecise in their use of the terms “nation,” “state” and “people.”

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In discussing national rights, Sollicitudo rei socialis includes the first attempt in a papal document to define nationhood: It often happens that a nation is deprived of its subjectivity, that is to say the sovereignty which is its right, in its economic, political-social and in a certain way cultural significance, since in a national community all these dimensions of life are bound together.120

National sovereignty includes not only the political life of a state, but also the wider psychological and spiritual life of its inhabitants, a concept close to Romantic notions of Volksgeist. Here the nation is defined in terms that extend beyond culture: the nation is also the subject of economical and socio-political affairs. National sovereignty is however a hapax legomenon in papal teaching, for the phrase and concept has not been further developed. The 1991 encyclical Centesimus annus was written to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of Rerum novarum. Against charges that the Church should limit itself to spiritual concerns, John Paul II defends his predecessor’s innovation, asserting that the Church “has something to say about specific human situations, both individual and communal, national and international.”121 Centesimus annus contains an important description of aggressive nationalism. When it takes the form of exclusivism or claims of superiority, nationalism is the fruit of an inauthentic philosophy which “consists of an understanding of human freedom which detaches it from obedience to the truth, and consequently from the duty to respect the rights of others.”122 In this collective egoism, “the essence of freedom then becomes self-love carried to the point of contempt for God and neighbor, a self-love which leads to an unbridled affirmation of self-interest and which refuses to be limited by any demand of justice.” The “self” of “self-love” and “self-interest” is the national, corporate self responsible for these sins and crimes. Referring to the first and second World Wars, the encyclical places “exaggerated nationalism” in the company of militarism and totalitarianism. All egregiously disrespect the rights of individuals and other nations. Centesimus annus reiterates the importance of the cultural dimensions of human life. Discussing the fall of Eastern European Communism, John Paul II rejects a purely economic analysis of that historical event itself. It also decries the materialist reductionism of Marxist philosophy and praxis and its insufficient philosophy of the human person. A purely materialist mindset attributes little importance to culture, but is centered on socio-economic concerns alone. “It is not possible to understand the human person on the basis of economics alone, nor to define the person simply on the basis of class

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membership,” John Paul writes. “A human being is understood in a more complete way when situated within the sphere of culture through language, history, and the position one takes toward the fundamental events of life, such as birth, love, work and death.” Each individual is better understood when one recognizes how his or her culture deals with the question of God: “Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence. When this question is eliminated, the culture and moral life of nations are corrupted. For this reason the struggle to defend work was spontaneously linked to the struggle for culture and for national rights.”123 Under the communist regime, the struggle for culture was at the same time a struggle for faith, for Soviet atheism “deprived the younger generations of a sense of direction and in many cases led them, in the irrepressible search for personal identity and for the meaning of life, to rediscover the religious roots of their national cultures.”124 However, it is not atheist Marxism alone that is found to be spiritually deficient. Capitalist materialism is also criticized: The freedom from alienation proclaimed by the Marxist internationale continues in the modern world, perpetuated, inter alia, in the form of manipulation by the media of mass communication, which impose fashions and trends of opinion through carefully orchestrated repetition, without it being possible to subject to critical scrutiny the premises on which these fashions and trends are based.125

In other words, the capitalist drive behind the mass media industries promulgates a mindset which is inevitably destructive of distinctive cultures. In Sollicitudo rei socialis, John Paul had attacked the way that richer economies instrumentalize developing countries. Centesimus annus makes plain that there is inequality of power in the domain of culture too. Social communications, run out of the rich North, do not always give due consideration to the priorities and problems of developing countries, nor respect their cultural traditions. They “frequently impose a distorted vision of life and of man and thus fail to respond to the demands of true development.”126 Materialist communism and unbridled capitalism alike tend toward “imperialism, or towards forms of neo-colonialism: an easy temptation to which they frequently succumb.” An important mechanism of imperialism is a monocultural ethnocentrism which downplays the spiritual values inherent in the diversity of human cultures. Imperialism, whether economic, political, or cultural, is inseparably adversarial to local, national particularities and the spiritual “wealth of the nations.”

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In John Paul II’s theology, mutually inseparable national and religious roots are revealed to be dynamic, longue durée forces. Historical developments reveal these deep-rooted instincts to be more powerful than the shortlived ideology of Marxist materialism. Two interrelated themes emerge from this group of encyclicals, ideas which are also found throughout his immense corpus of writings and speeches. Against materialistic reductionism, he insists on the anthropological primacy of culture, and gives an important place to national culture in the constitution of the human person: The need to accept one’s own culture as a structuring element of one’s personality . . . is a fact of universal experience whose importance can hardly be overestimated . . . It is on the basis of this essential relationship with one’s own “origins”—on the level of the family, but also of territory, society and culture—that people acquire a sense of their nationality, and culture tends to take on . . . a “national” configuration. . . . This is a natural process, in which sociological and psychological forces interact, with results that are normally positive and constructive.127

Secondly, cultural particularity is presented positively. Yet although it is an important value, it cannot be allowed to dominate over other, more pressing considerations. “Love for one’s country is thus a value to be fostered,” he writes, but “with an effort to avoid those pathological manifestations which occur when the sense of belonging turns into self-exaltation, the rejection of diversity, and forms of nationalism, racism and xenophobia.”128 In John Paul’s vision then, patriotism is a virtue that is fully compatible with impartial brotherly love for all nations. Nonetheless, the common good requires that it take a secondary rank. The natural loyalty represented by concepts like dulce et decorum est pro patria mori must yield to the self-giving desire to sacrifice pro multis that following Christ involves.

The Cautious Catechism Among the most pastorally significant documents of the papacy of John Paul was the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church, which he ordered to be compiled in response to a desire for a “compendium of all Catholic doctrine regarding both faith and morals.”129 An editio typica, containing numerous emendations, was promulgated in 1997. As a “major catechism,” intended as a source for so-called “minor catechisms” (of less complexity and geared to more specific readerships), it aims at summarizing the universal teaching of the Church. A cursory examination of the Catechism suggests that any contributions it might make to a theological discussion of nationality are very limited.

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Strictly speaking, it contains not a single paragraph dedicated to nationality. By comparison, incest—presumably a far more infrequent human experience than national belonging—merits three full paragraphs of its own. Of the 66 occurrences of “nation” and “nations” in the English translation, roughly one half are in the form of biblical quotations, the most frequently occurring of which is 1 Pe 2:9. “National” occurs only twice, and there are no entries for either “nationality” or “nationalism.” However, a more detailed analysis of the issues connected with nationality reveals that in fact, the Catechism provides, albeit sotto voce, some significant contributions to a theology of nationality. In discussing the stages of revelation, the Catechism makes what is its most complete reference to the “the nations,” understanding these as men grouped “in their lands, each with (its) own language, by their families, in their nations.” This state of division into many nations is at once cosmic, social and religious, each entrusted by divine providence to the guardianship of angels. It is intended to limit the pride of fallen humanity united only in its perverse ambition to forge its own unity as at Babel. But, because of sin, both polytheism and the idolatry of the nation and of its rulers constantly threaten this provisional economy with the perversion of paganism.130

An interesting emendation in the editio typica omits “each entrusted by divine providence to the guardianship of angels,” along with references to Deut 4:19 (which suggests a divine origin for polytheism) and Deut 32:8–9 (which describes Yahweh’s allotment of nationality according to “the number of the sons of God,” i.e., angels). As it stands, the paragraph is strikingly vague as to why and how the division into nations is cosmic and religious as well as social. The Catechism assumes the de facto division of humanity into nations as forms of social organization. It attributes this division to perennial natural law (referred to occasionally as “the law of nations”), which “subsists under the flux of ideas and customs” (1958). While it recognizes the objective existence of nations it also signals the potential danger of national idolatry—presumably a veiled reference to certain forms of nationalism (e.g., 1939). The nation appears amongst those groupings, including the family, to which humans have the obligation of solidarity (2281); the word appears in company with “people” and “ethnic minority” in a condemnation of genocide (171); and it is used generically, as in the trope “languages, cultures, peoples and nations” (2230, 2241, 2316, etc.). The Catechism gives its most intense focus of interest concerning nations to great moral issues. Significantly (in line with papal teaching over the

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previous century) moral personhood in the area of responsibilities and rights (2105, 2316, 2317, 2437, 2439) is attributed to the nation. While the cultural aspect of nationality is reflected in the phrase “spiritual qualities and endowments” (2527), the most common usage for “nation” is as a synonym for “political community.” This is a significant retrenchment from the wide theological treatment of nationality of John Paul II, and a return to the terminological inexactitude of earlier papal teaching. The political community arises from the needs of human nature: “Certain societies, such as the family and the state, correspond more directly to the nature of man; they are necessary to him” (1882). However, the discussion of modern political realities also employs biblical quotations which include the word “nations.” This anachronistic polysemia confuses different aspects of nationality—religious and political, ancient and modern. As an occasional synonym for “nations,” “peoples” provides more entries. “Peoples” have a distinctive “culture and genius” (1204); they are agents of moral action, and of the Gospel’s purification of that morality (2527); they have dignity and the goods necessary for the establishment of peace (2304) and receive the Gospel (854). The most common usage of “people” in the singular occurs in the phrase “People of God,” defined by characteristics that clearly distinguish it from all other religious, ethnic, political, or cultural groups. The Church is portrayed as a sui generis contradistinctive reality. The Church is the People of God; membership is acquired through baptism, not physical birth; its head is Jesus Christ and its people are “messianic.” The Church should not “be confused in any way with the political community” (2245). Given the Catechism’s paucity of explicit references to the nation and questions of national identity, its potential contributions have largely to be extrapolated by analogy and argumentation drawing particularly on its treatment of the significance of social identity: “The human person needs to live in society. Society is not for him an extraneous addition but a requirement of his nature” (1879). A society is defined as a group of persons bound together organically by a principle of unity that goes beyond each one of them. . . . By means of society, each man is established as an “heir” and receives certain “talents” that enrich his identity and whose fruits he must develop. He rightly owes loyalty to the communities of which he is a part and respect to those in authority who have charge of the common good (1880).

As an “essential” means for the development of the human person, society is to be ordered to this end (1886). Society is both visible and “spiri-

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tual,” for it is a repository of the past and a storehouse for the future (1880). The common good has no primacy over the individual; rather, the common good and the good of each individual person are interpenetrated and mutually implicating realities (1905). The common good is most completely effected by and in the political community (419). Consequently, human development requires the existence of a political community, which is “based on human nature and therefore . . . belongs to an order established by God, though by this no particular form of political organization is meant or lauded” (1901). Capitalism and communism alike are critiqued by the Catechism for being anthropologically insufficient (2424–2425). In a section on the eschatological tribulation of the Church, the Catechism warns against the Antichrist, represented by “a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth” (675). Materialist concepts of social development are criticized for their empty promises that it is possible “to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment.” A common critique of nationalism is that it represents an ersatz religiosity. It is important therefore to note that the Catechism rejects any “falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the ‘intrinsically perverse’ political form of a secular messianism” (676).131 Any ideology or any form of social organization which seeks to arrogate to itself the attributes of God or the Church is necessarily idolatrous, and sins against the First Commandment. The ultimate reason for the deficiencies of communism, unbridled capitalism or nationalism lies not in their praxis. Underlying all of them is an absence of faith: Every institution is inspired, at least implicitly, by a vision of man and his destiny, from which it derives the point of reference for its judgment, its hierarchy of values, its line of conduct. Most societies have formed their institutions in the recognition of a certain preeminence of man over things. Only the divinely revealed religion has clearly recognized man’s origin and destiny in God, the Creator and Redeemer. . . . “Societies not recognizing this vision or rejecting it in the name of their independence from God are brought to seek their criteria and goal in themselves or to borrow them from some ideology . . . [T]hey arrogate to themselves an explicit or implicit totalitarian power over man and his destiny, as history shows” (2244).132

This study has concentrated on nationality as a cultural phenomenon. The Catechism recognizes the existence of “the genius and culture of the different peoples” (1204). Moreover, the Church itself “generates cultures”

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(1207), and is shaped by those cultures. The relationship between culture and the Gospel is one not of replacement, accommodation, or withdrawal. Rather, in order that the mystery of Christ be “made known to all the nations,” it must be proclaimed, celebrated, and lived in all cultures in such a way that they themselves are not abolished by it, but redeemed and fulfilled. It is with and through their own human culture, assumed and transfigured by Christ, that the multitude of God’s children has access to the Father, in order to glorify him in the one Spirit (1204).

The catholicity of the Church is expressed in its vocation and mission, and concretized in “a variety of cultural, social, and human terrains” in which the Church takes on different expressions. Such diverse cultural expressions of faith show “all the more resplendently the catholicity of the undivided Church” (835). The relationship between religion and culture is not however equilateral, for the Church also transcends the limits of nation, culture, race, or sex (1267). One of the neuralgic points of questions of nationality concerns the relationship of particularity to universality. A disproportionate psychological stress on the uniqueness of a particular culture or nation can make union with other societies impossible. Conversely, where unity is confused with uniformity, national diversities will not be respected. A myopic concentration on either diversity or unity will destroy the possibility of healthy equilibrium between the two. This fundamental tension between unity and plurality exists within the Church itself—in the relationship between particular churches (“a community of the Christian faithful in communion of faith and sacraments with their bishop ordained in apostolic succession” [441]) and “the Church.” Since particularity is the precondition for and the concrete locus of the expression of unity, it is “in [the particular churches] and formed out of them that the one and unique Catholic Church exists.” In the Body of Christ, “the very differences which the Lord has willed to put between the members of his Body serve its unity and mission” (873). Since the identity of the Church is corporate, unity is both possible and required. Differences between the members of the body are the concrete opportunity for exercising love. Quoting a section of the Dialogues of St. Catherine of Siena, in which Christ addresses Catherine as to how virtue is exercised socially, the Catechism presents Jesus teaching that I have given many gifts and graces, both spiritual and temporal, with such diversity that I have not given everything to one single person, so that you may

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be constrained to practice charity towards one another. . . . I have willed that one should need another and that all should be my ministers in distributing the graces and gifts they have received from me (1937).

The assumption underlying the Catechism’s teaching on the relationship between particularity and diversity on the one hand and universality and unity on the other is that both sets of values are proximate goods. They have a subordinate function within salvation, yet are also susceptible to becoming ends in themselves. Each therefore acts as the necessary correction to the other, lest particularity degenerate into an egoistic particularism, and unity into monochrome uniformity. Another theological trope which illuminates the relationship between individual societies and the whole of humanity is found in the Catechism’s teaching on the “Communal Character of the Human Vocation.” Drawing on the theology of imago Dei, the Catechism presents the internal economy of the Trinity as the model for human relationships: “The divine image is present in every man. It shines forth in the communion of persons, in the likeness of the unity of the divine persons among themselves” (1702). In relationships modeled after the Trinity, unity and diversity mutually express each other, for the persons of the Trinity “are relative to one another. Because it does not divide the divine unity, the real distinction of the persons from one another resides solely in the relationships which relate them to one another” (255). The metaphysics of the Trinity lends itself to a series of analogous relationships, secular and religious: between individuals and any given society; between individuals and the Church; between local or even separated churches and the whole Church; and between the various kinds of social organizations (amongst which is the nation) and the community of nations. In all of these, love patterned on the Trinity will obviate the polar extremes of fragmentation and homogenization. In fragmentation, each part becomes absolutely autonomous and solipsistic, unity is shattered, and there is no possibility of relationship. At the other pole, where unity is confused with uniformity, there is no distinction between the parts, and loving respect relationship is likewise precluded, since there is no freedom involved. The analogues of these two dangers are many. Politically, fragmentation includes the political forms of isolationism, nationalismus exacerbatus and ethnic superiority. At the other extreme, homogenization takes totalitarian, imperialist colonialist, and globalizing cultural forms. Within the Church, forms of fragmentation have included heresies and schisms, as well as religiopolitical national election. The drive to standardize religious practice to such

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a degree that there is little room for expressing particular cultural identity meaningfully is an effective homogenization. Within the Trinity, parts and whole coincide to complement each other. Analogously, we can argue that individual societies (including nations) require the existence of the larger principle of the universal destiny of all created things lest they become ends in themselves. On the other hand, in order that the abstract ideals represented by the universal may become incarnated in history and place, they must be expressed in the particular, the specific, the local and the temporal. Trinitarian complementarity may also be applied to the connections between the Church and the world, which are united yet distinct. The Catechism discusses under the Fourth Commandment relations between the Church and civil society. Christians must learn to “distinguish between the growth of the Reign of God and the progress of the culture and society in which they are involved” (2820). However, distinction is not coextensive with separation. The Church “travels the same journey as all humanity and shares the same earthly lot with the world: she is to be a leaven and, as it were, the soul of human society in its renewal by Christ and transformation into the family of God” (854).133 The holy (which is universal and eternal) is leaven and soul of all the geographical and historical particularities of the world. Logically then, in order for “the Gospel to take flesh in each people’s culture” (854), the existence of the Church necessarily requires the existence of other kinds of society. Amongst these kinds of society is the nation.

Conclusion: Some Bricks and Mortar The historical context of the original composition of text is an important factor in determining its total meaning. Scripture and Church teaching arise from several thousand years of experience, ranging from the ancient Middle East into the age of the Internet. Neither Scripture nor the Catholic theological tradition provide one single, coherent scheme of nationality. Rather, they contain statements that reflect a number of different theological opinions, each of which has been articulated in response to specific historical situations. To the simple question “does God create nations?” a literalist reading of the Old Testament might come up with the answer “yes.” However, the question is far more complex than it appears. Creation can be variously understood as being once and for all or as ongoing, as being ordained by God’s divine action or as involving human action also, as simple or multilayered. Moreover, an assertion that something is created by God

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does not mean that that object is necessarily considered to be sacred, much less an object of worship. To hold that the Old Testament teaches that God creates nations would not necessarily be to believe that they are inalienably sacred realities. The categories of “created,” “sacred,” “holy,” “consecrated” and “divine” are neither discrete nor synonymous. The Hebrew Scriptures are not historical reportage, but faith narratives. This fact should warn us against rushing to hasty and un-nuanced conclusions about nationality based on scriptural evidence alone. A strict division into sacred and secular spheres does not make total sense, for the area of human life covered by “natural law” is also the result of creation, and therefore subject to God’s authority. Rather, the Bible shows that sacred and secular realities interpenetrate each other in complex ways. To this extent, all history—modern or ancient—is in some respect divine history. The existence of a radically secular reality is theologically questionable. The Hebrew scriptures do in fact offer some important theological insights into nationality. The people of Israel, Yahweh’s “treasured possession,” is party to the covenant. The terminus of the covenant is the territories given them, which become their “national,” historic homeland. The unity of Israel was a short-lived reality. Instead, the ideal of national sovereignty evoked a golden past, which in turn served as the basis of the prophecies of a redeemed future. Israelite nationality thus functions as mythic and theological truth, and the emotional tonality surrounding land and religio-cultural identity in contemporary Israel witnesses to the primordial importance of that truth. Such intense feeling also explains in part why many other peoples, removed at a distance of hundreds and thousands of miles and years, should also find in the Hebrew scriptures the framework and language upon which to ground their own experiences of religion, land and nationality. The Old Testament theology which has been of greatest influence in matters of nationality is election. This fact immediately raises the question of the extent to which the Israelite experience of national chosenness can be applied to other nation, and especially for nations which are majority Christian. (This is a different matter from how the Israelite experience has historically in fact been co-opted in all sorts of ways by different groups claiming to be the modern-day inheritors of God’s blessing upon Israel.) In biblical Israel, particularistic election coexists with a universalistic, missionary theology. From this coexistence emerges a pressing theological and practical question: how can the apparently opposing claims for particularity and universality be reconciled? The tension was particularly important in the life of the apostolic Church. The new Christian community inherited Israelite theological terminology, a significant degree of which involves national considerations. As in

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the Old Testament, the writers of the New Testament assume that humanity is divided, even under imperial rule, into discretely separated and named peoples. Whereas the Old Testament generally favors Israelite particularism over universalism, the focus of the New is distinctly universal. Having broken out of its Israelite territorial and ethno-national chrysalis, Christianity divides humanity along religious rather than ethnic lines. A residual theology of “the nations” as God’s agents is largely supplanted by a vision of the nations as the destinatories of Christian evangelization. As the proportion of Christians grew in the Roman Empire and beyond, the idea of a “Christian nation” was evangelization’s by-product. Christian nationalism frequently makes a promiscuous, loose and selective use of scripture. Patriotic biblical interpretation can be stringently literalist when convenient, yet focus on certain elements of the Christian kerygma while ignoring others. Consequently, what could appear to be an application of biblical images to any one nation may ultimately turn out to be merely a calculating abuse of Christianity in the service of ideology. Claims to being the one, holy people generally omit Christianity’s catholic and apostolic dimensions. Where particular identity is championed in this way, tensions will inevitably arise between religious or social loyalties. This imbalance is due not only to the emotive solipsism of particularistic national projects: it also derives from the limitations of their sources. A theology of nationality or of our nation based on sola scriptura will find itself embarrassed by lack of substance. Starkly put: the Bible alone does not provide enough primary material to articulate such a theology coherently. If scripture is insufficient in its explicit references to the question of the nation, at first sight the Catholic theological tradition promises to provide equally meager pickings. Neither the extraordinary magisterium nor the murmurations of Catholic theologians provide anything remotely approaching a detailed treatment of ethnic or national belonging. Instead, nationality has been largely accepted as part of that natural state of affairs which requires the existence of political and social community for people to develop fully. As one of several kinds of natural social bodies, nations have been understood to be endowed with a kind of ethical personhood which is more than the sum of its individual parts. (A caveat to this statement is that in Church documents, “nations” is sometimes no more than cover-all reference to “political communities.”) Individuals and societies alike are subject to divine law; both are subjects who bear the responsibility to opt for the morally good or better action. Although “national rights” correspond to national responsibilities, papal documents are frustratingly vague about the content of those rights.

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To consider nationality as a form of culture rather than as a political entity provides a richer vein of consideration, for the Catholic tradition has a comparatively well-elaborated theology of culture. The documents of Vatican II discuss its individual and social significance at some length. Cultural particularity is praised as a value in itself, even attributed a religious role. However, Church doctrine constantly returns to the hierarchy of values and goods in which the human person, made in the image and likeness of God, occupies the prime position. The collective “personhood” of nations is of a lesser degree than the human individual. The notion can mean no more than the moral agency of the sum of the persons who together make up a nation. At the same time, papal teaching hints at something more—an abiding, national character expressed in particular traditions, customs and ways of thinking. Cultural and national diversities are subsidiary values which must be balanced against the common good. In both Church and world, even legitimate collective or individual interests may require self-abnegation for the sake of unity. The magisterium understands nationalism to be an idolatry which absolutizes the nation, enthroning it as supreme, unconditional value, and placing the person below society. This ideology also seeks to invert the relationship between the sacred and secular, attempting to secularize the religious by having it serve the secular, which is in turn sacralized as an antiChurch. The relationship between the secular and the religious upheld by the Catholic intellectual tradition is, as I have stated, gratia supponit naturam et eam perficit. The concept derives directly from the implications of the Incarnation. An incarnational notion of holiness stresses engagement with the world, not separation from it. The role of Christian faith is to be salt of the earth, to mediate grace to all those human experiences and entities that exist by nature. Included in these are the very building blocks of ethnic and national identities—ancestral kinship, historical memories and myths, common culture, and attachment to a homeland. “Grace builds on nature and perfects it” is something of a Russian doll creed, containing as it does many different levels of concrete manifestations within an overarching principle. Within that framework, since nature includes culture (in the broad sense of social organization), and culture includes nationality, it is logical to claim that gratia supponit culturam et nationes et eas perficit. Grace may build on nationality and also perfect it. “Perfection” is understood here not as the replacement of a defective reality by another perfect one, but as completing a lack or fulfilling a potential. Perfection is of course what is proposed as the Christian ideal. In the history of the Church, however, the operative theology of relationship between the secular and the

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sacred has frequently diverged widely from the ideal. To claim that grace perfects culture and nationality does not involve asserting that cultures and nations (let alone any single culture or nation) are unconditionally sacred or consecrated entities. Between nature and grace there exists the same necessary tension that inheres in the connection between the world and the Church: “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age . . . are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ.”134 Although the followers of Christ are also “men of this age,” not all “men of this age” are Christians. Christianity and culture are not forensically equal or functionally equivalent. Rather, the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, and the action of the Spirit which guides the Church, develop and perfect the natural good of culture: Nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in the hearts [of the followers of Christ]. For theirs is a community composed of men. United in Christ . . . they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for every man. That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with mankind and its history by the deepest of bonds.135

In the Paschal mystery, the sphere of the natural is not destroyed but brought to its fullness. Transformed, it continues to have a role within the economy of salvation. To hold that creation and salvation are not two separate divine plans, but united acts of the one God, is to stress the goodness and perfectibility of human activity. According to Catholic faith, original sin diminishes human nature but does not reduce it to total depravity. It is fully and truly justified by that baptismal grace that inserts a person into the death and resurrection of Jesus. If culture is a natural phenomenon, then logically speaking, it can be evangelized and graced. To that extent, it is legitimate to talk—at the very least figuratively—of nations and cultures being “baptized” into Christ, and of “Christian nations” and “Christian culture.” However, such language runs the massive risk of being misapplied and misunderstood. In some forms of religio-cultural particularism, nations claim literally to have been “baptized” corporately. The baptism of the inhabitants of Kiev in connection with conversion of Prince Vladimir in the 890s has historically been referred to as the “baptism of Rus.” The phrase can easily suggest that the Russian nation itself underwent an ontological change that gave it an unalienable position as guardian of Orthodoxy. A highly problematic theology underlies such claims. Individuals “born with a fallen human nature and tainted by original sin,” are certainly freed by baptism “from the power of darkness” and granted “the freedom of the children of God.”136 Membership of the Church does not

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place the baptized in a position of unqualified good standing with the divine. The same must necessarily hold true of any culture, nation or ethnic group which claims to be Christian. Moreover, any given nation is a constantly changing collective, a fact which means that national “baptism,” if we can refer to it at all, would need to be a constantly re-occurring process rather than a punctual event. It is important to understand that perfected culture, thoroughly interpenetrated with the Gospel is always goal, never a static condition. Church teaching preaches the value of culture as a good which is necessary for and in service to the development of the human person. Culture is inevitably particular, and post-conciliar teaching begins to appreciate more fully that culture exists only in the concrete, i.e., in the form of cultures. The Christian value of cultural particularity lies in fostering authentic humanity. Understood this way, the culture of one ethnic group or nation is a relative value, a means rather than an end. Asserting the spiritual remit of any specific national culture is entirely different from championing the particularism that Church documents critique. Nationality, even a periodically intense loyalty toward one’s own nation, is not identical to nationalism. Nor does it necessarily issue into blind ethnocentricity or xenophobia. To have an affective bond with a homeland or to cherish a particular culture is not tantamount to worship or idolatry. But in order for culture to be truly human, it must be permeated by Christian values. In other words, nations—whether considered merely as a number of individual persons or as corporate moral persons themselves—are constantly in need of Christ, in order that they may fully become themselves. It is legitimate therefore, to talk of a theology not of national destiny but of national vocation. To conclude: to be particular, cultural communities authentically, nations require the existence of a universal, supra-national Church, lest they be misled into seeking to usurp the role of church themselves. There is a necessary complementarity between particular culture and the catholicity of Christianity, for the universal Christian community is made flesh and experienced in and as its local manifestation. Nationality may not be a sine qua non for the mission of the Church. It is at the very least one of the important places in which the Church can and must enter human experience. What can a Christian theology offer to the experience of nationality and public self-understanding of any one nation? To take one example: the chosen people motif that, mostly in subtle and secular guise, to inform Americans’ sense of their own nation’s place in the world draws heavily from the Exodus traditions—or rather Exodus as appropriated by the New Testament and then envisioned particularly by Calvinism. Difficulties with

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the paradigm of election lie in its understanding of the effect of grace upon nature, and in particular the matter of sin subsequent to conversion. In the life of the Spirit, grace does not eradicate nature nor totally replace it, but rather informs it dynamically. Even the lightest hint of chosen people status can easily imply that a particular nation is in a state of immutable grace or at least of moral probity. Wherever this happens, the value of cultural particularity collapses into ideologies of cultural superiority and entitlement, those narcissistic assumptions that one’s own national values are, or should be, the whole world’s too. Along with the Israelite model of election also comes the associated problem of the relationship of the elect to the non-elect. Nor does directly applying a Christian model of salvation wholesale to any one nation promise to provide a satisfactory answer to the question of the theological value of nationality. The Christian understanding of salvation is corporate: it is as a member of the faithful that the individual is saved. In much of Paul’s writing, “in Christ” is equivalent to “in the Body of Christ,” i.e., the Church. The body of the faithful is not the nation, the ethnic group, or any other kind of community. Creation and salvation are not the only available theological tools for understanding nationality. Trinitarian theology provides the ideal of a harmony between parts and the whole. The Trinity is the supreme source, model and culmination of human love, for in the internal processions of the Triune God, there is “a certain resemblance . . . to the fraternity that men are to establish among themselves in truth and love.”137 God exists not in, but rather as relationality. In the divine dynamic of perichoresis, the distinction between the Persons and the unity of the Trinity express each other mutually. Distinctive identity is at the highest level the basis and fruit of unity. On condition that legitimate human differences or singularities are held in balance with unity, they are not synonymous with isolation or superiority. Rather, specific identity is the precondition and the possibility of breaking through solipsistic individualism and overcoming the unjust hierarchies of the world. The link between the internal economy of the Trinity and the salvation of humanity is, of course, the Incarnation, in which the Second Person of the Trinity takes on the human condition in all things but sin, being simultaneously and in one person, truly divine and truly human. Christ is the model of redeemed humanity, whose vocation is to show forth the image of God and to be transformed into the image of the Father’s only Son. This vocation takes a personal form since each of us is called to enter into the divine beatitude; it also concerns the human community as a whole.138

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Within the Incarnation, two orders of reality, human and divine, are united in the most intimate of relationships—without confusion, without change, without division, without separation. It is through (and only through) reference to and understanding of the implications of the Incarnation for all created reality that Christian theology will discover the role of particular communities within the universal vocation to beatitude.

Notes 1. Grosby, Biblical Ideas of Nationality, 15. 2. Daniel N. Freeman, ed., Anchor Bible Dictionary (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing, 1992), s.v. “Nationality and Political Identity,” by Mario Liverani. 3. R. Laird Harris, Bruce Watke, and Gleason L. Archer, eds., Theological Wordbook of the New Testament (Chicago: Moody Press, 1980), vol. 2, 676–77. 4. Ibid. 5. Harris et al., Theological Wordbook, vol.1, 326. 6. Harris et al., Theological Wordbook, vol.1, 327. 7. For Septuagint and New Testament vocabulary, see Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, eds., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, abridged in one volume, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1985); also Gerhard Kittel, ed. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1964). 8. Kittel, Theological Dictionary, vol. 2, s.v. “Laos,” by Georg Bartram. 9. Ibid. 10. Kittel and Friedrich, Theological Dictionary, 502–3. 11. Kittel and Friedrich, Theological Dictionary, 201–2. 12. Judith A. Dwyer and Elizabeth L. Montgomery, eds., New Dictionary of Catholic Social Thought (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994), s.v. “Political Theology,” by Werner Kroh. 13. Anchor Bible Dictionary, s.v. “Nations,” by D. I. Christensen, 1037. 14. Christensen, “Nations,” n. to Gen 11:9. 15. Liverani, “Nationality and Political Identity,” 1035. 16. The “Deuteronomistic History” thesis was first described in 1943 by Martin Noth. 17. Liverani, “Nationality and Political Identity,” 1036. For an exposition on the social consequences of exile, see Daniel Smith-Christopher, A Biblical Theology of Exile (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002). 18. Benedict Thomas Viviano, “The Christian and the State According to the New Testament and in the Early Church,” in William R. Ferrar, ed., The International Bible Commentary: A Catholic and Ecumenical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press. 1998), 329–330. 19. On the nations as instruments of God, see Walter Bruggemann, “At the Mercy of Babylon,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 110/1 (1991): 3–22.

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20. E.g. 1 Chr 23:13; Ps 4:3; Ez 45:1. Cf. the related vocabulary of chosenness: Deut 7:6; 1 Sam 10:24, etc. 21. Christensen, “Nations,” 1046. 22. Deut 29:10 shows that the covenant community in pre-exilic Israel had also included the resident alien. Similarly, the Judaic community in Babylon had remained open to foreigners (Is 52:6–8), a fact which reflected a continuing consciousness of God’s interest in all peoples, and a religious, rather than an ethnic understanding of Israelite religion. The story of the curing of Namaan in 2 Kings likewise makes it clear that God’s power extends beyond the geography or people of Israel. 23. Christensen, “Nations,” 1046. 24. Christiansen, “Nations,” 1046. 25. These two foci correspond roughly to the distinction made by Victor Turner, “Ritual, Tribal and Catholic,” Worship 50 (1976): 504–26, between “salvation” and “tribal” religions. In Turner’s distinction, salvation religions place their emphasis on separation from one community and adhesion to a new one. Tribal religions on the other hand are invested in the perpetuation of group membership and identity. 26. Viviano, “The Christian and the State,” 328. 27. The Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1992), n. to Acts 2:10. 28. For a discussion of this point, see John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991), vol. 1, 207–8, who claims that there was among the cultural and religious currents of first-century Palestine a strong revival of “native-religious feeling,” evidenced in the names of Jesus’ religious “family.” 29. Viviano, “The Christian and the State,” 330. 30. Ibid. 31. New Dictionary of Catholic Social Thought, s.v. “Sacred and Secular, Relationship of,” by Michael H. Crosby. 32. Buell, Why This New Race, 2. 33. For a history of the debate on church and state, see O’Donovan and Lockwood O’Donovan, From Irenaeus to Grotius, xv–xx. 34. Llobera, The God of Modernity, 3. 35. Quotations from St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Thomas Gilby et al. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–). 36. E.g., W. H. C. Frend, “Nationalism as a factor in anti-Chalcedonian feeling in Egypt,” in Mews, Religion and National Identity, 21–38, and E. R. Hardy, Christian Egypt: Church and People, Christianity and Nationalism in the Patriarchate of Alexandria (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), passim. On national considerations involved in Donatism, see Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity (New York: Touchstone Books, 1995), 84. On the link between Gothic tribal identity and Arianism, see the articles in New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967–), s.v. “Arianism,” by V. C. deClercq and “Theodoric the Great,” by R. H. Schmandt. 37. The question of Aquinas’ understanding of “nature” insofar as it relates to social organization has generated a vast secondary literature. See for example John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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1998) and Alfonso Gomez-Lobo, Morality and the Human Goods: An Introduction to Natural Law Ethics (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 2002). 38. Leo XIII, Immortale Dei, 14. 39. Catechism, 2421. 40. Gregory Baum, Nationalism and Ethics (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2001), 5. 41. Wright, National Patriotism in Papal Teaching, 3. 42. Pius XI, Non abbiamo bisogno, 302. 43. Mit brennender Sorge, 145–167. 44. Mit brennender Sorge, 11. 45. Mit brennender Sorge, 18. 46. Ibid. 47. Leo XIII, Rerum novarum, 9. 48. Mit brennender Sorge, 29. 49. Summi pontificatus, 42–44. 50. Summi pontificatus, 43. 51. Summi pontificatus, 72. 52. Ibid. 53. Summi pontificatus, 106. 54. Summi pontificatus, 112. 55. John XXIII, Mater et magistra, 106. 56. Mater et magistra, 181. 57. John XXIII, Pacem in terris, 42–43. 58. Pacem in terris, 92. 59. Pacem in terris, 80. 60. Pacem in terris, 43. 61. Ibid. 62. Pacem in terris, 97. 63. E.g. Gaudium et spes, 6. 64. Ad gentes, 1. 65. Ad gentes, 15. 66. Ad gentes, 16 and 18. 67. Gaudium et spes, 56. 68. Apostolicam actuositatem, 8. See also Gaudium et spes 8 and 83. 69. Gaudium et spes, 1. 70. Leo J. O’Donovan, “For Church and World: A Messenger of Faith and Hope,” in Lucien Richard, Daniel Harrington and John O’Malley, eds., Vatican II: The Unfinished Agenda (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), 13. 71. Quoted in Crosby, “Sacred and Secular,” 85. 72. Ad gentes, 21. 73. John O’Malley, “Vatican II: Historical Perspectives on Its Uniqueness and Interpretation,” in Richard et al., Vatican II, 24. 74. Lucien Richard, “Mission and Inculturation: The Church in the World,” in Richard et al., Vatican II, 94.

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75. O’Malley, “Vatican II,” 30. 76. Fritzleo Lentzen-Deis, “The Bible in Different Cultures,” in René Latourelle, ed., Vatican II: Assessment and Perspectives (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1988), vol. 3, 426. 77. Roberto Tucci, “The Proper Development of Culture,” in Herbert Vorgrimler, ed., Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969) vol. 5, 257. 78. Gaudium et spes, 53. 79. Hervé Carrier, “The Contribution of the Council to Culture,” in Latourelle, Vatican II, vol.3, 453. 80. Gaudium et spes, 53. 81. Richard, “Mission and Inculturation,” 96. For a discussion of the relationship between the Council’s anthropology and its Christology, see Luis Ladaria, “Humanity in the Light of Christ in the Second Vatican Council,” in Latourelle, Vatican II, vol. 2, 386–401. 82. Luigi Rulla, “Anthropology of the Christian Vocation: Conciliar and Postconciliar Aspects,” in Latourelle, Vatican II, vol. 2, 437. 83. Gaudium et spes, 52. 84. E.g., Gaudium et spes, 46. 85. Gaudium et spes, 58. 86. Tucci, “The Proper Development of Culture,” 264. 87. Gaudium et spes, 57. 88. Gaudium et spes, 40. 89. Gaudium et spes, 43. 90. Crosby, “Sacred and Secular,” 858. 91. Gaudium et spes, 43. 92. Gaudium et spes, 40. 93. See Llywelyn, Sacred Place, 70. 94. Gaudium et spes, 40. 95. Gaudium et spes, 59. 96. The paradigm for this transformation is the resurrection of Jesus, sacramentally represented in baptism. Cf. “The Christian Initiation of Adults,” in The Rites of the Catholic Church (New York: Pueblo Publishing, 1976), 102: “In Christ you have become a new creation and have clothed yourselves in Christ.” Ibid, 102: “The promised strength of the Holy Spirit, which you are to receive, will make you more like Christ.” 97. Gaudium et spes, 62. 98. Yves Congar, “The Role of the Church in the Modern World,” in Vorgrimler, Commentary, vol. 5, 218. 99. Gaudium et spes, 42. 100. Gaudium et spes, 85. 101. Paul VI, Populorum progressio, 48. 102. Populorum progressio, 62. 103. Paul VI, Evangelii nuntiandi, 72. 104. Evangelii nuntiandi, 21.

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105. Ibid. 106. Evangelii nuntiandi, 19. 107. Evangelii nuntiandi, 21. 108. John Paul II, Redemptor hominis, 47. 109. Ibid. 110. Redemptor hominis, 48. 111. John Paul II, Laborem exercens, 10. Emphasis added. 112. John Paul II, Slavorum apostoli, 11. 113. Slavorum apostoli, 18. 114. Slavorum apostoli, 27. 115. Slavorum apostoli, 31. 116. John Paul II, Redemptoris mater, 6. 117. Redemptoris mater, 28. 118. Ibid. 119. See Nicholas Perry and Loreto Echeverría, Under the Heel of Mary (New York: Routledge, 1988). 120. John Paul II, Sollicitudo rei socialis, 15. 121. John Paul II, Centesimus annus, 5. 122. Centesimus annus, 17. 123. Centesimus annus, 24. 124. Ibid. 125. Centesimus annus, 41. 126. Sollicitudo rei socialis, 2. 127. John Paul II, “Message for World Peace Day, January 1, 2001,” 17. 128. “Message for World Peace Day, January 1, 2001,” 6. 129. John Paul II, Apostolic Constitution Fidei depositum, 1992, Preface to Catechism, 3. 130. The quotation is from Gen 10:5. 131. The quotation is from Divini redemptoris, the 1937 encyclical of Pius XI that had condemned Soviet communism as “deceptive mysticism . . . a counterfeit of the redemption of the lowly.” 132. The internal quotation is from Centesimus annus, 45–46. 133. The internal quotation is from Gaudium et spes, 40. 134. Gaudium et spes, 1. 135. Ibid. 136. Catechism, 1250. 137. Catechism, 1878. 138. Catechism, 1877.

