Readings « Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Readings’ Category

Reading Selections From The Great Liberal Death Wish — Malcolm Muggeridge

December 14, 2009

Malcolm Muggeridge

In 1979 Malcolm Muggeridge gave a short speech at Hilsdale College that more or less repeated some thoughts he had published in various essays before. There he reflected over his life and upbringing to underline how deep his connections with the liberal community had been.

Muggeridge was one of a small cadre of western journalists who recognized the evil of Soviet Communism when most were still entranced by the Marxist utopia.He relates some of that experience below.

For his honest reporting on the Stalinist show trials he lost his job and was blacklisted for a time. Happily he never lost his critical touch. In the 1980’s Malcolm Muggeridge emerged, along with his friend William F. Buckle,y as one of the most delightful, articulate, brilliant thinkers and conversationalists in the world. His career (related below) has included journalist and Moscow correspondent for the Manchester Guardian; agent for British Intelligence in Africa during World War II; Liaison – Officer with the Free French; Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph; Editor of Punch; and Book Reviewer for Esquire. In addition to several anthologies of his own writings, he is a published novelist and playwright. His television career began when television began, and has continued in the United States, the United Kingdom and throughout the English-speaking world. In England he had worked extensively with the B.B.C. and in the U.S. with PBS.

In 1970 Muggeridge went to Calcutta to do a special documentary on Mother Teresa for the BBC-TV. At the time Muggeridge was Europe’s Tom Brokaw. On that fated morning of their meeting (a morning that would change him for the rest of his life) he met her as she was working out in the streets with sick and poor people in a ghetto like he had never seen before, amid stench, filth, garbage, disease, and poverty that was just unbelievable. But what struck Muggeridge more than anything else, even there in that awful squalor and decadence, was the deep, warm glow on Mother Teresa’s face and the deep, warm love in her eyes.

“Do you do this every day?” he began his interview.

“Oh, yes,” she replied, “it is my mission. It is how I serve and love my Lord.”

“How long have you been doing this? How many months?”

“Months?” said Mother Teresa. “Not months, but years. Maybe eighteen years.”

“Eighteen years!” exclaimed Muggeridge. “You’ve been working here in these streets for eighteen years?”

“Yes,” she said simply and yet joyfully. “It is my privilege to be here. These are my people. These are the ones my Lord has given me to love.”

“Do you ever get tired? Do you ever feel like quitting and letting someone else take over your ministry? After all, you are beginning to get older.”

“Oh, no,” she replied, “this is where the Lord wants me, and this is where I am happy to be. I feel young when I am here. The Lord is so good to me. How privileged I am to serve him.”

Later, Malcolm Muggeridge said, “I will never forget that little lady as long as I live. The face, the glow, the eyes, the love-it was all so pure and so beautiful. I shall never forget it. It was like being in the presence of an angel. It changed my life. I have not been the same person since. It is more than I can describe.”

After Malcolm Muggeridge made those comments, Mother Teresa continued to serve in that sacrificial way until the end of her life-nearly twenty-seven years later.

***********************************************************

The Great Liberal Death Wish
The Great Liberal Death Wish” is a subject that I’ve given a lot of thought to and have written about, and it would be easy for me to read to you a long piece that I’ve written on the subject. But somehow in the atmosphere of this delightful college, I want to have a shot at just talking about this notion of the great liberal death wish as it has arisen in my life, as I’ve seen it, and the deductions I’ve made from it. I should also plead guilty to being responsible for the general heading of these lectures, namely, “The Humane Holocaust: The Auschwitz Formula. “

Later on I want to say something about all this, showing how this humane holocaust, this dreadful slaughter that began with 50 million babies last year, will undoubtedly be extended to the senile old and the mentally afflicted and mongoloid children, and so on, because of the large amount of money that maintaining them costs. (DJ – If that is not prophetic, I don’t know what is)

It is all the more ironical when one thinks about the holocaust western audiences, and the German population in particular, have been shuddering over, as it has been presented on their TV and cinema screens. Note this compassionate or humane holocaust, if, as I fear, it gains momentum, will quite put that other in the shade. And, as I shall try to explain, what is even more ironical, the actual considerations that led to the German holocaust were not, as is commonly suggested, due to Nazi terrorism, but were based upon the sort of legislation that advocates of euthanasia, or “mercy killing,” in this country and in western Europe, are trying to get enacted. It’s not true that the German holocaust was simply a war crime, as it was judged to be at Nuremberg. In point of fact, it was based upon a perfectly coherent, legally enacted decree approved and operated by the German medical profession before the Nazis took over power. In other words, from the point of view of the Guinness Book of Records you can say that in our mad world it takes about thirty years to transform a war crime into a compassionate act.

The Dostoevsky Connection
But I’m going to deal with that later. I want first of all to look at this question of the great liberal death wish. And I was very delighted that you should have got here for this CCA program the film on Dostoevsky for which I did the commentary, because his novel The Devils [More commonly translated as The Possessed] is the most extraordinary piece of prophecy about this great liberal death wish. All the characters in it, the circumstances of it, irresistibly recall what we mean by the great liberal death wish. You cannot imagine what a strange experience it was doing that filming in the USSR. I quoted extensively from the speech that Dostoevsky delivered when the Pushkin Memorial was unveiled in Moscow, and his words were considered to be, in terms of then current ideologies, about the most reactionary words ever spoken. They amounted to a tremendous onslaught on this very thing that we’re talking about, this great liberal death wish, as it existed in Russia in the latter part of the last century.

The characters in the book match very well the cast of the liberal death wish in our society and in our time. You even have the interesting fact that the old liberal, Stephan Trofimovich Verkovensky, who is a sort of male impersonator of Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, with all the sentimental notions that go therewith, is the father of Peter Verkovensky, a Baader Meinhof character, based on a Russian nihilist of Dostoevsky’s time, Sergey Nechayef. To me, it’s one of the most extraordinary pieces of modern prophecy that has ever been. Especially when Peter Verkovensky says, as he does, that what we need are a few generations of debauchery – debauchery at its most vicious and most horrible – followed by a little sweet bloodletting, and then the turmoil will begin. I put it to you that this bears a rather uneasy resemblance to the sort of thing that is happening at this moment in the western world.

Muggeridge’s Father
Now I want to throw my mind back to my childhood, to the sitting room in the little suburban house in south London where I grew up. On Saturday evenings my father and his cronies would assemble there, and they would plan together the downfall of the capitalist system and the replacement of it by one which was just and humane and egalitarian and peaceable, etc. These were my first memories of a serious conversation about our circumstances in the world. I used to hide in a big chair and hope not to be noticed, because I was so interested. And I accepted completely the views of these good men, that once they were able to shape the world as they wanted it to be, they would create a perfect state of affairs in which peace would reign, prosperity would expand, men would be brotherly, and considerate, and there would be no exploitation of man by man, nor any ruthless oppression of individuals. And I firmly believed that, once their plans were fulfilled, we would realize an idyllic state of affairs of such a nature. They were good men, they were honest men, they were sincere men. Unlike their prototypes on the continent of Europe, they were men from the chapels. It was a sort of spillover from the practice of nonconformist Christianity, not a brutal ideology, and I was entirely convinced that such a brotherly, contented, loving society would come to pass once they were able to establish themselves in power.

My father used to speak a lot at open air meetings, and when I was very small I used to follow him around because I adored him, as I still do. He was a very wonderful and good man. He’d had a very harsh upbringing himself, and this was his dream of how you could transform human society so that human beings, instead of maltreating one another and exploiting one another, would be like brothers. I remember he used to make quite good jokes at these outdoor meetings when we had set up our little platform, and a few small children and one or two passers-by had gathered briefly to listen. One joke I particularly appreciated and used to wait for even though I had heard a hundred times ran like this: “Well ladies and gentlemen,” my father would begin, “you tell me one thing. Why is it that it is his majesty’s navy and his majesty’s stationery office and his majesty’s customs but it’s the national debt? Why isn’t the debt his majesty’s?” It always brought the house down.

The Fabian Society
Such was my baptism into the notion of a kingdom of Heaven on earth, into what I was going to understand ultimately to be the great liberal death wish. Inevitably, my father’s heroes were the great intellectuals of the time, who banded themselves together in what was called the Fabian Society, of which he was a member – a very active member. For instance, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Harold Laski, people of that sort. All the leftist elite, like Sydney – and Beatrice Webb, belonged to this Fabian Society, and in my father’s eyes they were princes among men. I accepted his judgment.

Once I had a slight shock when he took me to a meeting of the Fabian Society where H. G. Wells was speaking, and I can remember vividly his high squeaky voice as he said – and it stuck in my mind long afterward -”We haven’t got time to read the Bible. We haven’t got time to read the history of this obscure nomadic tribe in the Middle East.” Subsequently, when I learned of the things that Wells had got time for, the observation broke upon me in all its richness.

Education: An Overrated Experience?
Anyway, that for me was how my impressions of life began. I was sent to Cambridge University, which of course in those days consisted very largely of boys from what we call public schools, and you call private schools. Altogether, it was for me a quite different sort of milieu, where the word socialist in those days – this was in 1920 when I went to Cambridge at 17 – was almost unknown. We who had been to a government secondary school and then to Cambridge were regarded as an extraordinary and rather distasteful phenomenon. But my views about how the world was going to be made better remained firmly entrenched in the talk of my father and his cronies. Of course, in the meantime had come the First World War, to be followed by an almost insane outburst of expectations that henceforth peace would prevail in the world, that we would have a League of Nations to ensure that there would be no more wars, and gradually everybody would get more prosperous and everything would be better and better. That rather lugubrious figure Woodrow Wilson arrived on the scene, to be treated with the utmost veneration. I can see him now, lantern-jawed, wearing his tall hat – somehow for me he didn’t fill the bill of a knight in shining armor who was going to lead us to everlasting peace. Somehow the flavor of Princeton about him detracted from that picture, but still I accepted him as an awesome figure.

My time at Cambridge was a rather desolate time. I never much enjoyed being educated, and have continued to believe that education is a rather overrated experience. Perhaps this isn’t the most suitable place in the world to say that, but such is my opinion. I think that it is part of the liberal dream that somehow or other – and it was certainly my father’s view – people, in becoming educated, instead of on Sundays racing their dogs or studying racing forms, or anything like that, would take to singing madrigals or reading Paradise Lost aloud. This is another dream that didn’t quite come true.

Teaching in India
Anyway, from Cambridge I went off to India, to teach at a Christian college there, and I must say it was an extremely agreeable experience. The college was in a remote part of what was then Travancore, but is now Kerala. It was not one of the missionary colleges, but associated with the indigenous Syrian Church, which you may know is a very ancient church, dating back to the fourth century, and now there are a million or more Syrian Christians. In its way it was quite an idyllic existence, but of course one came up against naked power for the first time. I had never thought of power before as something separate from the rest of life. But in India, under the British raj, with a relatively few white men ruling over three or four hundred million Indians, I came face to face with power unrelated to elections or any other representative device in the great liberal dream that became the great liberal death wish.

However, it was a pleasant time, and of course the Indian nationalist movement was beginning, and Ghandi came to the college where I was teaching. This extraordinary little gargoyle of a man appeared, and held forth, and everybody got tremendously excited, and shouted against Imperialism, and the Empire in which at that time the great majority of the British people firmly believed, and which they thought would continue forever. If you ventured to say, as I did on the boat going to India, that it might come to an end before long, they laughed you to scorn, being firmly convinced that God had decided that the British should rule over a quarter of the world, and that nothing could ever change this state of affairs. Which again opened up a new vista about what this business of power signified, and how it worked, not as a theory, but in practice. We used to boast in those days that we had an Empire on which the sun never set, and now we have a commonwealth on which it never rises, and I can’t quite say which concept strikes me as being the more derisory.

Marriage, Egypt, The Guardian and Hasheesh
That was India, and then I came back to England and for a time taught in an elementary school in Birmingham, and married my wife Kitty. (I wish she were here today because she’s very nice. We’ve been married now for 51 years, so I am entitled to speak well of her.) She was the niece of Beatrice and Sydney Webb, so it was like marrying into a sort of aristocracy of the Left. After our wedding, we went off to Egypt, where I taught at the University of Cairo, and it was there that the dreadful infection of journalism got into my system. Turning aside from the honorable occupation of teaching, I started writing articles about the wrongs of the Egyptian people, how they were clamoring, and rightly so, for a democratic setup, and how they would never be satisfied with less than one man one vote and all that went therewith. I never heard any Egyptian say that this was his position, but I used to watch those old pashas in Groppi’s cafe’ smoking their hubble-bubble pipes, and imagined that under their tabooshes was a strong feeling that they would never for an instant countenance anything less than full representative government. That at least was what I wrote in my articles, and they went flying over to England, and, like homing pigeons, in through the windows of the Guardian office in Manchester, at that time a high citadel of liberalism. That was where the truth was being expounded, that was where enlightenment reigned. In due course I was asked to join the editorial staff of the Guardian, which to me was a most marvelous thing. I may say that the work of teaching at Cairo University was not an arduous job, essentially for three reasons. One was that the students didn’t understand English; the second that they were nearly always on strike or otherwise engaged in political demonstrations, and thirdly they were often stupified with hashish. So I had a lot of leisure on my hands.

