By Robert Royal
Pope Leo has been traveling through Turkey and Lebanon, doing what popes do on such occasions: visiting religious and political leaders, signing agreements for deeper dialogue, calling for peace and respect for human dignity. All of this is good, and this pope does it with notable dignity. But it is not the essential. And without the essential, the other things have quite limited prospects. The essential—the very reason for the trip—is the truth confirmed at the Council of Nicaea (Iznik, Turkey today) in the year 325 A.D.: that Jesus was not just a great man, as even many secular people today concede, but that he is the eternal Son of God and the Savior of the world.
Indeed, although Leo has spoken vaguely about some theological controversies as no longer relevant, he also took the time to warn in Turkey that, among our many postmodern problems, “there exists another challenge, which we might call a ‘new Arianism,’ present in the current culture and sometimes even among believers. This occurs when Jesus is admired only on a human level, perhaps even with religious respect, but without being truly considered as the living and true God among us.” Arianism may seem like one of those obscure theological controversies that no one cares about anymore. But in Nicaea, exactly 1700 years ago, it was a hot topic because Arianism was very widespread. And it remained so for centuries. And now, again.
All this is well known to anyone who has studied the history of the early Church. But many do not realize how truly widespread Arianism really was. When the Vandals invaded North Africa, around the death of St. Augustine (430 A.D.), they did not arrive just as “barbarians,” but as “Christian” Arians. The Roman Empire itself “fell” in 476 A.D. when Odoacer, a “barbarian” Goth, deposed the last Western emperor. The causes of Rome’s fall are much debated, but it was not due to a pagan incursion: Odoacer was an officer trained in the Roman army, with ties to the Eastern Roman emperors, and although tolerant of Catholics, he was Arian.
Arianism appealed to soldiers, who saw Jesus not only as holy, but—as for his courage in torture and death—as heroic. It is a strange view for many today. For centuries, the West has tended to turn Jesus into a “kind” figure, warm and fuzzy. But perhaps those soldiers saw in Him something from which we could benefit, especially as Christians are persecuted around the world.
Leo’s emphasis on Jesus as “the living God among us” is also linked to his warnings about another heresy. As an Augustinian, he is particularly sensitive to contemporary “Pelagianism”, against which the great bishop of Hippo famously fought about a century after Nicaea. Pelagius was a Celtic-British theologian, who was thought to teach—although modern scholars, of course, disagree on this—that we can fulfill the precepts of the law without the need for divine grace.
I have seen Pelagius described in some popular works as quite reasonable. There are rules. We are rational beings. We can follow them. But that, of course, ignores our daily experience, not to mention St. Paul: “the law is good… but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.” (Rom 7:16,23) Augustine, the Doctor of Grace, railed against Pelagianism with force, leaving a great legacy that shows how dependent we are on God and not on our own will.
Pope Leo has also recalled this mainstream current of the tradition:
the greatest mistake we can make as Christians is, in the words of St. Augustine, “to pretend that the grace of Christ consists in his example and not in the gift of his Person” (Contra Iulianum opus imperfectum, II, 146). How often, even in not so distant times, we have forgotten this truth and presented the Christian life above all as a set of rules to follow, substituting the wonderful experience of encountering Jesus—God who gives himself to us—for a moralistic, burdensome, and unattractive religion, which in some respects is impossible to live in concrete daily life.
This classic Augustinian vision should not be understood as a denial of moral norms. Rather, it places grace and the love of God first, which are the deep realities that make living the Christian life possible. Pope Benedict expressed it forcefully: “Being Christian is not the result of an ethical decision or a great idea, but the encounter with an event, with a Person, who gives a new horizon to life and, with it, a decisive direction.”
A notable detail of Pope Leo’s pilgrimage is his decision not to pray in Istanbul’s Blue Mosque, something that both Benedict XVI and Pope Francis did. He took off his shoes, visited it “as a tourist,” but kept a certain distance from Islam. And rightly so. Alongside the neo-Arianism that denies the divinity of Christ, and neo-Pelagianism that suggests we can save ourselves alone, a false universalism and indifferentism has arisen in the modern world—even in the Church: “God wants the multiplicity of religions,” as Pope Francis said in an unfortunate moment.
Leo’s resistance to this in the Blue Mosque is a small gesture, no doubt. But it deserves to be highlighted, because it is in those small details—and not in the usual worldly topics that interest the media—where we glimpse the necessarily countercultural character of the Faith today.
Indeed, we need more of that. It is delicate to believe in the radical importance of the Faith and, at the same time, speak in public as if peace and fraternity resulted from dialogue, instead of the only true source of charity: Jesus Christ. Leo, like his predecessors, usually speaks the usual public language. But it would be good if, at this moment in history, he also became even more openly Augustinian, precisely about the difference that Christ makes even in public affairs.
About the author:
Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. His most recent books are The Martyrs of the New Millennium: The Global Persecution of Christians in the Twenty-First Century, Columbus and the Crisis of the West y A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.