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There may well be no end to the possible starting points for a consideration of nationality that would apply theological insights, concepts and language to questions of nationality, national identity, and nationalism, particularly when one brings to bear the insights of the many sub-disciplines of theology upon these questions. The notion of creation, drawing especially from the Genesis accounts, might be the most obvious place to begin. To discuss nationality from this perspective will require two different sets of questions. The first set begins with an issue raised in the previous chapter: does God create individual nations? If so, with what end in mind? And, to paraphrase George Orwell, are all nations created equal, or are some “more equal than others”? A second set of questions emerges from theological anthropology, concerning the role of nationality within the human constitution: can we talk of the existence of national primordialism in the human condition? From these questions derive other specifically Christian problems: the place (if any) of particular nations within the salvific order wrought by Christ, and the role of national identity in the human person transformed by Christ. No small amount of difficulty arises almost immediately with the first set of consideration. The very notion of creation is ambiguous: it refers both to the ab initio beginnings of “the heavens and the earth” and to God’s ongoing creative and sustaining activity in the world. Secondly, it raises the large question of extra-scriptural nations. Paul’s address to the Athenians in the Areopagus asserts that “from one ancestor, [God] made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the

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places where they would live.”1 Does this sentence, which refers to nations only in passing, and in the context of a discussion of the universal search for God, apply to a post-resurrection world and to all times and places? Are we to claim that God made the Australian or Tongan nations, or allotted the time of existence of the Shoshone people or the boundaries of say, Kurdistan? How does this assertion apply to cases of genocide, or the birth of new nations? Salvation provides a second potential starting point. Two reasons suggest this may be a more fruitful approach. Historically, a number of Christian nations have sought to insert themselves into the Paschal mystery, most frequently by means of an associative connection with the Church or an application of Paschal imagery to national histories. More importantly, much of the discourse of nationalism over the last two centuries—even in non-Christian contexts—has been distinctly soteriological in tone, in part because its ultimate source is the Exodus traditions of ancient Israel. The experiences of Sinai, the settlement of Canaan, the Babylonian exile and the resettlement of Israel have served to illuminate the historical experiences of some modern and early modern nations. In this scheme, scriptural passages that originally applied to Old Testament Israel are used to frame and understand the experience of peoples far removed from that time and place. If the Israelite experience of covenant, exile and restoration is a paradigm of national “salvation,” it is also a potential theology of nationality. Yet placing the existence of individual nations within the mindset and patterns of Israelite salvation raises troubling questions. Considering the objections of some contemporary scholars to the integrity of the very category of nationality, how are we to understand nationalist claims of particular divine election? Do apparently competing claims of different nations to be the inheritor par excellence of the Israelite covenant contain any truth whatsoever, or are they merely misguided imaginings? Above all, how does one articulate a specifically Christian theology of nationality? The application of salvation motifs to modern nations often makes exclusive use of Old Testament schemes: the Christ-event is absent in allegorical nation-myths that confuse the community of the faithful with the national community. According to Catholic theology, the Church, not any one nation, inherits the blessings of Sinai, the original covenant being restated and fully revealed in the Paschal mystery. Moreover, salvation-centered theology contains a certain inherent risk: an over-rigorous emphasis on the significance of Christ’s death and resurrection can downplay the importance of perspectives arising from creation, pneumatology and eschatology. It can also reduce salvation to atonement. To raise a Berlin Wall between salvation and creation will result

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in two, equally deleterious outcomes. At one end of the spectrum, difficulty in finding a place for “natural” categories within the salvific order will end up denying the goodness of the natural, created order. At the opposite pole, creation theologies can so confuse creation with salvation as to end up practically deifying the natural world, and overlooking the transcendent centrality of the Christ-event. However a third major theological perspective offers an alternative without the dangers of the two previous suggestions: Incarnation. In the one person of Jesus Christ, the orders of creation (Jesus’ human nature) and salvation (the Paschal mystery) are united. Viewing human activity in the light of the Christ-event allows us to draw from the perspectives of both creation theology and salvation theology, and to escape from the more obvious partialities of both.

“You are Son of God and Son of Mary”2 “Who do you say I am?” Jesus puts this question to his disciples in the Synoptic Gospels (Mk 8:28 and parallels). The assertion that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth was also God was “a stumbling block for the Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” (1 Cor 1:23). As the Christian faith spread into the Jewish diaspora and outwards into the world of pagan Hellenism, Jesus’ question became rephrased as “What do you say I am?” The history of the grand theological debates of the first centuries after Christ is largely that of the gradual intellectual inculturation of Christianity, as a Hellenistic mentality struggled to find language and concepts with which to understand and describe Christianity and its Semitic cultural notions. For Hellenistic philosophy, the Incarnation presented a particular difficulty, for it represented the descent of the divine—the realm of the spiritual, immaterial and immutable—into the vitiated, base world of matter. As Jaroslav Pelikan writes, “[T]he most important intellectual struggle . . . in all of Christian history . . . took place in response to the question of whether the divine in Jesus was identical with God the creator.”3 The ensarkosis of the Word involved a logical inconsistency: in Christ, human liberation and perfection were not achieved through an ascent from matter into the realm of pure idea. On the contrary, in the Incarnation, the spiritual, divine realm entered into the material world and became part of it. Moreover, the claim that Jesus was both divine and human was a metaphysical conundrum. In that divinity and humanity were considered as mutually exclusive categories, the Incarnation presented an exception to the law of contradiction. This was an anomaly baffling or simply unacceptable to those who conceived of the

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kosmos as being rationally ordered, rendering the Christian kerygma “foolishness to the Gentiles”(1 Cor 1:23). Nor were these matters merely intellectual problems. Early Christian thinkers knew well that the relationship between Christ’s humanity and his divinity has important implications for our understanding of two other sets of relationships: between the orders of creation and salvation, and between nature and grace. Indeed, the nuances of the precise understanding of the Incarnation have almost incalculable repercussions for Christian living. Differing theologies of the Incarnation will give rise to different attitudes toward human and divine realms. Precisely how that relationship is understood also defines how Christians will live their own human realities in their path to salvation. If “Christ is the head and exemplar of . . . renewed humanity,”4 then varying Christological emphases will develop corollary understandings not only of religious categories such as salvation, ecclesiology, etc. Christological preferences also apply to the whole gamut of human experiences (the body, gender, culture, economic status, psychology, the relationship with the natural world, etc.). An affirmation of Christ’s real, physical, humanity for example will give rise to a correspondingly positive evaluation of our own human realities. A docetist Christology which denies Christ’s material reality, on the other hand, will produce a Christian anthropology which minimizes the importance not only of the body, but also of all secular realities, physical and social. Since Christ “fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling,”5 a Christological approach will allow us to understand all dimensions of the human condition theologically, nationality among them. Belief in the Incarnation, as expressed in the historical creeds of the Church, involves at the most simple level three foundational elements: belief in Christ’s full humanity, belief in his full divinity, and belief in the unity of both. In the first centuries of Christianity, a plurality of opinions about the nature of the Incarnation arose. Gnostics of various hues taught that matter was ontologically deficient, to the point of being intrinsically evil. Consequently, they argued, a divine savior could not have had a material body, merely the appearance of one, and the physical suffering and death of Jesus was nothing more than a convenient illusion. The problems of a God subject to human passions and mutability, and the scandal of a crucified God could thus be obviated. Valentinus (d. approx. 160) admitted that Jesus had a body, but held that it was of an ethereal nature; Jesus therefore was not born of Mary. The fourth-century Apollinarist heresy taught that Jesus’ body was ordinarily human, but that his soul was purely divine and untouched by any human reality. The creedal formulations that emerged out of the Church councils of the first centuries, however, stress the full true and real humanity of Jesus. According to

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Epiphanius of Salamis (d. 403), an early creed of the church already included pointed assertions that the Son of God “took perfect human nature, soul and body and mind and all whatsoever is human save only sin, without the seed of man.” In the Incarnation, “the Word was made Flesh, not in that It underwent a change nor in that It exchanged Its Divinity for humanity, but in that It united Its Flesh unto Its one holy totality and Divinity.”6 Diversity of beliefs posed a potential threat to the political coherence of Constantine’s new Christian empire. Constantine himself convoked the Council of Nicea in 325 to deal with the dissension concerning the widely accepted teachings of Arius (250–336), who taught that the divinity of Christ was somewhat secondary, “standing midway between the First Cause and creatures; as Himself made out of nothing, yet as making all things else; as existing before the worlds of the ages . . . the Son was originated, and once had not existed. For all that has origin must begin to be.”7 The Council rejected Arius’s opinion and affirmed the equal divinity of God the Father and Jesus, “the Son of God, the only-begotten generated of the Father, that is, from the being (ousia) of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, begotten, not made, one in being with the Father by Whom all things were made.”8 In asserting Christ’s full divinity, Nicea in the process implicitly asserted the union of two natures in one person. The Council had not however defined in any precise terms how the human and the divine were united in Christ. Nestorius, elected Patriarch of Constantinople in 428, interpreted the union in purely moral terms, as an association of two forms of being, human and divine, in one person. The indwelling of the divine in Jesus’ humanity was the supreme and densest form of the presence of God in the just. Fundamentally, Nestorius’ opinion denied the union of the uncreated divine and created human in Christ. The wider implication of this position was that there could be no intrinsic unity or connection between the spheres of the sacred and secular, between nature and grace, or between creation and salvation. In 431, the Council of Ephesus condemned Nestorius’s opinion. In solemnly declaring Mary to be Theotokos, the Birth-Giver of God, the Council affirmed both Christ’s real humanity (in that he was born of a human mother) and his divinity. Simultaneously, the title asserted the possibility of real unity between the different orders of being represented by Christ’s divinity and his humanity. The battles over the nature of what came to be called the hypostatic union were not yet over. One polar reaction to Nestorianism was the assertion that the one person of Christ had only one nature. A number of subtly differing attitudes collectively referred to as monophysitism considered the one nature

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of Christ variously as a tertium quid in which there was an intermingling of the human with the divine, or as a conversion of the human into the divine, as united temporarily, or as a composite of different parts. The various models of this scheme had spiritual and temporal repercussions far beyond Christological questions, for the precise understanding of union between the divine and human in Christ also defined by implication how salvation was construed, and consequently the Christian stance to all worldly realities. A Christology for example which held that Christ’s own humanity was absorbed into his divinity would lead logically to the conclusion that sanctification would involve the disappearance of human identity. In reaction to the various forms of monophysitism, the Fathers of the Council of Chalcedon of 451 declared: We unanimously teach to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, the same truly God and truly man composed of rational soul and a body, truly man, the same one in being (homoousios) with the Father as to the divinity, and one in being with us according to human nature, like unto us in all things but sin. The same was begotten from the Father before the ages as to the divinity, but in the latter days us and for our salvation was born as to his humanity from Mary the virgin Mother of God. We confess that the one and the same Lord Christ, the only begotten Son, must be acknowledged in two natures, without confusion or change, without division or separation. The distinction between the natures was never abolished by their union but rather the character proper to each of the natures was preserved as they came together in one person (prosopon) and one hypostasis. He is not split or divided into two persons, but he is one and the same Son Only-begotten God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as formerly the prophets and Later Jesus Christ himself have taught about him and has been handed down to us by the Creed of the Fathers.9

In describing the union of Christ’s two natures, the four privative phrases—without confusion or change, without division or separation—set the parameters within which that hypostatic union was to be understood. As a corollary, they also describe a Christiform model of reality that has aspects that are human and divine, secular and sacred, material, natural and graced. They do so without confusing the spheres of the secular or sacred with each other. They sustain the belief that grace builds on nature, and that there is a certain continuity between nature and grace. They stand in defiance of any belief that secular realities have nothing to say to spiritual ones or vice versa. Scripture and Church tradition alike insist on both Jesus’ true, historical, embodied humanity—as witnessed by the infancy narratives of Matthew

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and Luke, and the physicality of the Passion narrative of John—and his sinlessness (Heb 2:17; 7:26). Although the common patristic assertion quod non assumptum non salvatum (that which is not taken up is not saved) was initially predicated of the human nature of Christ, it also has implications for the whole of the economy of salvation. Theological discussion of the question of the divine and human natures in Christ has generally centered on his agency and consciousness. The first issue tackles the question of which of Christ’s actions could be attributed to which nature (e.g., whether the human nature was the author of miracles, or the divine the subject of the Passion). The second question centers on Christ’s knowledge (or lack thereof) of his own identity, and his foreknowledge of what would happen to him or others (a question of hermeneutical importance in those Gospel passages where Christ appears to be unclear as to his future). Less developed in theological discussion has been what other elements of human nature are involved in the Incarnation, and whether the humanity of Christ is identical to ours. The question is not clear, and its implications are important. If Christ’s human nature is indeed different from ours, then it becomes difficult to see how our human nature is saved by the Christ-event, or how Christ’s humanity might shed light on ours. A Christology that weakens the reality of Christ’s humanity or its identity with our own will have less to say to our human experiences. Lucien Richard points out some of the potential problems of the Christology of the Second Vatican Council (subsequently adopted by John Paul II) by asking whether there is “any difference in being human as human and being human as Christ is human? Does the position taken by the Council not lead . . . to a collapse of Christology into anthropology? These questions are not answered by [Gaudium et spes], and yet they are quite crucial for any understanding of the Church’s mission to the world.”10 If we take the phrase “like us in all things but sin” at its maximum value, then Christ is indeed fully human with a humanity like ours. The farreaching implication of this belief is that in one person of Christ, everything that is constitutively human is united hypostatically with the divine—without confusion or change, without division or separation. The import of these Christological considerations for our study involves the question of how much identity—which includes but is not limited to ethnicity or nationality—is an essential part of what it means to be human. If it is indeed essential, then a syllogistic argument arises: 1. Everything that is constitutively human is taken up into the hypostatic union and thereby saved.

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2. Social identity, in ethnic and cultural forms, is constitutive of what it is to be human. (There is, after all, no one who is not concretely located in a particular culture and ethnic community.) 3. Therefore, social identity is taken up into the hypostatic union and is thereby “saved,” i.e., it is not simply accidental but is included as an essential element in human nature as transformed by the Paschal mystery. A further question arises from this: What does a “saved” social identity truly consist of? The various synonyms for salvation (theosis, redemption, transfiguration, liberation, healing, enlightenment, sanctification, being in Christ, etc.) are all metaphoric expressions that evoke aspects of a new state of being that combines change with constancy. At the very least, a social identity that is brought into the salvific order will necessarily reflect its savior, by having aspects which will be simultaneously human and divine. By its very nature, identity is always particular. Each human person and society is invariably located in a specific place and time, and shaped by the context that is part of who and what we are. In theological terms, each individual human being is an unrepeatable and unique form of the divine image and likeness. In ontological terms, this means there is a certain primacy of the specific over the universal. John of Damascus (675–749) taught that the human nature of Christ cannot be a universal, for then the Word would not be fully human, since humans are by nature individual. Logically, therefore, “the Word assumed an individual human nature (in atomo).”11 Other medieval authors including Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Peter Lombard adopted the teaching of John of Damascus concerning the individuality of Christ’s humanity. All agreed that the human nature of Christ logically was not a universal, since this would mean that the Word would have thereby assumed all the individual natures of all human beings. The fact that Christ’s human nature was individual cannot mean however that it alone was involved in the Incarnation. Were that the case, it becomes hard to understand how Christ’s death would have impacted the rest of humanity. Rather, humanity itself, and human individuality itself is united with the divine. The Word’s taking up of one individual human nature made the salvation of all humanity possible. In the dynamic of the Incarnation, any human reality united with divinity is graced by that union and transformed by it into a medium and locus of salvation. The logical corollary of quod non assumptum non salvatum is quod assumptum ergo salvatum: whatever is in Christ becomes part of the order of salvation.

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The Subtle Doctor The teaching of John of Damascus on the Incarnation was well known by many important medieval theologians.12 Among these, the Scottish Franciscan John Duns Scotus (c. 1266–1308) is notable for his vigorous insistence on the fullness of the human nature of Christ, and it is Scotus who furnishes us with a number of concepts for nuancing and filling out our theological understanding of nationality. This might appear at first sight to be a strange proposal, for Scotus appears to offer nothing of direct relevance to the discussion. The word natio occurs nowhere in his extant writings. Moreover, only in a discussion on the society and the family (directed toward a consideration of vowed religious life) does he make significant comment on social organization, in an early form of social contract theory.13 However, by teasing out the implications of Scotus’s Christology, the relevance of his teaching for a theological treatment of nationality becomes clearer. The starting point of these implications is Scotus’s treatment of the Incarnation. Cur Deus homo?, the question of Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) and the title of his major work on the reason for the Incarnation, was in the medieval period generally answered by the concept of satisfaction. Redemption in this scheme was largely located in Christ’s passion and death, which satisfied for humanity’s sins and merited us eternal life. In Anselm’s view, “our sin places us in debt to God. This debt is paid by Christ—who thus makes satisfaction for our sin. . . . According to Anselm, it is necessary for God to save us this way; otherwise his plan is frustrated.”14 Concepts of satisfaction and merit, however, particularly in a modern context, can have disadvantageous implications. Applying the language of feudal legal relations involves the danger of envisioning divine justice in a purely forensic manner. The language of satisfaction implies a minimalist, if not miserly, understanding of divine love. Moreover, to see satisfaction as something performed by the Son to placate an injured Father also runs the risk of an implicit tritheism. More importantly, the world thus conceived is sin-centered, for human willfulness is held to be the immediate (though not the ultimate) cause of the Incarnation. In the scheme of satisfaction-atonement, the Incarnation is a contingent “plan B,” which God sets in action to deflect the effects of the abuse of human freedom. The psychological mindset produced by this theology is pessimistic in tone, to say the least, in that it stresses the magnitude of human sinfulness against divine grace. Post-Edenic human realities thus conceived can only be something second best, not the reality originally willed by God.

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However, an alternate (if minor) tradition held that the Incarnation did not occur primarily as a remedy for sin. The scriptural roots of this cosmic Christology are to be found in the Johannine literature, where the death of Jesus is seen not as ransom or atonement, but as the way in which God fulfills the divine desire to give life. Colossians and Ephesians likewise express a cosmic vision of time in which Christ is “the image of the unseen God” (Col 1:15) and in which believers are predestined by God to a goal of salvation that predated creation. According to this view, the Incarnation was from the beginning the whole purpose and goal of God’s creation. In the medieval period, the resurgence of this tradition can be traced to Rupert of Deutz (c. 1075–1129), who held that regardless of the Fall, the second person of the Trinity would have become incarnate. Franciscan spirituality found this version of the Incarnation sympathetic to its strong cosmological interest, which both affirmed the goodness of the natural world and emphasized the humanity of Christ. (The best-known exemplar of the Franciscan incarnational emphasis is the Christmas crèche, which complements and completes devotion to the crucified God-man.) Since good is intrinsically self-diffusive, the Incarnation, as God’s self-giving, represents the highest form of goodness. In the scheme of Alexander of Hales (d. 1245), the Incarnation can only be understood in the light of the Trinity: “One must consider the doctrine of God prior to the doctrine of the Incarnation. . . . Creation and Incarnation find their sources in the divine nature, understood as a principle of action.”15 Scotus rejects the Anselmian theory of reparation as not making sense in terms of God’s intentions, since it makes sin a requirement for the most intense form of divine presence in creation. Ordinatio II, 3.7, n. 220 quotes Augustine to the effect that “[o]rder is an arrangement of like and unlike things whereby each is disposed to its proper place.”16 Scotus attributes considerably less importance to the Fall than does Anselm, and consequently answers the question of the reason for the Incarnation by an appeal to two metaphysical principles. His argument is based on the concept of an ordinate and reasonable love, in which means are loved as means, and ends as ends. In any well-ordered action, Scotus holds, [1] the end is willed before the means, and [2] a greater good is willed before a lesser one.17 God wills things through logical steps of priority: First God knows himself as the supreme good; secondly, he knows all other beings and creatures; thirdly, he predestines to glory and grace [those who are to be saved], while in a purely negative way he does not predestine the others; fourthly, he has foreknowledge of all those who would fall as a result of the sin of Adam;

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and finally, he foresees and preordains the remedy [for sin], that men would be redeemed through the passion of his Son. Thus the Christ-man as well as all the elect was foreseen and predestined to grace and glory even prior to the foresight of his passion as a remedy against the fall, just as a physician has a greater interest in the health of a patient than in prescribing medicine for him.18

The argument, articulated in a discussion of the predestination of Christ, is based on the idea that within the divinity, ends are ontologically prior to means: the Incarnation was foreseen by God as a moment prior to creation, or, rather, creation was willed with Incarnation in mind.19 Karl Rahner points out that the Church’s magisterium has never objected to this Scotist doctrine of Christ nor has it embraced it.20 The emphasis on sin and justification (and the language of satisfaction and atonement) of the “majority” theological tradition tends to be anthropocentric rather than Christ-centered. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in a section entitled “Why Did the Word become Flesh?” gives prominence to a quotation from Gregory of Nyssa, according to whom it was the sinful state of human nature after the Fall which “moved God to descend to human nature and visit it, since humanity was in so miserable and unhappy a state.”21 For a theological evaluation of nationality, a sin-centered understanding of Incarnation promises little. It carries latent within itself a somewhat pessimistic attitude toward human realities. In contrast, the minority tradition’s theocentricity—or more correctly, Christocentricity—offers a more positive view of the universe. Mary Beth Ingham points out that in this scheme, the Incarnation is the reason for creation rather than the result of sin. Creation and Incarnation are historically discrete, but intentionally closely linked acts of God’s wisdom. “There are two acts of divine initiative,” Ingham notes. “The first is that of creation, where God chose to make this world with all the creatures and natural relationships within it. The second act . . . flows logically from this first . . . involv[ing] the way that the two orders of intention and execution are related. This is the order of ends and means.”22 In Scotus’s understanding, the reasons for the event of Incarnation show that it is the center of all reality. God’s taking on of a human nature was not an independent act, but the culmination of the divine plan to extend divine life to all of creation. The first stage of God’s plan was the creation of all that is, including beings who would be naturally capable of free response to this divine initiative. Since human nature was not divine, an even closer relationship was required for God’s life to be to be shared. The union of two natures, divine and human, in the one person of Jesus Christ is the maximum manifestation of the Creator’s desire for intimacy with his creation.

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The Christiform Universe The Franciscan tradition generally views creation through the image of the incarnate son. William Short notes that Bonaventure located truth and knowledge in the person of Christ. Since Christ is the exemplar of all creation, “universals are located on the level of the singular and the person.”23 Location involves concrete embodiment in particulars. Within the Scotist scheme, “the universe is for Christ, and not Christ for the universe.”24 The human person is imago Christi as well as imago Dei. Yet this holds true not only for the human person. Christ is the paradigm for the whole of the created order: In the union of uncreated divine nature and created nature in Jesus, necessity and contingency co-exist without detriment to each other, each existing in perfect relation to the other so that neither pre-existent Word nor created nature is destroyed by this union. In the Incarnation therefore, all other created realities are brought to their apex, their single defining moment of existence. . . . Creation exists because there is a perfect nature which is its model . . . its exemplar; all creation, regardless of whether it is animal, vegetable or mineral, is . . . because there is a prevision of necessity and contingency existing as one in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.25

According the doctrine of the primacy of Christ, only the human nature of Christ is predestined. (On pain of contradiction, his divinity could not be predestined, since it is free of all contingency.) The logical corollary of this tenet is that among all other contingent realities in the order of creation, it is the humanity of Christ which has primacy and which the rest of creation reflects. And yet, as we have mentioned, creation refers both to the ab initio activity of God and his continual sustaining of all that is. A semilla verbi theology finds traces of God reflected in the whole of creation, understanding “creation” largely to mean the world of nature. Sources of this theology are to be found in Scripture (e.g., the “discourses of Yahweh” in the Book of Job, and Ps 19). This interest in the natural world has of course been one of the mainstays of Franciscan spirituality, but the cult of nature also found particular resonance in Romanticism. Outside philosophical circles, for example, Scotus is probably best known in connection with the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, for whom “Christ plays in ten thousand places.” The concept of Christ’s presence in nature is attractive, but raises problems of theodicy: does Christ also “play” in the cytotoxic lymphocytes of HIV or in Hurricane Katrina? The cultural concept “nature” is unstable, and not necessarily compatible in all its forms with the theological notion of creation.

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Here, Scotus provides some useful precision. Proceeding from principles of causality, he stresses the contingency of the cosmic order and the way in which this order points to a creator. Ordinatio I, d. 44 employs the medieval distinction between divine activity de potentia absoluta and de potentia ordinata, that is, between God’s unrestricted, rational, non-contradictory and absolute power on the one hand, and the power to do what God has chosen to do and done on the other. Lawrence Moonan refers to these as “optionneutral” and “option-tied” powers.26 In brief, “once God has set up a given created order . . . that created order has its own internal constraints that God respects.”27 In this scheme, the autonomy of creation is not that of the wound-up clock of Enlightenment deism. Scotus’s insight that the initial creative activity of God is at one with God’s sustaining of that activity allows us to avoid some of the obvious pitfalls of deism. If creation is merely the act that brings the material world into being, then God could be justly accused of being indifferent to the results of human freedom. Such an understanding of creation would tend toward a complete separation of the secular and the sacred. The result of this would be that the social reality of nationality would have nothing to say to faith, and vice versa. Rather, since “a continuum of cause/effect relationships requires a sustaining cause at every moment of the temporal continuum,”28 God is the active reason for continued existence of everything contained in creation. Within creation as Scotus construes it, human freedom has a degree of autonomy. We can argue that collective identities such as nationality or ethnicity and their respective forms of social organization are located within this God-given, relative autonomy, as fruits of free will. The distinction between the two potentiae mentioned above allows us to understand that these identities exist at a second-order level. Qua creation, they are contingent realities, sustained in existence by the constant creative act of God, who models creation upon and for the humanity of Christ. A simplistic creationist understanding would see all existing realities— including the category of nationality and even particular nations such as the ancient Hittites or modern Brunei—as willed by God in exactly the same way. However, anyone who reads Genesis will be hard-pressed to explain the “created” nature of the many things that find no place in that account: aspirin, for example, or the Chinese literary tradition. To see these subsequent realities as part of creation de potentia absoluta only (rather than as de potentia ordinata) means that God is involved in sustaining them in being, but at a certain remove. The distinction obviates the difficulties involved in using ancient Israel—which is indeed called together by God (although admittedly not at the moment of creation)—as a template for other nations. At the same time,

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it allows us to say that the Creator is in some way involved in the matter of every nation. Creation is often popularly conflated with “nature,” understood as the natural world untouched by human hand. An appeal to nature has troubling implications for questions of nationality. Where a “naturally” existing state of things is identified with creation, particular cultures may envision spreading their own values as a God-given right and responsibility. In this scheme, taking up the “white man’s burden” would be regarded as both universal common sense and a moral duty. Conversely, where “nature” is portrayed as a paradisiacal, uninhabited wilderness, devoid of human society, it becomes an arena of freedom from responsibility. The “manifest destiny” of American expansionism involved not a little of both attitudes—a mission civilatrice and an aestheticist attitude to the American landscape. “Oh beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat, across the wilderness”29 perfectly exemplifies the Barthesian turning of history into nature. Returning to the notion that creation is modeled on and destined for Christ, we must address some potentially abstruse concerns about the hypostatic union itself. As Richard Cross notes with an economy of words, “working out how to picture the hypostatic union is not wholly straightforward.”30 The “how” is of direct relevance to a range of questions. A monophysist Christology for example, according to which the divine and the human are united in one divine quid, would not object to a theocratic union of church and state, or a total solidarity between ethnic and religious identities, along the lines of “to be Croatian is to be Catholic.” A practical Nestorianism would on the other hand seek to maintain and even emphasize the boundaries between religion and public policy. For the medieval thinkers, one major question was how to characterize the relationship between Christ’s two natures and how to understand the difference between the categories of nature and person used to describe the union. Aquinas’s solution derived from his understanding of existence, according to which the concrete parts of a substance do not in any sense contribute existence to a substance, but rather share in the substance’s existence. According to the Thomist view, Christ’s humanity shares in the existence of his divinity by being related to it in the same way as a concrete part is to its substance. Scotus explicitly rejects this aspect of Aquinas’s Christology, claiming that the scheme would lessen Christ’s full and real humanity by making it dependent on his divine nature. For Scotus, “the human nature united to the Word is not informed by the Word.”31 Instead, he understands the relationship of Christ’s human nature to the whole person of Christ as akin to the relationship of an accident to a substance. Since Aquinas claimed that there is not more than one existence in the person of the Word, he could be accused of

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a certain monophysitism. Conversely, Scotus has been charged with pushing the boundaries of the human nature of Christ to the extent that for all practical purposes, it is almost a separate person. Not surprisingly therefore, Scotist Christology has sometimes been accused of the Nestorian view that Christ contains two persons—a view that ultimately allows for no intrinsic connection between temporal and eternal realities. Were this case the case, a theological view of the world would be rendered more difficult. Scotus insists that although the human nature of Christ is not a person, “the Word is properly the subject of both divine and human natures and properties. Christ and the Word are identical.”32 Christ’s full and real humanity—which Scotus holds to be essentially identical with ours—is thus asserted strongly, and its union with his divinity defended. This statement is an important step in understanding the practical implications of the hypostatic union. The Scotist interpretation maximizes the reality of Christ’s humanity, to the point that the dicta “like us in all things but sin” and quod non assumptum non salvatum must be taken in a very strong sense. Luther held that the communicatio idiomatum (the communication of properties) that took place in the Incarnation meant that divine properties could be ascribed to the human nature: “Since the divinity and the humanity are one person in Christ, the scriptures ascribe to the divinity, because of this personal union, all that happens to the humanity, and vice versa.”33 However, Chalcedonian Christology does not necessarily imply a symmetrical relationship between the human and the divine. Scotus’s account of the hypostatic union—in which Christ’s human nature is an individual, in atomo substance-like thing—means that Christ’s human nature has its own intrinsic causal powers. Because of the hypostatic union, the ultimate subject of Christ’s actions is the person of the Word. The causal origin however is his human nature, which has fully human properties and acts according to fully human ways. By analogy, we might assert that in the same way as Christ’s human actions are also actions of the Word, then his human properties are properties of the Word. Nevertheless, does this necessarily mean that all properties of the human nature are also the property of the Word? Cross proposes a Christology in which the subject of the ignorance and mistakenness shown by the Jesus of the Gospels is the human nature of Christ, but not the second person of the Trinity.34 The limited consciousness or power of Christ’s humanity cannot be attributed to the incarnate Word. Rather their psychological subject is only the human nature of Christ. The asymmetry of the hypostatic union in this respect means two important things. First, on pain of contradiction, the human nature is not the

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subject of any divine properties. What is human in Jesus is purely human. This allows us to affirm the real humanity of Jesus, identical to ours in everything but sin. Secondly, in this fully Chalcedonian but strongly human Christology, the proximate subject and causal origin of Christ’s human actions, consciousness, feelings, and properties is his human nature. Yet their remote subject is the Word, the second person of the Trinity, for in the one person of Christ, Jesus’ human nature is united to the divine nature. We can thus begin to see how it is possible to predicate at least certain human characteristics to the second person of the Trinity. In the Incarnation, the Word is united to whatever is a fundamental part of what it is to be human. In Jesus, everything that constitutes human nature is brought into an intimate and dynamic relationship with the divine. As Rahner notes, Christ’s human nature “possesses a genuine, spontaneous, free, spiritual, active center, a human self-consciousness, which as creature faces the eternal Word in a genuinely human attitude of adoration, obedience, a most radical sense of creaturehood.”35 If this is true of Christ as the new Adam, the same must be true of the renewed humanity that the Incarnation inaugurates, in all dimensions of our being.

Cur Deus hic homo? The Particularity of Incarnation The strength of a theological discussion on nationality that takes the Incarnation as its starting point will depend on what values, realities, and experiences it is willing to include in Christ’s humanity, and what relative importance they are given. If we can consider the particularities of Jesus’ identity to be taken up into the hypostatic union, then we can predicate a correspondingly greater theological weight to all human experiences of cultural specificity, ethnicity and nationality. Conversely, unless those particularities are involved in the hypostatic union, they have no theological remit or salvific value, and national identity remains unsusceptible to theological commentary. Jesus’ human nature is an individual one, and includes a particular ethno-cultural identity. If cultural belonging or social identity is a constitutive part of what it is to be human, then in the Incarnation that property may also be predicated of the Word. Since it is taken up into the hypostatic union, socio-cultural identity thereby becomes not only a Christological but also a fully theological category. The writers of the New Testament present Jesus as a political subject of the Roman emperor. He is portrayed as unambiguously Jewish in culture and religion, while also somewhat heterodox in his belief and practice. However, none of these individual particularities (Jesus’ time and place of birth, his

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cultural and religious origins) can be considered universal, essential properties of humanity. Following Scotus’s understanding of the communicatio idiomatum, we might say that the human nature of Jesus is Jewish, born around the beginning of the Christian era in Palestine, etc., but that these accidentals are not communicated to the Word. That being said, these specific properties of the man Jesus are at least closely associated with his divinity. In analogy with the concept of “consecration by contact,” we could argue the hypostatic union hallows Jesus’ Jewishness by association. (A loose parallel to this might be the development of Palestine as the “Holy Land,” sanctified as the place of Jesus’ birth, teaching, death, and resurrection.) This would still however be a rather vague relationship, and Jesus’ ethnic identity would be a derived rather than an intrinsic value. Nationality or ethnic identity would remain somewhat extraneous to the Incarnation, still lingering on the Nestorian fringes, and therefore marginal to questions of salvation. Bearing in mind the adage quod non assumptum non salvatum, is there any more intimate connection than mere association? A parallel with gender provides some useful light at this point. Human nature is invariably gendered, and the category of gender is expressed in reality as maleness or femaleness. Although there is in Christ “no male nor female” (Gal 3:27), this statement clearly cannot mean that the humanity of Christ, the perfection of all human nature, is non-gendered. Rather, the phrase denies the attribution of absolute value to either maleness or femaleness. The fact that Jesus of Nazareth was male does not make masculinity an essential element of redeemed humanity: if that were the case Christ truly would have died “for us men and our salvation” alone! Gender, however, is a universal and essential facet of human nature. The Word assumed a human nature in atomo: Christ’s maleness as an individual expresses the gender particularity inherent in human nature. It is human genderedness itself—rather than mere masculinity—which is assumed in the hypostatic union, and thereby redeemed by it. The reality of Jesus’ manhood is one important guarantee of his true humanity. At the same time, the assertion that “in Christ there is no male or female” need not necessarily imply a contradiction. In the same way that it is impossible to be non-gendered, it is impossible for any specific person to be a-national (if by nationality we mean at the least a socio-cultural identity wider than that of the family or the immediate kin-group and which extends beyond the immediate generation). By analogy with gender, it seems clear that it is socio-cultural identity itself that is assumed into the hypostatic union. The same cannot be said to be true for Jesus’ Jewishness, since Jewishness after all is not an essential component of human

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nature. Thus we may assert Jesus’ ethno-cultural and religious identity as a first-century Palestinian Jew as a confirmation of the historical reality of the Incarnation, while agreeing with the ecclesiological and moral claims that “in Christ there is no Jew or Greek.” The value of the singular “national” identity of Jesus can be thus honored without making it an absolute value. If we take seriously the teaching of John Paul II that “man [sic] combines his deepest human identity with membership of a nation,” then it becomes evident that the Incarnation brings nationality into intimate union with the divine. One consequence of this argument is to bring us back to the doctrine of the primacy of Christ. If creation is for the Incarnation, and if socio-cultural belonging is taken up into the hypostatic union, a series of important consequences emerge. First, a number of particularities, including historical and temporal locality, and social identity (in which field we may include modern concepts of nationality), are at least involved with the person of the Incarnate Word, in a relation of the closest intimacy. (I use the word “involved” to obviate some of the difficulties involved in predicating all properties of the human nature to the divine.) Second, if the human nature of Christ, as Scotus argues, is ontologically prior to creation—which has Christ as its model or goal, and if social identity is an essential property of humanity, then nationality is part of God’s creative plan. Socio-cultural identity is willed into and sustained in existence by God. On condition that we accept that nationality per se (or something approaching it) is assumed in the hypostatic union, then nationality has a role in the redeemed humanity of which Christ is the first-born and exemplar. Grace, after all, does not destroy nature. At the heart of this question however lies an imponderable: the relative value that we may attribute to socio-cultural identity within the hypostatic union. Our response to this question will depend on how much space we are willing to allot to ethnicity, nationality (or membership of any trans-temporal social group larger than the family or immediate clan) within the various components of human identity. If social identity is an essential property of being human, it is also only one property among many others. Being left- or right-handed, for example, is another. Arguably, someone’s social identity would seem to be a more significant property than his or her handedness, but it is no easy matter to prove definitely this in an empirical way. Cultural and psychological factors as well as ideological preferences significantly affect the way that the various facets of human identity are organized: nationalists for example are more likely to give a greater importance to “one’s own culture as a structuring element of one’s personality,” in the phrase of John Paul II, while Marxists are more likely to emphasize socio-economic class.