Incidentally, to be serious for a moment, it seems to me a most extraordinary thing that at that time you wouldn’t have found anybody, Egyptian or English or anybody else, who wasn’t absolutely clear in his mind that hashish was a most appalling and disastrous addiction. So you can imagine how strange it was forty years later for me to hear life peeresses and people like that insisting that hashish didn’t do any harm to anybody, and was even beneficial. I see that in Canada it is going to be legalized, which will mean one more sad, unnecessary hazard comes into our world.

The Golden Days Of Liberalism
Anyway, these were the golden days of liberalism when the Manchester Guardian was widely read, and even believed. Despite all its misprints, you could make out roughly speaking what it was saying, and what we typed out was quite likely, to our great satisfaction, to be quoted in some paper in – Baghdad or Smyrna as being the opinion of our very influential organ of enlightened liberalism. I remember my first day I was there, and somehow it symbolizes the whole experience. I was asked to write a leader – a short leader of about 120 words – on corporal punishment. At some head-masters’ conference, it seemed, words had been spoken about corporal punishment and I was to produce appropriate comment. So I put my head into the room next to mine, and asked the man who was working there: “What’s our line on corporal punishment?” Without looking up from his type-writer, he replied: “The same as capital, only more so.” So I knew exactly what to tap out, you see. That was how I got into the shocking habit of pontificating about what was going on in the world; observing that the Greeks did not seem to want an orderly government, or that one despaired sometimes of the Irish having any concern for law and order; weighty pronouncement tapped out on a typewriter, deriving from nowhere, and for all one knew, concerning no one.

We were required to end anything we wrote on a hopeful note, because liberalism is a hopeful creed. And so, however appalling and black the situation that we described, we would always conclude with some sentence like: “It is greatly to be hoped that moderate men of all shades of opinion will draw together, and that wiser councils may yet prevail.” How many times I gave expression to such jejune hopes! Well, I soon grew weary of this, because it seemed to me that immoderate men were rather strongly in evidence, and I couldn’t see that wiser councils were prevailing anywhere.

The depression was on by that time, I’m talking now of 1932–33. It was on especially in Lancashire, and it seemed as though our whole way of life was cracking up, and, of course, I looked across at the USSR with a sort of longing, thinking that there was an alternative, some other way in which people could live, and I managed to maneuver matters so that I was sent to Moscow as the Guardian correspondent, arriving there fully prepared to see in the Soviet regime the answer to all our troubles, only to discover in a very short time that though it might be an answer, it was a very unattractive one.

Power As The Absolute And Ultimate Arbiter
It’s difficult to convey to you what a shock this was, realizing that what I had supposed to be the new brotherly way of life my father and his cronies had imagined long before, was simply on examination an appalling tyranny, in which the only thing that mattered, the only reality, was power. So again, like the British raj, in the USSR I was confronted with power as the absolute and ultimate arbiter. However, that was a thing that one could take in one’s stride. How I first came to conceive the notion of the great liberal death wish was not at all in consequence of what was happening in the USSR, which, as I came to reflect afterward, was simply the famous lines in the Magnificat working out, “He hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath exalted the humble and meek,” whereupon, of course, the humble and meek become mighty in their turn and have to be put down. That was just history, something that happens in the world; people achieve power, exercise power, abuse power, are booted out of power, and then it all begins again.

The thing that impressed me, and the thing that touched off my awareness of the great liberal death wish, my sense that western man was, as it were, sleep-walking into his own ruin, was the extraordinary performance of the liberal intelligentsia, who, in those days, flocked to Moscow like pilgrims to Mecca. And they were one and all utterly delighted and excited by what they saw there. Clergymen walked serenely and happily through the anti-god museums, politicians claimed that no system of society could possibly be more equitable and just, lawyers admired Soviet justice, and economists praised the Soviet economy. They all wrote articles in this sense which we resident journalists knew were completely nonsensical. It’s impossible to exaggerate to you the impression that this made on me. Mrs. Webb had said to Kitty and me: “You’ll find that in the USSR Sydney and I are icons. ” As a matter of fact they were, Marxist icons.

Liberal Pundits And Fatuity
How could this be? How could this extraordinary credulity exist in the minds of people who were adulated by one and all as maestros of discernment and judgment? It was from that moment that I began to get the feeling that a liberal view of life was not what I’d supposed it to be – a creative movement which would shape the future – but rather a sort of death wish. How otherwise could you explain how people, in their own country ardent for equality, bitter opponents of capital punishment and all for more humane treatment of people in prison, supporters, in fact, of every good cause, should in the USSR prostrate themselves before a regime ruled over brutal-ly and oppressively and arbitrarily by a privileged party oligarchy?

I still ponder over the mystery of how men displaying critical intelligence in other fields could be so astonishingly deluded. I tell you, if ever you are looking for a good subject for a thesis, you could get a very fine one out of a study of the books that were written by people like the Dean of Canterbury, Julian Huxley, Harold Laski, Bernard Shaw, or the Webbs about the Soviet regime. In the process you would come upon a compendium of fatuity such as has seldom, if ever, existed on earth. And I would really recommend it; after all, the people who wrote these books were, and continue to be regarded as, pundits, whose words must be very, very seriously heeded and considered.

Mau-Mauing the Intelligentsia
I recall in their yellow jackets a famous collection in England called the Left Book Club. You would be amazed at the gullibility that’s expressed. We foreign journalists in Moscow used to amuse ourselves, as a matter of fact, by competing with one another as to who could wish upon one of these intelligentsia visitors to the USSR the most outrageous fantasy. We would tell them, for instance, that the shortage of milk in Moscow was entirely due to the fact that all milk was given nursing mothers — things like that. If they put it in the articles they subsequently wrote, then you’d score a point.

One story I floated myself, for which I received considerable acclaim, was that the huge queues outside food shops came about because the Soviet workers were so ardent in building Socialism that they just wouldn’t rest, and the only way the government could get them to rest for even two or three hours was organizing a queue for them to stand in. I laugh at it all now, but at the time you can imagine what a shock it was to someone like myself, who had been brought up to regard liberal intellectuals as the samurai, the absolute elite, of the human race, to find that they could be taken in by deceptions which a half-witted boy would see through in an instant. I never got over that; it always remained in my mind as something that could never be erased. I could never henceforth regard the intelligentsia as other than credulous fools who nonetheless became the media’s prophetic voices, their heirs and successors remaining so still. That’s when I began to think seriously about the great liberal death wish.

News And Intelligence
In due course, I came back to England to await the Second World War, in the course of which I found myself engaged in Intelligence duties. And let me tell you that if there is one thing more fantastical than news, it is Intelligence. News itself is a sort of fantasy; and when you actually go collecting news, you realize that this is so. In a certain sense, you create news; you dream news up yourself and then send it. But that’s nothing to the fantasy of Intelligence. Of the two, I would say that news seems really quite a sober and considered commodity compared with your offerings when you’re an Intelligence agent.

In The Name Of Progress And Compassion
Anyway, when in 1945 I found myself a civilian again, I tried to sort out my thoughts about the great wave of optimism that followed the Second World War –or me, a repeat performance. It was then that I came to realize how, in the name of progress and compassion, the most terrible things were going to be done, preparing the way for the great humane holocaust, about which I have spoken. There was, it seemed to me, a built in propensity in this liberal world-view whereby the opposite of what was intended came to pass. Take the case of education. Education was the great mumbo–jumbo of progress, the assumption being that educating people would make them grow better and better, more and more objective and intelligent. Actually, as more and more money is spent on education, illiteracy is increasing. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it didn’t end up with virtually the whole revenue of the western countries being spent on education, and a condition of almost total illiteracy resulting therefrom. It’s quite on the cards.

The Humane Holocaust
Now I want to try to get to grips with this strange state of affairs. Let’s look again at the humane holocaust. What happened in Germany was that long before the Nazis got into power, a great propaganda was undertaken to sterilize people who were considered to be useless or a liability to society, and after that to introduce what they called “mercy killing.” This happened long before the Nazis set up their extermination camps at Auschwitz and elsewhere, and was based upon the highest humanitarian considerations. You see what I’m getting at?

On a basis of liberal-humanism, there is no creature in the universe greater than man, and the future of the human race rests only with human beings themselves, which leads infallibly to some sort of suicidal situation. It’s to me quite clear that that is so, the evidence is on every hand. The efforts that men make to bring about their own happiness, their own ease of life, their own self-indulgence, will in due course produce the opposite, leading me to the absolutely inescapable conclusion that human beings cannot live and operate in this world without some concept of a being greater than themselves, and of a purpose which transcends their own egotistic or greedy desires.

Once you eliminate the notion of a God, a creator, once you eliminate the notion that the creator has a purpose for us, and that life consists essentially in fulfilling that purpose, then you are bound, as Pascal points out, to induce the megalomania of which we’ve seen so many manifestations in our time – in the crazy dictators, as in the lunacies of people who are rich, or who consider themselves to be important or celebrated in the western world. Alternatively, human beings relapse into mere carnality, into being animals. I see this process going on irresistibly, of which the holocaust is only just one example. If you envisage men as being only men, you are bound to see human society, not in Christian terms as a family, but as a factory–farm in which the only consideration that matters is the well–being of the livestock and the prosperity or productivity of the enterprise. That’s where you land yourself. And it is in that situation that western man is increasingly finding himself.

Reasons Not To Despair
This might seem to be a despairing conclusion, but it isn’t, you know, actually. First of all, the fact that we can’t work out the liberal dream in practical terms is not bad news, but good news. Because if you could work it out, life would be too banal, too tenth-rate to be worth bothering about. Apart from that, we have been given the most extraordinary sign of the truth of things, which I continually find myself thinking about. This is that the most perfect and beautiful expressions of man’s spiritual aspirations come, not from the liberal dream in any of its manifestations, but from people in the forced labor camps of the USSR. And this is the most extraordinary phenomenon, and one that of course receives absolutely no attention in the media. From the media point of view it’s not news, and in any case the media do not want to know about it. But this is the fact for which there is a growing amount of evidence. I was reading about it in a long essay by a Yugoslav writer Mihajlo Mihajlov [“Mystical Experience of the Labor Camps,” included in his excellent book Underground Notes], who spent some years in a prison in Yugoslavia.

He cites case after case of people who, like Solzhenitsyn, say that enlightenment came to them in the forced labor camps. They understood what freedom was when they had lost their freedom, they understood what the purpose of life was when they seemed to have no future. They say, moreover, that when it’s a question of choosing whether to save your soul or your body, the man who chooses to save his soul gathers strength thereby to go on living, whereas the man who chooses to save his body at the expense of his soul loses both body and soul.

He Who Hates His Life In This World…
In other words, fulfilling exactly what our Lord said, that he who hates his life in this world shall keep his life for all eternity, as those who love their lives in this world will assuredly lose them. Now, that’s where I see the light in our darkness. There’s an image I love – if the whole world were to be covered with concrete, there still would be some cracks in it, and through these cracks green shoots would come. The testimonies from the labor camps are the green shoots we can see in the world, breaking out from the monolithic power now dominating ever greater areas of it. In contradistinction, this is the liberal death wish, holding out the fallacious and ultimately destructive hope that we can construct a happy, fulfilled life in terms of our physical and material needs, and in the moral and intellectual dimensions of our mortality.

I feel so strongly at the end of my life that nothing can happen to us in any circumstances that is not part of God’s purpose for us. Therefore, we have nothing to fear, nothing to worry about, except that we should rebel against His purpose, that we should fail to detect it and fail to establish some sort of relationship with Him and His divine will. On that basis, there can be no black despair, no throwing in of our hand.

Augustine and Catastrophe
We can watch the institutions and social structures of our time collapse – and I think you who are young are fated to watch them collapse — and we can reckon with what seems like an irresistibly growing power of materialism and materialist societies. But, it will not happen that that is the end of the story. As St. Augustine said — and I love to think of it when he received the news in Carthage that Rome had been sacked: Well, if that’s happened, it’s a great catastrophe, but we must never forget that the earthly cities that men build they destroy, but there is also the City of God which men didn’t build and can’t destroy. And he devoted the next seventeen years of his life to working out the relationship between the earthly city and the City of God – the earthly city where we live for a short time, and the City of God whose citizens we are for all eternity.

This Limbo Between Life And Death
You know, it’s a funny thing, but when you’re old, as I am, there are all sorts of extremely pleasant things that happen to you. One of them is, you realize that history is nonsense, but I won’t go into that now. The pleasantest thing of all is that you wake up in the night at about, say, three a.m., and you find that you are half in and half out of your battered old carcass. And it seems quite a toss-up whether you go back and resume full occupancy of your mortal body, or make off toward the bright glow you see in the sky, the lights of the City of God. In this limbo between life and death, you know beyond any shadow of doubt that, as an infinitesimal particle of God’s creation, you are a participant in God’s purpose for His creation, and that that purpose is loving and not hating, is creative and not destructive, is everlasting and not temporal, is universal and not particular. With this certainty comes an extraordinary sense of comfort and joy.

