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Document Details : Title: Pro patria mori Subtitle: De actualiteit van een politiek-theologisch vraagstuk Author(s): DE WIT, Theo Journal: Tijdschrift voor Theologie Volume: 55 Issue: 2 Date: 2015 Pages: 123-146 DOI: 10.2143/TVT.55.2.3197433 Abstract : In a famous article ‘Pro patria mori’ (1951) the great authority on medieval political theology Ernst Kantorowicz concludes that this whole idea of the sacrifice of your own life for the sake of the Fatherland is discredited in the first half of the twentieth century, because of its instrumentalizing by the totalitarian political movements in this era. He focuses on a remarkable debate between two Roman Catholic cardinals in Belgium at the beginning of World War I: Mercier (who defends the theological surplus value of pro partia mori) and Billot (who refuses the link between God and Fatherland). Not long after the First World War the German jurist Carl Schmitt once again – and not by accident in a polemical style – promotes the idea of the sacrifice of one’s own life for the sake of the state (and the willingness to kill the enemy) as the core of political existence and of the sovereignty of the state. But he also recognizes the emancipation or exodus of this idea of sacrifice/killing from its orientation on the state and on Staatlichkeit – in the direction of civil wars, guerilla’s, ‘partisans’, ‘terrorists’, et cetera. Strange and inconsistent is Schmitt’s positive reference to the seventeenth-century thinker Thomas Hobbes, because he is one of the first political thinkers to attack the whole idea of a primacy of the political community over the self-preservation of the individual. The actual discussion about sense and nonsense of pro patria mori can still be framed as a continuation of the debate between Schmitt, Mercier, Billot and Hobbes. Recently, the American philosopher of law, Paul Kahn, took the side of Schmitt, while the theologian and ethical thinker Stanley Hauerwas follows the line of Billot. A lot of liberal thinkers – like Hobbes – have severe reservations regarding the idea of sacrifice for the state. The first standpoint tries to find existential meaning in war (‘War is a force that gives us meaning’), the second one inclines towards ‘better a martyr than a murderer’ (Socrates, Jesus Christ), while the liberal viewpoint reverses this: better a ‘sniper’ than a martyr. |
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