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How we understand the precise role and importance of Jesus’ socio-cultural, ethnic or national identity will define our belief in what is saved in and through the Incarnation—and what is not. This is something that Scotist Christology does not allow us to state beyond reasonable doubt. Nevertheless, Scotus’s insistence on Christ’s human agency and consciousness brings us several steps closer to a specifically Christian theology of nationality than does, say, the Old Testament model of particular national election. Yet Scotus’s potential contributions are not limited to his Christology. Another useful tool for looking at issues of nationality is found in his Trinitarian theology.36 The analogue on which Scotus bases his understanding of the internal economy of the Trinity is the human experience of giving and receiving love, acts which require of the self a certain potential incommunicability in order that this gift may be gratuitously shared with others. According to Scotus, the persons of the Trinity are endowed with elements of singularity and incommunicability proper to each person alone. The foundational term suppositum describes the distinctive forms of personal existence of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. Incommunicability describes that which one person cannot share with another. Paternity, for example, belongs to the Father alone. If something is incommunicable, it is also unrepeatable, unique, and indivisible. It is not a form of anything else. This element provides the precondition and possiblility of relation between the persons. Scotus’s interpretation agrees fundamentally with the standard patristic opinion derived from Augustine that within the Trinity, the relationship between the persons constitutes them as persons. In an early discussion of the matter, Scotus argued that each person of the Trinity is a person absolutely (per modo essendi), independently of relationship (per relationes).37 In a subsequent discussion, this marked insistence on the individuality of the persons was modified to state that even though we may think of the persons in their absoluteness, relationality is in reality an essential feature of each person of the Trinity.38 Questions of the internal relationships of the Trinity have significant ethical repercussion, for there is a direct correspondence between how we construe the inner life of God and our ideals of human relationship. Jesus prays to the Father for his disciples that “they may be one, as we are one” (Jn 17:11). The incommunicable individuality of the supposita of the persons Trinity, along with their de facto relation, is directly relevant to matters of national identity. Specifically, is national identity only privative, along the lines of “to be Croatian is to be non-Serbian”? Or does there exist some national suppositum? If relationships between nations or ethnic communities are to be based in justice, and if the Trinity is the supreme model of loving,

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then the existence of an incommunicable quid—something that makes a national us uniquely us—is a logical necessity. Such an entity need not be a full-blown, quintessential national essence such as mexicanidad or “the Russian soul.” Yet skeptical claims that modern concepts of the nation are merely the chimerical progeny of nationalist intellectuals seem to foreclose willfully the objective existence of collective identity, and with it the possibility of harmonious relationships between groups of people, qua groups. Applying a Trinitarian framework to international relations—a step which requires positing the existence of a national quid—might appear to move us beyond the intellectual impasse caused by two mutually exclusive claims: that the category of nationality is a post-Enlightenment cultural construct, fruit of a reaction to social change, or that nationality is of the essence of what it is to be human. However, even this solution is problematic, for one important reason: there is a significant difference between being within the Trinity and as it occurs within creation. The existence of the persons within the Trinity is always dependent on each other. In the order of creation, this is not so. Even though I am certainly dependent on others morally and practically, my own personal existence is not ontologically dependent on anyone else’s. No social group is dependent for its very being on the existence of any other group. Inter-Trinitarian relationships are the analogue for ethically ideal human social relations. Yet given the distance between what it is to be a divine person and a human one, the applicability of the Trinitarian model to worldly realities also has its limits. However, according to Scotus, in the created world too, identity is not intrinsically negative or privative. Scotus posits that there is within the order of creation a principle at the root of individual existence, an autonomous, positive element that is not dependent on anything else. This metaphysical entity, which describes the most ontologically developed form of existence, is known as haecceitas.39

Haecceitas: The Thisness of Things Philosophical speculation on the metaphysical problem of individuation— what makes a thing what it is and not something else—has a history that long predates Scotus, for the topic can be traced back via Boethius to Aristotle. Following the reintroduction of Aristotelian hylomorphism in the West, medieval theologians discussed the problem of individuation in connection with angelology. In twentieth-century academic theology, angels have been of minimal interest. Yet the topic was of great import to medieval

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theologians, due to its connection with the biblical accounts of angels and demons, astronomy, and metaphysical speculation about stages of being. Medieval discussions of angelic individuation arose from the difficulties of reconciling the Aristotelian notion that matter itself is the cause and principle of individuation with the Boethian notion of person as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” Competing theories sought to explain the nature or cause of individuation: (1) real natures are individual as such: the same Aristotelian causes that account for the reality of a material substance account also for its individuality; (2) individuation is a lack of internal division, a non-identity with anything else; (3) existence itself causes individuation; (4) quantity is the cause of individuation; and (5) matter is the cause of individuation.40 The last theory was particularly problematic for angelogy, for if all individuation stems from matter, then it is questionable whether angels are truly persons, since they are incorporeal and immaterial. Scotus’s solution to the metaphysical problem of individuation was to propose the necessity of a special individuating entity, a response that is still “the starting point for modern considerations of the question.”41 He too opens his discussion in the context of angelology: “On the basis of their divergent views about the cause of individuation in material, proponents think differentially about the personality of angels, and about their personality or unity in one species.”42 Lest this discussion appear arcane or even bizarre, the important point is that that angelology depends on individuation, and that individuation has implications wider by far than angelological concerns. The metaphysics of individuation involves a fundamental epistemological question, namely the objective value of our intellectual knowledge. . . . The human intellect invariably grasps some common or potentially universal characteristic of sense-perceptual objects, and yet discovers no reason why the nature of what it abstracts could not be multiplied infinitely. In this sense, what is known about a thing is not what is uniquely individual but some common property or feature which it shares with other things.43

In the matter of universals, Scotus follows a moderate realism, occupying a midway point between a real, extra-mental distinction and a merely rational distinction, a point that he calls the formal distinction. By virtue of this distinction, any created thing may be analyzed under two aspects which are formally distinct, yet in reality identical.44 When concepts are formally distinct, they are one as real objects, but separate as mental objects. The

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distinction is used by Scotus to explain the validity of universal conceptions of individuals. It allows us to conceive of a world as a place in which there can be commonality—and therefore communication—between individuals of the same species. The world thus conceived is not a random and meaningless collection of unrelated fragments, but a rational whole. To share commonality with something however, is not the same as being identical to it in all aspects. Individual things (or persons) possess a real difference, something that makes them this X rather than one of any number of identical Xs. To describe the relationship between these individuals and the whole, Scotus elaborated the theory of the natura communis: All substances are integrally comprised of a “common nature” and a positive individuating principle. . . . These two “elements” are inseparable but distinguishable “realitates” of all substances. They are inseparable in that they cannot exist apart, but they can be distinctly posited in re; i.e. they are not merely logical distinctions. The common nature is the formal reality of things, and is common in all members of the same species. The positive . . . principle of individuation, being non-formal, does not destroy the commonness of the nature.45

Common nature as such is then neither universal, nor singular. It is common, Scotus holds, because it is “indifferent” to existing in any number of individuals. As a universal, common nature exists within the intellect. Outside the human intellect, it is expressed in singular, concrete individualities. Once the common nature is actualized, it loses its divisibility, and becomes incommunicable. The incommunicability (i.e., radical uniqueness) of things characterizes each individual instantiation of a common nature. We may conceive of haecceitas as the deepest, the most real and most radical element in the identity of an individual thing. Haecceitas is not an extraneous quality or entity added to something. Rather, it is that which moves common nature from the species to its final form: the individual. Since each individual entity differs radically from any other, no one haecceitas has anything in common with, nor anything which may be communicated to, any other entity of the same type. It is haecceitas which is the reason for the unique “thisness” of each individual expression of a common nature, that which positively makes this this, rather than being a not-that. The unity of the individual instantiation is the ultimate in being and perfection: The individual possesses a unity that is more perfect than the unity of the species, for it cannot be divided into subjective parts. The individual is the only representative of itself. Unity and entity proceed together—a more perfect unity demands a more perfect being. . . . Haecceity is not just a perfection

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added to the form and within it, but a new mode of being that affects matter, form and the composite, i.e. the whole common nature which is thereby contracted. [It] is the last step or the ultimate preparation of the form and the whole composite toward and for real existence.46

Scotus arrives at the doctrine of haecceitas by way of reason, not experience. Indeed, individuating differences simply cannot be experienced directly. The haecceitas of this individual instantiation and that of another instantiation are so radically different from each other that there is between them no commonality which would allow us to know them as they truly are. In practice, as Allan B. Wolter points out, “it is the accidental features of objects in the real world that impinge on our senses, and it is these we must use to identify and differentiate individuals.” However, the fact that human perception cannot apprehend the haecceitas of a thing directly does not mean it cannot be perceived at all, for “God and the angel can know it directly and per se.” Our human inability to perceive the “thisness” of things is due “to the imperfection of our intellect and the way it functions in our present life.”47 Nothing suggests that Scotus intended to limit his doctrine of individuation to the material world. The equation “common nature + haecceitas = the individual” can be applied equally to all of creation. It includes those “option-open” things that are the fruit of divinely sustained human freedom. In reference to our subject, this suggests that nation X has its own haecceitas X, which together with the common nature “nation” takes the concrete form of particular nation X. In practice, however, what people may know of nation X and think constitutes it are merely its accidental differentiating features. These accidents express its uniqueness, but its uniqueness does not depend on nor derive from them. Scotus’s insights bear significantly on the questions of collective identity that we began to explore in Chapter One. For human perception, identity may only be construed by means of comparison, as not-Y, or like-Z. We should remember at this point Emile Béníviste’s claim that in ancient times “every name of an ethnic character in ancient times was differentiating and oppositional. There was present in the name which a people assumed . . . the intention of distinguishing itself from the neighboring peoples.” This corporate, adversarial identity means that the members of the imaginary nation Maurilia might conceive of themselves as being defined by their differences from their close neighbors and traditional enemies the people of Zenobia, or by their similarities with their ethnic and linguistic cousins the Euphemians.48 The theory of haecceitas teaches that at the heart of any reality stands a haec which is ultimately objective, and which is not defined either by comparison

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or by ideation. To insist that corporate identity is merely a myth is to fall into an excessive materialism that precludes real relationships between ethnic communities, nations, or any other groups based on particularity. Scotus’s formal distinction allows us to assert the real existence of individual—but without identifying these with any such accidental features as religion, language, or even territory, much less any kind of stereotypical “personal” qualities such as Gallic charm, German efficiency or American liberty. Qua accidents, these aspects may evolve with time and circumstances—a point not easily accepted by nationalist rhetoric that claims certain immutable characteristics as the essence of a particular nation. In philosophical terms, to claim that can be something as a “Christian nation” would be to confuse essence with accidents. Analogous to this is the question of expressions such as “national soul,” and “the heart of the nation” and the affirmations of twentieth-century papal teaching concerning the moral agency, responsibilities and rights of nations. Is a nation (or any other social group) merely the sum of its present members, in which case would the phrase “national identity” be a rhetorical decoration only? Scotus understands the defining note of individuality to be indivisibility, a positive and intrinsic attribute. Formally, any single nation can be conceived of as a positively existing, indivisible unity, existing in its own unique and specific haecceitas. That haecceitas is real, but ineffable and unknowable by us, and cannot be limited to any one characteristic and or set of characteristics. In this scheme, we can assert that the corporate “national identity” of a people is an immutable reality—but only on the condition that we accept the utter unknowability of that reality. Terms such “Anglo-Saxon attitudes” or “un-American activities” would not be admissible however, for these characteristics would be merely accidental, not inhering in the indivisible, individual haec of any one nation. At the same time, from another perspective, each of the individuals who at any given point in time constitute a nation also possesses his or her own haecceitas. They too are endowed with an intrinsic, stable reality. However, since a nation is composed of a constantly changing population, it is therefore also a dynamic, contingent reality. Anthony D. Smith notes two broad approaches in the study of ethnicity. A “Heraclitean” approach focuses on the emergence and dissolution of ethnic identity. “Parmenidean” sensibilities, on the other hand, give weight to those unchanging cultural aspects that identify particular human groups—their religion, way of life, language and communal memories.49 The formal distinction allows us to reconcile the insights of both perspectives without a necessary con-

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tradiction between these two attitudes. Moreover, in this plan, both the social and individual facets of human identity are simultaneously present, and have value. A nation consists of a sum of individuals who exist at any given point in history—the Heraclitean approach—but because it has its own ineffable haec, it is not only that group of people. We can claim that in its haecceitas, it also transcends immediate time and place and thus honor the Parmenidean perspective. The practical virtue of the Scotist doctrine of individuation is that it prevents us from absolutizing human identity’s social aspect (the sin of an aggressive collectivism that makes individuals subservient to it) or from agreeing with Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum that “there’s no such thing as society.” One further contribution of haecceitas to a theological understanding of nationality concerns knowability. The epistemological claim that unlike humans God and the angels can and do perceive haecceitas directly has important implications. It suggests that the intelligibility of a creature depends on God’s knowing it, and not the reverse.50 The theory insists that at the heart of all individual instantiations of a common nature there is a unique and ultimately intelligible reality. Intelligibility is not identical to human sense perception. In this world, the haec of a thing can only be intuited through its accidental characteristics. In the beatific vision of heaven, when “we shall know as we are known” (cf. 1 Cor 13:12), all haecceitates will be directly apprehended. Scotus’s argument for the moral goodness of creation proceeds along the same lines. The actual value of a creature “depends on God’s loving it with a creative love and not vice versa. This obviously applies to transcendental goodness, which is extensive with a thing’s being, but it also holds for natural and moral goodness as well.”51 This means that if something—in our case, any particular nation—exists, then it does through God’s gratuitous, sustaining love, and is known by him. To assert that nationality itself, or any particular nation X is created, loved and known by God is to assert its transcendental goodness. Care is needed at this point, however. This claim that something is transcendentally good is to ascribe one kind of moral legitimacy and value to the nation. It is not tantamount to claiming that it is morally impeccable. Wherever freedom can be exercised, sin is possible. Nor does transcendental goodness necessarily involve having a superior value to other things that share the same common nature. The source of such goodness is not in the thing itself, nor in how it acts, but rather in its being created, loved and known by God. The fact that all individuals of the same species share a common nature stresses that they have equal degrees of transcendental goodness, regardless of accidental characteristics.

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This step leads us on to another significant point. Scotus holds that each individual instance of a common nature contains the whole of that nature, “contracted” within itself. Metaphysically speaking, all humans are of equal transcendental value, for each human person contains within her- or himself the whole of the common nature “humanity.” The worth and value of a person are not to be confused with or measured by accidental characteristics such as age, gender, ethnicity, intelligence, physical attributes, etc. Mutatis mutandis, the whole common nature “nation” is similarly expressed within each individual nation. It follows then that all nations have an equal value and ontological reality, regardless of their accidental characteristics such as demographic size, political influence, geographical region or statehood. Bruno Bettoni argues that if the individual is “a more perfect being than the essence of the species, it will not only have a greater unity but a greater degree of truth and goodness.”52 If this is so, then each nation also contains an equal degree of truth and goodness as any other. No nation is “more equal than others.” Scotus’s teaching that individual instantiation is the supreme expression of being marks an important philosophical statement. If taken seriously, the tenet has immense social and ethical implications. In reversing the roles of the individual vis-à-vis the species, Scotus makes in effect a radical vindication of the value of the individual against the depreciating tendencies of Greek philosophy. For Plato, the only realities in the full meaning of the term were ideal essence. The multiplicity of individuals was a degradation from which, quite inconsistently, man alone could redeem himself. Aristotle . . . taught that only the form or essence is intelligible while the individual is the result of a contamination of being (form) by non-being (matter), reduc[ing] the individual man to a feeble incarnation of the species.53

Haecceitas in contrast “grounds the intrinsic goodness of each and every thing in creation emphasizing the dignity of each creature.”54 Applied to the human person, “it invests each individual with a unique value as one wanted and loved by God, quite apart from any trait he shares with others or any contribution he might make to society.”55 Haecceitas expresses “the absolute and irreplaceable value of each being.”56 The result of this irreducible value is that “my identity is not a ‘spiritual oneness’ with others . . . what I share with others is my humanity and my rationality, not my identity.”57 The haec of anyone is a sacred mystery known to God alone. Due to our inherent limitations, “we can never identify, exhaust, define or list the qualities, properties and characteristics that make up a particular individual because they are one of a kind in that person.”58

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One important qualification is necessary at this point. Wolter claims that there is an exception to the non-intelligibility of haecceitas, namely the introspective examination of our self: “‘I’ statements imply a precondition for their verity, an intuitive awareness of my bare particularity.”59 Given that first-person identity also includes a significant social element, could not the same intuitive awareness apply to “we” statements too? A “bare-particular” collective individuality would be acutely relevant to doctrinal statements that treat the nation as a collective, moral person. If we can predicate haecceitas of all beings, then if only by virtue of the fact that human societies are composed of self-aware individuals, the assertions concerning individual humans must surely also be applicable to some degree to groups. What is open to discussion is how great a degree. Haecceitas is a useful but limited tool for a theology of nationality. Its limits lie in the fact that there are many different kinds of human associations, each of which has its own haec. The nation is not unique in having its own unique haec. The same would be true of many other human groupings, such as a bank, an orchestra, or a film-crew. The pertinent question therefore is how essential ethno-cultural community or nationality are to human identity. To answer that question theologically, we must employ theological categories as well as philosophical ones. The terms employed in Scotus’s doctrine of individuation are philosophical, but they also reflect Scotus’s Christology. The value of the individual and the “scandal of the particular” involved in the Incarnation are complementary ideas. Christ’s human nature shares in all the dignity inferred on all human beings by their own unrepeatable uniqueness. The communication of properties consecrates human uniqueness by association with the divine, and thereby raises it to a transcendental value. Creation, modeled on and directed to Christ, is thus a world of haecceitates, in which the highest ontological perfection lies in the concrete and the particular rather than in the abstract and the generic. The common nature “humanity” reaches its ontological apogee in each image and likeness of God, the individual person, who is always located in a sociocultural context. To recap at this point: the Incarnation is relevant to the theological elaboration of nationality for two reasons, Christological and metaphysical respectively. First, in the Incarnation the second person of the Trinity descends into the material world. In assuming a human nature, the Word takes on an identity that includes socio-cultural and ethnic (i.e., approximately “national”) elements. In doing so, the Son thereby takes on the particularity proper to humanity. Chalcedonian Christology affirms that Christ shares with us all that is authentically human. Logically then, through the communication of

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properties, “national” or proto-national identity itself may also be predicated of the Word, who is “made man” in one place, time, society, and ethnic group. Not all of the properties of Jesus’ human nature are also properties of his divinity. Yet they all exist at the very least in personal association with it, and are thereby graced, if not also transformed, by that association. In the light of the Incarnation then, nationality may be thought of as being, at the minimum, a broadly theological category-by-association. However, if we claim that socio-cultural or ethnic identity—which in the modern world frequently takes the form of nationality—is indeed an essential property of humanity, then it is also fully involved in the Incarnation, i.e., taken up by the Word and therefore saved. If this is the case, then nationality is a theological category sensu stricto. Second, examining nationality with the aid of Scotist metaphysics reveals that there is an ineffable but objective quid at the heart of all realities— something that is created, known and loved by God. Haecceitas applies to all realities, non-material as well as material. As part of God’s gratuitous acts of creation, and as realities known to God, they are valid objects of theological investigation. Scotus’s theology of the Incarnation combines Christological and metaphysical perspectives. However, the Incarnation was not the final chapter of God’s action in history. Christ’s full and real humanity provides the possibility for our human salvation and acts as a guarantor of it. In the formula of Athanasius, “the Son of God became human so that we might become God.”60 The common nature “humanity” exists in time and space as the specific human person endowed with his or her specific identity. For these two reasons at least, Christian soteriology has to include some consideration of the role of social identity. The key to understanding this role is the transcendent value of the particular. Although the Word does not have a haecceitas (since it is not the instantiation of a species), it is nevertheless enfleshed in particularity. The infancy gospels of Matthew and Luke, the Prologue to the Gospel of John, and the phrases “incarnatus . . . ex Maria virgine,” “homo factus est,” and “sub Pontio Pilato” of the Nicene Creed all emphasize strongly that the Word took flesh as a real human, born into chronological not mythical time, at a particular place and into a specific cultural milieu. Through the Incarnation then, particularity itself becomes a reminder of God, for the Incarnation expresses the supremacy (in being, unity, truth, goodness, and beauty) of the specific over the generic, the located over the non-located, and the historical over the a-historical. Accordingly, all those things that derive their meaning from that most intimate encounter are expressed pre-eminently in and by concrete particulars. It is in this matrix of

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ideas, as one of many particularities inherent in the Incarnation, that we can discover the relative theological value of nationality. For a theology of nationality, a belief in the historical truth of the Incarnation is central. The enfleshment of the Word does more than provide the possibility of individual redemption: by carrying nature over into grace, it transforms the value of all material and social realities.

The Immaculate Conception and the Value of the Particular Scotus’s Christology pays special attention to the role of Mary. His secondary title Doctor Marianus refers to his elaboration of the theology of the Immaculate Conception. The early history of the dogma is itself interesting, since it centers on the role of the sensus fidelium in the development of doctrine. In the West, the liturgical feast of Mary’s Conception was particularly popular among the Saxons, but following the Norman Conquest and the consequent reorganization of ecclesial life, it was suppressed in many dioceses. Notably, it was “Saxon pride” which kept the feast alive and helped it regain its popularity.61 Although widespread, the feast involved particular national loyalties. In the Paris of a generation before Scotus, the Immaculate Conception, known by such Italians as Bonaventure as “the foreign opinion,” was championed particularly by and associated with Anglo-Norman students. Precisely what the liturgical feast celebrated was subject to differing interpretations and evaluations. Not all theologians were of the opinion that Mary had been conceived without contracting original sin. Aquinas, for example, thought that the theory of the Immaculate Conception detracted from the unique dignity of Christ, and taught that “Christ did not contract original sin, in any way whatsoever, but was holy in His very conception. . . . But the Blessed Virgin did indeed contract original sin, but was cleansed thereof from before her birth.”62 A number of theologians before Scotus had sought to justify the belief. Scotus’s defense of the Immaculate Conception accepted Anselm’s understanding of original sin as “a privation of original justice” existing in the soul, rather than in the body. This theological separation of original sin from concupiscence represented a rejection of the traditional Augustinian model, in which original sin was identified with concupiscence, “the insubordination of the flesh toward reason, with the unavoidable propensity to all kinds of evil.”63 In the second half of the thirteenth century, with the spread of the Aristotelian notion of the human being as a “rational animal,” theologians sought to present a more optimistic anthropology and to rethink interpretations of the Fall as the source of sexual desire. According to the Scotist

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scheme, Mary could have inherited the physical condition of post-lapsarian humanity without necessarily contracting original sin. Since Christ’s merit was assigned to Mary prae eventu, her soul was preserved or protected from the human diminution of original sin. Scotus argues that even though Mary did not contract original sin, she was still in need of the union with God that humanity gains through the Incarnation. Even sinless human nature needs Christ for this. Understood thus, the doctrine, rather than detracting from the centrality of Christ, actually insists on it, for Mary was preserved from sin by Christ, not through her own merit or efforts. Ingham notes that “the Immaculate Conception is the logical next step in a Christocentric world view.”64 In the process, the dogma affirms the dignity and potential of the human condition. Scotus’s discussion of the Immaculate Conception “seeks to distance our understanding of redemption from human fallenness. Scotus argues in favor of a renewed anthropology in light of human nature, dignity and divine liberality.”65 Such an emphasis finds an easy harmony with the Scotist vision of the Incarnation as the maximum expression of God’s desire for intimacy with humanity. The fundamental question underlying the dogma of the Immaculate Conception is how to understand Christ’s full and real humanity. At the same time as he is fully and truly divine, Christ is also incarnate ex Maria virgine. The same issue underlies the other questions concerning Mary that Scotus addresses: the predestination of Christ and his Mother, the maternity of the Mother of God, and the two filiations of Christ. These last two topics center on the matter of whether Mary’s maternity of the second person of Trinity involved a real relationship to Christ’s divine nature, or solely to his human nature, the same question that had led to the affirmation of Mary as Theotokos. In discussing the filiation of Christ, Scotus’s point of departure is the assertions of John of Damascus that “We never call the Blessed Virgin, ‘Mother of Christ’,” and “We proclaim the Blessed Virgin to be truly the Mother of God.”66 Scotus points out that John does not deny that Mary was indeed the mother of Christ. Rather, John’s intention was “to contradict Nestorius, who used this designation to deny she was the Mother of God, by stating she begot a mere human.”67 Scotus proposes that there are in the one incarnate Word two relations of filiation: an eternal one with the divine Father and a created one with Mary. Each sonship is real, though distinct: This is clear for the eternal sonship, because he really is the eternal son. For the temporal . . . if we posit a generating mother, and thus a suppositum that has a nature by generation, sonship in Christ follows, as does motherhood in Mary . . .

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Mary did no less in the case of Christ than if she had generated a mere man. Neither did Christ, as man receive less real a nature than a mere man would have received. . . . The relation (of filiation) is equally real in the two cases.68

However, Scotus’s position was by no means unanimously accepted, for it meant accepting a certain distinction between the Word and Christ. In this view, Christ includes the human nature as a part. A different relationship of sonship exists between Christ and Mary than between the word and the Father. On pain of contradiction, the relationship between the Word and Mary cannot be one of filiation. Aquinas, Bonaventure and others reject this scheme, arguing that two relations—being son of A and son of B—would entail two sons. Significantly, Aquinas also objects to the idea that there can be a real relation between Christ and Mary, on the grounds that God, the Person of the Word, has no real relationship with creatures. Scotus’s position, on the other hand, insists on the metaphysical and human reality of that relationship. Given the relevance of Christ’s humanity for an appreciation of the theological value of nationality—Scotus’s exposition of the dual filiation significantly presents Mary as the proximate source of Christ’s real humanity. Insisting on Mary’s maternity witnesses to and emphasizes the reality of Jesus’ humanity—along with it, all that the Incarnation implies. As such, Scotus’s Mariology is an assertion of the value of all that is human. Mary, pre-eminent among redeemed humanity, the human progenetress of the Incarnate Word, is the immediate cause of the elevation of humanity to divine life and the evidence of it. The Mariology of Scotus, a corollary of his radical Christocentrism, reiterates in theological terms his metaphysical insistence on the transcendent value of particularity.

Conclusion: Nationality and the Incarnation The simple question as to whether God creates nations reveals itself to be anything but simple. The question itself requires some parsing, for it contains several others: what the notion of creation involves; the connection between God and nationality itself; God’s relationship to individual nations. In the light of scholarly disagreements, claims by any one nation, modern or ancient to favored status with God could well seem intellectually bizarre and untenable as a matter for serious theological discussion. Such religious nationality may well indeed be naïve, willful, or devious. Yet this should not lead us to an overly hasty dismissal. A more meaningful question is whether such claims are only preposterous, or whether, mixed in with the chaff, there are also grains of truth, beauty and goodness. Does theological investigation have something to

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say about these beliefs? Moreover, can theologians dialogue about nationality as theologians, with each other and across the frontiers of disciplines? The notion of salvation has been an attractive way for many nations and ethnic communities to interpret their own historical experience. Yet as in the case of the application of creation motifs to nationality, the concept of “national salvation” has some significant unhealthy manifestations, the darkest of which is a tendency to assume that God’s will is identical with the flourishing of one’s own nation. Applying the language and mental framework of salvation to particular nations also frequently weakens the connection to true transcendence. One result of this attenuation is that national and truly religious considerations come to occupy radically different spheres of life, respectively public and private. The nation then begins to take on the trappings of religion (as in imperialism or secular nationalism), even becoming a practical substitute for God, in an aggressive form of ethnolatry. To avoid the dangers that accompany overlaying the patterns of salvation theology on the history and life of a particular nation or ethnic group, Christian theology has much to offer. In other words, if national salvation is to be truly salvific in the life of a nation, it must fully incorporate all the implications of the Christ-event—collective responsibilities as well as rights, justice and charity toward other nations, particularly less powerful ones—ensuring that cherishing national identity is balanced by a concern for the international common good. A more fruitful theological approach to the function, meaning, values and limits of nationality comes from taking the Incarnation as starting point. This involves considering both creation and salvation, and the relationship between the two. If theology is to progress beyond the a-confessional, phenomenological descriptions of the religious elements of national identity undertaken by historians, social scientists, philosophers and anthropologists, religious belief is required. Christian theology needs to provide more than a general theistic understanding of the value of nationality, or of the connections between religious and national identities: it needs to harmonize this data rationally with faith. Christianity is something rather more than belief in the existence of a creator god. It is faith in a very particular kind of divinity, who sustains, enters into, and becomes part of his own creation. Creation is not co-extensive with salvation—were that the case, then the Incarnation would have nothing to add to creation. On the other hand, underrating the goodness and integrity of the created order will result in an over-zealous separation between creation and the Incarnation. The somewhat toxic fruit of this is a theology that conceives of human sin as the motivation for the Incarnation, a stance which is subtly anthropocentric.

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In contrast, the “minority tradition” as articulated by Scotus—namely, that from eternity God willed the Incarnation as well as creation—places divine love at the center of the cosmos. Incarnation is the cause and pattern of creation, the reason for its existence. Consequently, everything connected with what it is to be human is also at the heart of this Christocentric universe. The Incarnation is the key to understanding of all aspects of creation, including social realities. Scotus’s understanding of creation includes the idea that God’s handiworks are granted a certain, “option-open” autonomy. Included in this is human freedom, the power with which humans choose, inter alia, to organize themselves socially. Such things are necessarily contingent. Anything that exists and that is not God necessarily belongs to the order of creation: in order for it to continue to exist, it must be sustained in its contingency. But creation is a multivalent concept. God sees that “it is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen 2:18) and therefore directly creates human sociality. Yet the various forms that social organization takes are the direct result, not of God’s work, but of human freedom. As part of the “option-open” order of creation, they are sustained in being by God’s will. Consequently, with these qualifications, we have solid grounds for holding that nationality and even specific nationalities are indeed part of creation. However, that same divine will also sustains and includes moral responsibility. In Christian terms, this means that there is no such thing as Conor Cruise O’Brien’s “holy nation,” a people which is intrinsically holy. The “Holy Russia” that the more extreme edge of contemporary Russian nationalism seeks to revive is a theologically dubious entity. A second point of relevance is the full and real humanity of Christ. The Incarnate God shares in all that is a fundamental part of what it is to be human. This necessarily includes a unique identity. Part of each person’s identity is constituted by his or her membership of various societies, such as family, ethnic group or nation. My social identity is part of my personal identity. But the term, we should remember also applies collectively: groups of people have an identity as groups, one that is more than the sum of its parts. If we take a quod non assumptum non salvatum Christology seriously, then both aspects of identity, personal and collective must have some significance for salvation. In the communicatio idiomatum, social identity enters into deep communion with the divine. The more intractable theological problem is how great a soteriological function we can attribute to social identity. The answer to this question will necessarily depend on how we evaluate its human import. That evaluation in turn inevitably reflects our own personal and cultural experience and our own preferences. Such considerations ineluctably reflect the conscious and

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semi-conscious partialities and personal experience of commentators. Where identity is primarily considered in individual terms (e.g., in the Kantian form, which considers personhood independently of social context), less salvific importance will be ascribed to community. Where the collective aspects of human life receive more attention (for cultural reasons or out of socio-economic necessity), the religious value and function of community is correspondingly more obvious. More brutally put: when cultural individualism has produced religious individualism, nationality will be a purely secular matter, and extraneous to valid theological consideration. If nationality as a form of social organization were merely the result of human freedom, individual nations would exist at somewhat of a remove from God’s interest and action. Any claims of a special interest on the part of God in the life and vicissitudes of any one people, ethnic group, or nation would be suspect or simplistic. However, it is important to ponder whether specific nations are only the result of human freedom, or whether there is something of greater being implicit within them, a quid which might be akin to those Romantic concepts of “national soul.” Given that Church documents imply a kind of moral personhood, is there a place in Christian theology for the collective meaning of “national identity,” namely a kind of being which subsists in the current members of a nation but is not limited to them? Scotus argues that in the internal economy of the Trinity, the identity of the Persons exists in and as relationship. Were we to extrapolate that Trinitarian pattern into the identity of a nation, then each nation would be contingent on each other’s existence. In that all identities also involve an element of incommensurability, in the case of international relations, to stress national distinctiveness could indeed foster the kind of negative identity (i.e., to be “us” is to be “not-them”) which gives impetus to those antemurale attitudes, adversarial identities, and historical enmities that invite at least rivalry between communities, if not violence. Within the workings of the Trinity, however, the distinctive, incommunicable suppositum of each of the persons is not a negative force. Instead, it is the condition for unity founded in love. Diverse identity provides not only the possibility of enmity, but also of charity. To cherish the distinctiveness of one’s own group does not necessarily include an attitude of superiority toward other groups. That having been said, it is not clear that we can stretch the analogy of divine Persons to the point where individual nations are corporate “moral persons” in the full sense of the term. At this point, applying haecceitas to the question of identity rescues us from a potential cul-de-sac. The notion that each reality contains a unique property is an important claim for the objec-

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tive truth of individuals and individual things. At the heart of each person’s and each group’s existence, there is something which makes of it an absolute this, rather than merely a comparative not-that. This allows us to aver the existence of individual nations as a number of unique, individual and unrepeatable this-es, each of which has its own haecceitas. The world’s youngest state is Timor-Leste. In Scotist terms, the ineffable haec “Timor-Leste” together with the common nature “nation” constitute the nation of Timor-Leste. In this way, we can allot to that fledgling people and state a positive metaphysical value, rather than conceiving of Timor-Leste in negative terms as being no longer the Portuguese colony of Timor or the Indonesian province of Timor Timur. This positive construal has important implications for the respect and dignity that nations afford each other. Humans perceive and define things only by their accidents. Nevertheless, the haec of something, although knowable only by God, is still knowable. It is thus an objective reality. The modern-day Republic of Mali traces its roots to the medieval Mali Empire. The real continuity between the two is not easily established however, and proving the longue durée existence of the Malinese nation or a historical Malinese national identity is difficult, since the accidents which might define that identity are tenuous and unstable. However, in disagreement with claims that modern nations (rather than states) are nothing more than historically conditioned imaginaries that have no objective, perduring existence, haecceitas allows us to distinguish between the imperceptible, ineffable haec of a nation and that nation’s phenomenology at any given point in its history. The potential intellectual embarrassment caused by beliefs in a national identity of essential, timeless features can thus be sidestepped. Haecceitas allows us to agree wholeheartedly with the declarations that modern nations may have little in common with the ethnic substrate that precedes them. Smith’s defining notes of an ethnic community (an identifying name or emblem, a myth of common ancestry, shared historical memories and traditions, one or more elements of common culture, a link with an historic territory or homeland, and a measure of solidarity at least amongst the elites) or of a nation (a named human population sharing an historic community, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights for all members) are in fact more likely than not to change with time. That these notes are in a process of constant evolution however, does not prevent us from talking about national identity meaningfully. Employing the principle of formal distinction, there is no necessary contradiction between the contingency and historic variability of a nation, manifested in its accidents, and its unchanging haecceitas that makes any nation this particular nation, different from any other.

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Another implication of haecceitas concerns international equality. Since things are constituted of a haec plus a natura communis equally present in all instantiations of that nature, every nation is an ontologically equal expression of the common nature “nationality.” The corollary of this is that regardless of wealth, religion, historical memories, geographical location, political power, population, language, etc., every single nation has an inherent dignity. All are equal expressions of nationhood. Since the haec of each nation is known by God, it is also by implication loved and wanted by God, in different but equal ways. Claims by one nation for superiority over others by appellation to divine favoritism can have no metaphysical justification. Nor can political power or economical flourishing be regarded as proof of divine favor. A final implication concerns the final goal of nationality. If the haec of each nation is knowable only by God, then we can at least hope that it will be revealed to our perfected, divinely informed knowledge at the eschaton, when according to St Paul, divine love will illumine human knowledge. In that new dispensation, “the partial will come to an end . . . For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face” (1 Cor 13:10,12–13). To consider nationality in the light of the final revelation of God, when “what we will be has not yet been revealed” and when “we will be like him because we will see him as he truly is” (1 Jn 3:2–3), allows us to imagine a teleological remit for nationality itself, a radically different creed from the fervid national messianisms that foresee an eschatological role for their own nation alone. The metaphysical notion of haecceitas thus proclaims the value of the particular, a value embodied in the Incarnation, in which God shares in the haecceitas inherent in his creation. Particularity, the highest degree of being of any nature, becomes graced by transcendence: God chooses to dwell and to reveal himself in the concrete, the historical and located, the embodied, and the singular. The Incarnation is the pattern, the source of meaning and the finality of all particulars, which include ethnic communities and nations. In the economy of grace, the particular humanity of Jesus is the place of encounter with the boundless God. In the Christian dispensation, one corollary of the scandal of the Incarnation is the scandal of particularity. To insist on the centrality of the Incarnation is to cherish the value of particularity. A theology which seeks to find a value in nationality needs not only to accept the union of the divine and human in the person of Jesus as dogma. It needs in addition to assert to the maximum all aspects of the humanity of Christ, against all tendencies to lessen their import or to leave their wider-

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reaching implications unexplored. Scotus’s incarnational worldview led inexorably to his defense of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. To emphasize the role and position of Mary in the economy of salvation is to affirm the truth and meaning of the Incarnation, and with it the inherent salvific value of all that makes for a full human existence.

Notes 1. New Revised Standard Version. 2. The Roman Missal Revised by Decree of the Second Vatican Council, Official English Texts (Dublin, Ireland: Talbot Press, 1975), 393. 3. Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 48. 4. Ad gentes, 8. 5. Lucien Richard, “Mission and Inculturation: The Church in the World,” in Richard, Vatican II, 96. 6. Charles G. Herberman et al., eds., The Catholic Encyclopedia: An international work of reference on the constitution, doctrine, discipline, and history of the Catholic church (New York: Appleton, 1907–), s.v. “Incarnation, The,” by Walter Drum. 7. New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967), s.v. “Arianism,” by V. C. deClercq. 8. Josef Neuner and J. J. Dupuis, eds., The Christian Faith: Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church (London: Harper Collins). 9. Neuner and Dupuis, The Christian Faith, 227–228, adapted slightly. 10. Richard, Vatican II, 97. 11. John of Damascus, De fide orthodoxa, ed. and trans. Bonifatius Kotter (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1973), 131. 12. Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 23n. 13. Mary Beth Ingham, Scotus For Dunces: An Introduction to the Sublime Doctor (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2003), 128. 14. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 129. 15. Ilia Delio, “Revisiting the Franciscan Doctrine of Christ,” Theological Studies 64/1: 17. 16. Allan B. Wolter and Blane O’Neill, John Duns Scotus: Mary’s Architect (Quincy, IL: Franciscan Press, 1993), 30. 17. Cross, Duns Scotus, 128. 18. Ordinatio III, d.19, q.unica, n.6, in Bernardine M. Bonansea, Man and His Approach to God in John Duns Scotus (Lanham, MA: University Press of America, 1993), 49. 19. See Ordinatio III, d.7, q.3, discussed in Damien McElrath, ed., Franciscan Christology: Selected Texts, Translations and Introductory Essays (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1994), 146–153.

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20. Karl Rahner, “Christology within an Evolutionary View of the World,” chap. in Theological Investigations, trans. Karl Kruger (Baltimore: Helicon, 1966), vol. 5, 184. 21. Catechism, 456. 22. Ingham, Scotus for Dunces, 28. 23. William Short, “Franciscus vir catholicus et universalis: From Tradition to Transformation. A paper given at the First International Congress of the OFM Universities and Research Centres, Rome 2001.” www.ofm.org /educ/ doc/bill.rtf. 24. Seamus Mulholland, “Incarnation in Franciscan Spirituality: Duns Scotus and the Meaning of Love.” www.franciscans.org.uk/2001jan-mulholland. html. 25. Seamus Mulholland, “Duns Scotus as a Basis for a Franciscan Environmental Theology.” www.ofm-jpic.org/ecology/DunsScotus.pdf. 26. Lawrence Moonan, Divine Power: The Medieval Power Distinction Up to Its Adoption by Albert, Bonaventure, and Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 18ff. 27. Ingham, Scotus for Dunces, 50. 28. Ingham, Scotus for Dunces, 67. 29. From “America the Beautiful,” the patriotic poem of Katherine Lee Bates, written in 1893. 30. Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, 29. 31. Cross, Duns Scotus, 115. 32. Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation,131. 33. In Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, 183. 34. Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, 315 ff. 35. Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. 1, 158. 36. See Quodlibet 4, art. 3, 4.61–4.63, in Ingham, Scotus for Dunces, 193–95. 37. Lectura 1, d.26. See Ingham, Scotus for Dunces, 111. 38. Ordinatio I, d.6, n. 27–75. See Ingham, Scotus for Dunces, 126n. 39. Allan B. Wolter, “John Duns Scotus,” in Jorge J. E. Gracia, ed., Individuation in Scholasticism: The Later Middle Ages and The Counter-Reformation, 1150–1650 (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994), 291. Wolter points out that Scotus himself uses the word haecceitas only two or three times, preferring the term differentia individualis. 40. Allan B. Wolter, ed. Marilyn McCord Adams, The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 89. 41. Cross, Duns Scotus, 5–6. 42. Ordinatio II, d.3, q.1, n.1, in Woosuk Park, “The problem of individuation for Scotus: a principle of indivisibility or a principle of distinction,” Franciscan Studies 48, vol. XXVI (1988): 108. 43. Wolter, The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus, 71–72. 44. Cross, Duns Scotus, 149. 45. Philip Ballinger, “Hopkins and Duns Scotus,” Charter, 2001–2002: 41. 46. Efrem Bettoni, Duns Scotus: The Basic Principles of His Philosophy, trans. and ed. Bernadine Bonansea (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1961), 61–62.

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47. Wolter, The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus, 95. 48. I have borrowed the name of these imaginary places from Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (London: Picador, 1979). 49. Smith, The Ethnic Origins of Nations, 206. 50. Paul Edwards, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1967), s.v. “John Duns Scotus,” by Allan B. Wolter. 51. Wolter, “John Duns Scotus.” 52. Bettoni, Duns Scotus, 63. 53. Bettoni, Duns Scotus, 62–63. 54. Short, “Franciscus vir.” 55. Wolter, “John Duns Scotus.” 56. Ingham, Scotus for Dunces, 39. 57. Ingham, Scotus for Dunces, 53. 58. Ingham, Scotus for Dunces, 53. 59. Wolter and O’Neill, John Duns Scotus: Mary’s Architect, 28. 60. St. Athanasius, De incarnatione, 54, 3, in Catechism, 460, slightly adapted. 61. See Allan B. Wolter, John Duns Scotus: Four Questions on Mary (Santa Barbara, CA: Old Mission Santa Barbara, 1988), 2–3, 17n. 62. Summa Theologica III, q.27, art.2, ad.2, in Wolter, John Duns Scotus: Four Questions on Mary, 4. 63. Wolter and O’Neill, John Duns Scotus: Mary’s Architect, 66. 64. Ingham, Scotus for Dunces, 81. 65. Ingham, Scotus for Dunces, 79. 66. In Wolter, John Duns Scotus: Four Questions on Mary, 74 and 77. 67. In Wolter, John Duns Scotus: Four Questions on Mary, 91–92. 68. Ordinatio 3.8 unica, n.11, in Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, 216–17.