Reality Means Knowing God
Nothing that happens in this world need shake that feeling; all the happenings in this world, including the most terrible disasters and suffering, will be seen in eternity as in some mysterious way a blessing, as a part of God’s love. We ourselves are part of that love, we belong to that scene, and only in so far as we belong to that scene does our existence here have any reality or any worth. All the rest is fantasy — whether the fantasy of power which we see in the authoritarian states around us, or the fantasy of the great liberal death wish in terms of affluence and self-indulgence. The essential feature, and necessity of life is to know reality, which means knowing God. Otherwise our mortal existence is, as Saint Teresa of Avila said, no more than a night in a second–class hotel.

Posted in Malcolm Muggeridge, Readings | Tagged Dostoevsky, He Who Hates His Life In This World…, Liberal Pundits And Fatuity, Malcolm Muggeridge, Mother Teresa, Reality Means Knowing God, The Fabian Society, The Golden Days Of Liberalism, The Great Liberal Death Wish, The Humane Holocaust, This Limbo Between Life And Death | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections From “The Illusion of Moral Neutrality” by J. Budziszewski

December 9, 2009

Dr. J. Budziszewski

During the 1990s, J. Budziszewski rose to prominence as one of the leading intellectual lights among Evangelical Christians in America. A political theorist with a special interest in the natural-law tradition, he was highly sought as a speaker at conferences organized by groups such as the InterVarsity Fellowship and Campus Crusade for Christ. A principal theme of his many talks to American campus groups is captured in the title of his 1999 book, How to Stay Christian in College.

For some Evangelical Protestants, then, it came as a jolt when, on Easter Sunday 2004, Budziszewski was received into the Catholic Church. J. Budziszewski teaches in the departments of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recently books are What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide (Spence, 2004) and The Revenge of Conscience (Spence, 2004).

J. Budziszewski received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1981, and is a professor in the departments of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. Budziszewski is an ethical and political philosopher. He is also a nationally-known authority on the tradition of Natural Law, which is germane to intelligent design because natural teleology is at heart a design concept.

Much of his work focuses on the repression of moral knowledge — on what goes wrong when we try to convince ourselves that we don’t know what we really do. Another of his interests is the intersection of philosophy with theology. Budziszewski’s scholarly books include Evangelicals in the Public Square (2006), What We Can’t Not Know: A Guide (2003), The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man (1999), and Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law (1997), which received a Christianity Today book award. Budziszewski’s works appear in both scholarly and popular venues, and he has also written several books for young people.
Here he speaks to his conversion:

“What actually led me back was a growing intuition that my condition was objectively evil. I didn’t believe in objective evil, so that seemed to make no sense. But the intuition became so strong that I could no longer ignore it. It wasn’t a “feeling.” I was forced to regard it as a perception of truth.

At this point I suppose intellect does come in, because I was familiar with Augustine’s argument about evil. Evil is deficiency in good; there is no such thing as an evil “substance,” an evil-in-itself. So if my condition really was evil, there had to be some good of which my condition was the ruination. And if there really were both good and evil, then I had been so wrong, for so long, so profoundly, that it seemed that almost anything might be true — even the faith that I had abandoned.

So I began studying all those Christian things I had forgotten. There was no distinct moment in time at which I could have said, “I believe, but a moment ago I didn’t.” One day, though, I realized that without having noticed it, I had been believing for some time.”

If you are interested more in J. Budziszewski’s conversion story you can find more of it here.

This article which was printed in First Things back in 1993 is a difficult but very rewarding read. The main points are highlighted and summarized as follows:

The God Of Tolerance And Moral Neutrality
Nietzsche claimed that if men took God seriously, they would still be burning heretics at the stake. In the same spirit, one supposes, are the notions that if men really cherished moral truth, they would suppress all beliefs that they considered wrong, and that if men still cared about the sanctity of the marriage bed, they would go back to making adulterers wear the scarlet A.

Today two different groups of people agree with conditional statements of this sort. In the first group are the ordinary bigots, who are always among us. The second are a kind of modern backlash — call it the reaction — found principally among the “cultural elite.” For instance, whereas the bigots respond to Nietzsche’s conditional by saying, “Yes, that’s why we should burn heretics,” the reactionaries respond to it by saying, “No, that’s why we should suppress the public expression of belief in God.”

These reactionaries claim to love tolerance, but, misunderstanding it, they strangle it in their embrace. Their creed is that intolerance is born at the same moment as public moral commitments; that morality must therefore be a “private” affair; that in order to say that tolerance is a good, we must forbear to say aloud that anything else is good or evil. Their god is Neutrality. In certain intellectual regions he travels under other names such as Autonomy and Rights.

We meet this jealous and negating god on the philosophic right, where conservatives like Michael Oakeshott tell us that the specific and limited activity of “governing” has “nothing to do” with natural law or morals. We encounter him on the philosophic left, where liberals like John Rawls and Marxists like Jurgen Habermas invent devices like the Veil of Ignorance and the Ideal Speech Situation to convince us that if we wish to understand truly the principles of justice, we must pretend to forget not only who we are, but also everything we ever thought we knew about good and evil. We meet this god in law, where many jurists treat ethical distinctions such as “family” vs. “non-family” as “invidious classifications” that deny citizens the equal protection of the law. We meet him in education, where elementary school children are offered books like Daddy’s Roommate, Heather Has Two Mommies, and Gloria Goes to Gay Pride. In fact, we meet this god everywhere: in the university, in the movie theatre, in many churches and synagogues, and, it goes without saying, on the even more ubiquitous altar of the television.

The Folly Of Neutralism
It might seem remarkable that people who insist that tolerance means moral neutrality should themselves be so earnest in ridiculing those who aren’t neutral. But of course, they themselves aren’t neutral either. The scandal of Neutrality is that its worshipers cannot answer the question “Why be neutral?” without committing themselves to particular goods — social peace, self-expression, self-esteem, ethnic pride, or what have you — thereby violating their own desideratum of Neutrality. Yet even this is merely a symptom of a deeper problem, namely, there is no such thing as Neutrality. It isn’t merely unachievable, like a perfect circle; it is unthinkable and unapproachable, like a square circle. Whether we deem it better to take a stand or be silent, we’ve offended this god in the very act of deeming.

To see the folly of neutralism is one thing; to escape from it is another. Many who understand perfectly well that tolerance cannot be defended by suspending judgment about goods and evils have difficulty defending it in any other way. They suspect the worst: that if neutrality is a square circle, then so is tolerance, along with all of its component virtues like objectivity and fairness. They fear that by leaving the reactionaries, they will join with the ordinary bigots. They are right to fear this trap, but make the difficulty of avoiding it greater than it is.

What Is This Thing Called Tolerance?
The truth is, we already know the answer in part. To tolerate something is to put up with it even though we might be tempted to suppress it. The next step, then: which things are we tempted to suppress? Here, too, we know the answer: we are tempted to suppress those things that we deem mistaken, painful, wrong, harmful, offensive, or in some other way unworthy of approval.

Now, we use the term “temptation” when our hearts solicit us either to do something we ought not do or to forbear from doing something we ought to do. But shouldn’t we suppress the things that we deem mistaken, painful, wrong, harmful, offensive, and so on? The answer is, sometimes we should, and sometimes we shouldn’t. For instance, it’s certainly not acceptable to tolerate the act of rape. But it is certainly right to put up with the profession, by rational argument, of opinions that we deem mistaken.

Averting Evils Protecting Goods
What makes these two cases (rape vs. suppressing false opinions) different? In one respect, of course, they are just the same. Whichever we endeavored to suppress — rape, or the profession of false opinions — we would presumably be trying to avert particular evils, or, if you prefer, to protect particular goods. The goods that are injured in the act of rape include the dignity of the woman, her physical and emotional well-being, and the integrity of a certain pattern of relationships between men and women, a pattern that depends on trust rather than fear. Similarly the goods that are injured in the act of professing false opinions include the clear knowledge of the truth, the public recognition of its value, and the integrity of a certain pattern of conduct, a pattern that depends on right judgment rather than error. By suppressing rape we would be trying to protect the first set of goods; by suppressing the profession of false opinions, the latter.

And so it is with every case. People may not agree about what is good and what is evil; or they may be mistaken about what is good and what is evil. They may even call evil good, and good, evil. But every time someone wants to suppress something, we can be sure he is attempting to prevent what he thinks, rightly or wrongly, to be evil; alternately, to protect something he thinks, rightly or wrongly, to be good.

Why Tolerate An Evil, Or Put Up With An Injury To A Good?
…the real reason that we sometimes tolerate evils or put up with injuries to good becomes clear: We do it to prevent graver evils, or to advance greater goods. For there is a certain paradox in this business of suppressing evils: the act of suppression itself may give rise to evils. In fact it often does. Because this is so, we must always put the two evils, the evil that suppression engenders and the evil that it prevents, on a scale. When the evil that suppression engenders equals or exceeds the evil that it prevents, we ought to put up with the thing in question instead of suppressing it.

Paradox Is The Basis Of The Virtue Of Tolerance
The less paradoxical case is one in which the goods that are protected by suppression and those injured by suppression are different. For example, at the same time that we consider suppressing the profession of false opinions for the sake of truth, we might consider tolerating their profession for the sake of peace. Truth and peace are both goods, but of course they are not the same good. First we have to decide which of the two goods is of higher order, because that one trumps the other. If they are of the same order, then we must resort to judgments of degree. One need not suppose that judgment has mathematical precision; only that there is such a thing as judgment.

In the other, more paradoxical, case, the goods that are protected by suppression and the goods that are injured by suppression are the same. For example, at the same time that we consider suppressing the profession of false opinions for the sake of truth, we might consider tolerating their profession — at least their profession by rational argument — also for the sake of truth. On the side of suppression we might plead, “After all, the opinions in question are false, aren’t they? Then isn’t it a gain to get rid of them?” But on the side of toleration, we might ask, “But what better engine have we for honing truth than to try it against error in a fair fight?” In this case we don’t have to decide which of two goods is of higher order, because there is only one good at issue. But we do have to compare different hypotheses about what really promotes that good.

Each of these cases reveals a different element in the practice of tolerance: the first, in which the good that suppression protects is different from the one it injures, holds up right judgment in the protection of greater ends against lesser ends; the second, in which the goods protected by suppression and injured by suppression are the same, holds up right judgment in the protection of ends against mistaken means.

Considering Intolerance
…intolerance shows itself in two different ways, for we can err in either of two different directions. One way is by an excess of indulgence — putting up with something we should suppress. Let’s call this the error of soft-headedness. The other way that we can err is by a deficiency of indulgence — suppressing what we should put up with. Let’s call this the error of narrow-mindedness. Each of these two opposite errors is a deviation from true tolerance; each of them therefore has the same claim to the name of “intolerance.”

This may at first sound odd, because our language has so far reserved the word “intolerance” for narrow-mindedness. By contrast, consider courage, which is easier to talk about than tolerance. Although we do sometimes forget that rashness as well as cowardice is opposed to true courage, at least we aren’t burdened by a term, say “in-courage,” that could be applied only to cowardice and not to rashness. It seems that either we prefer the error of softheadedness to the error of narrowmindedness, or else we don’t realize that softheadedness is an error at all. But this is a deep confusion. It is just as much a deviation from true tolerance to put up with rape as it is to suppress the profession of false opinions advanced by rational argument.

A Summary of Possibilities Understanding True Tolerance
Thus far we have three possibilities: two kinds of wrong judgment in the protection of ends against mistaken means, and one kind of right judgment in the protection of ends against mistaken means. Expressed in this way, what we have are three points that appear to be floating in space. Of course there is a flaw in this mental diagram. The three need to be arranged along a continuum which is bounded by two extremes, the one excessive, the one deficient; the one softheaded, the other narrow-minded. Because just how indulgent we are toward something — just how much we put up with it, just where we fall between the two extremes — is a matter of degree. For instance, we might make some act a crime. Or we might shun those who do it, but without going so far as criminalization.

Or we might try to persuade the wrongdoers to change their ways without going so far as to shun them. Or we might ignore them. Or we might encourage them. We might even reward them. The truly tolerant point will always be somewhere between the two endpoints of the continuum, its location depending on the act in question and on the circumstances. But precisely where it is along this line will vary. The location of true tolerance can be determined only by the exercise of case-by-case judgment about the goods and the evils involved. Just as true courage is a mean between rashness and cravenness, and true friendliness is a mean between obsequiousness and boorishness, so true tolerance is a mean between soft-headedness and narrow-mindedness.

Three Propositions Concerning Tolerance
(1) Tolerance cannot be neutral about what is good, for its very purpose is to guard goods and avert evils.

