Illuminating Dark Times

Illuminating Dark Times:The Surprising Relevance of Catholic Social Teaching Anna Rowlands (bio) This article is the text of the inaugural Annual Lecture of the Jesuit Centre for Faith and Justice, Dublin, delivered on 24 March 2022 at the JCFJ premises in Upper Gardiner Street, Dublin 1. In 1968 the social philosopher and sometime critic of Christianity Hannah Arendt published a book in homage to Bertolt Brecht's poem, 'To Posterity', which begins with the following stanza: Indeed I live in the dark times!A guileless word is an absurdity. A smooth forehead betokensA hard heart. He who laughsHas not yet heardThe terrible tidings. Arendt titled her book Men in Dark Times. Each chapter is devoted to an individual she judged to have lived a life of substance, a life that, in its humanity, illuminated the darkness. Resisting the darkness Three things are striking about Arendt's book. The first is her claim that each generation lives through dark times and the challenge is less to argue about whose times are darkest than it is to find a way to name and resist the darkness. Claiming our freedom to begin again in the mess of things, and to do so with others, honouring human dignity in its plurality, lay at the heart of this resistance and this illumination for her. The second striking thing is Arendt's trenchant insistence that the thing that offers most genuine illumination is not concepts or cleverness – the perfect analysis that nails it (although so much of Arendt's work was precisely about the conditions for thinking well) – but rather lives that are able to take into themselves [End Page 339] the very condition of the world and, in all their flickering uncertainty, to walk a pathway through the darkness and draw others into the light. These wayfarers are for her the deepest bearers of hope in the darkness. The third striking thing about the book is her unlikely decision to dedicate a chapter to Pope John XXIII. Unlikely because Arendt was no fan of the papacy, nor of Catholic social thought. Yet in John XXIII she found a man with a capacity to attend to the world and its wounds deeply, to humanise. She titles the chapter wryly, 'Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli: A Christian on the Chair of St Peter'. I am drawn towards these three elements of Arendt's book in turn for three reasons of my own. Firstly, because of Arendt's stubborn insistence that in dark times, as she says, we have a right to demand illumination. Frankly, that just resonates. Secondly, because I think Arendt is right that what brings us hope is the witness of living well (which, of course, in case it needs to be spelled out, does not mean living perfectly, innocently, or blamelessly). Arendt cautions scepticism of those who present themselves to us as 'representatives of an era', 'mouthpieces of the zeitgeist', and instead suggests that we gain more hope, more sanity, more courage from the lives of those who allow themselves to be troubled by their times and to find ways to make the times their own, struggling towards solidarity in whatever small way they can. Arendt thought that what remains truly challenging for us is to look at the world as it really is and to find ways to love it. Thirdly, I am interested in the ways that Arendt was drawn to some of the great figures of the Christian tradition – chiefly St Augustine – but also issued warnings to Christians about the failures and limitations of our tradition, both conceptual failings and historical-institutional ones. In this vein, Arendt argued that the draw of the Christian tradition towards ideas of the common good was at once noble and, at the same time, often either naive or downright dangerous. It was naive when it simply proposed to the world a logic of love or of self-sacrifice, extended from the household to the Church to the world; it was dangerous when it turned notions of the common good into narrow theories of race, ethnicity, natural order and power, used for dark causes. In the messy and frankly terrifying world we currently live

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