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Our Lady of All Nations

It may not at first glance appear to be a sensible idea, let alone a likely one, to claim that there are correlations between Marian dogma and devotion and questions of nationality. Indeed, the connections are not always direct or immediately evident. Nevertheless, reflection on these phenomena shows that there are several important connections between them. Not the least of these is the fact that over the last two thousand years, many different ethnic and national communities have adopted the figure of the Virgin Mary as their patroness. In Los Angeles, where this book has been written, the figure of La Virgencita, Our Lady of Guadalupe is found everywhere from taco stands to taxi cabs to church walls, a doughty palladium of Mexican, Latino and Chicano identities.1 In such places, it is possible to describe the connection between the Virgin Mary and community identity phenomenologically. But a theology of nationality needs to go further, seeking out deeper connections between the figure of the Virgin Mary and the matter of nationality, and locating that nexus within the whole structure of Christian belief. At the heart of this discussion is the rich and often ambiguous relationship between religious experience and dogmatic formulations. The dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception exemplifies two classical theological dicta: Anselm’s definition of theology as fides quaerens intellectum (the bringing to bear of rationality on faith) on the one hand, and the relationship between prayer and belief on the other, expressed in the formula lex orandi lex credendi (literally, the law of worship is the law of faith). The significance of both phrases is shown in the fact that popular Marian devotion has been the cradle

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of later theological explorations and a source of precise dogmatic definitions. The uncertainty of the magisterium and the disputes of theologians persisted for centuries as to precisely what was being celebrated on the Feast of the Conception of Mary of December 8; their reticence was matched by the tenacity of the sensus fidelium in the matter. According to Lumen gentium, [t]he entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief. They manifest this special property by means of the whole people’s supernatural discernment in matters of faith when “from the Bishops down to the last of the lay faithful” they show universal agreement in matters of faith and morals. That discernment in matters of faith is aroused and sustained by the Spirit of truth. . . . Through it, the people of God adheres unwaveringly to the faith given once and for all to the saints, penetrates it more deeply with right thinking, and applies it more fully in its life.2

Indeed, the public and private devotion given to the Virgin Mary is probably the most salient example of the “whole people’s supernatural discernment” in Catholicism, for the formal definition of the Immaculate Conception as dogma in 1854 was rooted in centuries of devotion which knew nothing of the syllogisms of scholasticism. Both the dogmatic definition as well as the liturgical feast that preceded it by centuries represent the faith instinct of the whole Church. If the Virgin Mary was not in some way a channel of salvation, why, theologians asked, did the faithful across the centuries continually seek recourse to her? Mariological doctrines developed as an outgrowth and subset of Christology. According to the soteriological argument, human salvation depended on Christ’s being fully and truly human in his life and death. In turn, if his humanity was real, Christ had to have been born, which required the existence of a human mother. Mary thus became “the principal guarantee of Christ’s humanity.”3 The creed of the First Council of Nicea of 325 had already included the phrase “born of the Virgin Mary.” The Council of Ephesus was convoked in 431 to deal with the controversy caused by Nestorius, who taught that the Logos only dwelt in Christ, along the lines of divinity dwelling in a temple, without there being any inherent connection between his humanity and the godhead. Consequently, the correct term for Jesus, Nestorius argued, should be Theophoros, the God-bearer. The Virgin Mary gave birth not to God, the Logos, but to a man, Jesus Christ. Since the term Theotokos, the bringer-forth (Mother) of God, would mean that a human had given birth to the Logos, the Virgin Mary should be referred to Anthropotokos or Christotokos.4

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Nestorius’s scheme emphasized the full humanity of Christ, but at the expense of its union with his divinity. The Fathers of Ephesus denounced Nestorius’s teaching, declaring that Jesus Christ is not two separate entities, human and divine (the man Jesus, and the Son of God, Logos) but one person. The Virgin Mary was therefore truly Theotokos, because she gave birth not to a mere man but to God who was also a man. Aristotelian theories of generation supported this belief. Mary was understood to have “provided the material in her womb to form Jesus’ human aspect, while God the Father was fully responsible for the contribution of his soul.”5 The figure of the Theotokos became a symbolic affirmation of the real humanity of Jesus and of the truth of the Incarnation itself. As a consequence of the furious Christological debates, Mary “was forced into a more and more prominent position. Her unbroken virginity suspended the law of nature, and this manifested the presence of the divine, but her full parturition of Christ served to prove his manhood. The virgin birth was the key to orthodox Christology.”6 Many of the Church Fathers commented on the role of the Virgin. For Tertullian (c. 150–229), writing to combat Gnostic teachings denying the true, physical humanity of Jesus, Mary guaranteed the real human origins of Christ. Since Jesus is connected to the Davidic promise precisely through Mary, his humanity being inseparable “not only from Mary but also from David through Mary and from Jesse through David,” 7 Mary was essential to the fulfilling of the messianic prophecies, the pattern which gave salvific meaning to history. Gregory Nazianzen (325–389) taught that the title Theotokos itself was a criterion of orthodoxy, since it “guarantees the divine-human unity of the person of the incarnate Word, as well as guaranteeing the truth of the Incarnation.”8 Gregory insisted that if anyone does not admit that Holy Mary is Mother of God (Theotokos), he is cut off from the Godhead. If any one claims that Christ merely passed through Mary, as if passing through a channel, but denies that he was formed within her in a divine way (because there was no intervention of man) and in a human way (that is according to the laws of conception) he is equally godless.9

Echoing Gregory, John of Damascus insisted that “it is with justice and truth that we call the holy Mary the Mother of God (Theotokos). For this name embraces the whole mystery of the dispensation.”10 The development of Marian doctrine has gone hand in hand with the growth of devotion to her. The earliest extant version of the prayer invoking Mary’s protection and patronage, referred to in Catholic tradition as Sub

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tuum praesidium, is found in a (possibly) second-century Coptic papyrus.11 Moreover, the intimate relationship between Marian devotion and doctrine proved from an early point to be of signal importance. In his attacks on Nestorian Christology at Ephesus, Cyril of Alexandria (376–444) was defending “a precious tradition of the Alexandrian church, which was already accustomed to invoking Mary under the title Theotokos for centuries.”12 Nestorius’s Christology flew in the face of liturgical usage. Cyril also originated the homiletic form of sequences of praises. A famous homily against Nestorius is addressed to Mary, and stresses her salvific role: “Through you the Holy Trinity is glorified . . . through you churches are established throughout the world, the peoples are led to conversion . . . through you the dead rise, sovereigns reign.”13 Cyril’s eulogies are the conclusion of a loosely constructed syllogism, according to which Mary is the channel of salvation—Scotus’s “proximate cause”—but not its source. Humanity is saved by Christ, Christ is born of Mary, and therefore humanity is saved through Mary. Following Ephesus, Marian devotion flourished, often making use of hyperbolic language that sometimes elevated Mary to equality with Christ. One of the homilies of John of Damascus on the Dormition of Mary proclaims that “for our sake she became mediatrix of all blessings; in her God became man and man became God.”14 The most glowing Mariological language of the patristic period is to be found in the works of Ephrem the Syrian (c. 306–373), whose writings reveal “feelings of deep awe and admiration” for Mary and her virtues. Ephrem “loves the Blessed Virgin passionately and tenderly.” His devotion is “marked by an easy familiarity that . . . encourages confidence and faithful prayer.”15 Scholars have sought to discover the roots of Marian devotion in the ancient Mediterranean. According to Peter Brown, Marian devotion must be placed in the context of the development of the cult of the saints. This belief-system was influenced by the social institution of patronage of late antiquity, in which a powerful patronus was the protector and legal advocate of clientes from lower classes, or sometimes of a city or a region.16 Another approach stresses the residual influence of Middle-Eastern goddess cults. With the spread of Christianity into the pagan world, Mary began to bear a closer resemblance to Isis and the Eastern mother goddesses. . . . In the fifth century prayers were addressed to her and pictures of her were carried into battle by the soldiers on their chariots. In a Greek hymn of thanksgiving, it is Mary rather than Demeter who is praised for bringing

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in the harvest. The Parthenon was consecrated to Mary’s name. In a Roman painting of the sixth century, Mary is enthroned wearing a crown and dressed in a gown covered with jewels, like Cybele. . . . The cult of the Virgin Mary was a replacement for, rather than a continuation of the ancient cults of the goddesses.17

Other theorists seek psychological explanations, identifying Marian devotion as a response to an archetypal need for a divine feminine: “In its attempts to make connection with . . . the transcendental realm, humanity has felt the need to use both male and female images to symbolize the Absolute.”18 In similar vein, in a discussion on the connections between Marian devotion and depth psychology, Donald Dawe notes the boundless symbolic dimensions of the figure Mary.19 George Tavard believes that Marian devotion has been “another way to seek for some Christian version of divine femaleness,” and claims that this search “led to the early dogmas about the Virgin Mary.”20 Tavard’s assertion suggests that doctrinal statements are the working-through of pre-conscious psychological needs which are largely not met by abstract speculation but are expressed in a different milieu: prayer, devotion, liturgy and ceremony. A more nuanced understanding might suggest that in Mariological language, psychological needs and deep-seated cultural paradigms converge with doctrine.

The Crown of Creation It is worth noting that not all Marian devotional practices are verbal responses to fundamental existential concerns; sometimes they are profoundly felt, taking shape in gesture and symbol rather than in words. As I have suggested earlier, they can often bear a strikingly similar resemblance and embody a psychological stance close to that evoked by patriotism. The “fatherland” of the patria can also be a “motherland” (such as Matushka Rus, Mother Russia, or la madre patria of Spain), of which Mary herself may be mother.21 Marian devotions easily lend themselves to local, ethnic and national concerns. Marialis cultus, the 1974 Instruction of Paul VI on Marian devotion, notes that religious experience is subject to “the different sensibilities of peoples and their different cultural traditions,”22 the plurality of religious forms being a response to particular circumstances. John Paul II too notes that Marian spirituality “finds a very rich source in the historical experience of individuals and of the various Christian communities present among the different peoples and nations of this world.”23

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Given its variety, mapping out the various forms of Marian spirituality can bring the adage of Bernard of Clairvaux de Maria numquam satis (one can never say enough about Mary) frustratingly to mind, for as each time and place shapes an image of Mary that expresses the beliefs and concerns important to the faithful of that age, Mary’s image is altered and seen through a different filter. Mary has become known throughout history by hundreds of names. . . . Each of these manifestations reveals a lot more about the church in any particular historical situation than they do about Mary. . . . Every age consciously or unconsciously forms its own ideal of Mary and her titles can be seen as an expression of this idea.24

In each form of devotion, the figure of Mary is “protean and unstable” for it is “refracted through the prism of the needs and fears of the people who approach her.”25 Of the various arenas of devotion, one of the most important in volume and theological density is the official public worship of the Church. Indeed, “the highest and purest expressions of devotion to the Blessed Virgin have sprung from the liturgy or have been incorporated in it. . . . The liturgy which receives approval and strength from the magisterium is a most lofty expression and an evident proof of this living tradition.”26 The existence of an ancient liturgical commemoration was held to be an important confirmation of the confession of faith. In order for a belief to qualify as dogma, it had not only to be in harmony with the apostolic teaching, but also to conform to the timehonored worship of the Church. Jaroslav Pelikan has identified three different aspects in the development of veneration of Mary as Theotokos: the spread of usage of the title itself, the rise of a corresponding liturgical observance called “the commemoration of Mary,” and “the deepening perception that there was a need to identify some totally human person as the crown of creation.”27 The development of liturgical feasts of Mary witnesses to an abiding desire to explore and celebrate all aspects of her life. The prime literary source for the life of Mary (beyond the few details which can be gleaned in the canonical gospels) was the second-century apocryphal Protoevangelium of James, which presented a mythical account of Mary’s marvelous infancy. The first Marian feasts were kept in Byzantium: the Annunciation and a commemoration of her virginity, celebrated near Christmas. The celebration of a feast of the Dormition, based on the apocryphal Transitus Mariae accounts of Mary’s death, dates from around 600.28 Feasts of Mary’s birth and presentation in the Temple (based on the account in the Protoevangelium) were being celebrated some fifty years later. Byzantine monks fleeing Muslim conquests in the Eastern Empire brought these Marian feasts westwards to Rome.

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A liturgical feast can sometimes predate dogmatic explanation by centuries. While the Immaculate Conception was established in the fifteenth century as a major annual celebration for the whole Church, the belief was not confirmed as dogma until 1854. However, from its inceptions, Marian devotion appears not only within the liturgy but also outside the formal public worship of the Church, and in ambiguous relationship with it. According to Pelikan, in the first five Christian centuries “the connection between technical theology and the piety of ordinary believers was difficult to handle.”29 Indeed, throughout the history of Mariology, the “piety of ordinary believers” has played a leading role. Marina Warner characterizes the Immaculate Conception as “an interesting Mariological hybrid: the union of a belief that has enjoyed immense popularity and stimulated fierce passions . . . with a difficult framework provided by theologians in order to accommodate the popular creed.”30 Popular devotions to Mary have also inevitably resulted in some strange forms. Marialis cultus was an attempt to maintain devotion within a theologically correct spectrum, and to rescue it from more outlandish speculation, the claims of visionaries, or from well intentioned but misguided attempts to place Mary at the very center of liturgy. Mary’s unparalleled stature as a figure to whom the faithful sought recourse grew “through a complex interplay of legendary narratives, theological arguments, dogmatic assertions, artistic representations and devotional prayers.”31 Expressed in a complex of liturgy, private prayer, iconography, hymnology and poetry, the doctrine of Mary arose in the Christian East where Marian piety was “unrestrained,” “fervent” and “excitable.”32 From an early date, Marian theology made extensive use of typological readings of Old Testament figures, the first of which appears to have been that of Eve-Mary, evoked by Justin Martyr (c. 110–165). Throughout the patristic period, homilists delighted in discovering proleptic hints of Mary throughout the Hebrew scriptures, creating an ever-growing stock of literary images whose extravagant phraseology embellished the liturgy. Not the least of the elements contributing to the development of Marian devotion was the practice of veneration of icons. The neo-Platonic theory that visible reality was a diluted form of an intense, invisible reality lent philosophical support to an inchoate instinct that religious images somehow participate in the divine power of the forces they represent. The use of Christian imagery was rooted in the sensus fidelium that images of Christ, Mary, and the saints were channels of salvific power connecting the faithful on earth with their celestial patrons. Legends of authentic images of Christ and Mary grew: these included miraculous acheiropoietos (unmade by human hands) icons, icons painted by St. Luke, the Mandylion (legendarily sent by

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Christ himself to King Abgar of Edessa), and the Veronicle, the cloth with which, according to tradition, Veronica had wiped the face of Jesus. Images of Mary reiterated visually the doctrinal endorsement of her title Theotokos. The iconoclastic theology propagated during the reign of Byzantine Emperor Leo III (717–741) held that reverence paid to images of Christ, the Virgin and the saints was idolatry. Venerable icons were destroyed and the liturgical use of images forbidden. Yet there was considerable opposition, popular and ecclesiastical, to this theology: although the “theological justification [against the use of icons] did convince a number of Oriental bishops . . . it carried neither the people nor the majority of the monks.”33 John of Damascus argued that to deny icons was to deny the Incarnation itself. Since in the Incarnation the Word took flesh, tangible and visible, then it was licit and valid to make images of the Jesus, who was himself “image of the Father.” John’s theology of the icon built on the insights of Basil and Athanasius, who had distinguished between the sign and what it signifies, at the same time “affirming analogical unity between them, because of which honor moves from image to prototype.”34 An image of Christ or Mary or the saints is “a vessel that contains and participates in divine reality, rather than standing in as a mere representation of it.”35 According to Theodore of Studios (759–826), since images were united with their divine prototypes in a “hypostatic likeness,” they should “command the same veneration as that accorded to Christ or Mary.”36 With the confirmation in 843 by the Empress Theodora of the decrees of the Second Council of Nicea, the iconoclastic controversy was finally brought to an end, and the use of icons established and confirmed. The triumph of the icon affirmed “the full reality of the incarnation of the Logos, which Byzantine theology and piety like to read in the mystery of the divine motherhood.”37 In the mindset of Eastern Christianity, the doctrine of the Incarnation, the veneration of icons and the exaltation of Mary as Theotokos were conjoined aspects of the one divine mystery. The power attributed to Mary to influence political events is a historical feature of Orthodox and Catholic piety. Mary figures prominently for example in the myths of the founding of Byzantium, and was adopted as protectress of the Byzantine ruling dynasty.38 The emperor Heraclitus (fl. 610–641) had the image of Mary placed on the masts of his navy in the Sassanian Wars.39 Mary was early on given the attributes of sovereignty. The earliest image of Mary as “Queen of Heaven” is found in the Roman church of Santa Maria Antiqua. The veneration of Mary as celestial monarch belongs, according to Warner “to the ancient tradition of personifying cities and institutions as goddesses. . . . She embodies the new Rome which is the church just as Dea Roma on the capitol represented the pagan city.”40

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To take for granted that there was a direct continuity between pagan and Christian worship is seductively easy. Brown warns that to conceive of the cult of the saints as merely replacing the adoration of the old gods is “too inert” a way of understanding the relationship. Rather, Christians of the late Roman Empire “could obliterate their pagan past because they could add something new.”41 The cult of the saints put existing social structures and power relationships into question. Santa Maria Antiqua itself was fashioned out of the vestibule of Domitian’s palace, where the goddess Minerva had been venerated. Similarly, both Rome and Assisi have ancient churches called Santa Maria sopra Minerva, where the obvious connotation is a Roman temple turned into a church, but where the language—sopra as “on top of”—suggests not a syncretic move or a matter of recycling convenient stone and brick, but a replacement of the Roman goddess by Mary. The church and the Virgin alike could symbolize Christianity’s victory over paganism. As guarantrix of Christ’s humanity, Mary represented the truth of the enfleshment of God as opposed to the illusions of the insubstantial gods of the past. Santa Maria Antiqua subsequently served as the private chapel of the eastern emperors and their representatives in Rome, an implication that the imperial power was associated with that triumph. In Constantinople, the ancient icon of Maria Hodegetria (the one who shows the way) was venerated in the emperors’ chapel of the Blachernae. The Byzantine emperors removed Nike, goddess of victory, from their imperial seals and replaced her with an image of the Theotokos. In 626, the pagan Avars besieged Constantinople. Since the emperor was far away at another battlefront, the bishop placed the city under Mary’s direct protection by having an image of the Virgin and Child painted on the west gates. The defeat of the Avars was attributed to Mary’s direct intervention. This military-religious tactic was successfully repeated in 717 during an attack by Arab forces, when an image of the Virgin and the Christ-child was carried in procession around the city to foil the Muslim aggressors. According to legend, the icon of Mary and the Christ-child now known as “The Mother of God of Vladimir” was painted by the Evangelist Luke, but is probably of twelfth-century Byzantine origin. Brought from Kiev to the city of Vladimir, and finally to Moscow under the threat of a Mongol invasion in 1395, it became the perduring symbol of the survival of the Russian people as a polity and of Russian Orthodoxy as a faith, and of the indelible link between the two. Important state transactions took place before the icon, and the blessing of the Mother of God of Vladimir was sought before battles: Throughout the centuries this icon gives its protection to the Russian people and is venerated as the greatest holy treasure of the nation. The volunteer

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army which delivered Moscow from the Poles as 1612 fought at the same time for the Vladimir icon: “It is better for us to die than to deliver the image of the immaculate Mother of God of Vladimir to desecration.”42

To give such a central theological place to the veneration of images and to attribute such powers to them might strike Catholic theological sensibilities as odd. The Council of Trent taught that images of Christ, Mary and the saints should be used only as moral mnemonics or to focus piety. They are to be revered not because some divinity of power is believed to lie in them . . . or because anything is to be expected for them; but because the honor showed to them is referred to the originals which they represent; thus, through the images which we kiss and before which we go down on our knees . . . we give adoration to Christ and veneration to the saints, whose likeness they bear.43

Orthodox icons are frequently described as “windows into heaven.” Trent conceives of the veneration of images as a one-way process only. Images of Mary are a channel through which humans make themselves present to her, but Mary is not present in her images. Trent’s nervous theological exactitude notwithstanding, in popular Catholic piety, according to Robert Orsi, images of Mary frequently fuse image and prototype; responses to them are “predicated that what is represented on an image is actually present, or present in it.” . . . Encounters with images of the Virgin are encounters with presence and they are characterized by the whole range of emotion and behavior that is possible when persons are present to each other. . . . The Virgin Mary transforms looking into a devotional activity. The carefully monitored space between the wall and the view becomes an imaginative opening for need, fantasy, desire. . . . Devotional space is constituted by the presence of the Madonna and her devout to each other, by the desires of the devout and by Mary’s invitation to them to come to her and her recognition of their needs.44

Popular devotion involving images of Mary has expressed an ambiguous theology, one charged with a visceral, volatile affectivity. Where these images have taken on national (and especially nationalist) significance, Mary is more than merely commemorated. Her images are more than channels of prayer directed heavenwards. The relationship also involves her descent into the world of particular concerns: Mary is held to be as truly present to the people of these nations as they are to her.

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Presence and Patronage Even in those eras when the figures of God the Father and Jesus the Son have become laden with associations of fear, Mary has remained a comforting figure. Christians have held that as a mother to whom access is easy, Mary will listen to the prayers of her faithful and to intercede for them. True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, by Louis-Marie Grignon de Montfort (1673–1716) proposed that it is better in fact “to approach God directly, through the mediation of his mother, than address him directly.”45 (Devotion to Mary was a characteristic of the French school of spirituality, a fact that bears relevance to the apparitions of Mary in nineteenth-century France.) At a remove of several thousand miles and three centuries from seventeenth-century France, Linda B. Hall describes the religious practice of Latin American Catholic women. While Jesus Christ is certainly an important figure of devotion, in practice, far more day-to-day prayers go to Mary, who presents a picture of wholeness and integrity, of nurturing, healing, and power, which is comforting and validating. In fact, it is to this impossible model that women turn for comfort in their failings and sorrow and for help in their necessities. And this figure is always with them, a constant and familiar presence.46

Hall writes here of individual women’s devotion to the Virgin Mary, and indeed prayers seeking Mary’s intercession or protection may well be individual in nature. Marialis cultus evokes the solace to be found in turning to Mary, who “offers a calm vision and a reassuring word to modern man” and represents “the victory of hope over anguish, of fellowship over solitude, of peace over anxiety, of joy and beauty over boredom and disgust, of eternal visions over earthly ones, of life over death.”47 The “modern man” of Paul VI’s letter is generic, and does not preclude collective experience. Sub tuum praesidium is written in the first person plural. Historically the “we” of such prayers has been a collective voice as well as the sum of the voices of individuals. The thirteenth-century Polish hymn Bogurodzica (Mother of God) can be read as a simple prayer for personal happiness on earth and a place in heaven.48 Yet the poem also has an important place in Polish cultural history as an expression of collective concern. The “us” is the united nation who collectively seeks Mary’s intercession on behalf of the Polish people: O Mother of God, Virgin blessed by God, Maria! With your son, our Lord, O mother chosen, Maria! Intercede for us, send Him to us.49

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Redemptoris mater notes that Mary’s “pilgrimage of faith represents a constant point of reference for the Church, for individuals and for communities, for peoples and nations.”50 In the order of grace, her motherhood is extended to societies, which are more than a sum of individuals. As mother of the Church and of all humanity, she is the model of faith of “individuals and communities, of places and gatherings, and of the various groups existing within the Church.”51 For certain of those peoples, John Paul II held, “by reason of their situation” Mary has “particular love and solicitude.”52 In the mind of the Polish pope, not the least of these was his own motherland. Within a Christocentric theology, Marian doctrine is a derivative of the Incarnation, the historical event through which God becomes present to his world. In practice, the world of heaven has often been immediately and intimately experienced as the loving, generative presence of Mary, who is “somehow not only there, but everywhere.”53 Significantly, Mary’s presence may be felt to be more immediate than the presence of God, for it is located geographically, historically and culturally: Mary is one but she is also many things to many people. Her place-titles and other descriptive names show the ongoing story of love and affection of a mother and her children. They bring Mary more intimately into time and space, make her a person in one place or another just as she was a person in the village of Nazareth. They give people of a particular location the feeling that she belongs to them. Her titles represent a consoling truth: Mary holds dear enough a certain hamlet or other place which she, though Queen of Heaven, is ready to lend her assistance. Through her varied titles and shrines, Mary is present in the here and now. . . . Her special appearances show her, as well as God’s special care for a particular child, place or country.54

In such “special appearances,” the divine is localized and made particular. More disturbingly, the apocalyptic tone of certain Marian apparitions—particularly as appropriated by some strands of Catholic traditionalism—describes her as pleading with an angry God not to seek vengeance upon humanity for its sins.55 In this theologically problematic version, when God is punisher, Mary continues to be advocate and nurturer, essentially replacing the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity, or being at least a kind of Gnostic lesser-God. Given the fact that Mary is universally invoked as “mother,” it is not difficult to see how Mary has as a focus for the emotional constituents of faith. To Augustine’s credere in Deum—faith experienced as trust and confidence—there also corresponds a de facto credere in Mariam. This article of faith is social as well as individual, and anchored in specific times, places,

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and communities. For Victor and Edith Turner, religious symbols such as the Virgin Mary form part of theological and moral systems that are universally applicable. The “emotional-volitional charge” of such symbols however is intimately connected with “particular local geography and history.”56 This insight helps understand why devotion to the “presence” of Mary can involve such intense affect. Our attachments to particular times, places and peoples are likely to carry significant emotional weight. To a large extent, they shape our communal and individual identities, provide us with a sense of home, from which and about which we pray. Mary’s relationship with her devotees is mutual: they pray to her, and she makes herself present to them. The modality of that presence is far from simple, for the Virgin has many aspects. The Jewish peasant Mary of Nazareth is simultaneously Theotokos and Queen of Heaven, theologically one person, yet also “regional, local and even personal, at least in the minds of her believers.”57 Particular titles of Mary produce a particularistic kind of devotion, in which human beings “tailor their relationships with her and their beliefs about her to current needs and cultural contexts.”58 Hall’s work on Marian devotion in Latin America alerts us to Mary’s notable function at the meeting point of Christianity and culture. Pelikan points out that the Virgin Mary has frequently functioned as a “bridge builder to other traditions, other cultures and other religions. The term pontifex . . . can be applied to concepts and personalities whose fundamental message could be expressed better as “both . . . and” rather than “either . . . or.”59 Throughout history, in a sans-pareil manner, the figure of Mary has bridged the religious and the secular. In its unity of culture and dogma, Marian piety reveals a tension at play, a corollary of the tensions latent in the Incarnation itself: between temporality and eternity, transcendence and immanence, the spiritual and the material, ubiquity and locality. As the locus of this unity, “relationships with Mary are never lived apart from the circumstances of particular times and places.” 60 Perhaps more than any other major figure of Christian belief, Mary is eminently connected to culture, being “part of its web of meanings, limitations, structures, and possibilities. She contributes to making and sustaining culture, and reinventing it, at the same time that she herself is made and sustained by culture. . . . She does not belong completely to culture or the self, but to the spaces where the two are most intimately entangled.” Yet at the same time as being profoundly implicated in culture, as “Our Lady of Everywhere,”61 Mary is simultaneously above particular cultures. The conjunction of faith and culture, so central to Gaudium et spes, is made woman in the figure of Mary.

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Given that devotion to Mary “arises on the ground of the imagination, that point where people take hold of the world around them, in the idioms they have inherited and invented,”62 it is only to be expected that it should be superabundant and pluriform. The inherent variability of the cult of Mary is like a theological moiré pattern that shifts and shimmers constantly according to the angle from which it is viewed. A particular feature of Marian devotion may appear from one perspective to be a cultural and demotic phenomenon, and from another, purely a matter of doctrine. Both perspectives are connected. It is not true “that there are two completely distinct worlds of Marian devotion, official and popular.”63 Tavard claims that “a sharp distinction must be maintained between what is officially taught in any church and what is taken for granted among the people.”64 In practice, the matter is not so clear. The kinship between doctrine and folk piety does not lend itself to precise formulation. Tavard in fact goes on to note that the Marian writings of the popes of the last hundred years show the influence of popular devotion. This is especially true in the case of documents of lesser rank, which may include “exegetical, hermeneutical and theological hypotheses that fall . . . outside the scope of the church’s ordinary magisterium.”65 The interplay between official and popular theologies is noticeably present in the many titles of Mary. The patristic use of typology engendered a host of new epithets. The sixth-century Akathist to the Theotokos hails Mary variously as “king’s throne,” “heavenly ladder, “pillar of fire,” “land of promise,” and “tabernacle of God the Word.” Popular religiosity too “has invented new names and appellations by which Mary is known among the people of God,” to the point that “the Virgin Mary has more names than God.”66 The luxuriance of the names of Mary corresponds to the number and kinds of activities attributed to her. In the east especially, Mary’s titles proliferated, taken from icons, from towns and shrines, from qualities attributed to her, or simply from poetry and imagination . . . Litanies of praise, with inflated and often ambiguous titles whose theological meaning defies imagination, have at least pointed in the direction of the fullness of grace that God pours into the saints.67

Judith Bauer understands that the many names of the Mother of God are “a way of giving human beings an opportunity to honor Mary according to particular needs, in their own time and place, but still in the light of Our Lady as the giver of Jesus Christ to humankind.”68 This somewhat qualified statement suggests that it is not completely true. Titles of Mary connected with particular localities and groups are emotionally charged

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precisely because they are focused not “humankind” but on those places and people alone. Where ethnic and national loyalties are associated with Mary, they tend almost inexorably toward particularism. One group’s pretension to special favor easily implies superiority to similar groups, and is therefore ready made for political use. If “every age adapts its devotion and prayer to our Blessed Virgin in a way that meets its own particular needs,”69 the same is true of “every people” and “every place.” Marian titles derive from countless locales where “she is believed to have been seen or where she is simply loved . . . and lesser places, small villages, hamlets, even houses; after countries (Notre Dame de France) . . . [and] after maternal and political functions (Bonne Duchesse).”70 It is not simply as “Mary” or “the mother of Jesus” that cities, countries, and whole continents have invoked Mary as patroness, but under particular titles that frequently include their own name. Amongst the most theologically hazy but evocative epithets are those in which Mary is invoked under the title “Our Lady of N,” where N is a location or a group of people. The title “Lady” (Kyria, Domina) is attested at an early period in Christian history. Fathers of both East (Ephrem, Germanus of Constantinople, Andrew of Crete, John of Damacus) and West (Peter Chrysologus, Bede, Anselm) alike addressed the Virgin Mary as “lady” and “queen.” The letter of Pope Gregory II to Germanus of Constantinople, read at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 refers to Mary as domina omnium, a female counterpart to the title of Jesus as Pantokrator. The title “Our Lady” (Notre Dame) however, derives primarily from French and Provençal literature and the cult of courtly love. In that period, “lady” was an expression of affective, if feudal relationship—a sense invoked also by its Italian counterpart, madonna. It suggests a comfortable interplay between divine and earthly affections, secular emotions being framed in the language of religious ones, and vice versa. It is notable that the plural form, Our Lady, entered popular and official usage in French, English, German, Spanish and Portuguese. Many medieval French cathedrals, contemporaneous with the development of the cult of courtly love, are dedicated to Mary under the title “Our Lady of N.” Strictly speaking, these are “the church in N dedicated to the Virgin Mary.” From there we arrive at Mary’s personal, if ambiguous title as “Our Lady of N.” Since each of these appellations is “our” lady, they can be construed to imply a pre-eminent relationship, in which Mary is more “ours” than “theirs.” A large number of countries have taken Mary as their national patroness, naming her after an event in her life, an aspect of Marian dogma, a quality attributed to her, the title of a statue or icon, or an extraordinary event, such as an apparition. Several, including China, Hungary, Nigeria, Poland, and

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Sri Lanka, claim her as queen of that country. The list is open ended, and may wax and wane in response to circumstances. Aristocratic or royal titles of Mary can express significant political messages that reject a status quo and support change or even revolution. The title “Our Lady of the Philippines” dates back to 1634, but gained new currency during the People Power Revolution of 1986. According to one account, soldiers ordered to fire on citizens in the streets of Manila saw a globe of light from which “a lady” stepped out with the words, “Do not kill my children. I am Queen of this country.”71 Devotion to Mary as “Our Lady, Queen of Ireland” became popular following the apparitions at Knock in 1879. By this period, the British monarchy had lost considerable support in Ireland and the Irish Home Rule movement had begun to seek a limited autonomy from London. The title “Queen of Ireland” also belonged to the Protestant Queen Victoria. Prayers to the Virgin Mary as “Queen” could not help but carry overtones of insurgency. Mary’s queenship of Ireland defined the Irish as a Catholic nation, with heaven’s mandate to reject Protestant British sovereignty over their land.

Sons of Mary, Sons of God As we have seen, one of the roles attributed to Mary is protecting specific ethnic communities and nations. The title “Our Lady of N” is universally applicable and expresses the instinct that, since Mary has a close relationship both with that community and with God, she is especially capable of mediating divine protection. If it is true that it would be a gross oversimplification to adduce that Marian devotion derives from the goddess cults of Late Antiquity, Mary’s protective role is still intriguingly similar to the tutelage of ancient female divinities. James Preston notes that the activities of the divine feminine include protection from enemies who threaten the often-fragile fabric of human communities. When people unite to combat a common enemy, goddesses act as symbols of integration, mother-goddesses protect from natural disasters and ensure justice. They are associated with ethnic identity, even “mystical nationalism.”72 Where Mary is adopted as protectress or patroness, quasi-divine attributes are easily attributed to her. Cyril of Alexandria’s “through Mary” can easily mutate into “by Mary,” to the point where Mary is no longer mediatrix but “creatrix” and “salvatrix.” In Christian belief Mary is not a chthonic mother goddess, but the mother of Jesus, the Incarnate Word. To assert Mary’s special patronage of one place or group of people raises a number of potential problems. Orsi’s elaboration of “the presence of the Madonna and her devout to each other” consisting of “the desires of the devout and by Mary’s invitation

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to them to come to her and her recognition of their needs” is a sympathetic description, but makes no claims about the ultimate truth of that experience. Using the tools of Scripture, Church teaching and theological reflection, how do we understand Mary’s “presence” in particular places? In what real way might she protect particular peoples or causes, and what is the source of that action? Can we respectfully and respectably explain the sensus fidelium of many ethnic communities and nations that Mary has a special relationship with them? In the popular imagination, Mary has been thought of as “a mirror of the attributes of God, and especially of the divine attributes of immensity or ubiquity and of healing power. Our Lady of Everywhere reflects the God who is everywhere by creative presence and power.”73 At the very least, the presence of the Virgin must be a phenomenon of collective psychology, taking place in the minds of believers. Where devotion to Mary is common to a society, it establishes an “us” whose common bond is the belief in Mary’s protection of the group. This identity also implies a “them,” an out-group that does not benefit from that relationship. Mary’s patronage can be a religious boundary-marker that fosters the sort of collective identity-as-difference discussed in Chapter One. The clearest sign of American Catholic difference from the Protestant majority has been devotion to Mary. The establishment of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (the title under which Mary is invoked as patroness of the United States) in Washington, D.C., in 1920 expressed the unity of American Catholics in the face of a threat of assimilation into American Protestantism. It also signaled Catholics’ desire to emerge from their original ethnic enclaves, where devotion to particular Marian cults represented affective ties to the old homelands, into a new American Roman Catholicism.74 This socio-religious identity was conveniently amicable toward secular American nationalism. Christopher Rengers interprets the apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe as a forerunner to the “manifest destiny” of the United States, tracing Mary’s “special relationship” with the Americas from 1531, the year of the apparitions in Tepeyac, outside what is now Mexico City, to Cold War 1959, when the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception was finally dedicated. Her protection runs “from one great capital of American civilization to another great capital of a later American civilization.”75 Rengers even finds Mary’s hand at work in the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, a discovery that effectively tends to conflate the person of Mary with the Statue of Liberty. Despite Tavard’s insistence that “Mary’s presence is in the pious imagination of the faithful,”76 the more commonly perceived reality is that her presence is not only a question of psychology. For her devotees, Mary’s

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presence is so real as to be almost physical. Echoing popular religious instinct, John Paul II’s statements on Marian shrines frequently affirmed—in language that was evocative and lyrical rather than theologically precise— the “real presence” of Mary. His Angelus address of November 22, 1987, took as its theme the “Oranta,” the Ukrainian national icon of the Mother of God. John Paul told his audience that “Kiev is a holy city because it is a Marian city par excellence. The praying Madonna is invoked as the protectress of the city and as the Mother of all cities in the Rus. Here, for a thousand years, she has assisted her faithful and intercedes for them before her son Jesus.”77 His affirmation that Mary was “here” in Kiev provided a religious boost to Ukrainian claims for religious, political and cultural independence from Russia. Where deliverance from enemies or natural disasters is attributed to Mary’s intercession, a society may assume post eventum that Mary has chosen them. To this “descending adoption” there corresponds an “ascending adoption,” by which a society takes the initiative of placing themselves under Mary’s protection. The choice of Mary as patroness can be expressed through vows and covenantal declarations of special dedication, in which “not only individuals or local groups, but sometimes whole nations and societies, even whole continents” formally place themselves under her care, in hope of gaining her special protection. On November 13, 1998, Pope John Paul II visited the Argentinian National Church in Rome on the occasion of a solemn enthronement there of an image of Nuestra Señora de Luján, the national patroness of Argentina. The pope’s homily concluded by consecrating the whole nation to Mary’s care: Our Lady of Luján, patroness of Argentina, today I kneel before your image as the Pure and Immaculate Conception. . . . I entrust the Argentinian nation to you, Holy Mother of Luján. . . . Make all Argentina faithful to your Son; may it open its heart wide to Christ. Our Lady of Luján, help the people of Argentina . . . where the colors of their flag blend with the colors of your immaculate mantle!78

Here the initiative is human. The pope, speaking for the Argentine nation, dedicates it to Mary in the hope that that nation will receive Mary’s intercessory care. In the sense that her devotees hope that Mary will respond with maternal care, a society’s self-dedication to her is a variety of election whose theological origins are in the Israelite model. The Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan Stephen Sulyk, for example, identifies a particular covenant between Mary and the Ukraine:

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Since the dedication of Ukraine under the protective mantle of the Most Holy Mother of God by Yaroslav the Wise in 1037 . . . the Mother of God has protected her faithful sons and daughters of Ukraine. Our Lady has had a special relationship with the Ukrainian nation.79

The Metropolitan’s version of history arrogates to the modern Ukrainian nation the cultural and religious inheritance of medieval Rus, in rivalry with the claims of the modern Russian Federation. At the same time, it attributes the continued existence of the Ukrainians as a people to the patronage of the Mother of God. A more immediate influence on Marian filiation was the development of the cult of the saints and its connection to the client-patron model of Latin society. As mentioned earlier, Brown has stressed the degree to which “the intensity of late-Roman loyalty to patroni suffused [the] newly-forged style of relationship with the other world.”80 The cult of courtly love, with its dedications of fealty, is another source of “ascending adoption.” The difference between ascending and descending adoptions may not in practice be clear, for both varieties involve mutual relationship. Reputed Marian apparitions and locutions, on the other hand, express viscerally held sentiments that the prime mover in such relationships is not the human party, but Mary herself—a reflection of Yahweh’s initiative in choosing Israel. It is not difficult to see that Marian filiation has had inevitable political implications. The attribution of victory in battle, often against impossible odds, to Mary’s patronage was responsible for a large number of local and national devotions. Tenth-century defenders of Chartres flew their treasured relic, Mary’s tunic, from the staff of the bishop and defeated Norse invaders. In 1212, at Las Navas de Tolosa, a battle commonly marked as the decisive turning point in the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula, the Virgin Mary reputedly appeared in the sky with St. James and the cross of Christ to help Christians repel the Moorish forces. Popular piety has seen the shattering of Muslim power in southern Spain as the direct consequence of Mary’s intervention.81 The shrine of Our Lady of Hostyn in Moravia commemorates the Tartar invasions of 1241, when besieged Christians implored Mary’s help, which was granted in the form of lightning that destroyed the Mongol encampment. In the first published chronicle of the history of the Spanish Indies, the 1552 Historia de la conquista de México, Francisco López de Gómara describes how the Virgin Mary, seated on a white horse, appeared in a battle against the Aztec forces. In the company of Santiago Matamoros (St. James the Moor-slayer), she took an active part in the fight by casting dust in the faces of the Aztecs and blinding them. In the conquest of Mexico, images of

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Mary led the conquerors into battle, were given military honors and received the rank of general.82 In the same century, in preparation for battle against the Turks and hoping to regain Christian control of the Mediterranean, Pope Pius V organized a “rosary campaign” of prayers for military success over the Muslims. The naval victory at Lepanto on October 7, 1571, was attributed to Mary’s direct intercession, and Our Lady of the Rosary established as a universal liturgical feast. All of these instances of Mary’s intervention occurred in antemurale situations. Where particular forces represent a “wall of Christianity” at a geographical frontier, political and religious identities are likely to be so closely linked as to be identical. In the six hundred-year-long Reconquista of Spain, during which “Catholicism and Spanish identity fused in both reality and myth,”83 the Spanish Christian forces were described not by their national or regional identifiers (españoles, castellanos, aragoneses, etc.) but as cristianos, suggesting that the battle for Spain was construed not as territorial expansion but as a crusade. The Reformation critique of the cult of the saints meant that in Protestant countries, Mary could no longer be a patroness. Within the tenets of Protestant theology, the connection between the saeculum of the nation and the world of the transcendent could only be established through solus Christus. (In fact, as we have seen, Protestant nations explored the religious dimensions of their collective identity not through strictly Christian categories, but rather by adopting an Israelite model of election.) In reaction, the Protestant exclusion of Mary made Marian devotion of the most important markers of genuine Catholicism. As a result, the Virgin Mary personified an antemurale mentality that was religious rather than territorial. In the process, her role as champion of integral national-Roman Catholic identity grew. In 1620, at the Battle of White Mountain near Prague, troops of the Holy Roman Emperor took “St. Mary!” as their battle cry. The defeat of the Calvinist army eventually resulted in the recovery of Bohemia for Catholicism. The Virgin Mary continues to be invoked in national and military situations. By the end of the eighteenth century, the shrine of the Virgin Mary at Luján had become the most important pilgrimage site in Argentina, and her cult there had already begun to assume national dimensions. In 1930, Nuestra Señora de Luján was declared to be patrona of Argentina. In the 1950s, continuing a practice whose origins lay in feudal Spain, the Argentine army dedicated a regiment to her. In this form of Marian patronage, “this regiment becomes her ‘property’ and the members of the regiment call her la Generala del Luján.”84 Right wing governments and the military successfully harnessed traditional Catholic sympathies by enlisting devotion to La Lujánera in their

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attempts to establish a centralized government.85 In 1978, during a period of national instability, the Argentinian soccer team won the World Cup. Following the victory, many of the team visited the shrine to thank the Virgin of Luján for her aid in their triumph. When Argentine forces occupied the Falkland Islands in 1982, a copy of the image of the Virgin of Luján was taken to the islands and solemnly enthroned by the bishop of Lomas de Zamora—a gesture that echoed Columbus’s claiming of the Americas for Mary.