(2) Tolerance is not a moral rule, a moral attitude, a moral feeling, or a moral capacity, but a moral virtue. Further, although tolerance is not one of the moral virtues that Aristotle discussed, it is a moral virtue of the Aristotelian type. For it is a mean between two opposed vices, one of them characterized by excess and the other by deficiency, its location to be discovered in the case-by-case exercise of practical wisdom.

(3) The circumstantial element in the practice of tolerance is right judgment in the protection of greater ends against lesser ends. This is no different from any exercise of practical wisdom, except insofar as its constant element, right judgment in the protection of ends against mistaken means, makes it special.

To be sure, this is only a formal answer to the question of what tolerance is. It directs us toward the exercise of practical wisdom — of well-founded judgment about the goods and evils involved in putting up with things. To give a substantive answer to the question of what tolerance is, however, would be no small matter; even if one had the necessary wisdom to do it, the space of a single article could never suffice.

Still, the merely formal definition of tolerance does do certain work for us. For instance:

The fact that tolerance is a moral virtue of the Aristotelian type tells us a great deal about its relation to the others. For those of us who wonder how, if at all, tolerance might be taught, this relation carries powerful implications.

In addition, religion presents the acid test for tolerance. For the loyalty that it concerns is ultimate; if tolerance cannot survive it, then tolerance cannot survive. However, the special role of tolerance in protecting ends against mistaken means gives us the one clue we need to unscrew this inscrutable.

All Moral Virtues Are Interdependent
All moral virtues — or at the very least those of the Aristotelian type — are interdependent. The classical demonstration of this truth, which derives from Thomas Aquinas, pivots on the relation of these virtues to practical wisdom. For every moral virtue depends on practical wisdom; hence if practical wisdom is impaired, then every moral virtue is impaired. But on the other side, practical wisdom depends on every moral virtue; hence if any moral virtue is impaired, practical wisdom is impaired. It follows, then, that through practical wisdom, a flaw in any moral virtue entails a flaw in every other.

Think, by way of illustration, of the virtue of courage. Courage involves a mean between fear and daring — as we said before, enough fear to avoid being rash, enough daring to avoid being craven. But because the right balance between fear and daring varies from case to case, the habit of courage must be informed by practical wisdom. But how, on the other side, does practical wisdom depend on every moral virtue? Again, consider courage. In thinking of its exercises, our imaginations usually go no further than pain and death. Aristotle himself thought no evil could be greater. But this is false: to be held in contempt is more fearful, and vice, if it is not, certainly ought to be.

To achieve practical wisdom, one needs enough fear to be vigilant of error and enough daring to risk it in pursuit of truth. To hold onto such wisdom, one needs enough fear to dread its loss and enough daring to risk contempt in its defense.

The Bicycle Wheel With A Damaged Spoke Analogy – Understanding Tolerance and Wisdom
The same relation exists between practical wisdom and every other moral virtue. Using a bicycle wheel as our model, the moral virtues are to spokes as practical wisdom is to the hub. We all know what happens when we use a bicycle wheel with a damaged spoke. Before long, the others give in, too, and the wheel gets more and more out of true. This is the classical thesis of the unity of the virtues. If one virtue bends, then every virtue bends.

Everyday experience corroborates this. We don’t even have to go through the hub, for without implying their equality we may say that all the moral virtues are connected at the rim. Tolerance is addled in the unfriendly man; friendship is addled in the dishonest man; honesty is addled in the unjust man; justice is addled in the loveless man; love is addled in the hopeless man; hope is addled in the impatient man; and patience is addled in the intolerant man. So the wheel is closed.

Thus tolerance is one of the moral virtues, and depends on all the rest of them. This has implications for the cultivation of tolerant citizens. How so? The unity of the virtues works in only one direction. That is, while impairment of one moral virtue entails impairment of all the rest, progress toward one moral virtue does not in and of itself entail progress toward all the rest. Think of the bicycle wheel again. Beginning with a perfect round, bending one spoke will soon bend all the others, too, but straightening one spoke of a crushed wheel will not simply pull the others back in true. In fact it may cause some spokes to bend even more. With damaged bicycle wheels, there are three alternatives. We can replace the wheel; we can take it apart, straighten each part separately, and put it back together; or we can leave it in one piece and straighten every part at once. With a soul, the first two alternatives are out of the question because we can neither replace it nor take it apart. The only alternative is to leave it in one piece and straighten every part at once.

Virtues Are Complex Dispositions Of Character, Deeply Ingrained Habits
Here is what follows: if all the virtues depend on one another, then tolerance cannot be taught unless all the rest are taught as well. We cannot compensate for the collapse of all our virtues by teaching tolerance and letting the rest go by, as some educators and social critics seem to think; the only cure for moral collapse is moral renewal, on all fronts simultaneously.

That is a hard adage. For even with crushed wheels, the simultaneous straightening of every spoke is hardly thinkable. With crushed souls — which is what we all are — we’ve no idea how our own efforts might bring it to pass. More than education, we need redemption. For virtues are complicated things: complex dispositions of character, deeply ingrained “habits,” by which one calls upon all of his passions and capacities of mind in just those ways that aid, prompt, focus, inform, and execute his moral choices instead of clouding them, misleading them, or obstructing their execution. This means that virtues cannot be imparted just by encouraging certain feelings or developing certain capacities; feelings and capacities are instruments of the virtues, not their realization.

What adds to the difficulty is that virtues are much more than readiness to follow the rules. There are, of course, some rules that are true in all circumstances. Murder is always wrong. But virtues are more like a fitness to distinguish true rules from false, and to choose rightly even where there are no rules or where the rules are no more than rules of thumb and seem to contradict each other. To be sure, if rules are applied judiciously, they can help to restrain the most obvious evils. And this in turn is bound to help in the nurture of virtue. But virtue cannot, as we have said, be taught simply by means of an exhaustive list of rules. Not only would such a list be endless, but the vicious would rebel before we even reached the second page.

In sum, we aren’t going to transmit the virtue of tolerance through a quick fix, like a Freshman Orientation Weekend; through a long fix, like a three-volume set of workplace sensitivity regulations; or through a false fix, like a Children of the Rainbow Curriculum. If Plato was right that justice is medicine for the soul, then such instrumentalities are its patent medicine: 5 percent poison, 10 percent flavoring, 85 percent intoxicating spirits, and pure delusion from the first to the last.

Religious Tolerance
What is religion anyway? Some people say that all religions depend on faith, while all secularisms depend on reason. But as Chesterton remarked in Orthodoxy, “It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.” Other people say that all religions believe in God, while all secularisms do not. But though Buddhists do not believe in God, yet we call Buddhism a religion.

Still others, like Tillich and Niebuhr, hold the mark of religion to be the practice of ultimate concern that orders all other concerns, unconditioned loyalty that trumps all other loyalties. Here we finally hit the mark. For Christians, the ultimate concern is the saving God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who has revealed himself in Messiah. Though Buddhists do not believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, much less in Messiah, they do have an ultimate concern — escape from suffering, inherent in desire, which, they hold, springs in turn from the illusion of existence.

But if religion is the practice of ultimate concern, then we have another problem. In the first place, even a secularism may be the practice of an ultimate concern. We acknowledge this, for instance, by calling Leninism a religion; similarly we say of a greedy man that “his god is money” and call misplaced devotion “idolatry.” In the second place, even among those secularisms that do not go so far as to identify ultimate concerns, none is without implications as to what could, or could not, count as an ultimate concern. John Stuart Mill could never decide which, if any, of the “permanent interests of man as a progressive being” was deserving of unconditioned loyalty. But one thing he was sure of, that Messiah was not among them.

What all this tells us is that “religious” and “secular” constitute a false dichotomy. We would do better with a trichotomy. An acknowledged religion like Christianity or Buddhism posits an ultimate concern and admits it. An unacknowledged religion like Leninism posits an ultimate concern but denies that so doing is religious. And an incomplete religion like Millianism has not finished ranking its concerns.

Incomplete religion can live only in the dreamworld of thought. In the light of day it must become complete or die. For in every life or way of life — whether lived simply, lived with the guidance of an ethical theory, or even lived in defiance of an ethical theory — given enough time, some concern eventually emerges as paramount. Eventually there is something to which every knee bows. This is the person’s god. As a matter of theory, one may deny that any concern deserves ultimacy. But as a matter of practice, no one escapes ceding ultimacy to something, whether it deserves ultimacy or not. Choices between incompatible urgencies are unavoidable. To prevent the rise of one or another of these urgencies to supremacy, a person would have to practice a truly Stoic discipline of contradiction — and in the end we would have to ask what urgency he served in so disordering himself. In short, one need not be conscious of his god, or even conscious that he has a god. One might think he has no god, or that he is “looking for” or “waiting for” a god. One may even be converted from one god to another. But one will have a god — or at least be on the road to having one.

With all of this ultimate concern floating about, how can there be religious tolerance at all? The answer is, there can’t be — unless one’s ultimate concern commands it, or at least allows it. For in this case and this case alone, tolerance toward other claimants to ultimacy is obedience to one’s own.

A Christian Example Of The Limits Of Tolerance
Thus St. Hilary of Poitiers: “God does not want unwilling worship, nor does He require a forced repentance.” The idea is that although God demands and deserves our unconditioned loyalty, He is of such a nature that nothing exacted by threats could truly serve Him. For He desires sons and daughters, not slaves: His love is inexorable and consumes everything contrary to itself. This is not the Kantian idea that choice is lovable but rather the Christian idea that love is chosen. I do not say that His supposed followers have always practiced the loving tolerance He demands. I do say that intolerance stands under His judgment.

But notice: the same consuming fire that for its own sake demands tolerance, for its own sake sets the limits to what is tolerated. If Hilary was right that God does not want unwilling worship, then Hilary’s tolerance must be absolute with respect to permitting belief in other gods. This does not mean permitting every act of service to these gods. Hilary must claim the right to say that there are evil services which nothing deserving of unconditioned loyalty could demand, and the correlative right to try to stop anyone who attempts them.

For instance, whatever claims of conscience Hilary may honor he cannot permit a person to plead them in justification of murder. “God told me to kill anyone who got in my way” cuts no ice with him; nor is the case different when other ultimate concerns, other gods, are pleaded in place of God. The Defense of the Revolution, The Greater God of the Whole, The Purity of the Race, the Hunger of Moloch, The Right to Control One’s Body — neither these nor any other claimants to ultimacy are accepted as justifying the sacrifice of innocents. “Even conceding your God-given right to be left alone by me in your honor to another god,” I imagine Hilary saying, “that right concerns your own soul only. I will not permit you, in its service, to inflict injuries which my own God abhors and forbids.”

The Culture Wars:Neutrality And Religious Tolerance
Where does all this leave us? The bottom line is that Neutrality is no more coherent in the matter of religious tolerance than it is in tolerance of any other sort. What you can tolerate pivots on your ultimate concern. Because different ultimate concerns ordain different zones of tolerance, social consensus is possible only at the points where these zones overlap. Note well: The greater the resemblance of contending concerns, the greater the overlap of their zones of tolerance. The less the resemblance of contending concerns, the less the overlap of their zones of tolerance. Should contending concerns become sufficiently unlike, their zones of tolerance no longer intersect at all. Consensus vanishes.

This, I believe, is our current trajectory. The embattled term “culture war” is not inflammatory; it is merely exact. And we can expect the war to grow worse. (DJ: If that is not prophetic, I don’t know what is.) The reason for this is that our various gods ordain not only different zones of tolerance, but different norms to regulate the dispute among themselves. True tolerance is not well tolerated. For although the God of some of the disputants ordains that they love and persuade their opponents, the gods of some of the others ordain no such thing.

Posted in Readings | Tagged All Moral Virtues Are Interdependent, Averting Evils Protecting Goods, Considering Intolerance, J. Budziszewski, Moral Neutrality, Moral Virtues, The Folly Of Neutralism, The Illusion of Moral Neutrality, The Virtue Of Tolerance, Three Propositions Concerning Tolerance, Tolerance, Why Tolerate An Evil | 1 Comment »

Against The World But For The World

November 30, 2009

The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

In a wonderful essay called Christ Without Culture, based on a lecture delivered at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama, the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus spoke to the relation of the Church to culture – borrowing on a title of a book by H Richard Niebuhr. Reading selections follow along with links to posts that show this is a familiar theme on Paying Attention To The Sky.

The Big Picture
To look at the big picture of the relationship between Christ and culture is, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a dizzying experience. Our most immediate cultural world is chiefly Europe and the Americas. We do well to keep in mind, however, that the majority of Christians, and the most expansive growth of the Christian movement, is today in the Global South, led by Catholics and those who are described as evangelicals and Pentecostals, although many indigenous movements do not fit easily into our familiar categories. Only God knows what world Christianity will look like a hundred years from now, and that is perhaps just as well.

