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The Collapse of Communism: Recovering the Transcendent Order
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10940 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1993 |
3,984 Words |
| Author
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George Weigel
George Weigel, a Roman Catholic theologian, is president of
the Washington-based James Madison Foundation and the editor
of American Purpose. His most recent book is Tranquillitas
Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American
Catholic Thought on War and Peace. |
In the late eighteenth century, the radical Jacobin wing of the French Revolution proclaimed humanity's liberation from the bondage of tradition--which most especially included religious tradition. The Reign of Terror followed, as did a generation of war across the length and breadth of Europe.
The Duke of Wellington and his Prussian allies stemmed the tide of revolutionary French military aggression at Waterloo, but the virus of Jacobinism proved more difficult to expel from the Western body politic. Because it drew on (even as it radically secularized) ancient biblical teachings about the fulfillment of human community in a kingdom to come, Jacobinism proved to have remarkable staying power even as its central doctrine--that man could be made perfect through politics--was falsified by history time and again. Communism, which was Lenin's titanic effort to marry ruthless revolutionary practice to Marx's philosophy of history and theory of economics, was the ultimate form of the Jacobin heresy.
In 1989, two hundred years after the fall of the Bastille got the French Revolution going in earnest, a nonviolent revolution swept away the Yalta imperial system that had been erected by Lenin's heir, Stalin, in the aftermath of World War II. As even Mikhail Gorbachev now concedes, the chief architect of that nonviolent revolution--and of the collapse of European communism--was Pope John Paul II, the 263rd successor to the apostle Peter as bishop of Rome. Stalin's dismissive question--"The pope? How many divisions has the pope?"--was answered in ways beyond Stalin's capacity to imagine.
How did it happen? Three times before, in 1953, 1956, and 1968, the oppressed people of central and eastern Europe had tried, through politics, to free themselves from the yoke of Stalin's empire; and, on each of those occasions, they had failed. But now, in 1989, and after more than forty years of cruel oppression, central and eastern Europe said a definitive and effective no to communism--not through politics, but through a moral revolution that preceded and made possible the nonviolent political revolution of 1989. Put the other way around, the nonviolent revolutionaries of 1989 proclaimed their defiant no to communism on the basis of a higher and more compelling yes--to the good, to the truly human, and, for many of these nonviolent revolutionaries of conscience, to God. I call this depth dimension of the revolution of 1989 the final revolution.
The past two hundred years have amply proven Dostoevsky's point. Without God, anything is possible. In this
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