The Whole World in Her Hands: The Politics of Apparition The alleged appearances since 1981 of the Virgin Mary to a group of young people in Medjugorje, a Croatian-speaking village in Bosnia, have led to its becoming a major pilgrimage site that has at times rivaled Fátima and Lourdes in its appeal. Franjo Tudjman (1922–1999), first president of the independent Croatian state, is reported as having credited “the reawakening of the Croatian nation”86 to the events at Medjugorje, a statement that combines Marian fervor with classic nationalist rhetoric. Apparitions, of which those at Medjugorje are the latest example, are a historically important variety of Marian presence. Such events are necessarily mysterious: their objective reality is open to question, and the phenomenon is open to a wide range of interpretations, from the literalistic to the dismissive. Other commentators have variously sought to describe them as prophetic visions, as “personal icons” constructed by the imagination, or as collective hallucinations.87 Inevitably, the apparent irruption of the sacred into the life of a society has political repercussions, for it implies collective chosenness. The fact that Mary had appeared in Croatian rather than Serbian territory provided Croat nationalists with their own religious myth as a counterpart to the Serbian myth of Kosovo. Nineteenth-century Serb nationalist intellectuals interpreted the defeat of a Christian force at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 by Ottoman opponents, recasting the events to mean that the Serb people, in their very defeat, had chosen a heavenly kingdom rather than an earthly one. Mary’s appearance at Medjugorje challenged the spiritual and cultural pretensions of this Serbian version of Balkan history and strengthened the antemurale aspect of Croatian nationality. In one geographical region, there were now two claimants for chosen-people status, respectively Croatian and Catholic, and Serbian and Orthodox. The Mother of God had chosen to make herself present to Croats alone. The number of Marian apparitions of Mary has no official tally, but clearly runs well into the thousands. The first account of a Marian apparition does in fact go back to the patristic period: Mary’s miraculous appearance to Origen’s

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pupil Gregory the Wonder-worker (217–270), is recounted in a sermon by Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–392). If “visions of the Virgin Mary had no place in the writings of most of the Fathers of the Church,”88 they grasped the attention of wide sectors of the Church. By the Middle Ages, the number and fervor of Marian devotions had increased exponentially. The medieval Marienlegenden genre, which chronicled Mary’s direct intervention in human events, was an important category of pious literature. One standard legendform included Mary’s command to an individual or group of persons that a chapel or shrine should be constructed at the site of her appearance. Victor and Edith Turner note that the medieval cult of the saints was connected to the idea of pilgrimage. The decline over the last centuries in the practice of pilgrimage and the cultus of regional saints can be attributed to the massive social changes wrought by industrialization. Nevertheless “national saints” who are “symbols of religious nationalism have not suffered so much.”89 (In fact, pilgrimage seems to be on the increase rather than on the decline. According to one source, Santiago de Compostela will have received ten million pilgrims over the course of the Holy Year of 2010,90 while Charles Taylor notes that new pilgrimage centers and practices have arisen, a manifestation of a perennial religious desire for the “festive.”91) Towering over above all other national patrons is the figure of the Virgin Mary, whose many appearances in nineteenth-century France led to that period being dubbed the “Marian century” and France itself le règne de Marie.92 From an early point, the figure of Mary had been closely associated with the figure of the Church. Old Testament images and theological epithets such as “mother” or “virgin” could be applied with equal facility to Mary or the Church. Cyprian’s notion that “no one can have God as Father who does not have the Church as Mother”93 is complemented by the teaching of Pius X in 1904 that if Mary is the mother of Christ, “then she is our Mother also.”94 The profound theological connection between Mary and the Church has meant that historical variations in the depth and extent of Marian devotion, public and private, are a barometer of the Church’s influence, self-confidence and aspirations. Discussing the post-conciliar title “Mother of the Church,” Tavard claims that the “creeping Marian maximalism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries” was a correlation of “creeping papal maximalism.”95 Where the Church is strong, or seeks to be so, Mary occupies a correspondingly more central place in magisterial comment and theological discourse. Reaction among the intelligentsia of the Enlightenment against what they saw as the primitive excesses of the cult of the Virgin Mary was part of a general decline in Marian devotion over the course of the eighteenth century.

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The highly popular Glories of Mary of Alphonsus de Liguori (1697–1787) sought to revive waning piety and to combat religious indifference and hostility to the Church. The architects of the French Revolution embarked on a project of official de-Christianization, closing churches, prohibiting public worship and executing priests and nuns. After the ideological repositioning of the Napoleonic era, the France of the 1830s became “a social war zone, with Church-state skirmishes both inevitable and frequent.”96 Other social changes were at work: industrialization, the emergence of an urban working class, a more centralized and developed bureaucracy, and a disillusion with the promises of rationalism. Decades of rapid social fluctuation and unstable regimes, each with its own ideology, made nineteenth-century France a “particularly appropriate soil for the seeds of Marian devotion.”97 The apparitions of the “Marian century” in France were notable for their references to these social changes. The first of the apparitions came in 1830, when the Virgin Mary appeared in the rue du Bac, Paris, to Catherine Labouré, a Daughter of Charity. The capital was in the midst of a revolution that eventually deposed the unpopular Charles X. Victor Hugo’s successful new play Hernani expressed the heady intellectual and anti-royalist fervor of the moment. On July 18–19, Mary solemnly warned Catherine that “sorrows will befall France . . . the whole world will be plunged into every kind of misery.”98 In the next apparition on November 27, Mary appeared holding a globe—which Catherine took to represent “the whole world, France and each person in particular,” a suggestion of France’s religious pre-eminence. The rue du Bac apparitions set the tone for many subsequent Marian visions and locutions, many of which contained apocalyptic, moralizing messages. In the apparition to eleven-year-old Maximin Giraud and fifteenyear-old Mélanie Calvat at La Salette in the French Alps in 1846, in a complaint about the irreligious ways of the people and the practice of working on Sundays, Mary seemed to disapprove of a France that was becoming increasingly industrialized and secular.99 This was the “first intervention of the Virgin in an economic crisis.”100 To the dismay of the Republican government and the secular press, popular fascination with the apparitions at La Salette produced a significant revival in religious practice across the nation. The Virgin’s predictions of future national difficulties seemed to be fulfilled in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, which led to increased devotion to both the La Salette and the rue du Bac apparitions. During the social unrest of the Paris of the Communards, the archbishop of Paris was killed. Subsequently, the prelate’s death was interpreted as having been prophesied in Mary’s words to Catherine Labouré. Marian apparitions thus became a popular key to interpreting French political developments.

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The most famous of all apparitions, those at Lourdes (1858), must also be understood in the context of rival claims, secular and Catholic, on the French national soul, and European church-state relations. Within two years of the election of Pius X in 1846, revolutions broke across Europe. In November 1854, the troops of Mazzini and Garibaldi were preparing to attack papal Rome. On December 8 of that year, in the Constitution Ineffabilis Deus, the pope proclaimed the Immaculate Conception of Mary to be an essential part of Catholic faith. Historians have often interpreted the dogma as an expression of “the papacy’s need to defend its authority in the modern world.”101 Setting aside for the moment its dogmatic content, the timing of the declaration is an important consideration. As the papacy struggled to define its own territories and autonomy, the Catholic hierarchy adopted an intellectual siege mentality. At a moment of crisis, the Virgin Mary was invoked as defender of the faith. The formidable energies of Marian devotion were harnessed to the Vatican’s culture war against all those intellectual and social forces that it would later anathematize in the 1864 “Syllabus of Errors” of Pius IX and Lamentabili sane, Pius X’s 1907 condemnation of modernism. Three years after the papal declaration of the Immaculate Conception as a dogma, an Occitan-speaking Mary appeared to a semi-literate peasant girl in the obscure Pyrenean village of Lourdes. The “lady” of the vision eventually identified herself to Bernadette Soubirous as the “Immaculada Concepcioun”—a heavenly, Occitan affirmation of the dogmatic declaration. The apparitions at Lourdes confirmed not only the “maximalist” theology of the papacy implicit in the dogmatic definition. They also ratified centuries of de facto popular and scholarly belief in the Immaculate Conception. The fact that Mary herself had confirmed this on French soil was a direct challenge to secularist conceptions of the French nation. The apparently relentless desire of the Virgin Mary to appear in France at times of crisis was evidenced again at Pontmain (1871). In a Brittany overrun by Prussian troops, Mary predicted (successfully) the end of the Franco-Prussian war—a prophecy that was possibly self-fulfilling, given that reports of the apparition may well have contributed to its end. At Pellevoisin (1876), Mary once again predicted that “France will suffer much.”102 Mary’s forbidding promise of French suffering also suggested her abiding interest in national affairs. The events at Fátima, Portugal, in 1917 had much in common with the French apparitions. The main visionaries were children and the messages were similarly apocalyptic in tone and likewise referred to contemporary political tensions. The events there began with a vision in which the Archangel Michael instructed the seers to “offer prayers and sacrifices . . . and thus

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draw peace on your country. I am its guardian angel, the angel of Portugal.”103 Subsequently, the Virgin Mary appeared, reputedly asking for “the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart.” Mary’s promise that “in Portugal the faith would always be kept” strengthened popular pride that Portugal was a bastion of faith, and confirmed its cultural and religious antemurale preeminence. In “rationalistic, atheistic France”104 and beyond, Mary appeared to children and women who were comparatively uneducated, and the apparitions were received enthusiastically especially among lower socio-economic groups. This might suggest Marian devotion is more likely to be connected with popular religiosity rather than with the concerns of the intellectual classes. The emotive appeal of the cult of Mary means that it can agglutinate to itself political and ideological concerns with great ease. Mary’s appearances hallow particular locales, consecrating them by association. With their blend of popular enthusiasm and official or semi-official sanction, Marian apparitions rapidly take on more than local significance. Pelikan describes how Marian apparitions were particularly effective ammunitions in the church-state Kulturkampf: Neither the intellectual defense of Christian revelation by the apologetic enterprise in nineteenth-century theology, including the revival of Thomistic philosophical apologetics, nor the political defense of the institutional church and its prerogatives against the anticlericalism of the time was as effective a campaign, particularly among the common people, as the one that the Virgin Mary waged. “Rome is the head of the Church, but Lourdes is the heart.”105

At the same time that Vatican authorities had “an interest in shoring up traditional faith within the country that it considered to be the seedbed of modern revolution,”106 French Catholics were affirmed in their belief that they had been chosen by Mary. The fact that Mary seemed to choose to appear in France more than any other European country and directly referred to France and to French current events suggested that France had a continuing role in the Church and vice versa. Cumulatively, the apparitions were of national significance. The miraculous power of the appearances associatively also reinforced an instinct that in some, indefinable way, France was still a holy land inhabited by a holy people. French intégristes sought to fuse national and religious identities. At Lourdes, “Mary, refuge of the sick, could also be Mary the refuge of Catholic France. In her Immaculate Conception, she was also Queen of France, or at least the symbol of the ‘true France.’”107

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When devotion to Mary is associated with a specific territory, the belief of special Marian election is to be expected for theological reasons. The Immaculate Conception itself is the maximum intensity of election. The favor granted to Israel as God’s treasured possession is concentrated and made personal in Mary, Daughter of Zion. In preserving Mary uniquely from the stain of original sin, God chose Mary above all others. Notions that Mary stands in special relation to a society thus include the ambition of being the highly favored people of the one who is highly favored. Both ascending and descending adoption replicates the psychological and theological features of classical Israelite election. Mary’s apparent criticism of the failings of the French made at La Salette—“France has corrupted the universe, one day it will be punished”—reflect the classic framework of election. The threat of punishment for infidelity is the obverse face of a promise of blessing. In Mary’s apparitions “she who believed” can be seen to be calling “her” people back to belief and promising them a role in the world to come. At Seredne in Ukraine, in 1955, two years after the death of Stalin and immediately following the Marian Holy Year proclaimed by Pius XII, Mary spoke to visionaries, conveying the apocalyptic message that “Rome will be ruined and the Holy Father killed but Rome will rise again.” In the eschatological drama, both Mary and Ukraine will have a role to play. According to Mary’s promise, Rome will be renewed “by my presence here on the mountain of Seredne.” The prophecy implied a triple inheritance: imperial grandeur, Christian pre-eminence, and replacing Moscow in its title of “Third Rome.” Reported new visions of Mary in 1987 at Hrushiv, Western Ukraine, included a locution in which Mary told the crowd that “Ukraine was the first country to acknowledge me as Queen and I have received her under my care.”108 A final visitation—by which time the Ukrainian state authorities had attempted to close down the site—reported Mary as explaining that she had appeared there in order “to thank you, the Ukrainian people because you have suffered most for the Church of Christ in the last seventy years. I love Ukraine and its people and I shall protect you for the glory and the future of God’s kingdom on earth which will last a thousand years.”109 Mary’s implicit condemnation of Soviet Communism was at the same time an affirmation of Ukrainian nationalism. As with neighboring Poland, “suffering for the Church of Christ” is a national theodicy which gives a religious purpose and meaning to the vicissitudes of the Ukrainian people. Hrushiv lies in an area with a large concentration of Ukrainian Catholics. Mary’s appearance there appeared to support the Uniate Church’s desires to speak for the Ukrainian people and to refute the Ukrainian Orthodox Church’s pretensions.

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Church authorities have historically been very cautious in giving official sanction to apparitions, visions and locutions. For this study, the objective veracity of the apparitions and locutions is not the most important question. What is à propos is the susceptibility of Marian nationalism to take on millenarian and messianic coloring. Chronological primacy (“the first to call me Queen”) and the experience of having “suffered most for the Church” portray the Ukrainian nation as a first-born, messianic people with a chiliastic destiny. Visions of Mary reflect a national desire for a place in history and appear to confirm that hope. Mary’s motherhood or sovereignty asserts pre-eminence in religious and political spheres alike. The suggestion that Ukraine was prima inter pares echoes the ancient title of France as “eldest daughter of the Church.” Sibling rivalry with other, neighboring nations appears to be a deleterious side effect of having Mary as mother of one’s own nation.

Mother Poland and the Mother of Poland Two classic examples of the close link between Marian devotion and nationality are found in Mexico and Poland. In both countries, veneration of Mary is intimately linked with national identity and has been the dynamo of nationalistic endeavors. Marian Helm-Pirgo’s proud declaration that “Poland has . . . always been a powerful bastion of spiritual and political values”110 typifies a long-lived connection between Catholicism and Polish nationality. It is a commonplace that the baptism of King Miesko in 966 marks the beginning of the Polish nation as a political entity. St. Stanislaw (1030–1079), patron saint of Poland, is buried in Krakow’s Wawel, a complex that is at the same time royal mausoleum, cathedral and palace. Gaude Mater Polonia, the best-known medieval Polish hymn commemorates Stanislaw’s martyrdom at the hands of the forces of King Boleslaw following a dispute between religious authority and secular power. The song calls the motherland to worship. Significantly, its melody is taken from another ancient hymn, Gaude Mater Ecclesia, which is addressed to the Church. During the nineteenth century, at a point when the Polish state did not exist, a version of Gaude Mater Polonia was the effective Polish national anthem, both at home and in the diaspora. As we have seen, nineteenth-century Polish nationalism theologized Polish identity, interpreting contemporary history to mean that the injuries inflicted on Poland would result in the salvation of European nations. The “hidden God” of Jesus’ Passion corresponded to a “hidden Poland.” Polish national Marianism predates the theology of Poland the “Christ among the nations” by several centuries. Bogurodzica (The Mother of God), the

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oldest religious hymn existing in Polish, dates back to the tenth century. The fifteenth-century chronicler Jan Dlugosz refers to Bogurodzica as carmen patrium, and relates how this “hymn of the fatherland” was sung before the battle of the Kingdom of Poland with the Teutonic Knights in Grunwald in 1410, as well as before subsequent battles. Bogurodzica was rediscovered by nineteenth-century cultural revivalists and continues to be performed as a patriotic-religious anthem. The link between Polish national concerns and devotion to Mary cannot be proven to have given birth to later Polish nationalism, but is certainly congruent with it. The alliance between Polish identity and the figure of the Virgin Mary is embodied most completely in the icon of Our Lady of Czestochowa, closely associated with the Vow of King Jan Kazimierz (1609–1672). The icon, depicting a dark-faced Mary holding the child Jesus, is thirteenth- to fourteenth-century Byzantine in style. It is the most celebrated of a number of ancient images of Mary associated with miraculous deliverances. These icons were venerated, decorated, enthroned and crowned, and their shrines became places of pilgrimage. According to legend, the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa was, like its Russian counterpart the Mother of God of Vladimir, allegedly painted by St Luke. (The apostolic origin claimed for such icons guarantees their close association with the Incarnation, the source of their power to work miracles.) The image was reputedly rediscovered in the Holy Land by St. Helena and taken to Constantinople, where it was credited with saving the city from a Saracen attack. Dynastic marriages brought the image to the possession of Charlemagne, and subsequently to Ruthenia, where once again its intercession was believed to have saved Christian troops. The legend concerning its eventual location in Jasna Góra reflects a conventional motif involving images of Mary that “refuse to move.” The unwillingness of the oxen carrying the icon to continue with the journey to its planned destination was taken as a sign that Mary herself had chosen that particular spot as its dwellingplace. During one Tatar siege, the icon was hit by an arrow, leaving a scar the Blessed Virgin’s throat. Gashes in the Virgin’s cheek are attributed to Hussites who vandalized the icon. Injuries to the image are by analogy, injuries to the Virgin herself, to the Church, and to the nation. The miraculous survival of the image is tied up with the survival of Poland. Less legendary history involves the vow of King Jan Kazimierz. In 1655, Poland had been overrun by the Lutheran forces of Sweden’s King Carolus X. Swedish troops began to besiege the monastery built around the shrine. The monks’ successful resistance became a rallying point for the Polish and Catholic struggle. In 1655, at the height of the campaign, Jan Kazimierz

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made his public, solemn vow before a wonder-working picture of Our Lady of Grace in the cathedral of nearby Lwów: Great Mother of God, Most Holy Virgin, I . . . choose Thee as patron of myself and as Queen of all my states and offer my kingdom of Poland . . . to Thy especial care and protection, and do humbly entreat Thy succor and mercy so that this sorely tried and confused realm of mine may withstand the foes of the Holy Catholic Church. . . . I and my nation ardently desire to renew our service to Thee . . . and do therefore pledge to Thee and Thy Son that I will . . . spread veneration and worship for thee upon the territories of my realm.111

The vow is chivalric and feudal in form: it is the king who declares his fealty to Mary. At the same time, it is also a covenantal declaration of alliance between a people and heaven. As such, the vow is also a prayer for national survival. Helm-Pirgo notes with satisfaction that the prayers were answered: “Lwów provided an inspiring and mystically splendid example to the whole Polish Commonwealth. . . . Less than twenty years later, the Commonwealth was again one of the leading powers of Europe and could even save western civilization by decisively defeating the mighty Turkish army at the gates of Vienna in 1683.”112 Subsequent devotion has often identified the image of the Virgin of Czestochowa as Queen of Poland (or “Queen of the Polish Crown”), but in fact it was not to any one image that Jan Kazimierz made his vows but to the person of Mary. The vows of Jan Kazimierz to the “Queen of Poland” were made in the presence of his own consort, Queen Ludwika Maria. The simultaneous “presence” of two Polish queens, one temporal and one spiritual, illustrates the ambiguous nature of the vows. On one level, Mary’s queenship in respect of Poland is spiritual, not subject to the vicissitudes of history. Yet at the same time, her aid is sought in connection with temporal affairs. Mary’s title as Queen of Poland usefully reveals the fundamental distinction between nation and state. Between 1795 and 1918, Poland did not appear on maps as a political entity. The empires that ruled over the former territory of the Polish Commonwealth were antagonistic to any claims for Polish nationhood, let alone a Polish monarchy. During this period, the epithet “Queen of Poland” was as politically ambitious as it was theologically ambiguous. Indeed, its subversive power lay in that very ambiguity, for the title could appear from one perspective to be religious, and from another to be nationalist. Mary’s heavenly patronage relativized the power of the Russian, Prussian and Austro-Hungarian states, symbolized resistance to them by proffering a form of latent citizenship, and fueled hope of restoration of the national state.

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During the years of Polish communism, the cult of the Queen of Poland and the image of Our Lady of Czestochowa were the antithesis of all that Soviet-style Marxism represented. Polish patriotism challenged Marxist concern for socio-economic class, Catholic spirituality refuted atheist materialism, and the strains of Bogurodzica clashed with the Internationale. The year 1955 marked the 300th anniversary of the Lwów Vow. Tensions were running high between the communist government and the Church. Confident of public support, the bishops of Poland rededicated the whole Polish nation to the patronage of Mary. In a gesture that was equally political protest and a public declaration of Catholic faith, copies of the image of our Lady of Czestochowa were carried in procession through many towns and cities. In the Polish diaspora too, devotion to Mary coalesced with patriotism and opposition to communism. At the end of the 1950s, Helm-Pirgo urged his fellow exiles and second-generation Polish-Americans to remember that when the King of Poland chose the Mother of God as Queen of the Polish crown, he promised on behalf of the whole nation to exert every effort to spread devotion for the Blessed Virgin Mary upon the territories of his realm and that he would strive to free his people from all injustice. . . .The Yalta pacts were big errors towards God. We Americans of Polish descent must ask ourselves whether we have done and are doing all possible to restore to the Queen of the Polish crown the realm offered to her.113

The most prominent representative of Polish Marianism in the twentieth century was of course Pope John Paul II, whose meditations on Mary—and indeed his whole theology—are only fully understood in the light of his cultural heritage. The claim that there are intimate connections between folk piety and the Marian teaching of most of the popes of the last century is never truer than in the case of John Paul II, whose theological statements are frequently “rather in the nature of spiritual reflections . . . not unlike the philosophical writings, the plays and the poems of Karol Wojtyla.”114 Matka, his first major cycle of poems, was inspired by the 1950 proclamation of Mary’s Assumption. While his official documents on Mary include references to Poland, John Paul II’s addresses and personal writings express, sometimes startlingly so, a visceral conviction that “the whole of his land is the Garden of the New Eve, Queen of Poland.”115 At Jasna Góra in June 1979, the pope rededicated “all the peoples and the nations, Europe and all the continents, Rome and Poland” to Our Lady of Czestochowa.116 The phrase “Rome and Poland” confirmed an inalienable bond between Catholic and national identities. On the same occasion, he

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indirectly ascribed his very election to the Queen of Poland: “The call of a son of the Polish nation to the Chair of Peter involves an evident strong connection with this holy place. . . . So many times I had whispered Totus Tuus [his episcopal motto] in prayer before this image.”117 Polish identity is inseparable from Mary: “One must listen . . . in order to hear the heart of the nation beating in the heart of the Mother,”118 a fervid admonition which manages to be as beguiling as it is indeterminate. In similar vein, on arriving in Warsaw on his first papal visit, John Paul II blended Polish history with a nationalist exegesis of scripture: I greet with veneration the nest of the Piasts [the legendary first Polish dynasty], the origin of the history of our Motherland and the cradle of the Church. . . . All together we are “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people he claims for his own.” All together we also form the royal race of the Piasts.119

In these allusions lies an extraordinary inference: the Catholic Church is the legitimate inheritor of regal authority over the Polish nation. The Church, not the Communist state, speaks for the nation and is responsible for its authentic national identity. In a particularly Polish form of liberation theology, John Paul suggests that it is Catholicism that will fulfill the unrealized part of the vow of Jan Kazimierz: the emancipation of the serfs and the extension to them of the rights of nobles. Marian piety’s characteristic lyrical voice makes it difficult to evaluate such statements theologically, for their register is not that of scholastic precision. Rather, it is metaphorical, shifting and open to manipulation. Titles or phrases that suggest a special relationship between Mary and particular nations such as Poland contain condensed allusions and trains of thought which are not always immediately obvious. Theological compression in fact typifies much Mariological language. The title Theotokos is the conclusion to an implied syllogism (Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ is God, therefore Mary is the “birth-giver of God). However, unless the propositions of such syllogisms are clearly known and understood, the conclusion can be easily misinterpreted. From the declaration of Mary as Theotokos, the Catholic Church moved in the late twentieth century to the courtesy title “Mother of the Church.” Mary’s maternity of the Church lies in the fact that she is “Advocate, Helper, Benefactress and Mediatrix.”120 However, these are precisely the roles in which Mary is also venerated as a national materfamilias. Where Mary is officially “Mother of the Church” and simultaneously, if unofficially, mother of a nation, it is possible to conclude erroneously that the nation is the Church or at the least so akin

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to it that that it is impossible to think of one without the other.121 Patristic typology frequently identified Mary as the personification of the Church. In the popular imagination, the figures of Mother Poland, Mother Church, and the Mother of the Church are tightly interwoven. St. Francis of Assisi’s “Salute to the Virgin” hails Mary as “Virgin Made Church.”122 Theological precision requires that we understand and analyze the curious nexus by which she has also become the “Virgin Made Nation.”123

“Es de María la nación” In parallel with the title of “Christ the King,” Mary is held to be “Queen of Heaven.” The title was formally bestowed on Mary by Pope Pius XII in 1954, four years after the proclamation of her Assumption, the dogma with which Mary’s queenship is now most closely associated. Yet from at least the twelfth century, Mary’s coronation was celebrated in prayer and her statues and icons crowned solemnly. Mary is Queen of Heaven and simultaneously “Our Lady” of an infinite number of territories. One easy implication of Mary’s dual sovereignty is that those places and peoples that declare Mary’s patronage are correspondingly closer to heaven and holier than others. The refrain of the popular hymn Tú reinarás (a Mexican adaptation of Nous voulons Dieu by the nineteenth-century French intégriste Abbé François-Xavier Moreau) urges “may Jesus reign forever, may his Sacred Heart reign. In our homeland, on our soil, the nation is Mary’s.”124 The last phrase is appropriately ambiguous: es de María la nación implies not only that the nation belongs to Mary, but could also be rendered as “this is the nation to which Mary belongs.” The many subsidiary titles of the Virgin of Guadalupe include “Queen of Mexico and Empress of the Americas.” The standard account of the apparition and the famous image derives from a 1648 Spanish account by the Mexican-born Oratorian priest Miguel Sánchez and the Nican mopohua, a 1649 account written in Nahuatl. Both relate the appearances in 1531 of “a lady” to a poor Indian on the hill of Tepeyac, outside today’s Mexico City, her repeated wish that a church should be built in her honor at that place, the refusal of the Spanish bishop to accept the testimony of the Indian, Juan Diego, and the final miracle of the imprinting of the image of the lady on Juan Diego’s tilma. This cloak has been the object of veneration for almost four centuries. There exists a vast and ever-expanding literature on Our Lady of Guadalupe. Current intellectual foci include feminist concerns, Guadalupe as a symbol of ethnic identity amongst Latino immigrants to the United States, and the devotion’s syncretic nature.125 Guadalupe is perhaps the preeminent

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example of a Marian devotion that “reveals the mechanism by which a vision becomes the mark of a people’s favour with God and thus boosts their confidence in the Church.”126 With unstoppable momentum, the cult of Guadalupe has progressed from sacred object (Juan Diego’s cloak) to cult site (the shrine church), to palladium of a people and a nature and a cause. . . . The private ecstatic experience . . . is translated over the years into a communal experience whereby a whole people is blessed. The possession of a sacred object or event fills that people with power . . . and confers moral authority in the temporal realm.127

A controversial revisionist account by Stafford Poole, based on detailed examination of sources, suggests that the origins of the Guadalupe cult lie in a search for such moral authority. Poole contends that there is evidence of devotion to a wonderworking statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the 1540s at Tepeyac. This would have been a copy of the statue at the ancient shrine of that name in Spain, carved according to legend by St. Luke. An Indian named Juan Diego might have been one of the beneficiaries of those miracles. Poole’s more contentious conclusion is that the famous image, far from being a miraculous acheiropoietos portrait of Mary, was actually painted in the mid-1550s. In Poole’s analysis, the apparition account is entirely the fruit of Miguel Sánchez’s imagination. Sánchez’s story was intended to exalt the status of his own social group, the criollos (Mexicans of Spanish ancestry), who occupied a social rank below the Spanish-born peninsulares. Born out of ressentiment, the apparition account provided the criollos with a pious myth that showed them in fact to be especially favored by God, for God’s own mother had chosen to appear in New Spain. Noting that “historical facts were of little concern” to Sánchez, D. A. Brading concurs with Poole’s conclusions. The dubious historicity of the account notwithstanding, Brading seeks to find theological meaning by analyzing Sánchez’s biblical and patristic motifs. Successive generations of preachers made liberal use of typology, finding references to the Virgin of Guadalupe in biblical passages: the result of this strategy was the transformation of the criollos of New Spain into a new people, for whom the Virgin Mary was “our criolla sovereign.”128 The chosenness of the criollos lay in the fact that “no other people had a picture of the Virgin that she had personally painted.”129 The apparition narrative is inspired, according to Brading, by the book of Exodus: in a conflation of the events of Horeb and Sinai, the image replaces the tablets of the Law as the symbol of celestial communication. The “American” Virgin in her apparitions was more the fruit

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of the inventive imagination of homilists rather than the fulfillment of the prophecy of the woman of Rev 12. Even if the image itself may not be the direct handiwork of a divine artist, Brading holds that it is divinely inspired, a Mexican equivalent to Andrei Rublev’s great icon, the Old Testament Trinity, which approaches divine revelation in its sublimity. Along the same lines, the Nican mopohua, although the work of human hands, is “a revelation which depicts the spiritual foundation of the Mexican church.” Sánchez’s own account is “a theologoumen . . . which sought to provide his country and church with a theological foundation based on a primordial covenant celebrated between the Virgin Mary in her image of Guadalupe and the Mexican people.”130 In the centuries following Sánchez, the cult of Guadalupe was fostered by public sermons in praise of the image, which employed limitlessly imaginative Baroque conceits. The image was exalted with expositions on Ps 147:20: Non fecit taliter omni nationi. God had “not treated other nations thus” for in the miraculous image, Mary was given as it were, a second birth in Mexico. Floridly transferring biblical motifs, preachers presented New Spain as a new Patmos, place of revelation, and Juan Diego as a second John the Evangelist. The criollo agenda was also supported through an elaborate neo-platonic theology of the Mexican image. Stirring rhetoric intimated (but only intimated) that Mary was somehow really present in her image, in a manner parallel to the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The dense concatenation of ideas implied that the image was a kind of sacrament, one that had been given uniquely to New Spain. Theological exaggeration bolstered the criollo desire for an autonomous spiritual ancestry to complement a growing sense of cultural identity that was distinct from Spain. The Guadalupe cult was a significant contributor to national myth making, providing as it did a “usable past.”131 In the light of the miracle of Tepeyac, the founding and flourishing of New Spain was interpreted as a reiteration of the biblical Exodus and the Reconquista of Spain. Contrary to popular wisdom, the image did not immediately inspire mass conversions amongst the Indians. Not until the eighteenth century did a cult of Guadalupe begin to take hold in that population. From its very beginnings however, this Marian devotion was local, particularistic and political. It made explicit claims for an exceptional relationship between Mary and Mexico, a phenomenon that “touches the heart of Mexican identity and religion.”132 One popular claim amongst nineteenth-century Mexican historians, “Mexico was born at Tepeyac,” is at one level a magniloquent flourish. The phrase is also objectively true, for it reflects an important Mexican self-

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understanding. The apparition account and the tilma have been put to different uses, to serve evolving social, political and religious needs. The changes wrought in the meaning of Guadalupe parallel the birth and the convoluted elaboration of mexicanidad: “In a very real sense, Guadalupe is reinvented by successive generations to meet the demands of a new orthodoxy.”133 From its beginnings, devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe was flexible and popular in appeal. The 1666 canonical enquiry into the origins of the image was intended to support a petition to Rome for an annual liturgical feast of the “Virgin of New Spain,” a celebration that would place Mexico City on a par with the Marian pilgrimage centers of Europe. During the plague of 1736–37, a public oath—reminiscent of Jan Kasimierz’s vow—adopted her as patroness of the capital. This expression of fealty was made to Our Lady of Guadalupe under new titles: “Queen of New Spain and Empress of Imperial Mexico.” Benedict XIV’s confirmation in 1754 of a proper mass and office for the feast was interpreted as a strong papal encouragement of criollo aspirations and greeted with massive jubilation. A crucial moment in the evolution of Guadalupe as a symbol of Mexican identity occurred during the 1810 revolution instigated by the criollo priest-revolutionary Miguel Hidalgo (1753–1811). Since French troops were present in Spain and a Bonaparte rather than a Spanish rey católico occupied the Spanish throne, Spain appeared to have lost its position as bastion of Catholicism along with its political independence. Guadalupe’s image, painted on the banners of Hidalgo’s independista forces symbolized Mexico’s supersessionist claims to be the “true Spain,” the inheritor of Spain’s religious role. Opposing sides both took as their patronas different images of Mary. Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, familiarly called La Criolla, and Nuestra Señora de Remedios, a Spanish statue known as La Conquistadora or La Gachupina (a pejorative slang term for “Spanish woman”) were respectively nationalist and royalist. The Spanish-born nuns of the Convent of San Jerónimo famously dressed the statue of Remedios in the uniform of a royalist general. The popular cry of the independence movement was “Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe and death to the gachupines!” Poole reports a story that an effigy of the Virgin of Guadalupe was shot by royalist troops.134 Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe has grown so irrepressibly it has eclipsed other cults of miraculous origin such as that of Mexico City’s Gachupina or Tlaxcala’s Nuestra Señora de Ocotlán and San Miguel del Milagro,135 becoming the epicenter of inseparable Catholic allegiance and Mexican pride. The solemn coronation of the image in 1895—a ceremony inspired by the crowning of an image of Mary in Lourdes—reflects the vicissitudes of nineteenth-century Mexican church-state relations. Highly charged sermons

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expressed in the rhetoric of romantic nationalism acclaimed the coronation as “the solemn plebiscite of the religious and social kingdom of Most Holy Mary in Mexico.”136 With this event, the Mexican Catholic hierarchy affirmed their independence from secular control, publicly recognizing Rome as sole authority over the Mexican Church. As the reign of Guadalupe has grown to embrace the whole of Latin America and beyond, her cult has continued to evolve in complex ways. In 1910, Our Lady of Guadalupe was deemed by Pius X to be “Patroness of all Latin America.” His successor Pius XI named her as “Patroness of the Philippines.” On his 1999 visit to the Basilica of Guadalupe, Pope John Paul II once again declared Our Lady of Guadalupe to be patroness of the Americas, offering “a public challenge to all those currents of thought, religious or secular, which dismissed the veneration of such sentiments as superstitious or puerile.”137 It was simultaneously an affirmation of the presence of the Church in the public forum and an encouragement to the Mexican bishops to seek the removal of anti-clerical clauses from the national constitution. During his first visit to Mexico in 1979, John Paul II frequently compared Mexico to Poland: “Of my country, it is customary to say ‘Poland semper fidelis.’ I wish to be able to say ‘Mexico semper fidelis.’”138 The Polish pope knew at first hand how appeals to devotion to Mary as national patroness could unite people in a common cause. In the United States, Our Lady of Guadalupe has the new title of “Protectress of the Unborn”—a devotion that makes a direct link between abortion and the human sacrifices of pre-Columbian Mexico that were ended with the arrival of Catholicism there. This pro-life devotion maintains faith in Mary’s protection, while de-nationalizing her figure. At the same time, it harnesses patriotic enthusiasm to an issue which is both a burning moral issue and a marker of American Catholicism. In Polish and Mexican Catholicism alike, Marian cults show indelible bonds between faith and culture and between national and Catholic identities. For modern Mexicans and for Mexican immigrants to the United States, Guadalupe represents “the moral superiority of traditional Mexican values vis-à-vis those of the United States.”139 She anchors national identity for Mexicans in the madre patria and ethnic identity in emigrant communities. The future of mexicanidad itself might appear to depend on maintaining devotion to Mary: “The day in which the Virgin of Tepeyac is not adored in this land, it is certain that there shall have disappeared . . . Mexican nationality.”140 Measuring the theological value of such rhapsodic statements requires us to interpret them in their cultural and linguistic contexts. Sentimental

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in nature, they can be interpreted literally, especially in folk religion. The popular song La Guadalupana, invariably sung at mañanitas on December 12, describes Mary’s face and hands anachronistically as “Mexican” and declares that “being Guadalupan is of the essence of being Mexican.” Popular sentiments confirm the scholarly opinion that Virgin of Guadalupe “expresses the socio-political uniqueness of the entire Mexican population.”141 As we have seen, the Christological definition of Chalcedon employed four qualifiers to describe the hypostatic union, the first of which is “without confusion.” If being Guadalupan is essential to Mexican identity, then religious and national identities have indeed fused together.