Niebuhr’s Five Ways
Speaking of Christ and Culture will, for many, immediately bring to mind H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic book of that title. Recall his typology of the ways in which the relationship between Christ and culture, meaning Christianity and culture, has been understood over the course of Christian history. Niebuhr suggests that there are essentially five ways:

(1) Christ against culture,
(2) the Christ of culture,
(3) Christ above culture,
(4) Christ and culture in paradox, and
(5) Christ transforming culture.

While Niebuhr’s typology is suggestive and therefore useful, it is also seriously misleading on several scores. I confess that, after some years, I stopped using it in classroom teaching when I found that I was spending more time in arguing with Niebuhr than in being guided by him.

Nevertheless, Niebuhr is certainly right that the questions of Christ and culture have been a constant in Christian history from the apostolic era to the present, and will be until Our Lord’s promised return in glory. Barrels of ink have been spilt in trying to define what is meant by culture, and I do not presume to have the final word on the subject. By culture I mean the historical ambiance, the social context, of ideas and habits, within which the Church proclaims and lives the gospel of Christ. This includes the dominant moral assumptions, the widely held aspirations, and the beliefs and behaviors that characterize economic, political, religious, and educational life, along with the institutions that reflect and support those habits, beliefs, and behaviors. One might go so far as to say that culture is to us what water is to fish; it is more assumed than analyzed.

American Culture
There is an American culture. Although the phrase is hotly contested, we speak of “the American way of life.” In a society so vast and various as ours, there are many subcultures and even countercultures. Indeed, the proponents of unbounded pluralism would persuade us that there is no longer an American culture; that what was American culture has been displaced by a maddening mix of subcultures and each of us lives in one subculture or another. Those who feel marginalized, constrained, or oppressed by the prevalent patterns of life in America tend to think this is a very good thing.

People who have a more comprehensive appreciation of world history, however, along with those who have the experience of living in other and very different societies, know that there is such a thing as American culture. Precisely in its being a capacious and hospitable culture with a marked respect for pluralism, it is American culture. Although it includes many non-Europeans, American culture is in the main an extension and reconfiguration of European culture, which is to say it is part of the culture of the West. And today it is the strongest and most vibrant part of the cultural tradition of the West. The challenge of Islam in its militant form of Jihadism powerfully reinforces our awareness that we are part of the West and, however ambiguously so, the Christian West.

A Sixth Way: Christ Without Culture
In addition to the above-mentioned five ways of framing the Christianity-and-culture relationship suggested by H. Richard Niebuhr — Christ against culture, the Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture — we might add a sixth way to his typology: Christ without culture. Now, as a matter of historical and sociological fact, Christianity is never to be found apart from a cultural matrix; Christianity in all its forms is, as it is said, “enculturated.” In relation to a culture, the Church is both acting and being acted on, both shaping and being shaped. What then do I mean by suggesting this sixth type, Christ without culture? I mean that the Church — and here Church is broadly defined as the Christian movement through time — can at times adopt a way of being in the world that is deliberately indifferent to the culture of which it is part. In the “Christ without culture” model, that indifference results in the Church unconsciously adopting and thereby reinforcing, in the name of the gospel, patterns of culture that are incompatible with her gospel.

Saint Paul writes, “Be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Worrying about the cultural conformity of Christianity is nothing new. Such worries are a staple in the history of Christian thought, from the third-century Tertullian’s defiant question “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” to Kierkegaard’s withering critique of culturally domesticated discipleship, to Karl Barth’s emphatic Nein! thrown in the face of the Kulturprotestantismus that was the form taken by the “Christ of culture” model in liberal Protestantism. And, of course, there are today in America forms of principled nonconformity finding expression among both left-wing and right-wing Christians who would revive, at least in theological and moral rhetoric, a “Christ against culture” model, meaning most specifically Christ against American culture.

Religion Is A Bull Market
If the subject of the future of Christianity is reformulated as the future of religion in this society and the world, there is, from a historical and sociological perspective, nothing to worry about. For as far as one can see into the future, religion is a bull market. In America, where more than 90 percent of the people say they believe in God and well over 80 percent claim to be Christians of one sort of another, Christianity is a bull market. We can debate until the wee hours of the morning whether this is “authentic” or “biblical” or “orthodox” Christianity, but the fact is that this is the form — composed of myriad forms — of the Christian movement in our time and place.

Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, is a bull market because it is now evident that homo religiosus, man in search of transcendent meaning, is irrepressible. The secularization theories that held sway over our high culture for three hundred years, ever since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, have been falsified by the very history to which they so confidently appealed. Or at least so it would seem. That form of Enlightenment rationalism confidently assumed the unstoppable progress of modernity. As people became more modern — meaning more enlightened and skeptical — religion would gradually wither away, or at least be confined to the sphere of privacy where it is hermetically sealed off and prevented from exercising cultural influence. In important respects, history is not turning out that way. I have already mentioned the explosive growth of Christianity in the Global South. When China really opens up, it may seem that we are witnessing the fulfillment of Pope John Paul II’s vision of the twenty-first century as “the springtime of world evangelization.” And then there are other forms of religious resurgence, such as the newly assertive Islam mentioned earlier.

If one is inclined to put it in vulgar terms, one might say that this is a good time to be in the religion business. And yet the Enlightenment prognosis of secularization may not be falsified in its entirety. While religion is certainly not withering away, one may wonder whether, in its very flourishing, it is fulfilling the second part of the prognosis; namely, that the “Christ without culture” model is impotent, and quite prosperously happy in its impotence, when it comes to exercising cultural influence. In our society, there is a greater awareness of the public influence of religion than was the case more than twenty years ago when I published The Naked Public Square. But that awareness is almost entirely centered on the political influence of religious voters and activists, leading to alarmist cries of a threatening theocracy. At the risk of generalization, I think it fair to say that Christianity in America is not challenging the “habits of the heart” and “habits of the mind” that dominate American culture, meaning both the so-called high culture and the popular culture.

Exploiting Habits of the Heart and Mind
On the contrary, some of the more flourishing forms of Christianity not only do not challenge those habits; they exhibit a wondrous capacity to exploit them, and thus to reinforce them. Preachers of self-esteem and the gospel of happiness and prosperity uncritically accept the debased and pervasive notion that unhappiness and discontent with one’s circumstance in life is a disease; they would lead us to believe that self-criticism, along with its inevitably depressing discoveries, is a dangerous indulgence. The entrepreneurial spirit has built empires of Christian books, Christian music, and entertainment mislabeled as worship, all of which creates the delusion of living in a vibrant Christian subculture that is, in fact, a mirror of the habits of heart and mind that its participants think they are challenging — or at least escaping. As everything goes better with Coke, so everything goes better with Jesus, and, if that doesn’t work, there is always Prozac.

A False Evangelism
The fact that such religious enterprise presents itself as “evangelization” should not mislead us. Despite all the talk about a religious resurgence or revival, the percentage of the population characterized by a disciplined commitment to Christ, however that might be described, and by active engagement in Christian service to the Church and the world has not grown appreciably. At least I have seen no evidence to that effect. Rather, religious entrepreneurs are increasingly competing for niche markets within a stable population that prefers religion to Prozac, or prefers their Prozac with a panache of religion.

I do not wish to paint too grim a picture. There is, to be sure, the undeniable reality of the culture wars. There are Christians not only voting their moral convictions but, especially with respect to the conflict between the culture of life and the culture of death, making truth claims and advancing arguments in terms of public reason aimed at engaging the centers of cultural influence. For instance, there is the Evangelicals and Catholics Together statement issued last fall, “That They May Have Life.” That is a welcome exception, but it is an exception.

A Stealth Christian Challenge?
The centers of cultural influence in this country do not recognize that they are being challenged by Christians, except for the allegedly theocratic challenge in electoral politics. They do not recognize that they are being intellectually, conceptually, and culturally challenged, in largest part because Christians are not persuasively articulating such a challenge. Their complaint is that Christians are trying to “impose their values” on them. They do not understand that we want to engage them in a civil argument about the possibility of moral truth, about what kind of people we are and should aspire to be, and therefore about how we ought to order our life together. They do not understand that because so few Christians understand and attempt to practice such engagement.

The Church Proposes
Engagement is very different from imposing one’s understanding of the truth on others. In his encyclical Redemptoris Missio (The Mission of the Redeemer), John Paul II said, “The Church imposes nothing; she only proposes.” But what she proposes she believes to be truth. She proposes as a lover to the beloved, reflecting as she does the words of John 3:16 that “God so loved the world.” She proposes persistently, persuasively, and winsomely. Unlike an imposition, a proposal is not a conversation stopper but a conversation starter.

The Disenchanted World
Of course, it is true that many people will reject the proposal, and many will simply refuse to be engaged by it. They simply know that, no matter how winsomely proposed, the conversation with Christianity is but a cunningly disguised threat of imposition on their freedom. Their default position, so to speak, is one of methodological, if not metaphysical, atheism. Any reference to God or transcendent truth, any proposal associated with religion, and especially any proposal associated with Christianity is a threat to the autonomous self and to the achievements of a rigorously secularist modernity. They live in what Max Weber called “a disenchanted world,” and they are determined to keep it that way.

This is a mindset powerfully influential in our culture. Karl Marx spoke of those who control the commanding heights of economies, and so we may speak of those who control the commanding heights of culture. Even though they may be a minority of the population, they succeed in presenting themselves as “the mainstream” through their control of powerful institutions in the media, in entertainment, in the arbitration of literary tastes, in the great research universities and professional associations, and in the worlds of business and advertising that seek the approval of those who control the commanding heights of culture.

An Aside
(DJ: Elsewhere I have borrowed a conception of G. K Chesterton’s and called this mindset The Diabolists Among Us. In fact the inaugural post of Paying Attention To The Sky was written in support of Judea Pearl and railed against what I was calling an Age of Detached Tenderness – all part of the same phenomena.)

A Minority of Diabolists
It is necessary but not sufficient to alert them to the fact that they are a minority by defeating them in electoral politics. Yet such alerts intensify their alarm that “The theocrats are coming!” They are thus reinforced in their determination to resist what they view as a populist uprising against the hegemony of their enlightened ways. On many questions pertinent to the right ordering of our public life, Christians view those who control the commanding heights of culture as political opponents, and they typically are that. While we view them as political opponents and engage them in fair battle, we must not view them personally as our enemies. Many of them may view us that way, because, for many of them, politics is the name of the game. It is the only game in town. But we know, or we should know, that politics is not enough.

Christ-Without-Culture Christians
The great contest is over the culture, the guiding ideas and habits of mind and heart that inform the way we understand the world and our place in it. Christians who, knowingly or unknowingly, embrace the model of “Christ without culture” are captive to the culture as defined by those who control its commanding heights. They are not only captive to it but are complicit in it. Their entrepreneurial success in building religious empires by exploiting the niche markets of the Christian subculture leaves the commanding heights untouched, unchallenged, unengaged.

Cultivating Christian Culture in the Catacombs
Christianity does indeed have its own culture, its own intellectual tradition, its own liturgy and songs, its own moral teachings and distinctive ways of life, both personal and communal. The Church must carefully cultivate that culture and, in times of severe persecution, cultivate it, if need be, in the catacombs. (Fr. Barron refers to this same thought here.) But that is not our time in America, although there are Christians who, embracing the model of “Christ against culture,” invite us to take refuge in the catacombs of their own imagining.

Against The World But For The World
A rich ecclesial culture, a distinctively Christian way of being in the world, sometimes finds itself positioned against the world as the world is defined by those who are hostile to the influence of the Church. But even when the Church is against the world, she is against the world for the world. “The Church imposes nothing; she only proposes.” In season and out, whether the response is sympathetic or hostile, she proposes what Saint Paul at the end of I Corinthians 12 calls “a more excellent way.” The way proposed is not so much a message as a person, the One who is the way, the truth, and the life. The Second Vatican Council says that Jesus Christ is not only the revelation of God to man but the revelation of man to himself. Those words of Gaudium et Spes were insistently repeated in the pontificate of John Paul the Great and have a prominent place in the teaching of Benedict XVI.

The Contentments of Subculture
The Christian proposal of a more excellent way is not just one option among others, although it must be freely chosen. Some years ago, in conversation with a prominent Anglican bishop in Britain, I asked how he would define the mission of the Church of England. After a pause for thought, he said, “I suppose I would say that the mission, so to speak, is to maintain the religious option for those who might be interested.” Needless to say, those who control the commanding heights of British culture do not feel threatened by that understanding of the Christian mission.

While religion flourishes here in America, it is largely of the Christ-without-culture variety. What in recent decades have been the distinctively Christian contributions that deserve to command the attention of the cultural gatekeepers of America? In literature and the arts, in music and entertainment, in political philosophy and the humanities, such contributions are few and far between. Distinctively Christian cultural products typically cater to the Christian market. They are not proposals of a more excellent way for American culture. Recently the Fox movie studio announced that it was inaugurating a new series of films under the label of FoxFaith. Does this indicate a growing Christian influence in our public culture? Perhaps so, but it is much more obviously a commonsensical capitalist decision to take advantage of the niche market that is the Christian subculture.

The “Christ without culture” model induces contentment with being a subculture. But, as I have suggested, Christianity that is indifferent to its cultural context is captive to its cultural context. Indeed, it reinforces the cultural definitions to which it is captive. Nowhere is this so evident as in the ready Christian acceptance of the cultural dogma that religion is essentially a private matter of spiritual experience. Against that assumption, we must insist that Christian faith is intensely personal but never private. The Christian gospel is an emphatically public proposal about the nature of the world and our place in it.

Religion As Private And Intensely Subjective
Many Christians, possibly most Christians, have uncritically accepted the dichotomy between public and private, between fact and value, between knowledge and meaning. These dichotomies are deeply entrenched in American religion and culture and are closely associated with what is often described, and frequently decried, as American individualism. In what is called our high culture, this understanding of religion as private and intensely subjective was influentially depicted a hundred years ago in William James’ classic work, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Early on in that work, James defines religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” In this understanding, church, community, doctrine, tradition, morality — all of these are secondary and, as often as not, hindrances to genuine religion. Genuine religion is subjective experience, and subjective experience in solitude.

Harold Bloom And “A Religion Of The Self”
Many years later, in 1992, the influential literary critic Harold Bloom published The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. The post-Christian nation, says Bloom, emerged a long time ago and is exemplified in Ralph Waldo Emerson, who declared: “It is by yourself without ambassador that God speaks to you… It is God in you that responds to God without.” Bloom, rather loosely, calls the American religion “gnosticism,” the belief that each individual possesses a divine spark and salvation consists in the liberation of that divine spark from the body and from the particularities of its constraints in history and cultural space. Bloom writes:

Unlike most countries, we have no overt national religion; but a partly concealed one has been developing among us for two centuries now. It is almost purely experiential, and despite its insistences [to the contrary], it is scarcely Christian in any traditional way. A religion of the self burgeons, under many names, and seeks to know its own inwardness, in isolation. What the American self has found, since about 1800, is its own freedom — from the world, from time, from other selves.

Of course, Harold Bloom overstates his case. It is not sufficient, however, to point out that there are innumerable ministries in the several Christian communities that insist on the objectivity of truth, the authority of Scripture and Spirit-guided interpretation, the ecclesial means of grace, and the reality of moral good and evil. But in preferring such religion, Bloom might respond, one is still exercising a private preference. One’s preferred religion may be conservative or liberal, orthodox or squishy, but the point is that it is my religion, certified and secured by the fact that it is mine. By the privilege of privacy, it cannot be publicly questioned, and it is forbidden to publicly question the preferred beliefs of others.

“Gnosticism” may not be the right word for it, but it is what Bloom calls a religion of the self. It is a seductive way of accommodating differences by declaring a truce in contentions over truth. The “Christ without culture” model would seem to produce a circumstance in which religion is impervious to culture and culture is impervious to religion. But, in fact, it results in religion’s acquiescing in the culture’s demand that it confine itself to the sphere of privacy, William James’ radically individualistic solitude, even if that solitude is celebrated in a five-thousand-seat auditorium of a megachurch.

The Church’s Message And Mission

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us. With all wisdom and insight he has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory.
Ephesians 1:3-14

It was not so in the apostolic period, as witness Saint Paul’s opening hymn in the letter to the Ephesians, his depiction of cosmic transformation in Romans 8 and his anticipation in Philippians 2 of every knee bowed and every tongue confessing Jesus Christ as Lord. It was not so in the patristic era when Justin Martyr proposed Christianity not as a more satisfying religion among other religions but as “the true philosophy.” It was not so with Saint Augustine, who proposed in City of God that the story of the gospel is nothing less than the story of the world. Were Christianity what a man does with his solitude, there would be no martyrs. In every vibrant period of the Church’s life, it has been understood that her message and mission are based on public events, are advanced by public argument, and invite public response.

A Public Proposal Inhibited And Stifled By Christians
“The Church imposes nothing; she only proposes.” For the past three hundred years, that public proposal has been inhibited and stifled by Christians who acquiesced in the Enlightenment demand that religion, if it is to survive at all, confine itself to the closet of subjectivity. In America, that acquiescence was embraced as a virtue. The freedom of religion was purchased at the price of agreeing to the public irrelevance of religion. Religious empires were constructed and flourish today by catering to private salvation and the spiritualities of solitude.

Pope Benedict XVI’s Challenge
Today the Enlightenment settlement that imposed a public truce with respect to the truths that really matter, divorcing fact from value, knowledge from meaning, and faith from reason, is being boldly challenged. Whatever one may think of papal authority, on the world-historical stage that challenge is being pressed most boldly, even audaciously, by the bishop of Rome. That was the real significance of Pope Benedict’s lecture at Regensburg University on September 12. The media excitement focused on a few words about Islam. And he did say that the use of violence to impose religion is to act against reason, and to act against reason is to act against the nature of God, for God has revealed himself as logos — the word and the reason by which all came to be and in which all coheres.

But the bulk of the Regensburg address was directed to Christian intellectuals who, in the name of “de-Hellenizing” Christianity, pit biblical faith against the great synthesis of faith and reason achieved over the centuries of the Christian intellectual tradition. At Regensburg and elsewhere, Benedict has challenged also non-Christian intellectuals to free themselves from the truncated and stifling definition of rationality imposed by the Enlightenment. It is not reasonable, he argues with great intellectual sophistication, to hold that atheism or agnosticism is the default position of rationality. Nor, he insists, can the undoubted achievements of modernity be sustained without reference to transcendent truth.

Living As Though God Does Exist
Since we cannot prove beyond all reasonable doubt that God is, the rational position is not to live as though God does not exist but to live as though God does exist. Here he is urging a form of Pascal’s wager. As you remember, the seventeenth-century genius Blaise Pascal proposed that it is more rational, in view of the benefits to be gained, to believe that God exists than to believe he does not exist. If the believer turns out to be wrong, he has lost what he had hoped for; if the nonbeliever turns out to be wrong, he has lost, quite simply and catastrophically, everything, including life eternal. In short, what is at stake is the infinite or the finite, and there is no commensurability between the infinite and the finite. C.S. Lewis rephrased Pascal’s wager this way: “Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and, if true, is of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.”

Rejecting “Christ Without Culture”
In these and many other ways, the case is advanced that Christianity is a public proposal within the realm of authentically public discourse, and requiring decisions of immeasurable consequences, both personal and cultural. In different times and in different places, the Church has understood its relationship to culture in different ways. There is Christ against culture, the Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in paradox, and Christ transforming culture. As I said, H. Richard Niebuhr’s useful taxonomy can be expanded and modified. The one model that is not possible, except by deluding ourselves and betraying the Church’s proposal to the world, is Christ without culture.

Posted in Readings | Tagged A False Evangelism, C. S. Lewis, Christ Without Culture, Christ-Without-Culture Christians, Ephesians 1:3-14, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, H Richard Niebuhr, Harold Bloom And “A Religion Of The Self”, Living As Though God Does Exist, Pope Benedict XVI’s, Pope Benedict's lecture at Regensburg, Pope John Paul II, Redemptoris Missio, Religion As Private And Intensely Subjective, Saint Paul, The Church Proposes, The Church’s Message And Mission, The Contentments of Subculture, The Disenchanted World | Leave a Comment »

Abortion And The Catechism

November 26, 2009

I enjoy many of the people I meet online at various Catholic Forums. One fellow the other day was launching a debate between Catholics on abortion using just the references in the Catechism. Well this is what he was using (I looked them all up, along with their references). While there are many statements by various Catholics about abortion, this is what you might call the Church’s teaching as demonstrated in the modern Catechism. Some of it is based on biblical references, others on the Didache, still others on various Church documents.

One of the interesting upshots of the debate between pro-choice and pro-life Catholics is how both the former and latter accept Church teaching (if they didn’t they would not be Catholic) but differ on legal or biological interpretations. I realize that is a broad statement to make and a raft of exceptions ensue; but it captures something nevertheless.

2270 Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you. Jeremiah 1:5.

My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth. Psalms 139:15

2271 Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law:

You shall not kill the embryo by abortion and shall not cause the newborn to perish. Didache 2, 2:Sch 248, 148.

God, the Lord of life, has entrusted to men the noble mission of safeguarding life, and men must carry it out in a manner worthy of themselves. Life must be protected with the utmost care from the moment of conception: abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes. Gaudium in Spes 51:3

2272 Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life. “A person who procures a completed abortion incurs excommunication latae sententiae,” “by the very commission of the offense,” and subject to the conditions provided by Canon Law. The Church does not thereby intend to restrict the scope of mercy. Rather, she makes clear the gravity of the crime committed, the irreparable harm done to the innocent who is put to death, as well as to the parents and the whole of society.

2273 The inalienable right to life of every innocent human individual is a constitutive element of a civil society and its legislation:

“The inalienable rights of the person must be recognized and respected by civil society and the political authority. These human rights depend neither on single individuals nor on parents; nor do they represent a concession made by society and the state; they belong to human nature and are inherent in the person by virtue of the creative act from which the person took his origin. Among such fundamental rights one should mention in this regard every human being’s right to life and physical integrity from the moment of conception until death.” Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Donum Vitae III

“The moment a positive law deprives a category of human beings of the protection which civil legislation ought to accord them, the state is denying the equality of all before the law. When the state does not place its power at the service of the rights of each citizen, and in particular of the more vulnerable, the very foundations of a state based on law are undermined. . . . As a consequence of the respect and protection which must be ensured for the unborn child from the moment of conception, the law must provide appropriate penal sanctions for every deliberate violation of the child’s rights.” Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Donum Vitae III

2274 Since it must be treated from conception as a person, the embryo must be defended in its integrity, cared for, and healed, as far as possible, like any other human being.

Prenatal diagnosis is morally licit, “if it respects the life and integrity of the embryo and the human fetus and is directed toward its safe guarding or healing as an individual…. It is gravely opposed to the moral law when this is done with the thought of possibly inducing an abortion, depending upon the results: a diagnosis must not be the equivalent of a death sentence.” Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Donum Vitae I, 2

2275 “One must hold as licit procedures carried out on the human embryo which respect the life and integrity of the embryo and do not involve disproportionate risks for it, but are directed toward its healing the improvement of its condition of health, or its individual survival.”

“It is immoral to produce human embryos intended for exploitation as disposable biological material.” Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Donum Vitae I, 5.

“Certain attempts to influence chromosomic or genetic inheritance are not therapeutic but are aimed at producing human beings selected according to sex or other predetermined qualities. Such manipulations are contrary to the personal dignity of the human being and his integrity and identity” which are unique and unrepeatable. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Donum Vitae I, 6

2319 Every human life, from the moment of conception until death, is sacred because the human person has been willed for its own sake in the image and likeness of the living and holy God.

2322 From its conception, the child has the right to life. Direct abortion, that is, abortion willed as an end or as a means, is a “criminal” practice (Gaudium in Spes 27:3), gravely contrary to the moral law. The Church imposes the canonical penalty of excommunication for this crime against human life.

2323 Because it should be treated as a person from conception, the embryo must be defended in its integrity, cared for, and healed like every other human being.

Posted in Readings | Tagged Catechism of the Catholic Church, pro-choice Catholics, pro-life Catholics | Leave a Comment »

An Introduction to Dante Alighieri

November 25, 2009

Dante Alighieri by Andrea del Castagno

Robert Hollander is Professor of European Literature at Princeton University and Director of the Princeton Dante Project, which can be found here. The following are selections from an essay he wrote in 2002 titled Dante: A Party of One

His Place in History
Rarely has a writer left a more indelible mark — and under less favoring circumstances — than Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). His major work is considered one of the crowning achievements of human expression. It lives even today, nearly seven hundred years after its making, as one of the two or three greatest poems ever written.

Exile and Unfulfilled Political Hopes
The author of the Divine Comedy was born in Florence into a family of minor nobility, Guelph in its political alignment and thus siding with the popes in the city’s political tensions (as opposed to Ghibellines, at the time mainly banished from Florence, who favored the imperial cause). The struggle between the two largest political forces in medieval Europe had not abated in Dante’s time.

Dante was significantly involved in politics, eventually holding office as one of Florence’s six Priors in 1300. Within a year, perhaps after an encounter with Pope Boniface VIII in 1301 — Dante may have been part of a political mission to the Holy See — he was sent into exile when an opposing Guelph faction in Florence took over the city. Refusing the humiliating compromises offered by his enemies, Dante saw his exile eventually become permanent. After 1302 he never again entered his native city, at that time one of the most wealthy, beautiful, and important urban centers in the Western world. The exile was a difficult period, and we know little of his itinerary around northern Italy during the last twenty years of his life. He enjoyed two lengthy sojourns at the court of the Scaligeri, in Verona (ca. 1303-06 and 1312-18). Upon his return from a political mission to Venice on behalf of that city’s ruler, he died in Ravenna of malarial fever in September 1321.