Instincts of Faith The message of Guadalupe has been “a varied, even ambiguous one that has meant different things to different groups, and that has been exploited to meet special needs and interests.”142 Writers on Mary frequently note that Marian devotion on the whole escapes easy definition: “It is a complete illusion to think that you have a clearly defined figure if you just pronounce the name ‘Mary.’ It is a very flexible name that can be adapted to the needs of the time when and the place where it is invoked.”143 Marian theology and piety have grown out of “the interplay of revelation and folk religion.”144 In that interplay, popular religiosity has had a more significant role than in many other aspects of Christian faith, and culture has been central to Marian devotion. Melissa Katz writes of the last two centuries, but the pattern she describes has ancient roots: “Mary’s legacy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries intertwines history, politics and national identity with religion and art.”145 In the same vein, Pelikan explains that “throughout human history, the basic category for thinking about Mary was that of paradox”146—a paradox whose origins are to be found in the Incarnation. Mary is pontifex, the supreme bridge-builder, in whose cult religious and secular aspects of life are intertwined and even identified with one another. Significantly, questions of religion and nationality, in all their psychological weight, are located at exactly the same intersection. Whether we accept Warner’s soapbox declaration that “popular belief has never found theology anything but superfluous to its continuing life,”147 or if we merely understand that the phenomenon of Marian devotion is only partly defined by nice doctrinal distinctions, theology is obliged to consider how Scripture, doctrine and theological reflection can illuminate the connection between popular Marian piety and national identity. In responding to the question of what theology has to say to that phenomenon, we also

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need to ponder what popular religious instincts have to teach the Catholic theological tradition. The adage lex orandi lex credendi has often been evoked in connection with the cult of the Virgin Mary. As many a Protestant disputant has liked to point out, neither popular devotion nor dogmatic assertions about Mary are easily supported by an appeal to the Bible alone. The principle lex orandi lex credendi emerged from the theological controversies of the fifth century. The formula first appears in the work of Prosper of Aquitaine (435–442), the so-called Capitula Coelestini, which cites liturgical practice in its argument against Pelagianism.148 Pelikan notes that Athanasius too was evidently familiar with the idea that “implicit in Christian worship there was a normative doctrinal content.”149 Tavard asserts that “regarding peripheral doctrines of the hierarchy of faith, as are the later Marian doctrines, the relevance of the axiom is highly debatable,” and that the notion lex orandi lex credendi is “radically ambiguous.”150 It can be taken to mean that liturgical practices illustrate de facto church approval, since celebration would have no value unless it was aligned with doctrine, and that liturgy and doctrine are both expressions of tradition.151 In his 1950 Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus, Pius XII proclaimed that “the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory.”152 To arrive at its conclusion, the Constitution makes a somewhat circular argument, arguing that popular celebration would be meaningless without the inspiration of doctrine. Doctrine is itself a tradition that is expressed inter alia by the liturgical traditions of the church. However, another interpretation of the principle is possible: if a sufficiently large number of people have believed in something over a sufficiently long period of time, then that belief must contain an element of truth. In this version, lex orandi lex credendi is closely related to the concept of sensus fidelium, according to which “the entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One, cannot err in matters of belief.” Communal instinct “from the Bishops down to the last of the lay faithful” is a manifestation of the Spirit at work in the Church. A striking example of this application of the principle occurred in the controversial canonization of Juan Diego. At the time of the promotion of the cause, the abbot of the Basilica of Guadalupe, Guillermo Schulenburg, publicly expressed doubts about the historical existence of Juan Diego, the figure on whom the truth of the Guadalupe apparitions and the miraculous origin of the image depended. Not having any historical evidence that would prove beyond doubt that such a person had existed, the process of canoniza-

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tion depended solely on the persistence of popular devotion to Guadalupe, assuming that it would have existed from the alleged time of the apparitions. Earlier church examinations of the cult, from the first canonical investigation of 1660 onward, had also appealed to tradition. Subsequent investigations built on the hearsay and the assumptions of earlier enquiries. A tradition of evidence emerged as a by-product of the processes of investigation, which took current popular belief and religious practice as confirming the existence of ancient oral traditions dating back to Juan Diego himself. Such suppositions took on the gravitas of fact and were marshaled in support of doctrinal decisions of the magisterium. Rebutting and publicly reproaching Schulenburg, Norberto Carrera, Cardinal Archbishop of Mexico City appealed not to historical evidence, but to national sentiment as justification for the canonization. Schulenburg’s statements, he claimed, had “wounded all Mexicans.”153 The relationship between doctrine and popular belief and religion is a critical nexus of Mariology. The principle lex orandi lex credendi is also directly relevant to the connection between Christianity and nationality. Chapter Two has shown us that historically, Christian and national identities have often been closely associated with each other, and many Christians, individually and collectively, have attributed spiritual value to their own nation. If we are to treat this widespread experience respectfully, we are obliged to consider what kind of truth might lie at the heart of that connection. Specifically, do these apparently spiritual dimensions of nationality indicate the presence of something that theological investigation can and should make explicit and discuss? If theology is fides quaerens intellectum it is also praxis quaerens intellectum. A theology that undervalues religious practice or popular faith experience runs the serious risk of reducing faith to a series of universally applicable principles. Abstract in its thrust, this theological method will struggle to accept that popular practice and instincts can precede theological explanation and indeed be a channel of doctrine. Its concept of faith will likely be weighted toward intellectual aspects. Only with difficulty will it be able to embrace the more emotional varieties of religious experience. In this model, the spiritual role of culture can only be peripheral. As I have suggested in Chapter Three, the absence of theological discussion of nationality is due among other things to the stubbornly residual influence of neo-scholasticism. On the other hand, an understanding of lex orandi lex credendi that overemphasizes the importance of religious experience, to the point that it becomes the measure of doctrine, runs the very serious risk of identifying belief

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with truth. In this plan, if a sufficient number of people were to agree with Metropolitan’s Sulyk’s conviction that “Our Lady has had a special relationship with the Ukrainian nation,” that belief would perforce be true. A simple quasi-democratic notion of truth is simply unreliable. Given the possibility of theological waywardness, all claims of divine favor need to be rigorously measured against scripture and the historic tradition of the whole Church. Any number of beliefs—heliocentrism for example—have held large sectors of the population for millennia. Within the Church, Athanasius’s opposition to the Arian Christology that had gained almost universal acceptance led to his repeated exile. However, the principle lex orandi lex credendi can be understood to mean that there can and should exist a mutual congruency between on the one hand, dogma, doctrine and formal theology, and on the other religious practice, worship, and at least some of the instincts of popular religiosity. Religious experience is necessarily the source of truth, but if it is congruent with truth, its perdurance should alert theologians that there is a fides awaiting intellectum. Obviously, the existence of popular belief or experience can never be the sole determining factor for truth claims, especially in theologically peripheral issues. Assertions of peripherality, however, need to be treated with circumspection. Centrality, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. There have been few considerations of nationality within academic theology, particularly within Catholic and North American contexts. But we are left with the bare fact that historically, significant numbers of people have experienced their ethnicity or nationality—or at least their social identity—as something so intimately connected with their faith as to be inseparable from it. The interplay of Christianity and nationality, of which national cults of Mary are one significant subset, is too common for it to be consigned to the margins. Despite its limitations and ambiguities, the use of the principle lex orandi, lex credendi can be usefully applied to a theology of nationality. The Lutheran theologian Friedrich Heiler (1892–1967) elaborated a Mariology that investigated the interplay between revelation and religious experience.154 Examining Catholic and Orthodox beliefs and practices concerning Mary within a wider context of universal religious experience, and incorporating Jungian perspectives, Heiler concluded that the later Marian doctrines of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption are not in fact peripheral (as Tavard would have it) but the necessary correlates of faith in the Incarnation. The key to this connection is in the dictum per Maria ad Jesum. For Heiler, the experience of Marian devotion is also necessary, for it corresponds at the level of popular affectivity to formal theology’s abstract formulations. However, popular piety should also be open to critical reflection and to theological

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correction. When Marian devotion holds Mary to be the source of grace, it misleads believers. Ad Jesum is the correct trajectory of prayer and belief. Heiler’s articulation usefully illustrates how this theme might also apply to considerations of the theological import of nationality. The implication of his arguments is that religious experience and popular faith instincts must be allowed their proper place: no more than is due but also no less.

Conclusion: Mother of All Nations Authentic Mariology derives from Christology, and in turn, the wider implications of Christology are illuminated by Mariology. As we have seen, the figure of Mary has functioned theologically to guarantee the truth of Jesus’ true and complete humanity in the Incarnation, which unites the world of the divine with humanity. The hypostatic union is the living embodiment of a number of antinomies that correspond respectively to Jesus’ divinity and his humanity: eternal and temporal, incorporeal and embodied, universal and culturally and historically located. However we understand the ways in which Mary might be present to her devotees, that presence derives from and reflects the omnipresence of God. Using the terms of patronage, maternal care and intimacy, Marian devotion expresses the value of everything which is contained in Jesus’ own humanity and which the Incarnation raises to transcendent value. Amongst these are collective identity, shared culture, and attachment to a particular homeland. Devotion to Mary as “Our Lady of N” does more than reflect a desire for a heavenly advocate or pretensions to unparagoned status. It is also a communal experience that corresponds at the level of popular piety to the theological notion that God is immanent in the particularities of each time, place and society. The “ascending adoption” of Mary as a national patroness is a sensus fidelium expression of the potential religious import of that nation. Yet the fact that Marian devotion may be seen as an affirmation of the Incarnation (within which we may find a religious role for nationality) is a critical qualifier. The history of Marian devotion also shows a tendency to move in a theologically murky direction toward real Mariolatry in which Mary is seen as the absolute cause of salvation, or as advocate against the actions of a threatening and angry God. Belief in the Trinity devolves into a belief that God’s intimacy, presence, and protection are expressed universally, to groups of people as well as to individuals. God is present in the world in many different ways. But in reality, in Catholic and Orthodox cultures, individuals and societies alike have often experienced Mary, rather than any of the three persons of the Trinity,

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as being more directly involved in life’s uncertain fluctuations. This faith experience need not necessarily be construed as Mariolatry. Certainly, some culturally specific Marian devotions (e.g., the formal investiture of Nuestra Señora de Luján as La Generala of an Argentine regiment) could easily seem to be atavistic and ecumenically scandalous to delicate North American theological sensibilities. However culturally perplexing they may appear, such phenomena are also deeply human attempts to express belief in God’s interest in the minutiae of human existence, and to consecrate all aspects of life in loving response to that concern. That said, it is important to continue to insist that when Marian imagery, symbolism and devotion have national dimensions, they assume ambiguous coloring, all too easily turning into intimations of superiority, which are apparently supported by miracles and visions. Marian apparitions happen at particular times and places. They are therefore cultural moments. Particular context inevitably molds their form, language and concern. In a rather loose analogy with Scripture, we might think of them as being “authored” by the human seers who experience them. As in the case of Scripture, human authorship does not preclude a divine origin.155 Secondly, in a general sense, they are expressions of human desire for God’s presence and assistance in the insecurities of life. On the condition that we believe in its objective reality, an apparition can also be construed as a divine desire to respond to human needs. Of the thousands of Marian apparitions or locutions recorded, few have been given the Church’s official blessing. In many cases, Church authorities have taught that they contain no supernatural elements, and the most outlandish have met with condemnation. The potential theological problems of Marian apparitions lie in their content too. When apparitions are interpreted to imply a more intense relationship between Mary and a society, all the problems of theology of election arise. Whether Mary’s patronage is descending or ascending, the same predicament remains: how to harmonize particular election with the fundamental equality of all humans. Redemptoris mater expounds Mary’s maternity by analogy with human relationships: Of the essence of motherhood is the fact that it concerns the person. Motherhood always establishes a unique and unrepeatable relationship between two people: between mother and child and between child and mother. Even when the same woman is the mother of many children, her personal relationship with each one of them is of the very essence of motherhood. For each child is generated in a unique and unrepeatable way, and this is true both for the

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mother and for the child. It can be said that motherhood “in the order of grace” preserves the analogy with what ‘in the order of nature’ characterizes the union between mother and child.156

Taking human maternity as the primum analogatum of national chosenness allows us to see Mary’s motherhood as an expression of divine sustenance, support and intimacy. God’s care for a particular group of people is particular to that group, analogously to the way in which a mother (ideally) loves each of her children differently but equally. Thus we can affirm the fundamental equality of all nations and ethnic communities, for God’s love for groups of people is both equal and particular. Collective election, as a form of love, calls for a collective response and invites collective responsibility. The international analogy with the human family goes further. Parental love, equal though specific to each child, does not preclude sibling rivalry. Claims for particular divine favor in respect of a nation or ethnic community are theologically justifiable, but only on the strict condition that we understand that God has a particular predilection for all other similar groups, too. To relate to Mary as mother of one’s particular nation should, in the best of worlds, not be a demand for primacy but rather be the source of fraternal respect for all other nations. Despite a high potential for being misunderstood, statements such as “in Poland, we have the Pope as our Holy Father and the Virgin as our Holy Mother”157 can in fact be true. They are at the same time a salutary opportunity remembering that “God shows no partiality” (Acts 10:34). Perhaps more than any other branch of dogmatic theology, Mariology makes use of analogical language, in simile and metaphor, typological conceits images from liturgical poetry. Analogy combines difference with identity, X being like Y in some respects but unlike it in others. Yet metaphors sometimes lose their metaphorical nature, and become taken literally. The praise-language that has been a seedbed of doctrine is hyperbolic and extravagant: de Maria numquam satis. In this sense Marian piety can be a glorious expression of the power of the sensus fidelium. In the words of Henry Adams, “the Virgin [has] acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and [has] drawn man’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, [has] ever done.”158 Moreover, if we agree with the Turners that “the dominant symbols of the church derive their emotional-volitional charge from their particular local geography and history,” it becomes easy to see how the particularities involved in the Incarnation, and mediated by Marian piety, have tremendous affective power. Devotion to Mary and affection for homeland can easily reinforce each other to the point where

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they are indistinguishable. In popular religiosity, the Polish Motherland, the Mother of the Church, and Mother Church have become inseparable figures, sharing the same generative and protective power whose ultimate source is the Triune God. The fact that Mary has become a symbol for so many nations should not surprise us. Given the ethnosymbolic nature of national identity, Marian piety finds an obvious home within national myths, and a fortiori in religious patriotism. To revisit Roland Barthes: myth is “not just a message, but a message that is political by depoliticizing. It turns history into essence, culture into Nature, and obscures the role of human beings in producing the structures they inhabit.”159 This alerts us to the possible abuses of power latent in Marian piety. Thomas Kselman and Steve Avella argue that the power of Mary to stir hearts and minds may ultimately stem from her ability to link deeply felt emotions about our own mothers to institutions that claim to fulfill similar protective and nurturing functions. During the past two centuries the nation-state has emerged as the institution which asserts a primary claim to its citizens’ loyalties and affections. Nationalist politicians have frequently used familial metaphors to describe the relationship that exists between the state and the people, who have been asked to live, work for, and sometimes die for their motherland. Marian devotions in the modern age are an important vehicle through which such nationalist sentiments have been expressed and channeled.160

Kselman and Avella write here about Cold War America, but as this chapter has shown, the pattern is evidently ancient. The rococo typology employed by criollo preachers to exalt the Virgin of Guadalupe expressed class and political interests in religious registers. Yet the patristic framework upon which those preachers drew expresses other ideas: desire and hope for God’s salvific action for all people and peoples, regardless of ethnic origin or class. Belief in the miracle of Guadalupe helped render the criollos, peninsulares and indios of New Spain into a new nation with a singular identity. The 1945 radio broadcast in which Pius XII acclaimed Mary as Empress of the Americas, assured Mary that “we are certain that while you are recognized as Queen and Mother, America and Mexico will be safe.”161 At first glance, that papal fervorino is only a devotional flourish. Yet it also expresses a hope that is based on the real, historical perdurance of Guadalupan devotion. Understood aright, Pius XII’s phrase also encompasses a profound theological truth. Mariology exists at the crossroads of faith and culture. Mary “is not solely the creation of theologians or of the masses; she belongs completely neither

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to her devout nor to culture.”162 The progression of Marian titles from theology to culture, from Theotokos to patroness of city, a nation, or even a regiment, involves many steps. Each of these may be logically explained and its internal coherence defended. But unless people are aware of each of those intervening steps, of the metaphoric nature of Marian language, and of its reference to Christ, then Mary’s role in salvation will be prone to misunderstanding and manipulation. Where this happens, the assumed predilection of Our Lady can only too easily justify ethnocentric attitudes and actions. The tension between religious and national identities is a neuralgic point in the necessary relationship between Church and world. This engagement has been historically delicate. It is fraught with danger as well as replete with possible blessings. Christian institutions and the values they espouse are as easily co-opted into imperialist projects of expansion and ressentiment-based nationalism as they are to efforts to build peace and justice between nations. Where the Church is identified simplistically with the ethnic community or nation, both sides end up losing. Equally detrimental is a radical separation between the two. If by virtue of these reasons alone, a theological consideration of nationality is not merely possible, but indeed an ethical imperative.

Notes 1. For an excellent treatment of this topic, see David A. Sánchez, From Patmos to the Barrio: Subverting Imperial Myths (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008). 2. Lumen gentium, 12. 3. Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries, 50. 4. See Richard Price, “Theotokos: The Title and its Significance in Doctrine and Devotion,” in Sarah Boss, ed., Mary: The Complete Resource (Oxford University Press, New York, 2007), 56–73. 5. Melissa Katz, “Regarding Mary: Women’s Lives Reflected in the Virgin’s Image,” in Melissa Katz and Robert Orsi, eds., Divine Mirrors: The Virgin Mary in the Visual Arts (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 52. 6. Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Picador, 1985), 64. 7. De carne Christi 21,5, in Luigi Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church: The Blessed Virgin in Patristic Thought, trans. Thomas Buffer (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999), 64. 8. Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church, 162. 9. Ibid. 10. De fide orthodoxa 3, 12, in Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries, 56–57. 11. George H. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996), 59. Different authors date this papyrus variously from the second to the eighth centuries.

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12. Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church, 243. 13. Hom 4, in Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church, 248. 14. Hom 2, in Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church, 410. 15. Gambero, Mary and the Fathers of the Church, 109. 16. See Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). 17. Mary K. Lefkowitz, “Mary and the Ancient Goddesses,” in Katz and Orsi, Divine Mirrors, 134. 18. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 49. 19. Donald G. Dawe, “The Blessed Virgin and Depth Psychology,” in William McLoughlin and Jill Pinnock, eds., Mary Is for Everyone, 86–100. 20. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 65, emphasis added. 21. See Joanna Hubbs, “The Worship of Mother Earth in Russian Culture,” in James Preston, ed., Mother Worship: Themes and Variants (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 123–144; also Tricia Cusack and Síghle Bhreathnach-Lynch, eds., Art, Nation and Gender: Ethnic Landscapes, Myths, and Mother-figures (Burlington, VA: Ashgate, 2003). 22. Paul VI, Marialis cultus, 24. 23. Redemptoris mater, 48. 24. Judith A. Bauer, ed., The Essential Mary Handbook: A Summary of Beliefs, Devotions and Prayers (Chawton, England: Redemptorist Publications, 1999), 89. 25. Robert Orsi, “The Many Names of the Mother of God,” in Katz and Orsi, Divine Mirrors, 3. 26. Marialis cultus, 15. 27. Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries, 57. 28. For an account of the Transitus Mariae material, see Stephen J. Shoemaker, The Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 29. Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries, 103. 30. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 238. 31. Sharon Elkins, “Mary in the Christian Tradition,” in Katz and Orsi, Divine Mirrors, 137. 32. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 108. 33. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 69. 34. Thomas Lucas, “Virtual Vessels, Mystical Signs: Contemplating Mary’s Images in the Jesuit Tradition,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits 35 (November 2003): 5. 35. Lucas, “Virtual Vessels,” 6. 36. D. A. Brading, Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 17. 37. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 72–73. 38. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 107. 39. Bauer, The Essential Mary Handbook, 91. 40. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 104.

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41. Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 60. 42. Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky, revised ed. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982), 96. 43. Norman Tanner, ed. and trans., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Georgetown: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. II, 774–776. 44. Orsi, “The Many Names of the Mother of God,” 4–5. 45. Bauer, The Essential Mary Handbook, 96. 46. Linda B. Hall, Mary, Mother and Warrior: The Virgin in Spain and the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 2. 47. Marialis cultus, 57. 48. See Maja Trochimisczyk, “Sacred versus Secular: The Convoluted History of Polish Anthems,” chap. in Maja Trochimisczyk, ed., After Chopin: Essays in Polish Music (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2000). 49. Translation by David Welsh, from www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literatur/polpoet/ bogurodz.htm. 50. Redemptoris mater, 6. Emphasis added. 51. Redemptoris mater, 28. 52. John Paul II, “Prayer of Consecration of the World to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, March 25, 1984.” L’Osservatore Romano, English edition, April 2, 1984: 8–10. 53. John Martin, Roses, Fountains, and Gold: The Virgin Mary in History, Art and Apparition (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998), 9. 54. Christopher Rengers, Mary of the Americas: Our Lady of Guadalupe (New York: Alba House, 1989), 57–58. 55. See Michael W. Cuneo, The Smoke of Satan: Conservative and Traditionalist Dissent in Contemporary American Catholicism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univeristy Press, 1999), esp. chap. 5, “Mystical Marianists and Apocalypticists.” 56. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, “Postindustrial Marian Pilgrimage,” in Preston, Mother Worship, 155. 57. Hall, Mary, Mother and Warrior, 12–13, emphasis added. 58. Ibid. 59. Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries, 67. 60. Orsi, “The Many Names of the Mother of God,” 8. 61. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 248. 62. Orsi, “The Many Names of the Mother of God,” 8. 63. Ibid. 64. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 247. 65. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 216. 66. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 247–48. 67. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 78. 68. Bauer, The Essential Mary Handbook, 65. 69. Bauer, The Essential Mary Handbook, 89.

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70. Bauer, The Essential Mary Handbook, 247. 71. McLoughlin and Pinnock, Mary Is For Everyone, 285. For Marian shrines, see Zoltan Aradi, Shrines to Our Lady Around the World (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954), passim. 72. James Preston, “New Perspectives on Mother Worship,” in Preston, Mother Worship, esp. 333–335. 73. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 248. 74. See Thomas Tweed, “Proclaiming Catholic Inclusiveness: Ethnic Diversity and Ecclesiastical Unity at the National Shrine,” U.S. Catholic Historian 18, no.1 (Winter 2000): 1–18. 75. Rengers, Mary of the Americas, 28. 76. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 215. 77. In John Bird, A Vision of Hope: Queen of Ukraine (Great Wakering, England: McCrimmon Publishers [for Saint John Baptiste Foundation]), 17. 78. http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/homilies/1998/documents/ hf_jp-ii_hom_19981113_argentina_en.html. 79. Stephen Sulyk, “Foreword,” in Bird, A Vision of Hope, 8. 80. Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 60. 81. Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 33. 82. Bauer, The Essential Mary Handbook, 243. 83. Stafford Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Origins and Sources of a Mexican National Symbol, 1531–1797 (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1996), 19. 84. Aradi, Shrines to Our Lady, 164. Mary’s military patronage is not limited to her role as Nuestra Señora de Luján. Under the title of Nuestra Señora del Carmen, she is Virgen Generala del Ejército Argentino, Patrona y Generala del Ejército de los Andes (Virgin General of the Argentinian Army, Patroness and General of the Andean Army). Similarly, the Chilean army acclaims la Virgen del Carmen as patrona y generala. 85. See Emilio Mignone, Iglesia y Dictadura (Buenos Aires: Pensamiento Nacional, 1986). 86. David Bruce MacDonald, Balkan Holocausts?: Serbian and Croatian Victimcentred Propaganda and the War in Yugoslavia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 120. 87. E.g., Michael Carroll, The Cult of the Virgin Mary: Psychological Origins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 88. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 173. 89. Turner and Turner, “Postindustrial Marian Pilgrimage,” 148. 90. http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=5078 91. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 468–469 and 546. 92. See André de la Franquerie, La Vierge Marie dans l’Histoire de France (Condom, Gers: n/p 1939). 93. De unit. 6, in Catechism, 101.

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94. Pope Pius X, Ad diem illum laestissium, 10. For a series of discussions on the connection between Mary and the Church, see R. N. Swanson, ed., The Church and Mary (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2004). 95. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 204. The central thesis of Nicholas Perry and Loreto Echeverria, Under the Heel of Mary (London and New York: Routledge, 1988) is that Marian devotion has been deliberately fostered by Church authorities to bolster its political power. 96. Martin, Roses, Fountains, and Gold, 146. 97. Sally Cunneen, In Search of Mary: The Woman and the Symbol (New York: Ballantine, 1996), 212–13. 98. Martin, Roses, Fountains, and Gold, 159. 99. See René Laurentin and Michel Corteville, Découverte du secret de la Salette (Paris: Editions Fayard, 2002). 100. Cunneen, In Search of Mary, 223. 101. Ann Taves, Household of Faith: Roman Catholic Devotions in Mid-Nineteenth Century America (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 109. 102. Turner and Turner, “Postindustrial Pilgrimage,” 155. 103. Martin, Roses, Fountains, and Gold, 214. 104. Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries, 184. 105. Ibid. 106. Barbara Pope, “Immaculate and Powerful: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century,” in Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles, eds., Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 183–84. 107. Pope, “Immaculate and Powerful,” 173. 108. Bird, A Vision of Hope, 10. 109. Ibid. Emphases added. 110. Marian Helm-Pirgo, Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland (New York: Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences, 1957), “Preface,” n/p. 111. Helm-Pirgo, Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland, 21. There exists a Hungarian myth parallel to the vow of King Jan Kazimierz, according to which the first king of Hungary, St. Stephen, offered the royal crown to Mary and thereby chose her as patroness of the whole country. 112. Helm-Pirgo, Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland, 27. Emphasis added. 113. Helm-Pirgo, Virgin Mary, Queen of Poland, 27–28. 114. George Hunston Williams, The Mind of John Paul II: Origins of His Thought and Action (New York: Seabury Press, 1981), 216. 115. Williams, The Mind of John Paul II, 49. 116. Williams, The Mind of John Paul II, 283. 117. Ibid. Emphasis added. 118. Arthur Burton Calkins, “Mary’s Spiritual Motherhood,” in McLoughlin and Pinnock, Mary Is for Everyone, 81. 119. Williams, The Mind of John Paul II, 313.

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120. Catechism, 969–971. 121. The syllogism runs: 1. Mary is mother of the faithful (i.e., the Church), 2. Mary, as Our Lady or Queen of X, expresses maternal care for X. 3. Therefore, X is equivalent to or co-extensive with the Church. 122. Kajetan Esser, Die opuscula des hl. Franziskus von Assisi (Grottaferrata, Italy: Editiones Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1976), 418. 123. For a discussion of the Virgin Mary as personification of Ireland, see John Turpin, “Visual Marianism and National Identity in Ireland: 1920–1960,” in Cusack and Bhreathnach-Lynch, Art, Nation and Gender, 67–78. 124. Spanish text in John Lamb, ed., Flor y Canto (Portland: Oregon Catholic Press, 2001), second edition, 92. Translation my own. 125. E.g., Ena Campbell, “The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Female Self Image: A Mexican Case History,” in Preston, Mother Worship, 5–24; Katz, “Regarding Mary,” passim; Hall, Mary, Mother and Warrior, passim; and Jeanette Rodriguez, Our Lady of Guadalupe: Faith and Empowerment Among Mexican-American Women (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994). The classic study of the relationship between the cult of Guadalupe and pre-Colombian religion is Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcoatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1813 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 126. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 302. 127. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 303. 128. Stafford Poole, “The Woman of the Apocalypse,” in John F. Schwaller, ed., The Church in Colonial Latin America (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1999), 214. 129. Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 101. 130. Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 367. 131. I have borrowed this phrase from Norman Taylor, Inventing the Loyalists: Ontario Loyalist Tradition and the Creation of Usable Pasts (Toronto: University of Canada Press, 1997). 132. Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, 214. 133. Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, 13. 134. Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, 3. 135. See Ilona Katzew, “Stars in the Sea of the Church: The Indian in EighteenthCentury New Spanish Painting,” in Joseph N. Newland et al., eds., The Arts in Latin America 1492–1820 (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2006), 335–348. 136. Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 299. 137. Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 341. 138. Brading, Mexican Phoenix, 338. 139. Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, 6. See also Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (New York: Viking Penguin, 2002), 103–25. 140. Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, The Feast of Guadalupe, in Brading, Mexican Phoenix, frontispiece. 141. Campbell, “The Virgin of Guadalupe and the Female Self Image,” 5. 142. Poole, Our Lady of Guadalupe, 4.

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143. Hall, Mary, Mother and Warrior, 16. 144. Dawe, “The Blessed Virgin and Depth Psychology,” 95. 145. Katz, “Regarding Mary,” 104. 146. Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries, 55. 147. Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 238. 148. Paul de Clerck, “‘Lex orandi, lex credendi:’ the original sense and historical avatars of an equivocal usage,” Studia Liturgica 24 (1994): 178–200. 149. Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries, 59. 150. Tavard, The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary, 90. 151. The complex relationship between doctrine and liturgy is discussed in Geoffrey Wainwright, Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine and Life: A Systematic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 218–283. For a theologically cautious discussion, see Daniel Slyke, “Lex orandi lex credendi: Liturgy as Locus Theologicus in the Fifth Century?” Josephinum Journal of Theology 11/2 (Summer/Fall 2004): 130–51. 152. Pius XII, Munificentissimus Deus, 44. 153. Stafford Poole, “History versus Juan Diego,” The Americas 62:1 (July 2005): 5. 154. Friedrich Heiler, The Madonna as Religious Symbol (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). 155. Dei verbum, 11 teaches that “in composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him, they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted.” 156. Redemptoris mater, 45. 157. Gabrielle Glazer, “Warsaw journal; Church’s Bane: Madonna and Other Temptations,” The New York Times, Jan. 15, 1991, quoting Rev. Szymon Stefanowicz of the Jasna Góra monastery. 158. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Sioux Falls, SD: NuVision Publications, 2007), 289. 159. Michael Moriarty, Roland Barthes (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), 28. 160. Thomas A. Kselman and Steven Avella, “Marian Piety and the Cold War in the United States,” The Catholic Historical Review 72, no. 3 (July 1986): 424. 161. Rengers, Mary of the Americas, 22. 162. Orsi, “The Many Names of the Mother of God,” 3.

CHAPTER SIX



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Others abide our question. Thou art free. We ask and ask: Thou smilest and art still, Out-topping knowledge.1

These words that Matthew Arnold first addressed to Shakespeare could apply equally to the frustratingly Sisyphean task of explaining what we mean when we use the term nation and the related concepts of nationality, national identity and nationalism, to say nothing of determining out their various connections with Christianity. This process requires conceding that any kind of neat defining scheme will be necessarily provisional and constantly challenged by inconvenient and untidy historical examples. The development of a theology of nationality includes trying to “out-top” an unwieldy panoply of notions. At its most fundamental level, it consists of two different but related tasks. We must first understand what a nation is, where the category came from, and be familiar with at least some historical contours. Only from there can we logically proceed to working out a theological response. At the level of knowledge, these two tasks correspond to the relationship between other sciences and theology. Our understanding of what a nation and nationality actually are will obviously shape what we think Christianity has to say to them. Indeed, the first of these is pre-theological, for it is an interest shared by historians, sociologists, and social and political scientists. Expressed in another way, if grace builds on nature, then

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how we envisage the nature of nationality will shape the ways in which we imagine grace might affect it. Regardless of how academics explicate cultural identities (as substantial realities or merely convenient but chimerical constructs), the fact remains that religious considerations have historically been frequently inseparable from people’s sense of cultural identity—their own and others’. Among the many ways in which cultural identity is experienced, at least in the Western world of the last two centuries, nationality is one of the most important. In the words of the philosopher J. R. Jones, “the world is presented to the experience of man . . . there within his own experience, not in its global universality, but rather through . . . the cradle of national distinctiveness.”2 Christianity and nationality meet and affect each other on the shared terrain of culture. This is to state the obvious, for the manifestations of Christian belief are also cultural moments. Church and nation are both meaning-systems that give rise to individual and communal interactions with the world. Indeed, it would be foolish to propose too radical a dichotomy between culture and religion. There is no such phenomenon as an a-cultural Christianity, since faith is always expressed in particularities of time and place. The Catholic intellectual tradition has long fostered an intellectually sophisticated discussion of church and state, centered primarily on the question of the limits of their respective jurisdictions. The struggle of the Church to find its place in relation to secular polities has been expressed variously in the Eusebian synthesis of church and empire; in the historically troubled relationship between imperium and sacerdotium; in the medieval theory of the “two powers”; and in the definition of the Church at the First Vatican Council as a coetus perfectus, which does not need state approval to fulfill its role. However, as I have insisted throughout this book, a state is not a nation, and vice versa. If we accept Anthony D. Smith’s definition of a nation as a group of people which shares “an historic community, common myths and historical memories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights for all members,”3 and if nationalism consists of a movement seeking to “attain and maintain the movement identity, unity and autonomy of a social group, some of whose members deem it to constitute an actual or potential nation,”4 then it is clear that nationhood exists in differing grades of realization. Not all self-confessed nations meet Smith’s conditions. Nations may exist without states and states may also exist without a consolidated sense of national identity, or indeed include several different nations or ethnic groups, all of whom are citizens of one “national” state. In modern states that do not possess a historical ethnic substrate, it is the state

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that defines that nation, rather than the other way around: such countries are state-nations, not nation-states. The United States, says one distinguished American political scientist “are not a nation in the pristine sense of the word.”5 The American experience of nationality inevitably colors the perspectives of American Christianity and American theology. It has also influenced Catholic doctrine in the germane question of the relationship between church and state. John Courtney Murray’s significant contributions to the final form of Dignitatis humanae, the Declaration of the Second Vatican Council on religious freedom, are inseparable from his thought on the First Amendment.6 Such considerations are political rather than cultural in their focus, yet culture inevitably shapes them. Given the tendencies of scholastic theology to emphasize the universal and timeless, culture was a fairly minor consideration in earlier ages, studied primarily in its pastoral role in traditional “mission territories.” Secular intellectual movements have inevitably contributed to the fact that culture is so prominent in contemporary ecclesial awareness. Challenges to traditional perspectives such as Edward Said’s Orientalism or Kwame Antony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers typify a movement toward multiculturalism, in which the world is no longer conceived as having one organizing cultural focus, but as being in constant, Heraclitean flux. Twentieth-century global developments have also contributed to pushing cultural diversity into the main theological arena, and changes in Church’s population have forced changes in theological perspective and agency. From its former incarnation as a largely European and Eurocentric body, the Catholic Church is now found in largest numbers in former mission territories and former European colonies—the comparatively new nations and states of the Americas, Africa and Asia. Fruit of this re-centering has been the rejection of exclusively Eurocentric perspectives. A concern for the political processes of decolonization, which spurred the writing of Pacem in terris, is echoed in the cultural foci of Gaudium et spes and Ad gentes and the notion of inculturation, which urges that the message of the Gospel be “earthed” in time and place. The development of Asian, Latin American and other theologies specific to and conditioned by a variety of cultural milieus expresses a pastoral awareness far different from that of Trent or the First Vatican Council, both of which emphasized the unity and universality of the Church. Contemporary Catholic theology is increasingly particularistic. The evolution of former colonies into new states has also brought questions of culture to the foreground. As new political states have sought to develop a corresponding particular cultural identity, the connection between

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religious and national identities has emerged as a significant focus. Since the content of Catholic faith is universal, the concrete ways in which that faith is expressed have become correspondingly more important. Borrowing some more names of imaginary places from Italo Calvino helps see some basic patterns at work. Following independence, the theoretical territory called Sophronia is no longer conceived of as the European imperial possession Sophronialand, but rather as the homeland of a new (or “restored” or “redeemed”) Sophronian nation. Side-by-side with decolonization, a pastorally and psychologically particular form of inculturated Sophronian Christianity emerges, one which will complement the new nation-state by being distinctive in form: in both religious and secular arenas, Sophronian cultural particularities will be emphasized. Over the last 50 years the intellectual zeitgeist has increasingly valued diversity and particularity as intrinsic goods. Technological revolutions of the twentieth century—the development of internal combustion and jet engines, radio, television, telephone and Internet—have brought formerly separated cultures into contact. Consequently, the knowledge that the world is indeed peopled by a variety of inhabitants is now shared universally. Static, monocultural notions of “civilization” are challenged by a de facto cosmopolitanism in which cultural identity exists as flow rather than essence. Identity is negotiated daily, as people pick their way through cultural influences from all over the globe. In the same way that the encounter with the New World in the “age of discovery” radically reshaped the consciousness of European intellectual elites, the experience of a Western-flavored multiculturalism challenges traditional ways of life and religio-cultural certainties. Religious fundamentalism and extreme nationalism are visceral responses to these challenges. Within the United States, generations of immigrants from different national origins gradually assimilated a generic all-American national identity. While the House Committee on Un-American Activities of 1938–1968 was the most notorious response to the threats of Nazism and Cold War Communism, American nationality was echoed in habits of thinking which valued such notions as “the American way of life” and “American values.” In the 1960s, in reaction to the uniformity of this pattern, a whole generation of Americans began to stress their cultural and ethnic differences, giving rise to the phenomenon of the “hyphenated American.” In cultural assimilation and self-definition and re-definition, religious considerations have inevitably played a part, aiding and abetting each other in complex ways. At the consecration of a new Armenian cathedral in Burbank, California, in 2007, His Holiness Catholicos Karekin II of the Armenian Apostolic Church told his congregation that the building would

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rise up from this ground to the heavens on the blessed land of America, where within her walls and under her roof, she shall keep bountiful the spirit of faith in Christ and national identity in the souls of our Armenian sons and daughters on the banks of the Pacific.7

Precisely which nation was being referred to was not clear. What shone forth with great clarity, however, was the inseparability of Christianity from Armenian and Armenian-American identities. Nationality is one of those culture systems by which human beings construe meaning and purpose for their lives. As such, it is worthy of theological consideration. But theological endeavor is by its very nature affected by its cultural—and national and ethnic—context and in turn affects that context. There is also another sense in which theology is inevitably the work of culture as well as of the Church. “Latino/a theology” is for example a comparatively recent newcomer to academic theological reflection. Yet it is by no means a new creation, for its roots are in faith experiences long in search of understanding. Such experiences are necessarily cultural moments, shaped by tradition, language, and social context. The experience of a sense of national belonging easily engenders tremendous psychological energies, social and individual; perhaps no phrase better captures this face than dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.8 Clearly then, theological ethics has an interest in national and ethnic identities. The moral imperative becomes particularly urgent when we consider volatile forms of nationalism, ethnocentrism and patriotism, as well as their cousins imperialism, colonialism, and cultural globalization. However, an ethical treatment does not exhaust what a theology of nationality can and should include. A theology that limits itself to the deontological without also articulating the ontology of nationality is a house built without sufficient foundations: we can only say what should be when we understand what is. In chronological terms, the ontological explanation can follow the deontological mandate. In terms of logical priority, it necessarily precedes it. This ontological exploration is largely a matter of description and identifying patterns of interaction. Christian experiences of religious and national belonging have often affected each other in some recognizably typical ways—so often, in fact, that a degree of interpenetration between nationality and religion is the norm. In different but related ways, nationality and Christianity both promise to answer fundamental existential needs for meaning, identity, and belonging. Their mutual influence is therefore to be expected.

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The institutions of Christianity can easily seek to vest themselves with secular power. A more prevalent pattern, however, has been the reverse. The tendency of nations to take on the trappings of religion has deep roots. Long predating Christianity, it belongs to an ancient anthropological substrate that knows no easy separation between sacred and secular realms, or religious and political considerations. Refusing to pray to the state’s gods was tantamount to atheism. Indeed, a long-held historical perspective of the proponents of “primordial nationality” finds that the “nations” of the ancient Near Middle East were religious rather than cultural entities. One could argue that in the case of the first empire-wide persecutions of Christians, it was the quasi-sacral identity of the Roman state that was threatened by Christianity. However, an analysis of the relationship between Christian and national identities nearer to our own era shows that what Christianity has abetted is not so much nationality as nationalism, in the form of an insistence on the value of one’s nation. Historically, a large number of nations have become convinced that God “has not treated other nations thus” (Ps 147:20). National pride has often turned into national arrogance. In these cases, the institutions and language of Christianity have been so identified with particularistic cultural projects and political ambition that they have become (consciously or unconsciously) inseparable from them. Where this happens, nations adorn themselves with the kind of numinous mandorla that surrounds the figure of La Morenita on the tilma of Juan Diego. The “women clothed with the sun” of Rev 12, whom Mexican preachers have liked to associate with Our Lady of Guadalupe, is sometimes also dressed in national flags. Gauging the exact extent to which national concerns have been sacralized is no simple task. The phenomenon is overwhelmingly pluriform. Its linguistic registers are hermeneutically unstable and its visual manifestations send out mixed messages At one end of the spectrum, “civic religion” and national religiosity may represent nothing more than a purely formal use of religiously tinged language—the “conventional civic deism” referred to in the Newdow vs. U.S. Congress case of 2002. Toward the middle range of holy nationality lies the Eusebian model of solidarity between church and empire. Slightly further along the scale are “chosen peoples,” “Christian nations” or integrist schemes such as the nacionalcatolicismo of the Francoist regime. American evangelicals sometimes claim that the United States was founded as a Christian nation. This is to confuse the ideals of John Winthrop, who effectively sought to bring together a holy people, based on the belief in a covenant between God and Winthrop’s Puritan co-religionists, with the secular concerns of the Founding Fathers who established an American state.