Beatrice
If his life seems fairly unremarkable except for the bitterness of the exile and of his unfulfilled political hopes, it resulted in an overpowering single work, the Comedy (which was not known as The Divine Comedy until 1555, an apt editorial intervention that has remained with the poem to this day). His earlier literary activity is also of considerable interest. Perhaps as early as 1293 he had composed a work called Vita nuova (“New Life”), in which he assembled thirty-one poems written during the previous ten years, many of which celebrated a woman named Beatrice.

Beatrice and the Presence of Christ
There is still some debate as to the actuality of this “relationship,” which in the telling seems to have been totally devoid of sexual concourse, no matter how defined. Suffice it to say that the pretext of the work is that the miraculous woman it celebrates was a flesh-and-blood Florentine woman. What is most remarkable about Vita nuova is that it contrives, in ways that remain securely on the side of calculated understatement, to make the reader understand that Dante’s lady is to be understood as directly, and miraculously, related to the physical and noumenal presence of Christ.

Beatrice is a “nine,” he once explains, because the root of nine is three and that is the number of the Holy Trinity. While the poems themselves may on occasion hint at this equation, the prose, which controls them and our understanding of them, eventually serves to release a secret: loving Beatrice was his way of finding Christ in his “new life” (a phrase that can hardly fail to bring to mind Paul’s frequent insistence on our conversion from the old way of being to the new). The figure of Beatrice was probably derived indirectly from the life of St. Francis, who was thought to have offered his followers as close an approximation of an experience of the nearness of Jesus as anyone since apostolic times had ever felt. Vita nuova is the first work in the history of Western writing to take the form of commentary on one’s own poems. In Dante’s startling decision to frame the work in this manner, we find the demon of experiment that always drove him. Indeed, De vulgari Eloquentia (Concerning Eloquence in the Vernacular), one of the two succeeding unfinished works that he began while in exile, begins by claiming, rather presumptuously but altogether accurately, that no one had ever before written about the rules governing writing in the vernacular. It was written in Latin, but argued that vernacular poetry, which had only begun in Italy 150 years before with the poems of St. Francis, was worthy of all the consideration previously bestowed on Latin alone. This polemical analysis was in Latin because Dante knew that to beat those who exalted Latin, and scorned all who wrote in the “vulgar” Italian, he had to join them — at least when composing a work on such a subject.

Earlier Work
At about the same time (ca. 1304-1307) Dante also completed the first four books of what was to have been a fifteen-book encyclopedic treatise, written in the vernacular, on the nature of philosophizing. Called Il Convivio (“The Banquet”), it takes the Consolation of Philosophy of Boethius as its model. Although at the conclusion of Vita nuova Dante had promised to write still more about Beatrice, in Convivio he has a new and “allegorical” beloved, the Lady Philosophy. Convivio, like Vita nuova, is cast in the form of commentary on poems by its author. The poems in this case were canzoni, or odes, long lyrics of considerable artifice, which in De vulgari Eloquentia Dante claimed to be the highest possible literary form in the vernacular, lofty (“tragic” is Dante’s word for this) and serious.

The fifteen “treatises” (trattati) of the work, after an introductory treatise that was to function as introduction to the whole, were each to comment on a canzone. The first two of the three succeeding treatises that Dante completed deal with his new love, Philosophy. Dante says that he sought “silver” (consolation) after the death of Beatrice but found “gold” instead in the counsels of philosophy, a “lady” better suited to the more mature man that he now was. These two unfinished works both contravene Vita nuova‘s celebration of Beatrice as the most valuable teacher of a fully charitable love that the writer could know. It is thus understandable that the Comedy, which presents Beatrice as giving essential meaning to Dante’s life and work, in turn contradicts things said in the two abandoned texts, while essentially presenting Vita nuova as a necessary and praiseworthy beginning.

The fourth and last treatise of Convivio that Dante completed moves in more political directions. Although a Guelph by family ties, early disposition, and Florentine political allegiances, Dante in this treatise turns in the direction of empire. He addresses the question of Rome and its authority as imperial seat. The question is presented as part of a larger discussion on the nature of philosophical and imperial authority, yet it is clear that the imperial part of the argument is not necessary to its main thrust, as a result standing out all the more.

This matter will resurface in the first and second cantos of Inferno, where state and church are seen as equally important, and then as the central concern of his later essay, Monarchia. Monarchia is one of Dante’s few forays into explicitly political concerns. Written in Latin to guarantee the readership of the “cultural elite” he intends to engage, probably around 1317, it offers a ringing attack upon the hierocratic position so urgently put forward by many after Pope Gregory VII. According to Dante, God created Rome to be the imperial leader of the secular world. Dante’s concept of “monarchy” (synonymous with “empire”) as a current possibility, however, exists only as an ideal. Except for its Roman model, it refers to few precise past and no existing temporal states, but to the divinely sanctioned secular government of all Europe that should be the essential ordering force of human affairs in this world.

The Comedy: Not A Summa Of Medieval Thought
It is important in this respect to note the dangers of taking the Comedy as a sort of summa of medieval thought. While one cannot deny that it at least appears to engage almost every subject that seized the imagination of the day, it is also true that to take Dante as the voice of late medieval Christendom is to fail to observe his heterodoxy and, one should add, his genius. Perhaps Dante’s strategic advantage lay in his ability to be completely himself, unworried should he oppose generally held beliefs, while also presenting his own ideas as though they were normative. A reader of the Comedy unversed in medieval debates and unaware of Dante’s idiosyncratic notions about them is easily persuaded that this work indeed represents the late middle ages in nuce (in a nutshell). In fact, Dante finds something to quarrel with in the positions put forward by almost every recognized authority, even those he respects the most, from Aristotle (whom he honors perhaps more than any other thinker) to Aquinas (with whom he fights mainly friendly but nonetheless frequent little battles).

The Comedy was probably composed between 1307 and 1321. We can only begin to imagine how its germinal idea was conceived. It probably took no more than an instant for Cervantes to have the simple, fruitful idea that produced Don Quixote: take a middle-aged, down-at-the-heels landowner, fill his brain with the entire tradition of chivalric romance, and then have him ride forth into the world as a knight errant. In the case of Dante’s Comedy, we likely read the result of a similar sudden inspiration, one based on a perhaps even less promising pretext: take a not-very-successful (though respected), soon-to-be-exiled civic leader and poet, and send him off to the afterworld for a week.

The Comedy: A Break From Previous Work
We shall never know what brought the work to life in Dante’s mind, his first awareness of a plan. But we can see how largely the Comedy departs from his previous work, despite its thematic and stylistic links to his literary past. Vita nuova, De vulgari Eloquentia, and Convivio all put prose to the service of controlling and explaining verse. The Comedy sticks to verse. And almost everything about it is new.

To begin with, the Comedy‘s verse form (terza rima) is an innovation. “Loosing and binding,” in the words of Erich Auerbach, its rhyme scheme (aba bcb cdc . . . yzyz) is ideal for propelling a rhymed narrative. No one had written in the form before Dante. Perhaps surprisingly, no later writers of epic in Italian (e.g., Boiardo, Ariosto, Tasso) would follow him.

Dante calls each of the one hundred divisions of the work a “canto,” or “song.” This word in this context is so singular and foreign that many early commentators didn’t “get it,” and referred to the canti as “chapters,” a more usual and perhaps more dignified way to indicate the parts of a “serious” whole. Dante’s word seems to reflect epic precedents (Virgil too was a “singer”: “Arma virumque cano,” begins the Aeneid) as well as his pride in his own vernacular. In addition, the word he eventually chooses for the three large divisions of the poem, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso-cantica-had never been used for such a purpose before him. Its resonance with the Canticle of Canticles is probably not coincidental.

The Choice of Virgil
The choice of guide is dramatic and challenging: Virgil, the greatest of the Latin poets (for Dante and many contemporary judges). What is a pagan, damned to Limbo forever for his lack of faith, doing as guide in a Christian poem? This was a bold decision. As has frequently been pointed out, Virgil’s example was seminal for many aspects of Dante’s poetic strategies in the Comedy: to write a poem that prominently features a visit to the underworld (Dante could not read Homer’s texts, though he did know of them, which explains why he can behave as though Virgil were uniquely qualified to serve as his model); that celebrates the Roman concept of political order as exemplified in the empire; and that is narrated by a poet who has been lent prophetic powers.

In addition, and perhaps most importantly, Virgil was a poet who wrote poetry as history, and Dante followed this example as well. As the work of Ulrich Leo demonstrated some years ago, Dante had been rereading the texts of Virgil and the other Latin writers of “epic” (Statius, Lucan, and Ovid) as he was finishing the fourth and last book of Convivio. We can say, then, that Dante chose Virgil as his guide because Virgil was his guide. Dante seems to be indicating that rereading the pagan Virgil redirected his attention to his good beginning as the Christian poet of Beatrice, the role to which he now returns in the Comedy.

The Veracity Of The Comedy’s Narrative
Before Dante no one had dared to write a poem that claimed for itself revealed truth. And one can understand why. The question of the veracity of the Comedy‘s narrative is never far from its readers’ attention. In the first invocation of the poem (Inf. II, 7), the poet asks for the aid of the Muses (the rules of grammar and rhetoric?) and of alto ingegno (“lofty genius” — either, somewhat implausibly, the poet’s own capacities, or, more probably but also rather disconcertingly, that of a higher Power). What follows immediately is a claim (and not an “invocation”) for the ability of the poet’s memory to set forth an exact record of his week-long visionary journey: “O mente, che scrivesti ciò ch’io vidi / qui si parrà la tua nobilitate“ (O memory, that set down what I saw, here shall your worth be shown-II, 8-9). Dante here seems to acknowledge his need for two kinds of external assistance, that conferred by what one can learn about poetic discourse (figures of speech, rhetorical devices, rhymes, etc.), and that conferred by God so that the poet can conceive the meaning of his experience.

Not A Mere Fiction
Dante’s claims for the absolute veracity of the Comedy offend, one might say, only two classes of reader: believers and nonbelievers. In ways that would have deeply surprised and troubled St. Thomas, Dante assumed for himself the ability to write his poem using the same procedures that interpreters like Thomas believed God employed in dictating Scripture. This tactic provides one of the continuing debates in Dante criticism. To this day there is controversy over whether Dante actually wrote the “Letter to Cangrande,” whose author overtly claims that he wrote the Comedy making use of the four senses of Scripture, almost exactly as these are defined by St. Thomas near the beginning of the Summa (I, i, 10). Even if Dante did not write the epistle, the techniques of signifying in the poem nevertheless centrally reflect “God’s way of writing.”

From Dante’s first insistence that what is narrated as having occurred is to be treated as having actually occurred, it is clear he does not actually expect us to believe that the journey really took place. He does want us, though, to pay particular attention to the fact that he has claimed that it did. Here lies the central difference between the Comedy and more “standard” medieval allegorical visions (e.g., the Roman de la Rose, Brunetto Latini’s Tesoretto). Take the moment in Inferno XVI when Dante stakes the credibility of his entire comedía on his having seen the fabulous monster Geryon. In such moments, we may sense that the poet realizes that his reader will not grant for an instant that such things really have occurred, but will recognize the reason for which the poet must make the outrageous claim. Dante does not want his poem categorized as a mere fiction, like those castigated by Aquinas and other theologians who held that poets are in effect liars and have little to say that is epistemologically valid.

Just Another Lying Poet
In Inferno XXIX, Dante emphasizes this point by comparing counterfeiters, victims of a plague-like ailment in their eternal damnation, to those plague victims on the island of Aegina described by Ovid, who were replaced by “ant-people”– “secondo che i poeti hanno per fermo” (as the poets hold for certain). That dig in Ovid’s ribs-no one will (or should) believe what a lying poet tells-is a risky and amusing joke between us and Dante. For at heart we know that his sinners, as he portrays them, are as “fictive” as Ovid’s Myrmidons. Dante takes on Thomas’ objections by claiming total veracity for his poem as he smilingly capitulates to them: he is, after all, only another lying poet, but one who nonetheless claims to tell “the truth,” and indeed literal truth.

There are, to be sure, several moments in which he seems altogether serious about the truth claims made for his vision. Yet his careful (and often amusing) undercutting of their full impact makes the poem’s readers far more comfortable than they would be were such passages not present. They allow the poem to be utterly serious when its author wants it to be (one cannot imagine such playfulness being allowed in the climactic visions of Paradiso XXXIII), and they allow readers to think that Dante is at least as sane as they are. Dante, while as stern a moralizing poet as one is likely to find, is a surprisingly restrained visionary.