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At a far extreme lies the effective sacralization of the nation-state practiced by such totalitarian regimes as Kim Jung Il’s North Korea, where the personal cult of the national leader is a de facto state religion. Significantly, at both poles of this spectrum any true reference to the transcendental effectively disappears. There is a vast literature, both popular and scholarly, on the controversial subject, but it is fair to assert that the American state largely understands itself to be a purely secular reality. (This concept may or may not be consonant with the American nation as imagined by various constituencies.) In North Korea, by contrast, the nation-state personified in its leader has effectively been deified. It is in the middle of this range, where an apparently confessing Christianity is associated with particular ethnic groups, nations or states that measuring the exact nature of the connection is difficult. The problem of interpreting religious nationality or national religiosity becomes embarrassingly acute if we accept “form follows function” and “the medium is the message” even as partly true. Even in self-confessedly secular states, symbolic national performativity that includes veneration of the national flag, celebrating national feasts or building war memorials, inevitably looks, talks, and sounds like religion. Modern concepts of the nation grew up in Christian or post-Christian countries. The secular nation-state bears the imprint of Christian institutions, language and patterns of thought. More crudely put, this means that national belonging and the relationship between individual and social facets of identity have, over the last two thousand years, been modeled upon Christian, ecclesial lines. The imagined community of the nation cannot help but be a kind of church, one that is secular—but not always totally so. For Christianity, this shared phenomenology is problematic, and even potentially treacherous. The respective claims of nation and Church co-exist in a fragile and ambiguous relationship: tension runs through the gamut of spiritual, psychological and political ambits over which each side claims dominion. Christianity is soteriological and eschatological in orientation and demands a degree of emotional distance with respect to the world, for it is not the ultimate horizon of existence. But given that salvation comes by way of the Incarnation, Christianity is also an intramundane faith, focused on “what is now” as well as “what will be” (1 Jn 3:2). Christian theology has the responsibility of investigating the value of all earthly realities, and of placing them in a hierarchy of relevance for salvation. Since the concept of nation has been molded by the concept of church, the shape-shifting relationship between secular and sacred realities underlies all considerations of the nation, not only theological ones. The place of religion

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in national identity and life has pressing implications, for it takes concrete— and sometimes violent—forms in the contemporary world. It is a matter far more important than merely satisfying the intellectual pruritus of academics. Historically, nations have tended to usurp religious functions, offering themselves as conduits of salvation and purveyors of meaning. Materialist secularism has similar pretensions, and relegates religious faith to the lumberroom of private conviction, effectively dividing individual and social aspects of human identity. In such a scheme, Christianity can enter into the public domain only in the form of a morality useful for sustaining the status quo. In reaction to the threat of usurpation of its domains by the state or particular interest groups, the Catholic Church has often sought to exercise as much jurisdiction as possible over human society. Because theological clarification frequently arises as a response to situations of political crisis, the relationship between church and state has been one dominant focus of a broad discussion of the relationship between saeculum and sacrum. Historically, the Church’s thinkers have been far more concerned with defining the Church’s own particular role and function along with its rights and responsibilities toward other kinds of society. This has been often perceived as a matter of keeping the barbarians at the gate, and the issue has most often been treated (as in the classical question of “the two powers”) in jurisdictional terms. In situations of threat, the magisterium has adopted typical antemurale attitudes that include repudiating its neighbors and defining itself in contradistinction to them. Many nineteenth-century nationalist movements were secularist in bent and inimical to the Catholic Church. The “Syllabus of Errors” and the description of the Church as coetus perfectus suggest a theological siege mentality. Theological habits die hard, and it is neither surprising nor scandalous that theologians have shown much more interest in ecclesiology rather than state-ology, let alone ethnology or nation-ology. Perhaps only with the rise of the question of culture in twentieth-century theology is a theology of nationality at last possible. As I have insisted, any moral imperative concerning nationality needs not only to describe its limitations and potential deviations. It also needs to understand the nation and its domains in theological terms. The dimensions of the Church ad intra and ad extra are expressed in the two Constitutions of Vatican II, Lumen gentium and Gaudium et spes. In reality, the two considerations are inseparable. Yet as mentioned above, the teaching of the Church has historically been heavily weighted toward ad intra considerations. As a result, a “high” or “descending” ecclesiology that has tended to undervalue the import of other kinds of society has dominated. The Trinitarian terms employed earlier in this work as one possible hermeneutical framework for understanding nationality

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suggest that a healthy identity requires the existence of a differentiating Other. This implies that an ecclesiology that does not take into the existence of other kinds of society is likely to be incomplete if not also erroneous. Consequently, we need to stress both the Church’s similarities to and difference from nations, ethnic groups, or other social bodies. While there has long been a positive (if latent) theology of culture inherent in the Roman Catholic tradition, only comparatively recently has the Catholic Church made explicit a positive evaluation of the anthropological category of culture—succinctly expressed by the phrase “the men of this age” who are addressed in Gaudium et spes, 1. There, what unites rather than what separates the “men of this age” and “the followers of Christ” is stressed. Underlying this unity is an incarnational concept of holiness, understood not as separation from the world, but engagement with its realities. The Council’s affirming attitude toward the particularities of human culture provides an important basis for understanding the “what is” as well as the “what should be” of nationality. As a result of this, we can elaborate a clear vision of the connections and disjunctures between national and Christian identities. Nationalists are distinguished not by their interest in the nation, but by the significance they allot it. One of the criticisms frequently made by those wary of attributing any objective reality whatsoever to nationality is that to give attention to nationality is to stumble into a quagmire of extreme nationalism. The twentieth century frequently experienced the worst forms of nationalism in virulent forms: racist supremacy, ethnic cleansing, genocide, land-grabs, jingoistic patriotism, and fundamentalist religiosity. Yet to profess that nationality has a value is not necessarily to make of it an absolute value. By the terms of the First Commandment, Christians are forbidden to worship their nation, but can certainly love it. Affection for one’s own people and native soil is not the same as a nationalismus exacerbatus. The theologian J. E. Daniel distinguishes between different grades of affection: “There are plenty of superficial thinkers ready to argue that . . . since to make an idol of the nation is a sin against God, then its very existence is also a sin, that since it may not be worshipped then neither may it be loved.”9 Likewise, John Paul II, drawing from his own Polish traditions and classical notions of patria and pietas, affirms that an “authentic love of country” is opposed to a grandiose and narcissistic nationalism. Patriotism is not necessarily the first stage of terminal xenophobia but is “perfectly compatible with a commonwealth that embrace[s] a love of humanity.”10 A theological discussion of nationality has to place nationality in relation to other particular markers of identity such as class, gender, ethnicity and geographical location. A national community is a society that provides

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meaning and contributes to identity. As Greenfeld says, feeling oneself to be a member of a national community “allows one to partake in the dignity of a far greater, stronger, and more perfect being.”11 Consequently, it corresponds to the level of nature, and possesses at the very least, a natural value. Salvation presupposes the existence of a natural order of things in creation. The corollary of this is that everything which belongs to the fundamental strata of what it is to be human is at least potentially capable of being transformed by grace and becoming a channel of salvation. Since the category of nationality is so varied historically, it is difficult to take seriously claims that nationality is a fundamental element in the human constitution, or so ancient and historically widespread that it is a primordial reality. Modernist critiques of national essentialism are in many ways justified and moreover salutary. To borrow another imagined place, what the Penthesilean nation might consist of would inevitably be far more complex than the rhetoric of Penthesilean patriots might suggest. The national essentialism preached by popular patriotism is an ideal that does not really correspond to a world of mass emigration and a daily interchange between cultures. Those very things that embody particular cultures such as language, religion, and food exist side-by-side with a de facto hybridity. An awareness of nationality is contextual, rising to the surface of consciousness only when confronted with significant difference embodied by an Other. Given the historical nature of the concepts of the nation, it is hard to agree with those who argue that the nation is a primordial form of social organization. But if nationality in its modern sense cannot be predicated as an essential component of human nature, social identity can. If it is essential to human life, then it is natural, and can therefore be graced, redeemed, or saved. But if this is indeed the case, between the values of the individual human person and of the international common good, where do we locate the value of the nation, as one important kind of social identity? Or does it in fact fit into a different dimension of considerations? Amongst the things most treasured by those who value their own nationality is cultural particularity. Such an emphasis contrasts dramatically with the universalist thrust of much Marxist thought. For Marxism, culture (and therefore nationality) is far less important a way of imagining human identity and history than socio-economic class. Notions of cultural particularity are highly sympathetic to Romantic concepts of authenticity and the Herderian ideas of “national soul” and “national identity.” It is important to distinguish between particularity and particularism, and between universality and universalism. Such “-isms” exalt their own qualities to a supreme position, effectively denying or ignoring the importance of their

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opposites. Universalism confuses unity with uniformity. Since culture is necessarily particular, universalist perspectives cannot help but assign an inferior value to cultural variety. Consequently, they will inevitably shy away from issues connected with nationality. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the particularism of more aggressive forms of nationalism is certainly based on claims to superiority. A disproportionate stress on one’s own ethnic group or nation automatically engenders xenophobia. Moreover, stressing the value of national distinctiveness can result in willful ignorance of other kinds of distinctiveness, such as class, age, gender, vulnerability, etc. Such particularism frequently goes hand in hand with national essentialism. Wherever people believe that their nation is constituted by certain, invariable characteristics, then its historical contingency is obviated and its internal variations and untidy porous edges are ignored. As a kind of purity society, it will stress difference vis-à-vis its neighbors and rivals, and demand internal conformity to a set of culturally acceptable norms. The ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer of Nazism stands as an extreme example of essentialist rhetoric and political practice, but the pattern is replicated, if less noxiously so, in many forms of identity politics, which stress exo-group difference and in-group unity, at the expense of ignoring commonalities with other similar groups and differences within the group. Where Christianity has been married to national essentialism, it has frequently engendered belief in divinely mandated national election. The claim of such a particular relationship with God is almost without exception framed as God’s predilection for that one nation over and above all others—especially neighboring nations or those of a different race or religion. Catholic Christianity, because it is catholic, certainly makes claims to universality. Regrettably, at times it has also adopted theologies and practices that have made the Church guilty of universalism. A failure to distinguish between the essence of Christianity and the European forms it has taken has meant that the missionary actions of the Church have too often been insensitive toward local cultures. Centralist theologies of papacy—and the Vatican policies that reflect this—have sometimes prioritized uniformity over legitimate cultural differences, confusing universality with standardization. The life of the Church is characterized by a constant flow between center and periphery. A catholicity of experience acts as a corrective toward abstraction, while the center constantly reminds the margins that they are part of a universal church. Drives toward uniformity have always co-existed with a rich variety of local forms of Christianity. Church and culture together continue to develop in a dynamic and ever-evolving synthesis. The instruction given by Pope Gregory the Great (c. 540–604) to

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Abbot Mellitus—famously quoted in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation—that Saxon pagan rites and festivals should be taken over into Christian feasts and that as far as possible local customs should be retained, is a pastoral theology that understands religious psychology. The same practical intelligence informed the attempts by de Nobili in India and Matteo Ricci in China and their followers to “translate” Christianity into the cultural discourse of Asian civilizations. The “Chinese Rites” controversy that pitted Jesuits against Dominicans shows that the relationship between form and content can be a neuralgic point in Christian inculturation. Ex quo singulari, the 1742 Bull of Benedict XIV forbidding the use of “Chinese rites” effectively ended a creative engagement between Christianity and the East and represented a pyrrhic victory for Catholic uniformity. A mindset nervous of venturing into unfamiliar situations retreated into an essentialism that confused form with content. In the complex and dynamic realities of Catholicism of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the image of the timeless, unchanging Church is as much an “imagined community” as any essential, primordial nation, more of an exercise in Platonic idealism than a reality which ever existed in pure form in history. It is a permanent theological and pastoral challenge to balance particularity and universality. The Church is one and catholic, and unity and catholicity exist in a constantly shifting tension. When that relationship is harmonious, cultural diversity does not threaten unity, but is the place where unity is made flesh. Christian faith is united and universal precisely because it is expressed in a variety of cultural forms, among which is the national. Distinctive forms of cultural expression correct the pull toward uniformity. Moreover, given the ever-present attempts of political entities and ideological factions to hijack Christianity for the benefit of one group (thus disenfranchising others), an awareness of the Church’s broad span helps rein in attempts to turn cultural, ethnic or national distinctiveness into pretensions of superior status. If the claim that “to be Croatian is to be Catholic” is qualifiedly true, it is certainly not true that “to be Catholic is to be Croatian.” If there is “no Jew or Greek” in the body of Christ, we might argue that there is also “no Serb nor Croat.” At the same time, however, since grace does not efface nature, Christianity does not wipe out ethnicity or nationality. It does, however, relativize it. Christian faith is based on two fundamental paradoxes—or, more technically speaking, two mysteries: the unity of the three persons of the Trinity, and the unity of the divine and the human in the one person of Christ. To some extent, all Christian realities bear the imprint of ambiguity and tension between realities that are at first glance mutually irreconcilable. Indeed,

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Christian belief and practice is characterized by the search for reconciliation between a number of paired extremes. The internal economy of the Trinity exists as an interflow of particularity and commonality, diversity and unity. In this relationship, the difference between each of the persons makes love possible. Diversity is the precondition for unity, causes unity, and expresses unity. Love both demands and creates a certain equality of persons. In God, equality-with is not the same as identity-with. Taking the Trinity as model and hermeneutical key, the same, writ large, should be true of relationships between societies. This Trinitarian reality allows us to see that espousing and cherishing the distinctiveness of one’s own national traditions does not have to issue into seeking Herrenvolk status or demonizing others into an “axis of evil.” Rather, one of the implications of Trinitarian belief is equality of being. To insist therefore on the reality and value of national singularities is in fact to lay the foundations for just relations between nations. Closely related to questions of equality and diversity is the image of the Church as the Body of Christ, a metaphor which harmonizes unity of life with a diversity of functions. The image of John Paul II in which the Church is portrayed as a mosaic of nations as well as a community of individual members has its problems. The constitutive role of societies within the Church is an ecclesiological question that is still waiting in the wings. But the image of “living mosaic” can easily be applied to humanity as a whole, which is indeed composed of a diversity of peoples, ethnic groups and nations. The Church as described in Rom12: 4–5 (“For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another”) serves equally well as an ideal for the body of humankind, whose members are not only individuals but peoples, gathered together in a plethora of social, ethnic, cultural and national groups. The internal life of the Church—the play between the centripetal call to unity with the centrifugal dynamism of catholicity—is of prime importance for its relationship with the world. The more the Church can model love internally, the more effective will be its call upon the nations to live in generous fraternity with one another. The second foundational mystery of Christian faith is Jesus of Nazareth, the eternal Word of God. The person of Christ unites not only human and divine natures, but also two whole worlds, secular and religious, natural and graced. In the theology proposed by Gaudium et spes, 1, the two spheres (“the men of this age” and “the followers of Christ”) share a certain unity of interest. For Christians, the Christ-event transforms the meaning of all human experiences. Jesus is the standard by which all else must be judged. A Christological hermeneutic must inform how we see the relationship not

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only between church and state, but also between Christian and socio-cultural identities. In Christ, the divine and human are united without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the distinction of natures being in no way annulled by the union, but rather the characteristics of each nature being preserved and coming together to form one person and subsistence, not as parted or separated into two persons, but one and the same Son and Only-begotten God the Word, Lord Jesus Christ.12

The difference between the two natures of Christ guarantees their unity in one person. They are united “without confusion”: consequently, any union of the sacred and the secular cannot (or rather should not) end up with a muddy and confused tertium quid union that is neither fish nor fowl. Second, just as the natures do not change, we cannot think of cultural realities as being simply required to yield to religious ones. Being a Catholic does not involve abjuring one’s Croatian nationality. Third, the hypostatic union is “without division.” A Christologically informed understanding of national and religious identities cannot parcel these out into two spheres that have no essential linkage. Fourth, Jesus is God and human “without separation.” There should be no experience in which one’s cultural identity becomes hived off from one’s Christian identity, or vice versa. Critics have accused nationalism (as hyper-patriotism or in its full-blown political form) of being an ersatz religiosity, a substitute for waning religious conviction. Certainly, a numinous penumbra has grown around many nations. Personifications such as Mater Polonia or epithets such as le règne de Marie, along with a whole series of new Israels, are a de facto confusion between religious and ethno-national societies. In order to prevent the Cross from being domesticated into being no more than a vestige on the quarterings of a national flag, particular nations require the existence of a formal and visible religious society. In other words, lest any nation seek to become a church, the Church is necessary. If nations have sought to become churches, the reverse is also true. Christian institutions have also yielded to the seductions of power, taking on secular forms and vesting themselves in military uniform or formal business attire, or else entered into questionable alliance with ethnic and political interest groups. Wherever the Church functions more as political party than the “little flock” of Lk 12:32, the world has usurped the Reign of God. A Christological hermeneutic suggests strongly that the society of the Church actively requires the presence of other kinds of collective quids such as na-

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tions or ethnic groups—in order to maintain its universality and prevent it from becoming an ersatz, secularized power. At this point, revisiting the concept of “identity as difference” can serve to illuminate the relationship of Church and nation. Historical and modern ethnies have often been based on and given rise to “adversarial identities” in which the defining character of a social group is that it is not another, oppositional group. From the French Revolution onward, many modern states imagine themselves to be purely secular entities. Corresponding to these are ecclesiologies that emphasize the distinctive nature of the Church vis-à-vis all other kinds of society. Although there is no necessary enmity between Christianity and nationality, Christian and national identities, in order to maintain and express their own particularities and fulfill their roles authentically, Church and nation need a healthy degree of separation—but not an absolute one. A total separation of the temporal and spiritual realms is only a theoretical notion in any case. The fact is that sacred and secular exist together in necessary ways. Indeed, an overly rigorous and rigid separation of the two is theologically difficult, for grace, while building on nature, does not ignore nor reject it. Creation and salvation are intimately linked moments of the one divine plan. The Judeo-Christian notion of creation means that there is no uncreated nature outside of God. In some way, all that exists bears the thumbprint of God. Moreover, to insist on a total metaphysical separation between the sacred and the secular would preclude the Incarnation ever happening. Two extremes result when the sacred is hacked away from the secular, the religious from the cultural, and the Christian from the national. At one pole, a pan-secularism denies all possibility of divine immanence, and conceives of human life in purely material terms. At the other end lies a lazy and superficial pan-sacral theology that divinizes the world, confusing creator and creation. A better way of understanding the intersection of the sacred and the secular must be found if we are to avoid the fallout from either of these two extremes. The Fathers of the Church used the term perichoresis to describe the internal relations of the three Persons of the Trinity. Variously parsed as mutual indwelling, inter-penetration, and co-inhering, it can be thought of as “the mutual interanimation and dynamic reciprocity of the divine persons.”13 In this dynamic relationship, identity and communion exist in harmony, without canceling each other out. Perichoresis is also a Christological notion, used to describe the effective interpenetration of Christ’s human and divine natures.14 If we agree with Scotus that the universe is indeed Christiform, then that constant, dynamic flux between aspects that are at one level human,

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temporal and secular and at another divine, spiritual, and sacred is present in many social realities. In the same way that Christianity is a cultural phenomenon, the thought processes of Christianity have shaped Western thinking. If it is true that “religions ape the world” and that the Church has too often over-accommodated itself to a secular realpolitik, the mutual influence of religion and culture need not necessarily be negative. Taking Christological perichoresis as model allows us to essay a dynamic connection between the spheres of the religious and the secular, a mutually responsive conversation in which there is no merging or domination of one aspect by another. Church and nation, Christianity and culture, and religious and cultural identities can in fact engage with each other constructively and with profound respect for each other. By virtue of this “mutual interanimation,” the cultural, ethnic and national dimensions of our own identity have something to say to our Christian convictions, but do not need to merge into the monistic integrism of the “chosen-people” or “Christian nation” stripe. To believe that national identity is of relevance to Christian life and viceversa is not tantamount to canonizing the nation. Rather, it is to assert that various forms and levels of identity are part of the order of creation. Since “all things came to be through the Word, and without the Word, nothing came to be” (cf. John 1:3), human identities are the result of God’s creative action and are therefore connected to the realm of the sacred. On condition that we agree that some level of objective being pertains to nations, then (given that nations are not God) they are logically part of creation. We may then assert, although tentatively and with a number of conditions, that nations are in fact created by God. A solidly established scriptural tradition (Ps 19; Si 43:1ff; Rom 1:20, etc.) declares that the existence of the world bespeaks a creator. Yet this certainly cannot mean that creation is divine: indeed, for the Bible, idolatry consists of mistaking the creature for the Creator (Ex 32; Rom 1:21–23). One of the main tasks of moral theology and Church doctrine is determining the appropriate relationship that should exist between humankind—the summit of creation and the only part of it to be made in the image and likeness of God—and the rest of the created order. As part of creation, nationality turns out to be a religious category, or at the very least, an ethical matter. But to avoid falling into perilous, simplistic thinking, we have to address two different questions immediately: first, what sort and intensity of creaturehood belongs to the category of nationality? Second, what sort and intensity of creaturehood belongs to any particular nation? One answer to these questions is nationality and particular nations alike are the result of human

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sociality and freedom that belongs to a first level of creation. Within the autonomy of that freedom, nationality exists at a second level of creation. To assert that nationality is part of creation is also to say that it is one of the forms—albeit an almost universal one in today’s world—of social organization. It has its own general set of characteristics that differentiate it from other kinds of community such as the family, the kin-group or the state. Perceiving nationality as the result of human freedom avoids the obvious cul-de-sac of struggling to justify any belief that God created any one nation ex nihilo and ab initio. Nevertheless, we are still left with the theological problem of understanding the religious role of particular nations. Are there, as their politicians and poets like to imply, nations that are pre-eminent in God’s plans? Is a nation of Christians in fact a “Christian nation”? The current debate over the Christian nature (or not) of the United States is not a matter of church and state, but of church and nations. It involves the question of the relationship between individual and collective identity, a conundrum which theologizing the nation has to wrestle with. A nation, like the Church, may be no more than the sum of its individual members. Some deeper instinct—possibly primal, possibly atavistic, or possibly theologically intuitive—suggests otherwise. Clearly, if a Christian theology is to be more than generically theistic or religious, its prime referent must be what makes Christianity distinctive, the person of Christ. A quod non assumptum non salvatum Christology affirms the reality of Christ’s humanity and thus the truth of human salvation. But as I have argued, the logical corollary of that classical adage is another: quod assumptum ergo salvatum. In the Incarnation, everything that constitutes what is it to be human is taken up and transformed, showing its ultimate destiny. As a first-century Jew and native of the Roman province of Judaea, Jesus had a cultural identity of a type we can reasonably call proto- or quasi-national. But, as I have argued, this cannot be taken to mean that Jesus’ own cultural particularity (i.e., first-century Palestinian Jewish) is a condition of salvation. It does allow us to assert that nationality (at least in the form of socio-cultural identity) per se is indeed taken up into that union, and in turn is graced by it. In a Christocentric universe, socio-cultural identities find their maximum meaning and dignity in the Incarnation and are transformed by the Paschal mystery. The work of Christ is to bring the world to its fullness (Jn 5:36; 1 Cor 15:24–28) and to return it, perfected, to the Father. The work of the Body of Christ is to continue the mission of Christ throughout space and time, under the unfailing guidance of the Spirit. By its very essence the Church has a remit toward all historical realities, which were “created through him

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and for him” (Col 1:16) and in which Christ is pre-eminent. The fact that through Christ all things are reconciled (Col 1:20) means that nationality has a soteriological telos. Understood in this light, “national salvation” may not, after all, be only a nationalist battle cry. To the extent that all creation is created in Christ, sustained by him and in need of his salvific action, the phrase “national salvation” makes theological sense. However, the chasm between a Christian understanding of “national salvation” and that envisaged by nineteenth-century cultural entrepreneurs is wide. The latter is largely an appropriation of a religious term, but with no real transcendental referent. The redemption sought depends, if not totally then mostly, on human agency. Where the Church preaches mission and vocation, secular nationalism substitutes destiny. Our understanding of Christ’s identity will mold how we conceive of the Church’s mission. The import of particular culture becomes especially salient in the “minor tradition” Christology represented by Scotus, according to which the Incarnation is the original and ultimate plan of and reason for creation. In his very person, Christ embodies various kinds of human particularity. Their union with his divinity thereby transforms them into transcendental values. Scotus, as now we know, teaches that the Word took flesh in one, concrete human being, rather than in human nature as a whole. A pastoral imperative derives from this. In order for the Church to be fully human, it must take on cultural individuality, in the same way that Christ did. Scotus’s metaphysics of individuation has helped fill in more gaps in a theology of nationality. In contradiction to theorists who hold that that nationality is only a social imaginary, at the most profound level of being, nations do exist. They may be experienced or defined privatively, but at heart their being is positive. Scotus has helped us see that there is at the most intimate, fundamental core of each thing a haec that makes it a particular this, in and of itself, rather than a not-that. Bénéviste’s phrase “antithetical duality” certainly describes the mental stance of those many peoples who have understood themselves to be placed in antemurale religious situations. However, their identity is not ultimately defined by enmity. God apprehends the haec of a nation directly, like the haec of anything else. The ultimate knowability of a thing stakes a claim for its fundamental goodness, unity, truth and beauty. However, the “bare-particularity” of the haec of something is not to be confused with any one feature, or how it appears at any one given point in their history. It is reasonable to aver that nations are indeed objective reali-

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ties. At the same time, they evidently have many contingent, historically conditioned aspects. Today’s Russians differ radically from the members of the medieval Rus. One of the major dividing lines between Smith’s national Heracliteans and Parmenideans turns out to be less a question of division and more a question of perspective. If a nation were only the sum of its members, then since none of the people who were alive, say at the founding of the First Mexican Republic in 1821, there would be no such thing as the Mexican nation. Moreover, even the contours of today’s cultural mexicanidad are rather different from collective national image of previous centuries. Those things that popularly define “national identity”—French cooking, Argentinian social customs, or Armenian communal memories—tend to be more mutable than popular conceptions allow or nationalists would care to admit. If however we think of national identity as equivalent to the haec of a nation, then the apparently conflicting views of Heracliteans and Parmenideans, sociologists and historians, national-skeptics and patriots, turn out to be harmoniously complementary concepts. Viewed from one perspective, a nation is indeed only a contingent imaginary on to which can be projected profound existential desires for belonging to a society larger than the immediate family or kin-group, and some form of continued existence beyond the lifespans of its current individual members. But at another level, a nation is also something ontologically stable, unique, unrepeatable, and endowed with a perfect particularity. One more relevant point emerges from Scotus’s scheme of individuation. Individual things are composed of a common nature and a haec. Between the concrete individual instantiations of the common nature, there is a complete equality of being that exists in harmony with a diversity of expression. This suggests strongly that individual nations have an identical set of rights and dignity, which is not determined by their historical age, their statehood or lack of it, nor by the size of their population. The tiny East Timorese nation is as ontologically significant as the gigantic nation of Indonesia. A metaphysical insistence on the value of the particular is highly sympathetic with theological emphasis on the full and complete humanity of Christ, a human nature that is concrete and individual. On condition that we remember Christ’s divine nature, there is a direct correspondence between an emphasis on Christ’s real humanity and a positive evaluation of human realities. A Christology that underplays the real humanity of Jesus will be less aware of the spiritual import of secular human experience. An a-sexual image of Jesus will, for example, produce a theology that will struggle to see

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the spiritual dimension of sexuality. In the same way, consigning nationality to theological irrelevance expresses an implicit cultural docetism. In that Christology, Jesus would be “like us in all things but sin and socio-cultural belonging.” This would be to exclude social identity from the possibility of redemption. Salvation thus conceived could not include the social aspect of my personal identity. It would also mean that salvation can only affect individuals as individuals. A Christology that asserts the full humanity of Jesus—as does the Chalcedonian formula—is logically committed to articulating the role of cultural identity in the person of Christ. Only then can it move on to two other tasks. The first of these is to seek to understand the role of social identities other than Church membership in the lives of individual Christians. The second is to investigate the significance of particular nations, ethnic communities, and peoples in the dispensation that follows from the Incarnation and the Paschal mystery. If Christ’s full humanity is to be taken at face value, then both these tasks are not only possible but also a logical requirement. Difficult relationships between ecclesiastical and secular authorities as well as cultural docetism have been at play in the reticence of the theologians and the magisterium to think about nationality. But theology is not the exclusive preserve of the magisterium and professional theologians. To take seriously the assertion of Lumen gentium that “the entire body of the faithful, anointed as they are by the Holy One cannot err in matters of belief” means that “the whole peoples’ supernatural discernment” is not only a source of theology, but also a kind of magisterium. The two prime exemplars of how the sensus fidelium may be evoked as an eminent source of authority are of course the Marian dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption. Widespread belief over centuries in Mary’s Immaculate Conception and Assumption acted as a sui generis theology, one far removed from the mechanics of scholastic argumentation. Popular Marian spirituality contains an implicit theology that expresses the value of the diverse and the particular, the local and the quotidian in the light of the Incarnation. Marian devotion is deeply rooted in and reflects “the scandal of the particular” that is made person in the Incarnation. In an extended litany, the poet David Jones addresses Mary as “she that loves place, time, demarcation, hearth, kin, enclosure, site, differentiated cult . . . mother of particular perfections, queen of otherness . . . tower of individuation.”15 Responding to this, A. M. Allchin writes that Mary “embodies in herself [a] qualitative catholicity which far from being opposed to outward catholicity is its safeguard and protection. In her, we see that . . . identity and distinction, unity and multiplicity are not in opposition to each other.”16

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Devotion to Mary as Our Lady of X, Mother of Y, or Queen of Z expresses a visceral sensus fidei that the encounter between God and humanity is experienced in the particular. In her role as Theotokos, guarantrix of the Incarnation, Mary is in a signally unique way intimately connected with the world transformed by that event. The connection felt to exist between Mary and specific peoples expresses the human desire for deep intimacy with God, and the conviction that such closeness is rendered possible through the Incarnation. To state that the Virgin Mary, as human mother of the Incarnate God, guarantees the historical reality of the Incarnation is also to affirm that she stands as an emblem of the value of all that is included in the Incarnation and of the conviction that no dimension of truly human existence is alien to God. Devotion to Mary expresses profound theology, but in registers different from the neat taxonomies of the professional theologian, and which are closer to the praise-language of liturgy. In Marian devotion, popular religiosity has expressed a sensus fidelium about the spiritual value of social particularity that still awaits formal theological reflection. In response to the intuition that Mary “loves time, place, intuition,” her patronage and protection has been sought not only by “individuals or local groups, but sometimes whole nations and societies, even whole continents.”17 Where her devotees believe that the Virgin Mary has indeed heard their prayers, and placed a city, people, a nation or even a continent under her protecting mantle, like all other claims of national election, this may imply preeminence. Yet it need not axiomatically do this. The Incarnation honors and raises to a transcendent level the value of the particular. Unique, individual persons have a value different from simply being generically human; part of that value is their concrete particularity. If humans are social as well as individual beings, then the same can and should be true of particular socio-cultural groups. The rich diversity of human societies is threatened from multiple directions and from countless sources. Hubristic totalitarian ideologies of both left and right, along with the forms of universalism created by globalization and the power of technology, exercise tremendous pressures on individual cultures and societies. The result can be not only cosmopolitanism or cultural hybridity, which have the virtue of correcting isolation and ethnocentrism, but also a banal and dangerous cultural uniformity. Where a “one-world” culture is touted as a value, it includes the subtle pressure for that culture to be in the image and likeness of the dominant partners. Imperialism easily passes unperceived in the clothing of a too-easy universalism in which more powerful parties park their trailers and picnic on the sacred territories of weaker cultures.

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In another poem, David Jones puts into the mouth of a Roman tribune the antithesis to a world shaped according to the Incarnation and the Trinity. On the wild northern reaches of the Roman empire, the tribune justifies his imperial mission to create uniformity out of diversity: It’s the world-bounds we’re detailed to beat to discipline the world-floor to a common level till everything presuming difference and all the sweet remembered demarcations wither to the touch of us and know the fact of empire Song? antique song from known-site spells remembered from the breast? No! . . . . . . Only the neurotic look to their beginnings.18

The “sweet remembered demarcations” of the world’s nations are their geographical homelands and motherlands, but also the common myths and historical memories that are rooted in their historical languages. According to a report in the Guardian of November 5, 2002, half of the world’s languages will have disappeared by the end of their century: “Economic imperialism has gone hand-in-glove with linguistic imperialism, as people abandon their mother tongues in favor of the globally dominant English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese and Russian.” 19 The primal mandate given to Adam and Eve is to have dominion over creation, a task that involves the responsible use of freedom. Global resources are endangered by collective irresponsibility, and bio-diversity is a necessity for the material survival of the human race. Since humans are more than material bodies, the diversity of human cultures is I would argue, equally critical to the survival of a truly habitable and humane world. Each distinctive way of life, mindset, or way of imagining one’s own people is a whole world made flesh in and as the particular. These cultural worlds are of value not only for each ethnic or national community. Together, they are the common patrimony all peoples. To proclaim the value of the particular is to stress its role in the whole. An equal concern for one’s own nation and for all nations should be a concern for the world of today and the future of humankind.

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The rich array of national identities and the experience of nationality itself are important human values. As such, they are also necessarily and simultaneously Christian values. In the terms I have employed in this book, nationality, as a form of communal organization, belongs to a second order of creation. However, this does not mean that it is a second-class reality. Like all other human constructs, it is also a place in which humans may find God present and collaborate with divine grace. Sustaining national particularities in a way that does not issue into denigrating other nations belongs to the whole human community. In this work the Church has an important responsibility. Nationality is, understood correctly, a God-given mission as well as work of the human mind and heart. If nationality has something to do with theology, the reverse is also true, and a more urgent issue. Individual nations have something to ask of theology: to help them understand that task and to carry it out with justice and in peace, for the sake of all.

Notes 1. Matthew Arnold, “Shakespeare,” in William Robertson, ed., The Golden Book of English Sonnets (London: G.G. Harrap, 1913), 109. 2. In Llywelyn, Sacred Place, 69. 3. Smith, Myths and Memories of the Nation, 6. 4. Smith, National Identity, 73. 5. Walker Connor, “A Nation is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group, Is a . . . ,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 1, no. 4 (1978), 381. 6. See for example, David Schindler, “Religious Freedom, Truth & American Liberalism: Another Look at John Courtney Murray,” Communio 21 (Winter 1994): 696–741. 7. Los Angeles Times, October 3, 2007. 8. Horace, Odes, iii, ii, 13. 9. John E. Daniel, Torri’r Seiliau Sicr: Detholiad o Ysgrifau J. E. Daniel, ed. D. Densil Morgan (Llandysul, Wales: Gomer, 1993), 74. Translation mine. 10. Giuseppe Mazzini, quoted in Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner, eds., Handbook of Citizenship Studies (London: Sage Publications, 2003), 8. 11. Greenfeld, Nationalism, 490. 12. Christological formula of the Council of Chalcedon. 13. Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity & Christian Life (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishing, 1992), 270–71. 14. See Oliver Crisp, Divinity and Humanity: The Incarnation Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. chap 1. 15. David Jones, “The Tutelar of the Place,” in David Jones, Selected Works of David Jones from In Parenthesis, The Anathemata, The Sleeping Lord, ed. John Matthias (Orono, MN: National Poetry Foundation, 1992), 211 and 215.

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16. A. M. Allchin, Praise Above All: Discovering the Welsh Tradition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), 136. 17. Redemptoris mater, 28. 18. David Jones, “The Tribune’s Visitation,” in Jones, Selected Works, 202–3. 19. John Crace, “Silence Falls,” The Guardian, November 5, 2002.



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Index

Abraham, 65, 82, 131, 136, 137, 140, 141 Ad gentes, 151, 152, 279 Adam and Eve, 104–5 Adams, Henry, 267 Aelfric, 84 Aeneas, 84 Africa, 7, 10, 30, 34, 40, 49, 91, 93, 101, 104, 117, 279 African-Americans, 100–102 Afrikaans, 93 Afrikaners, 94. See also Boers; South Africa; Voortrekkers Akathist to the Theotokos, 238 Albania, 67 Alexander of Hales, 194 Allchin, A. M., 296 America. See United States Anabaptist Uprising, 42 Anderson, Benedict, 43, 45–47 Andrew of Crete, 239 Angels, 87, 131, 144, 167, 204–5, 207, 248 Anglo-Saxons, 24, 84, 85, 86, 208, 213, 288

Anglicanism, 73, 84–86, 89. See also Reformation Anselm, 193,194, 225, 239 Anthimos V, 67 anthropology, 1, 3, 4, 12, 48, 49, 64, 75, 90, 149, 152, 159, 160, 166, 169, 182, 185, 188, 191, 195, 213, 214, 216, 282, 285 anti-Catholicism, 95–96 anti-semitism, 40 apocalypticism, 72, 87, 112–13, 135–36, 138, 139, 142, 236, 237, 248, 250 Apollinarism, 188 Appiah, Kwame Antony, 279 Aquinas, Thomas, 144–45, 145n37, 192, 198, 213, 215 Arabic, 298 Aragon, 53, 244 Argentina, 242, 244–45, 266, 295 Aristotle, 204–5, 210, 213, 304–5 Armenia, 44, 54, 78–9, 280–81 Arminius, 77 Asia, 7, 34, 40, 49, 104, 105, 117, 279, 280 Assyrians, the, 54, 131

317

318



Index

Athanasius, 212, 262, 264 Augsburg, Peace of, 7, 67 Augustine of Canterbury, 86 Augustine of Hippo, 42, 104, 194, 203, 213, 236 Australia, 74–75, 186 Austria, 44 Avars, the, 233 Avella, Steve, 268 Aylmer, 87 Babel, 24, 104–5, 133, 167 Babylon, 54, 134, 137 Babylonians, 54, 137 Bale, John, 86–87 Balibar, Etienne, 52 Balkans, 66, 245 Baptists, 64 Barrington, Lowell, 6 Barth, Frederick, 53 Barthes, Roland, 85, 198, 268 Basil, 232 Bauer, Judith, 238 Bayard, Jean-François, 69 Beaune, Colette, 109 Bede, 84, 239, 288 Belarus, 9, 10 Bell, Catherine, 75, 102 Bellah, Robert, 8, 9 Bellamy, Francis, 64 Ben-Israel, Hedva, 81, 103, 111 Benedict XIV, 259, 288 Benedict XVI, 16, 68 Bénéviste, Emile, 54, 207, 294 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 112–13, 116–17 Berlin, Isaiah, 38 Bernard of Clairvaux, 230 Bettoni, Bruno, 210 Bible, 4, 15, 46, 80, 81, 98, 105, 162, 173, 174, 257, 262, 292; figures and events in, 47, 94, 104, 109, 167, 168; King James, 25, 83, 96; and nationality, 129–43; Vulgate, 24, 25,

158. See also New Testament; Old Testament; Septuagint biblical language, 8, 73, 77, 80, 81, 89, 93, 95, 98, 101, 147, 151, 174, 257, 258 Blood River, Battle of, 90–91 Boer War, 93; Boers, 10, 91, 93. See also Afrikaners; South Africa; Voortrekkers Boethius, 204–5 Bogurodzica, 235, 251–52, 255 Bohemia, 244 Bolingbroke, Henry, 22 Bonaventure, 192, 213, 215 Boniface VIII, 108–9 Books of the Polish Pilgrim, 111 Boris and Gleb, 115 Bourassa, Henri, 99 Boyne, Battle of the, 92 Boynton, Charles, 95 Brading, D. A., 257 Breuilly, John, 68 Britain, 30, 36–37, 53, 72, 73, 84–91, 92, 93, 96, 104, 105, 240 British Empire, 72, 74, 84, 89, 93 Brodinksi, Kazimierz, 112 Brown, Peter, 228, 233, 243 Brubaker, Rogers, 4 Brunei, 197 Brutus, 84 Buddhism, 63 Buell, Denise Kimber, 9, 142 Bulgaria, 67 Burke, Kevin, 3 Byzantium, 53, 113, 232 Calvat, Mélanie, 247 Calvinism, 10, 87, 91, 93, 98, 177. See also Protestantism; Reformation Calvino, Italo, 207n48, 280 Canada, 75, 90, 98–100 Canadians, 74, 75, 99 capitalism, 36, 39, 43, 47, 147, 165, 169

Index

Capitula Coelestini, 262 Carrera, Norberto, 263 Castilians, 53, 244 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 17, 24, 166–72, 195 Catholicism, 2, 3, 12, 15, 16, 45, 46, 53, 64, 66, 67, 71, 74, 76, 82, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 107, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 119, 125, 143–172, 226, 227, 232, 234, 235, 236, 241, 244, 245, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, 259, 260, 265, 278, 279, 280, 285, 288, 290. See also Church; Christianity; theology, Catholic Catholic Church. See Church Celtic nations, 36, 37 Centesimus annus, 164–65 Chalcedon, Council of, 156, 180, 190, 199, 200, 211, 261. See also Christology; hypostatic union; Jesus Christ; Incarnation Chapman, William, 99 Charlemagne, 252 Cherniavsky, Michael, 116 Cherry, Conrad, 75 Chicanos, 225 Chile, 244n84 China, 106, 238, 288 Chinese, 298 Chinese rites controversy, 288 chosen peoples, 9, 10, 31, 41, 82, 83, 88, 89, 92, 94, 97, 100–101, 103, 121, 177, 282. See also covenant; election, divine Christ. See Jesus Christ Christendom, 46, 67, 68, 76, 80, 84, 108, 145, 148 Christianity, 12, 15, 42, 45, 46, 148, 149, 152, 155, 159, 188, 216, 233, 244; and culture, 176–77, 187, 237; and Judaism, 78, 141–43; and nationality, 3, 8, 9–16, 39, 42, 63– 121, 174, 263–64, 277–99



319

Christianity, Eastern. See Church, Orthodox Christology, 3, 12, 19, 187–214, 217, 227–28, 261, 264–65, 290–299. See also Incarnation; Jesus Christ Church, 11,13, 17, 18, 19, 70, 72, 78, 80, 92, 94, 95, 97, 102, 107 108, 109, 110, 143, 144, 149, 151, 159, 160, 168, 170, 171, 175, 177, 191, 226, 230, 231, 233, 238, 239, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 254, 257, 260, 262, 264, 266, 267, 268, 279, 281, 282, 284, 288, 289, 290, 291; Ancient British, 85, 86, 104; Celtic, 86; and culture, 2, 11, 13, 78, 147–48, 152–58, 170, 172, 176, 269, 287, 292, 294; early, 132–41, 143, 173; national, 80, 146; and nationalism, 2, 99, 111, 161, 164, 169, 294; and nationality, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 24, 39, 67, 76, 119, 121, 145, 147, 161, 172, 177, 186, 278, 283, 285, 288, 289, 290–99; and patriotism, 16, 251, 255, 256, 258, 285; and state 7, 8, 10, 12, 42, 58, 66, 67, 68, 74, 79, 94, 95, 102, 108, 143, 144, 146, 150, 152, 160, 163, 168, 198, 247, 248, 249, 259, 278, 279, 284, 290, 293; and the Virgin Mary, 162–63, 226–69. See also ecclesiology; Christianity; Protestantism; names of individual nations Church, Orthodox, 6, 15, 76, 78, 66–67, 81, 96–97, 103–4, 107, 114, 115–16, 120, 121, 113, 144, 148, 161, 173, 176, 203, 233, 265 Church of England. See Anglicanism Cicero, 5 civil religion, 41, 70, 74, 98, 102, 146, 156 Civil War, 98 Clovis, 107, 108, 109, 110

320



Index

colonialism, 31, 34, 37, 39, 41, 55, 92, 158, 165, 171, 281 common nature, 206–12, 219, 220, 295 communism, 22, 44, 97, 159, 160, 164, 165, 169, 183, 250, 254, 255. See also Marxism; Soviet Union Compendium of the Social Teaching of the Catholic Church, 2, 11 Constantine, 46, 66, 79, 85, 86, 92, 126, 189 Constantinople, 67, 114, 189, 233, 239, 252 Corsicans, 40 covenant, 65, 77, 78, 81–83, 90, 92–93, 131, 134, 136, 140, 160, 173, 180, 186, 242, 253, 258. See also election, divine; chosen peoples Coyer, Abbé, 26 creation, 10, 12, 13, 57, 71, 82, 98, 119, 133, 156, 172–73, 176, 178, 185–89, 194–98, 202, 204, 205, 209–17, 220, 286, 291–94, 298, 299. See also salvation, and creation; grace and nature criollos, 257, 258, 259, 268 Croatia, 66, 119, 245, 272, 288, 290 Cromwell, Oliver, 88 Cromwell, Thomas, 83, 86 Crusades, 41 Cross, Richard, 198, 199 Cybele, 229 Cyprian, 246 Cyril of Alexandria, 228, 240 Czechs, the, 44, 40 Damasus I, 107 Danes, the, 105 Daniel, J. E., 285 Danish language, 105 David (King), 134 Davies, Caryl, 104 Dawe, Donald, 229 de Coubertin, Pierre, 75

de Monfort, Louis-Marie Grignon, 235 de San Domino, Gerardo, 42 Declaration of Independence, 33, 241 decolonization, 42, 150, 279, 280 deism, 197 Demeter, 288 Denis, 109 Denisov, Semyon, 116 Descartes, René, 41 di Fiore, Joachim, 42 Diderot, Denis, 26 Dionysius the Areopagite, 109 Divini illus magistra, 11 Dlugosz, Jan, 252 docetism, 188, 296 du Toit, André, 91 du Toit, S. J., 93 Dürckheim, Karlfried Graf, 35 Dutch, the, 91, 93 Dutch Reformed Church, 93 ecclesiology, 3, 45, 86, 115, 188, 202, 284, 285, 289, 291. See also Church Edict of Milan, 41 Egypt, 78, 80, 90, 101, 104, 106, 131, 136 Elamites, 54 election, divine, 9, 10, 51, 52, 77–79, 82, 94, 90–95, 101–3, 110, 112, 136, 138, 173, 178, 186, 203, 242, 244, 248, 248, 250, 255, 266–67, 297, 297. See also covenant; chosen peoples Elizabeth I, 85, 87 Elizabeth II, 73–74 Encyclopédie, 26 Engels, Friedrich, 35 England, 4, 10, 32, 34, 37, 46, 53, 58, 68, 72, 73, 83–90, 94, 95, 105 English, the, 44, 54, 68, 73, 74, 83–90, 91, 92, 94, 112, 288 English language, 24, 25, 25, 44, 72, 74, 84, 94, 96, 99, 167, 239, 284, 298

Index

Enlightenment, the, 4, 33, 39, 40, 55, 71, 77, 105, 110, 114, 197, 246 Ephesus, Council of, 189, 227–28 Ephrem the Syrian, 228, 239 Epiphanius of Salamis, 189 Epistle to Diognetus, 66 Erikson, Erik, 28 eschatology, 65, 71, 116, 135, 137, 138, 139, 155, 169, 186, 220, 250, 283 ethical considerations, 3, 11, 12, 31, 34, 39, 50, 51, 65, 73, 75, 96, 118, 129, 132, 138, 156, 175, 203, 204, 210, 269, 281, 292 ethnic communities, 1, 7, 15, 48, 49, 77, 130, 131, 154, 163, 167, 192, 208, 219, 278, 281, 287, 298; ancient, 4, 44; biblical 10, 129–43; and Christianity, 78, 81, 93, 97, 100, 102, 168, 174, 175, 177–78, 203–4, 207, 212, 216–18, 220, 267, 268, 269, 283, 285, 288, 289, 290–91, 296; definitions of, 21, 26, 219; minority, 6, 167, 218; and nations, 8, 10, 27, 30, 32, 33, 36, 37, 50, 52, 65, 68, 75, 278; psychological aspects of, 23, 49, 50, 51, 56–58, 67, 69, 150, 154, 207, 287; and religion, 23, 66–67, 69, 75, 77, 118, 120, 198; and the Virgin Mary, 15, 225, 239, 240, 241, 256, 260 ethnicity, 18, 21, 26, 27, 50, 54, 57, 69, 104, 120, 129, 139, 150, 191, 197, 200, 264, 285, 288. See also ethnic communities; identity, ethnic; national identity ethnocentricity, 56, 89, 156, 158, 177, 269, 281, 281 ethnoscapes, 37, 91, 163 Eucharist, 64, 112, 156 Europe: and Christianity, 68, 73, 73, 88, 96, 107–9, 112, 117, 145, 150, 249, 252, 254, 259, 287; Eastern, 34, 41, 49, 54, 55, 66, 67, 164; and



321

empires, 1, 11, 106, 279–80; and nation-states, 11, 30, 66–67, 150; and nationalism, 32, 40–42, 146; and nationality, 1, 7, 24, 32, 36, 43–44, 68, 77, 96, 103, 105, 106–8, 112, 153; Western, 42, 108, 114, 116, 253 Eusebius, 42, 46, 79, 92, 107, 278, 282 Evangelii nuntiandi, 158–59 evangelization, 65, 86, 92, 93, 121, 158, 159, 174, 176 exile, 31, 54, 57, 69, 99, 112, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 186 Exodus, 10, 15, 91, 94, 97, 98, 100, 101, 177, 186, 257, 258 Falklands War, 245 Falwell, Jerry, 83 Fanon, Frantz, 41, 55 fascism, 11, 146 Fátima, 163, 248–49 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe, 75, 121 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 33, 39, 40, 41, 104 fides quaerens intellectum, 225, 263, 264 Filotheos, 114 Finns, the, 44 First Vatican Council, 278 Firth, Kathleen, 88 Fishman, Joshua, 50 Founding Fathers, 94, 282 Foxe, John, 87–89 France, 10, 30, 32, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 46, 52, 53, 68, 71, 72, 79, 107, 108, 109, 110, 116, 146, 235, 246–48, 251, 252, 295 Francis of Assisi, 256 Franciscan spirituality, 194, 196 Franco-Prussian War, 247 Frazer, James, 106 French, the, 32, 44, 54, 69, 72, 82, 86, 98, 104, 105, 109, 208, 248, 249, 250 French-Canadians, 98–100

322



Index

French language, 32, 72, 99, 109, 105, 109, 110, 239, 298 French Revolution, 33, 35, 42, 64, 70, 110, 146, 247, 291 Gallicanism, 85, 109 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 146, 248 Gaude Mater Ecclesia, 251 Gaude Mater Polonia, 251 Gaudium et spes, 151, 152–56, 191, 237, 279, 284, 285, 289 Geertz, Clifford, 38, 49, 50 Gellner, Ernest, 35, 36, 146 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 84 German language, 40, 104, 239 Germans, the, 33, 40, 44, 58, 77, 208 Germanus of Auxerre, 208, 239 Germany, 30, 35, 52, 64, 79–80, 86, 95, 146, 147 Giraud, Maximin, 247 Gladstone, William, 92 globalization, 2, 22, 34, 281, 297 gnosticism, 188, 227, 236–54 Gospels, the, 65, 67, 81, 121, 139, 149, 144, 156, 157, 158, 159, 168, 170, 172, 177, 187, 191, 199, 212, 230, 279. See also Bible; New Testament grace and nature, 4, 12, 58, 155, 161, 175, 176, 178, 188, 189, 190, 192, 202, 212, 213, 220, 236, 277, 278, 286, 288, 289, 291, 293, 299. See also Christology; hypostatic union; Incarnation; Jesus Christ; salvation, and creation Great Britain. See Britain Greece, 67 Greek language, 24, 25, 131 Greeks, the, 44, 54, 132 Greenfeld, Liah, 25, 25, 39, 109, 286 Greenwich meridian, 56 Gregory I (Gregory the Great), 86, 144, 287 Gregory II, 239

Gregory XVI, 11 Gregory Nazianzen, 227 Gregory of Nyssa, 195, 246 Gregory the Wonderworker, 246 Grosby, Steven, 9n16, 130 Groulx, Lionel, 99 Grunwald, Battle of, 252 Guadalupe, Our Lady of. See Virgin Mary, as Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe Guadalupana. See La Guadalupana Gunton, Colin, 13 Gurkhas, the 74 haecceitas, 204–13, 218, 219, 221, 294–95 Hall, Linda B., 235, 237 Haller, William, 87 Hayes, Carlton, 48 Hebrew Bible. See Old Testament Hebrew language, 25, 105, 130–31 Hechter, Michael, 37 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 44 Heidegger, Martin, 53 Heiler, Friedrich, 264 Helena, 85, 252 Helm-Pirgo, Marian, 251, 254 Henry VIII, 37, 83–87, 89 Heraclitus, 232 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 33, 34, 35, 40, 45, 52, 53, 55, 57, 114, 105, 120, 147, 148, 149, 160, 182, 286 Herodotus, 24 Hidalgo, Miguel, 259 Hinduism, 70 Hinze, Christine Firer, 2n4 Historia de la conquista de México, 240 Hittites, 197 Hobsbawm, Eric, 43–44, 45, 71 holy lands, 44, 53, 65, 82, 90, 91, 96, 98, 100, 116, 173, 201, 249, 252 Holy Roman Emperor, 107–8 Holy Roman Empire, 84, 145 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 196

Index

Hungary, 53, 239 Hugo, Victor, 72, 247 Hutchinson, John, 52 hypostatic union, 156, 189, 190, 191– 92, 198–202. See also Chalcedon, Council of; Christology; grace and nature; Jesus Christ; Incarnation; salvation, and creation icons, 116, 161, 231–33, 234, 238, 239, 242, 245, 252, 256, 258 Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, 33, 114 identity: adversarial, 14, 19, 54, 207, 291; antemurale, 53, 113, 218, 244, 245, 249, 284, 294; cultural, 16, 47, 294; ethnic, 2, 21, 30, 69, 97, 129, 201, 208, 212, 240, 256, 260, 281. See also identity, collective identity, collective, 5, 6, 7, 13, 14, 15, 23, 28, 29, 30, 32, 34, 44, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 63, 77, 79, 115, 116, 121, 135–36, 148, 150, 154, 164, 175, 178, 197, 204, 207, 208, 211, 217, 218, 219, 241, 265, 293, 296 Immortale Dei, 145 imperialism, 31, 43, 57, 89, 92, 93, 110, 159, 165, 171, 216, 269, 281, 297, 298 Incarnation, the, 12, 13, 40, 143, 156, 161, 171, 175, 179, 187–204, 210–217, 220, 221, 226–27, 232, 236, 237, 252, 264, 265, 267, 279, 283, 285, 288, 291–97. See also Christology; Jesus Christ inculturation, 2, 153, 157, 187, 267, 279, 280, 288 India, 70, 105, 288 individual, 2, 3, 5, 6, 14, 15, 17, 27–32, 51, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 92, 121, 154, 156, 160, 165, 177, 192, 209, 211, 217, 218, 237, 283, 284, 293, 296; religious, 16, 19, 69, 90, 137,



323

138, 159, 202, 241, 244, 290. See also ethnic communities; ethnicity; identity, collective; national identity; names of individual nations and ethnic groups individuation, 204–13, 294–95 Indonesia, 5–6, 46, 219, 295 Ingham, Mary Beth, 195, 214 Ireland, 92, 111, 116, 240 Irish, the, 54, 74, 104, 111, 240 Isidore of Seville, 104 Isis, 228 Islam, 15, 54, 63, 67, 69, 70, 113, 230, 233, 243, 244 Israel, ancient, 10, 65, 66, 73–92, 94, 95, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 109, 111, 121, 130–42, 173, 174, 186, 186, 197, 242, 244, 250, 290. See also Jews, the; Judaism; Old Testament Israel, contemporary, 173 Israelites. See Israel, ancient Italy, 74, 146 Jasna Góra, 252, 254 Jerusalem, 56, 117, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 142 Jesus Christ, 3, 8, 18, 65, 67, 81, 99, 111–12, 114, 115, 129, 132, 139, 142, 152, 153, 156, 168, 177, 178, 182, 185, 187–214, 226, 232, 235, 238, 239, 242, 251, 256, 269, 281, 288; and the Church, 66, 81, 142, 147, 148, 152, 157, 161, 166, 168, 170, 176, 285, 294; and creation, 13–14, 195, 196, 293–94; as fulfillment of Old Testament prophesies, 111, 112, 140, 141, 143; humanity of, 12, 13, 14, 212, 215, 220, 227, 233, 295, 296; hypostatic union of, 156, 187–204, 220, 226– 27, 240, 255, 265, 289, 290, 291, 293, 296; images of, 231–34; and

324



Index

ministry, 140, 141, 293; resurrection of, 64, 78, 97, 111, 140, 142, 176, 186; and social identity, 13n22, 139, 139n28, 141, 201–2, 293; teachings of, 81, 141, 154, 170. See also Christology; Incarnation Jews, the, 6, 18, 23, 40, 44, 54, 65, 78, 79, 83, 95, 96–97, 112, 123, 131, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140, 141– 42, 144, 187, 200, 201, 237, 293. See also Israel; Judaism; Old Testament Joan of Arc, 109, 110 John XXIII, 149–51 John of Damascus, 192, 193, 214, 227, 228, 232 John Paul II, 12, 16, 17, 68, 149, 159– 66, 191, 202, 229, 236, 242, 252, 254–55, 260, 285, 289 Jones, David, 296, 298 Jones, Edwin, 84, 86, 89 Jones, J. R., 155, 278 Jones, William, 105 Joseph of Arimathea, 86 Juan Diego, 256, 257, 258, 262, 263, 282 Judaism, 65, 137, 138, 139, 141, 180. See also Israel; Jews, the; Old Testament Justin Martyr, 231 Kant, Emmanuel, 27, 28, 29, 39–40, 41, 70, 218 Kantorowicz, Ernst, 106 Kapferer, Bruce, 74 Karekin II, 280 Katz, Melissa, 261 Kazimierz, Jan, 252–53, 259 Kedourie, Elie, 39, 41, 42, 70 Kempe, Anders, 105 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 54 Kiev, 113, 176, 233, 242 Kim Jung Il, 283 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 101

Kingdom of God, 39, 94, 95, 112, 116, 140, 142, 172, 290 Kipling, Rudyard, 72–73 Klopstock, Johannes, 77 Knock, 240 Know-Nothing Party, 96 Korea, North, 283 Kosovo, Battle of, 245 Kselman, Thomas, 268 Kurdistan, 7, 186 Kurds, the, 7, 24 Kwakwaka’wakw nation, 75 La Guadalupana, 6, 261 La Salette, 247, 250 Laborem exercens, 160, 162 Labouré, Catherine, 247 Lackow, Jon, 118 Laflèche, Louis-François, 98 Lamentabili sane, 248 languages, sacred, 53, 54 Lappish, 105 Las Navas de Tolosa, 243 Latimer, Hugh, 86–87 Latin, 24, 25, 46 Latin America, 34, 46, 158, 235, 237, 258, 279 Latinos, 225, 256 Lenzten-Deis, Fritzleo, 152, 153 Leo XIII, 145, 146 Lepanto, Battle of, 244 Lex orandi lex credendi, 225, 262–64. See also popular religiosity; national identity, psychological aspects of; sensus fidelium; Virgin Mary, devotion to Liguori, Alphonsus, 247 Lithuanians, 113 liturgy, 15, 107, 114, 116, 149, 229, 230–231, 262, 275, 297 Liverani, Mario, 130, 134 Livingstone, David, 91 Llobera, Josep, 51

Index

Locke, John, 27, 28, 33 Lodoli, Carlo, 118 Long, Michael, 2 López de Gómara, Francisco, 243 Los Angeles, 225 Louis IX, 108, 109, 110 Louis XVI, 46 Lourdes, 163, 248, 249 Ludwika Maria, 253 Lumen gentium, 151, 226, 284, 296 Luther, Martin, 79–80, 199. See also Protestantism; Reformation Lwów, 253 Malawi, 13 Malaysia, 14 Mali, 219 Manila, 240 Mariology. See Virgin Mary Marxism, 13, 22, 35, 63, 120, 164–66, 202, 254, 286. See also communism; Soviet Union Mary Magdalene, 115 Mary Tudor, 84, 87 Mater et magistra, 149 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 82, 118, 248 McCarthy, Joseph, 97 McLuhan, Marshall, 117 McPherson, James, 41 Medellín, 158 Medes, the 24 Mediterranean Sea, 56 Medjugorje, 24 Meinecke, Friedrich, 52 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 83 Mesopotamia, 52 mexicanidad, 258, 260 Mexico, 204, 241, 243–44, 256–61, 295 Mexico City, 259, 253 Michelet, Jules, 72, 111 Mickiewicz, Adam, 111, 149 Middle East, 134, 182 millenarianism, 42, 169, 251



325

millennialism, 113, 120 Milton, John, 88 Miron, Gaston, 99 mission, 9, 10, 42, 45, 67, 68, 79, 84, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 101, 110, 111, 118, 119, 123, 140, 141, 142, 145, 147, 151, 157, 159, 162, 170, 173, 177, 191, 198, 279, 287, 293, 294, 298 Mit brennender Sorge, 147–49, 181 monophysitism, 189–90, 198, 199 Montesquieu, 33 Moonan, Lawrence, 197 Moorhead, James, 95, 103 morality. See ethical considerations Moravia, 243 Moreau, François-Xavier, 256 Moroz, Valentyn, 57 Moses, 79, 101, 102 Müller, Max, 48 Munificentissimus Deus, 262 Murray, John Courtney, 279 Muslims. See Islam myths: of ancestry, 10, 26, 41, 49, 84, 103–4; ethno-national, 41, 44, 46, 48, 52, 53, 56, 64, 75–76, 78, 85–86, 89–91, 92, 94, 97, 98, 100, 102, 103, 109–10, 113, 118, 122, 133, 135, 173, 175, 185, 245, 257, 258, 268; linguistic, 24, 55, 104–5; origin, 10, 84, 108, 133, 232 nacionalcatolicismo, 282 Nairn, Tom, 36, 37, 66 natio, medieval use of, 25, 144–45 nation-states, 7, 9, 10, 12, 24, 26, 30, 54, 66, 74, 111, 120, 150, 279, 280, 283 national identity: in Catholic doctrine, 145–72; and Christianity, 9–10, 46–47, 63–121, 137–246, 254, 263, 264, 266, 267, 269, 277–99; and culture, 6, 8, 9, 12, 14, 16, 22, 30,

326



Index

33, 35, 37, 43–48, 52, 56, 58, 65, 69, 83, 102, 116, 145–46, 152–57, 160–61, 164, 166, 169, 170, 175–78, 260, 266, 278, 280–81, 284–87, 295, 298; and language, 24, 33, 35, 40, 43, 53, 80, 94, 99, 103–6, 109, 114, 121, 145, 282, 298; and nationalism, 35–38; and performativity, 3, 118–19, 283; psychological aspects of, 1, 7–8, 23, 38, 53, 56–58, 76, 113, 134–45, 165, 174, 178, 281. 285; and religion, 8–9, 31, 39–43, 47–48, 63, 68–67, 117–18, 263, 280, 284–85; symbolic dimensions of, 51–56, 74–76; terms for, 24–27, 129–43; and territory, 26, 35, 49, 55, 65, 66, 89, 90, 91, 98, 100, 104, 109, 151, 173, 174, 208, 280; theories of, 5–6, 21–58, 130. See also ethnicity; identity; personhood; names of individual nations national sovereignty, 163–64 nationalism: biblical, 138, 139, 140, 146; Catholic teaching on, 11, 143, 146, 151, 157–58, 159, 164, 167, 169, 171, 183; concepts of, 5, 21–22 23, 27, 29, 35, 36, 37–38, 41–42, 55, 70, 76, 154, 208, 277; cultural, 13, 36–37, 43–44, 45, 52–53, 100, 118; and elites, 37, 38, 50, 65, 204; ethnic, 5, 11, 36, 37, 43, 44, 52; linguistic, 40, 43, 54, 99, 114; origins of, 34–37, 40, 43, 46–47; political, 2, 13, 34, 43, 52–53, 68, 70, 71; primordial, 44, 55; psychological aspects of, 1, 26, 30, 32, 38, 39, 40, 44, 45, 47, 53, 55, 71, 72, 100; Romantic, 55, 90, 118, 160, 260; and territory, 37, 82, 104, 119; and xenophobia, 22, 38, 43, 56–57, 58–62, 111, 164, 166, 171, 177, 286, 287. See also nationalism, and Christianity; nationalism, moral

aspects of; nationalism, and religion; ressentiment; names of individual nations nationalism, and Christianity, 3, 9, 11, 40, 67, 68, 76, 79, 81, 82, 88, 94, 99, 100, 104, 110, 111, 112, 113, 146, 149, 174, 225, 241, 245, 250, 251, 252, 254, 260, 263, 268, 277, 282, 283, 284 nationalism, moral aspects of, 5, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 34, 42, 43, 52, 55, 56, 71, 75, 77, 83, 92, 95, 100, 103, 111, 115, 118, 131, 147, 150, 157, 165, 167, 168, 174, 175, 178, 198, 202, 208, 209, 217, 257, 260, 281, 284. See also ethical considerations nationalism, and religion, 24, 35, 38, 39, 40, 47, 48, 54, 64, 68, 70, 71, 75, 103, 110, 111, 117, 119, 120, 186, 216, 217, 240, 246, 281, 290, 294 nationality. See nations; national identity; names of individual nations nations: Christian, 10, 12, 14, 46, 78, 79, 83, 94, 103, 110, 176, 186, 208, 282, 293; and Christianity, 4, 18, 25, 63–121, 137–246, 269; collective personhood of, 6, 26, 32, 42, 115, 150, 151, 157, 159, 168, 174, 175, 177, 208, 211, 218, 248, 286; concepts of, 4–5, 21–58, 277, 279; elect, 77–117; and memorials, 9, 47, 64, 71, 74, 101, 102, 283; and messianism, 10, 41–42, 99, 110–17, 169, 251; and rituals, 43, 49, 64, 70, 72, 74, 75, 108, 118, 288; and states, 6–8, 11, 23, 24, 24, 27, 30, 39, 43, 55, 75, 92, 104, 107, 118, 120, 143–44, 148, 150, 158, 168, 174, 219, 278–79, 283; and symbols, 7, 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 52, 56, 72, 74, 75, 237, 240, 242, 246, 282, 283, 290; uniqueness of, 14, 50–51, 148, 210, 219, 220, 297

Index

Native Americans, 96 Nazism, 22, 40, 64, 120, 147, 159, 280, 287 Nestorianism, 189, 198, 199, 201, 214, 226, 227, 228 Netherlands, the, 93 New Testament, 18, 89, 91, 110, 123, 139–43, 159, 173–74, 177, 200. See also Bible; Gospels Newdow, Michael, 102 Nican mopohua, 256, 258 Nicea, First Council of, 189, 226 Nicea, Second Council of, 232 Nicene Creed, 212 Niehbuhr, Reinhold, 152 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 38 Nigeria, 6, 239 Noah, 104, 133 Non abbiamo bisogno, 146 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 81, 103, 111, 217 O’Malley, John, 152 Obama, Barack, 8 Old Believers, 114, 116 Old Testament, 9, 10, 23, 24, 26, 46, 54, 63, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 102, 103, 104, 121, 130–39, 140, 144, 172, 173–74, 186, 203, 246. See also Bible; Israel; Septuagint Olympic games, 75 Orsi, Robert, 234, 240 Orwell, George, 185 Ottoman Empire, 53, 113, 120, 243 Pacem in terris, 150–151, 162, 279 Palestine, 18, 116, 130, 134, 163, 201, 202, 293 Papal States, the, 11, 146 Paris, 42, 54, 109, 111, 213, 247 Parker, Matthew, 85, 87, 88 Paschal mystery, 13, 111, 112, 153, 176, 186, 187, 192, 293, 296



327

patriotism, 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 11, 16, 17, 19, 22, 37, 43, 58, 64, 68, 72, 73, 75, 77, 87, 97, 99, 111, 134, 146, 151, 163, 166, 174, 229, 252, 254, 260, 268, 281, 285–86, 290 Paul VI, 157–59, 229, 235 Paul the Apostle, 141, 185 Paulus Orosius, 79 Pearse, Pádraig, 111 Péguy, Charles, 72 Pelagianism, 262 Pelikan, Jaroslav, 187, 230, 237, 249, 261, 262 Pellevoisin, 248 performativity, 118–19, 283 perichoresis, 120, 178, 291, 292 Persians, the, 54 personhood, 27, 28, 218. See also identity; nations, collective personhood of Peter Chrysologus, 239 Peter the Great, 114 Peter Lombard, 192 Pfaff, William, 71, 75 Philip IV, 108, 109 Philippines, the, 240 phyletism, 67 Piasts, the, 255 Pietism, 33 Pilgrim Fathers, 94 Pindar, 24 Pius V, 244 Pius IX, 248 Pius X, 246, 248, 260 Pius XI, 11, 146–47, 260 Pius XII, 148–49, 160, 250, 256, 262, 268 Plato, 210 Pledge of Allegiance, 64, 102 Poland, 10, 11, 12, 33, 45, 111–12, 146, 149, 160, 235, 236, 239, 250–56, 260, 267, 268, 285 Poles, the, 24, 44, 45, 82, 112, 159, 234, 284

328



Index

political religion, 39, 42, 43, 47 Pontmain, 248 Poole, Ross, 27, 29–30 Poole, Stafford, 29, 30, 257, 259 popular religiosity, 15, 16, 65, 149, 231, 234, 238, 242, 249, 261, 262, 253, 264, 265, 268, 298. See also Virgin Mary, devotion to; lex orandi lex credendi; nationality, psychological aspects of; sensus fidelium Populorum progressio, 157–58 Portugal, 46, 219, 239, 248 prayer, 15, 74, 162, 225, 227, 228, 229, 231, 234, 235, 239, 240, 244, 248, 253, 255, 265 Preston, James, 240 Prosper of Aquitaine, 262 Protestantism, 2, 10, 15, 46, 53, 58, 69, 76, 79–98, 240, 241, 244, 262. See also Anglicanism; Luther; Calvinism; Puritans; Reformation Protoevangelium of James, 230 Prussia, 248, 253 Puritans, 7, 39, 83, 88, 94, 97, 98, 100, 112, 282. See also Calvinism; Reformation quod non assumptum non salvatum, 191, 192, 217, 293 Raboteau, Albert J., 100 Rahner, Karl, 195, 200 Ratzinger, Joseph, 15. See also Benedict XVI Reconquista, 243. See also Spain; Mexico redemption. See salvation Redemptor hominis, 159, 162 Redemptoris mater, 162–63, 236, 266 Reden an die deutsche Nation, 33, 39, 41 Reformation, the, 40, 46, 79, 80, 81, 86, 88, 118, 244. See also Anglicanism; Calvinism; Luther; Protestantism

Renan, Ernest, 25, 26, 64 Rengers, Christopher, 241 Republican Party, 96 Rerum novarum, 147, 164 ressentiment, 38, 93, 100, 114, 134, 135, 150, 158, 164, 257, 269. See also nationalism, psychological aspects of Reynolds, Susan, 25 Roman Catholic Church. See Church Roman Empire, 46, 66, 74, 79, 107, 142, 174, 200, 229, 233, 298 Romans, the, 25, 46, 52, 74, 140, 142, 229, 298 Romanticism, 33, 39, 41, 49, 51, 55, 57, 67, 71, 77, 114, 118, 147, 162, 196, 218, 286 Rome, 74, 75, 79, 84, 146, 230, 232, 233, 250, 254 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 9, 40, 41, 52, 82 Rudbeck, Olof, 105 rue du Bac, 247 Rulla, Luigi, 153 Rupert of Deutz, 194 Russia, 9, 10, 34, 44, 46, 53, 54, 58, 112–17, 176, 204, 217, 229, 233, 242, 243, 249, 253, 295. See also Soviet Union Russians, the, 54, 112–17, 295 Ruthenia, 252 Sadd, Tracy Wenger, 2 Said, Edward, 55, 105, 279 Salazar vs. Buono, 102 salvation, 3, 10, 12, 14, 63, 65, 68, 70, 77, 80, 91, 92, 115, 116, 129, 132, 133, 138n25, 149, 154, 156, 159, 162, 171, 178, 183, 185, 192, 193, 201, 213, 214, 218, 221, 231, 268, 293, 294, 296; and creation, 12–13, 169, 176, 178, 186–85, 189–91, 192, 194, 199, 201, 216, 217, 283, 286, 291; and nationality, 64, 70, 71, 64,

Index

81, 97, 101, 102, 112, 117, 174, 178, 186, 202, 216, 251, 284, 286, 294, 295; religions, 43, 63; secular 71, 75, 295; and the Virgin Mary, 15, 215, 216, 221, 226, 228, 240, 265, 269 San Marino, 30 San Miguel del Milagro, 159 Sánchez, Miguel, 256, 257, 258 Sangh Parivar, 70 Santa Maria Antiqua, 232 Santa Maria sopra Minerva, 232 Santiago de Compostela, 246 Sassanian Wars, 232 Scalia, Antonin, 102 Schieler, Max, 38 Schlegel, Friedrich, 40 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 40 Schneiders, Sandra, 4n10 Schulenberg, Guillermo, 262, 263 Scotland, 30, 53, 73, 75 Scots, the, 54 Scotus, John Duns, 13, 14, 191–221, 228, 291, 294, 295 Scripture. See Bible; New Testament; Old Testament Second Vatican Council, 11, 151–57, 175, 191, 279, 284. See also Ad gentes; Gaudium et spes; Lumen gentium Sen, Sun Yat, 54 sensus fidelium, 213, 226, 231, 265, 267, 296. See also lex orandi credendi; nationality, psychological aspects of; Virgin Mary, devotion to September 11, 2001, 83 Septuagint, 132. See also Old Testament Serbs, the, 203, 245 Seredne, 250 Seton-Watson, Hugh, 71, 91, 110 Shils, Edward, 49, 73 Short, William, 196 Shoshone people, 186 Sieyès, Abbé, 49



329

Slav peoples, 40, 114, 160, 162 Slavophiles, 114, 115, 116 Slavorum apostoli, 160–162 Smith, Anthony D., 26–27, 33, 36, 43, 44, 52, 56, 91, 117, 158, 163, 208, 219, 278, 295 Sobieski, Jan, 45 Sollicitudo rei socialis, 163–64 Soteriology. See salvation Soubirous, Bernadette, 248 South Africa, 10, 90, 93, 94. See also Boors; Afrikaners; Voortrekkers Soviet Union, 7, 24, 57, 113, 120, 146, 165, 183, 250, 254. See also communism; Marxism; Russia Spain, 30, 46, 53, 68, 104, 229, 243, 244, 257, 258, 259 Spanish, the, 86, 244, 257, 259 Spellman, Francis, 2, 97 Spoelstra, Cornelius, 93 Sri Lanka, 14, 239 Stanislaus, 251 Stiernhielm, Georg, 105 Sub tuum praesidium, 235 Suffering Servant, the, 82, 99, 101, 111, 137, 140 Sulyk, Stephen, 242, 264 Sumeria, 78 Summa theologica, 144–45 Summi pontificatus, 148, 149, 151, 160, 162 Sweden, 65, 105, 113, 252 Swiss, the, 44 Syllabus of Errors, 146, 248, 284 Syria, 80 Tacitus, 106 Taiping Rebellion, 42 Tarasov, Oleg, 116 Tatars, the, 113, 252 Tavard, George, 229, 238, 241, 246, 262, 264 Taylor, Charles, 29, 246

330



Index

Tertullian, 227 Teutons, the 106 Theodora, Empress, 232 Theodore of Studios, 232 theologia prima and theologia secunda, 15, 16 theology: American, 1, 2; Byzantine, 66, 161, 232; Catholic, 1, 2, 10, 14, 143, 172, 174, 186, 234, 262, 279; and culture, 3, 11–12, 16, 132, 152–57; Johannine, 81, 142, 194; Latino/a 281; liberation, 255; medieval, 143– 45, 193–204, 225; and nationality, 1–4, 6, 12, 14, 16, 17, 48, 139, 147, 151, 160–62, 164, 166, 172–78, 174, 178, 186, 211, 213, 215–21, 225, 265–69, 277–99; of supersession, 78, 84, 99, 102, 140, 156, 259 Timor-Leste, 7, 219, 295 Tonga, 186 Transitus Mariae traditions, 230 Trent, Council of, 234, 279 Trinity, the, 3, 14, 19, 120, 171, 172, 178, 194, 200, 203–4, 211, 214, 218, 228, 236, 258, 264, 265, 288, 289, 291 Troy, 84, 104 Truszkowska, Natalia José, 118 Tucci, Roberto, 153, 154 Tudjman, Franjo, 245 Turks, the, 113, 244, 253 Turner, Victor and Edith, 159, 180, 237, 246 Ubi arcano Deo, 11 United Kingdom. See Britain United States: Catholic Church in, 2, 84, 96–98, 241, 254, 260, 269; and Christianity, 8, 9, 94–99, 102, 117, 264, 279, 283; as elect nation, 94–99, 103, 112, 177–78; and nationality, 2, 7, 31, 70, 208, 254, 269, 279, 280–81. See also AfricanAmericans; Native Americans

Ukraine 9, 10, 18, 57, 242–43, 250, 251, 264 Ulster, 92 Urartians, 54 Ussher, James, 88 van der Berghe, Pierre, 49 Valentinus, 188 Vasilj III, 114 Vatican, the, 11n19, 98, 146, 157, 248, 249 Vatican II. See Second Vatican Council Vergil, Polydore, 85 Veronicle, the, 232 Versailles, Peace of, 36 Vico, Giambattista, 33 Victoria, Queen, 92 Virgin Mary: apparitions of, 236, 237, 240, 243–44, 245–51, 266; Assumption of, 254, 262, 263, 264, 296; as Bogurodzica, 251–52; and the Church, 246–50, 252, 254, 255–56, 259–60, 267–68; devotion to, 227–28, 229, 231, 234, 237–78, 246, 248, 249, 250, 256, 261, 266, 267, 296, 297; as Empress of the Americas, 256, 268; feasts of, 214, 226, 230–31, 244, 259; and goddess cults of Antiquity, 228–29, 240; images of, 231–32, 233–34, 244, 245, 252, 253, 254, 256, 257, 258, 259, 266; Immaculate Conception of, 14, 213–15, 221, 225, 226, 231, 242, 248, 249, 262, 296; and the “Marian century,” 246, 247; as Mother of the Church, 246, 255; as the Mother of God of Vladimir, 233, 252; as Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, 6, 163, 225, 241, 256–63, 266, 268, 282; as Nuestra Señora de Luján, 242, 244; as Our Lady of Czestochowa, 252–54; as Our Lady of Everywhere, 237, 240; as patroness, 15, 228, 232–33, 235–40, 242–45, 265, 269;

Index

as pontifex, 237, 261; and psychology, 235–36, 241, 249; as Queen of Heaven, 236, 237, 256; as Queen of the Philippines, 240; as Queen of Poland, 253, 254; shrines of, 162, 163, 164, 236, 238, 241, 244–45, 246, 252, 257; as Theotokos, 189, 214, 226–228, 230, 232, 255, 269, 297; titles of, 238–39. See also icons Visigoths, 107 Viviano, Benedict Thomas, 136, 139, 142 Vladimir of Kiev, 113, 115, 176 Volksgeist, 13, 33, 147, 154, 164 Voltaire, 26 von Moser, Karl, 33 von Treitschke, Heinrich Gotthard, 22n2 Voortrekkers, 90–94. See also Afrikaners; Boers; South Africa



331

Wales, 30, 53, 83, 85 Walls, A. F., 73, 89 Warner, Marina, 232, 261 Wars of Religion, 41 Warwick Debates on Nationalism, 36 Welsh, the, 44, 54, 74 Westernizers, 114, 116 Westphalia, Peace of, 7 White Mountain, Battle of, 244 William of Malmesbury, 86 Winthrop, John, 282 Wolter, Allan B., 207, 211 Wordsworth, William, 28 Wright, John D., 2 Wuikinuxv nation, 75 Young, Michael, 73 Zion, 137 Zionism, 76



About the Author

Dorian Llywelyn is a member of the California Province of the Society of Jesus. Born in Wales, he has lived and taught in Europe, Africa, Asia, and North America. He holds degrees in English and theology from Cambridge University, the Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, and the University of Wales. Currently assistant professor of Christian spirituality at Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, Llywelyn also directs the Huffington Ecumenical Institute, established in 2007 to foster rapprochement between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches. He is the author of Sacred Place, Chosen People: Land and National Identity in Welsh Spirituality.

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