A final example of his witty playfulness about his role as prophetic seer is worth noting. In describing the six wings adorning each of the four biblical beasts representing the authors of the Gospels in Purgatorio XXIX, Dante assures us that their wings were six in number (Ezekiel’s cherubic creatures had only four [1:6]), that is, as many as are found in John’s description of the same creatures (Revelation 4:8). Verse 105 puts this in an arresting way: “Giovanni è meco e da lui si diparte“ (John sides with me, departing from him). No one but Dante would have made this statement in this way. “Here I follow John” would have been a more acceptable gesture for a poet to use in guaranteeing the truthfulness of his narrative. Not for Dante. Since the pretext of the poem is that he indeed saw all that he recounts as having seen, that experience, in good Thomistic procedure, is prior — he knows this by his senses. And so John is his witness, and not vice versa. It is an extraordinary moment.

The Time For Mercy And A Time For Justice
Nothing is more difficult for one who teaches this poem to students than to convince them that all of the damned souls, no matter how attractively they present their own cases, are to be seen as justly damned. The poem creates some of its drama from the tension that exists between the narrator’s view of events (in Inferno often represented by Virgil’s interpretive remarks) and that of the protagonist. What makes our task as readers difficult is that at some pivotal moments neither the narrator nor Virgil offers clear moral judgments. Instead, Dante uses irony to undercut the alluring words of sinners who present themselves as victims rather than as perpetrators of outrage in the eyes of God. Guido da Pisa’s gloss (to Inf. XX, 28-30) puts the matter succinctly: “But the suffering of the damned should move no one to compassion, as the Bible attests. And the reason for this is that the time for mercy is here in this world, while in the world to come there is time only for justice.”

If it was John Milton’s task in Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to men,” Dante before him had taken on the responsibility of showing that all that is found in this world and in the next is measured by justice. Everything in God is just; only in the mortal world of sin and death do we find injustice. And it is small wonder that Dante believes there are only few living in his time who will find salvation (Par. XXXII, 25-27). Words for “justice” and “just” recur frequently in the poem, the noun some thirty-five times, the adjective some thirty-six. If one were asked to epitomize the central concern of the Comedy in a single word, “justice” might represent the best choice.

An Insistence On God’s Justness
In the Inferno we see this insistence on God’s justness from the opening lines describing Hell proper, the inscription over the gate of Hell (III, 4): “Giustizia mosse il mio alto fattore“ (Justice moved my maker on high). If God is just, there can be absolutely no question concerning the justness of his judgments. All who are condemned to Hell are justly condemned. Thus, when the protagonist feels pity for some of the damned, we are meant to realize that he is at fault for doing so. This is perhaps the most crucial test of us as readers that the poem offers. If we sympathize with the damned, we follow a bad example. In such a view, the protagonist’s at times harsh reaction to various sinners, e.g., Filippo Argenti (canto VIII), Pope Nicholas III (canto XIX), Bocca degli Abati (canto XXXII), is not (even if it seems so to some contemporary readers) a sign of his falling into sinful attitudes himself, but proof of his righteous indignation as he learns to hate sin.

If some readers think that the protagonist is occasionally too zealous in his reactions to sinners, far more are of the opinion that his sympathetic responses to others correspond to those that we ourselves may legitimately feel. To be sure, Francesca da Rimini (canto V) is portrayed more sympathetically than Thaïs (canto XVIII), Ulysses (canto XXVI) than Mosca dei Lamberti (canto XXVIII), etc. Yet it also seems to some readers that Dante’s treatment of Francesca, Ulysses, and others asks us to put the question of damnation to one side, leaving us to admire their most pleasing human traits in a moral vacuum, as it were.

It is probably better to understand that we are never authorized by the poem to embrace such a view. If we are struck by Francesca’s courteous speech, we note that she is also in the habit of blaming others for her own difficulties; if we admire Farinata’s magnanimity, we also note that his soul contains no room for God; if we are wrung by Pier delle Vigne’s piteous narrative, we also consider that he has totally abandoned his allegiance to God for his belief in the power of his emperor; if we are moved by Brunetto Latini’s devotion to his pupil, we become aware that his view of Dante’s earthly mission has little of religion in it; if we are swept up in enthusiasm for the noble vigor of Ulysses, we eventually understand that he is maniacally egotistical; if we weep for Ugolino’s piteous paternal feelings, we finally understand that he, too, was centrally (and damnably) concerned with himself, even at the expense of his children.

Trusting His Readers
Dante’s innovative but risky technique was to trust us, his readers, with the responsibility for seizing upon the details in the narratives told by these sympathetic sinners in order to condemn them on the evidence that issues from their own mouths. It was indeed, as we can see from the many readers who fail to take note of this evidence, a perilous decision for him to have made. Yet we are given at least two clear indicators of the attitude that should be ours. Twice in Inferno figures from Heaven descend into Hell to further God’s purpose in sending Dante on his mission. Virgil tells of the coming of Beatrice to Limbo. She tells him, in no uncertain terms, that she feels nothing for the tribulations of the damned and cannot be harmed in any way by them or by the destructive agents of the place that contains them (Inf. II, 88-93). All she longs to do is to return to her seat in Paradise (Inf. II, 71). And when the angelic intercessor arrives to open the gates of Dis, slammed shut by the rebellious angels against Virgil, we are told that this benign presence has absolutely no interest in the situation of the damned or even of the living Dante. All he desires is to complete his mission and be done with such things (Inf. IX, 88, 100-103).

Such indicators should point us in the right direction. It is a continuing monument, both to the complexity of Dante’s poem and to some readers’ desire to turn it into a less morally determined text than it ultimately is, that so many of us have such difficulty wrestling with its moral implications. This is not to say that the poem is less because of its complexity, but precisely the opposite. Its greatness is reflected in its rich and full realization of the complicated nature of human behavior and of the difficulty of moral judgment for living mortals. It asks us to learn, as does the protagonist, as we proceed.

Each Of Us Reads His Own Dante
One tradition of deathbed utterance has it that Calderón’s last words were, “Dante, why were you so difficult?” Whether or not the anecdote is true, the lament is a fitting one. We might choose a different version of this question: “Dante, why were you so good?” His extraordinary gifts as poet-and these are the most salient aspects of what he has left behind-enable him to reach everyone who loves to watch or hear language do everything it can do. In this he is like Homer and Shakespeare. And, like them, he enjoys some of this power even when he is translated. He has the further ability to enter the hearts of nearly everyone: “Monarchists” read him their way; “Papists,” theirs.

For some conservative Catholics he is the authentic voice of the medieval Church; for many liberal atheists he is an authentic voice of human suffering and hope. Each of us reads his own Dante, and admires what he reads. How would Dante react, come back to experience it, to all our fuss over him? It seems reasonable to believe that, first of all, he would be pleased with the extraordinary amount of attention his work continues to gather. The poet who, with unbelievable boldness in Inferno IV, had made himself one of the six major poets between antiquity and his own day (Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, . . . Dante), now looks modest, in the world’s estimation; he has eclipsed, for most readers, all but Homer.

But then do we not imagine hearing him complain, over and over, about how badly we now read him? Even posthumously he probably would consider that he had ended up what he had said he was in his political endeavors: “a party of one.”

Posted in Readings, Understanding Dante | Tagged Beatrice, Beatrice and the Presence of Christ, Dante Alighieri, The Choice of Virgil | Leave a Comment »

Reading Selections From Fighting the Noonday Devil by R. R. Reno

November 20, 2009

R. R. Reno teaches theology at Creighton University and is the author of In the Ruins of the Church: Sustaining Faith in an Age of Diminished Christianity (Brazos, 2002). From a review of the latter: “Our modernist heritage and postmodern sophistication have trained us well. We take care of ourselves, virtuously avoiding pain, rewarding ourselves with pleasure. Thanks to this thorough cultural training, we often approach the church with the same self-protective posture.

Faced with the failures, hypocrisies, and faithlessness in the church, we fall back on the modern strategy we’ve learned so well: we simply keep our distance. In this essay, as in the book, R. R. Reno, warns against this sense of aloofness and shows how it relates to acedia – a subject of many posts here on Paying Attention To The Sky. Reno‘s passionate call for Christians to “suffer divine things” also provides a message of hope: through intimate loyalty to the church, daily prayer, and serious reengagement with Scripture, we can dwell in and with the living Christ. We can abandon the “temptations of distance” and embrace the “imperatives of intimacy.” It is a bold exhortation that has enormous appeal for critical thinkers and Christians who are disillusioned with the church yet still desire to pursue a life of discipleship.” The roots of many of his arguments you will find in the reading selections of this essay which was published in First Things in 2003.

Pride and Faith
For most of the modern era, Christian apologists have emphasized the role of pride as the primary barrier to faith. Take Milton, for example. At the outset of Paradise Lost, Satan rallies his fellow fallen angels with a speech of exculpation. Bidding farewell to the “happy Fields” now lost, Satan hails the “infernal world,” promising his followers that they, with him, might make “Heav’n of Hell.” What seems a disaster can be made a victory. Satan’s reasoning is simple. “Here at least,” he says, “we shall be free.” “Here,” he continues, “we may reign secure.” The gain, then, is autonomy and self-possession. Thus, in famous words, Milton has Satan pronounce the purest formula of pride: “Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in Heav’n.”

To a great extent, the standard story of modernity emphasizes exactly the self-confidence and self-assertion that Milton describes in Paradise Lost. The emerging powers of modern science gave the seventeenth and eighteenth century a keen sense of the real powers of the human intellect. Rebelling against servile obedience to dogmatic and clerical authority, progressive forces in Enlightenment culture championed free and open inquiry. The same sentiment, this standard story continues, characterizes modern moral and political thought. Against traditional moral ideals and social forms, modern thinkers have sought, and continue to seek, a pattern of life derived from and properly expressive of our humanity. Thus, Ralph Waldo Emerson shouts the battle cry of modernity: “Trust thyself.” Against subservience to the ideals of another, Emerson writes, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” So central and important is this self-affirmation that Emerson reports that “if I am the Devil’s child, I will then live from the Devil.” Better to reign in the hell of self-affirmation, than to subordinate the self to external ideals or principles, no matter how heavenly.

Does Secularism Come From Self-Trust And Pride?
This modern voice of rebellion against God’s sovereignty is quite real. Yet, in the twilight of modernity, do people really attack the Christian tradition because they have vibrant Emersonian souls? Do the nay-sayers and critics of Christianity attract audiences of willful and self-assertive individualists who are eager to find leverage to free themselves from the constraining powers of dogma and priestcraft? Does secularism today stem from a deep self-trust and demonic pride?

The answer, I think, is “no.” Pride may go before the fall. However, after the fall, other spiritual temptations and difficulties predominate. In our times, whether we call the prevailing outlook late modern or postmodern, the vigor and ambition of the ideal of self-reliance has lost its luster. When the United States Army can adopt a fine Emersonian sentiment — “Be all you can be” — as a recruiting slogan, then surely what was once a fresh challenge has become a hopeless cliché. For this and other reasons we need to turn our attention away from pride and look elsewhere for the deeper sources of resistance to the Christian message.

The Demon Of Acedia And Faith
Looking elsewhere does not mean looking away from the Christian tradition. Christians have not always thought pride the deepest threat to faith. For the ancient spiritual writers of the monastic movement, spiritual apathy was far more dangerous. Recalling the sixth verse of Psalm 91, the desert fathers wished to guard against “the sickness that lays waste at mid-day.” Evagrius of Pontus, a fourth-century monk, is one of the earliest sources of information about the desert monastic movement, and he reports that gluttony, avarice, anger, and other vices threaten monastic life. Yet, of all these afflictions, he reports, “the demon of acedia — also called the noonday demon — is the one that causes the most serious trouble of all.”

Defining Acedia
Acedia is a word of Greek origin that means, literally, “without care.” In the Latin tradition of the seven deadly sins, it comes down to us as tristitia or otiositas, sadness or idleness. But citing synonyms and translations will not do. For the monastic tradition, acedia or sloth is a complex spiritual state that defies simple definition. It describes a lassitude and despair that overwhelms spiritual striving. Sloth is not mere idleness or laziness; it involves a torpor animi, a dullness of the soul that can stem from restlessness just as easily as from indolence. Bernard of Clairvaux speaks of a sterilitas animae, a sterility, dryness, and barrenness of his soul that makes the sweet honey of Psalm-singing seem tasteless and turns vigils into empty trials. Medieval English writers often speak of acedia as wanhope, a waning of confidence in the efficacy and importance of prayer. For Dante, on the fourth ledge of purgatory, those afflicted by acedia are described as suffering from lento amore, a slow love that cannot motivate and uplift, leaving the soul stagnant, unable to move under the heavy burden of sin.

Across these different descriptions, a common picture emerges. The noonday devil tempts us into a state of spiritual despair and sadness that drains us of our Christian hope. It makes the life of prayer and charity seem pointless and futile. In the heat of midday, as the monk tires and begins to feel that the commitment to desert solitude was a terrible miscalculation, the demon of acedia whispers despairing and exculpatory thoughts. “Did God intend for human beings to reach for the heavens?” “Does God really care whether we pray?” “Is it not unnatural to seek solitude and chastity?” According to another ancient writer in the Evagrian tradition, the noonday demon “stirs the monk also to long for different places in which he can find easily what is necessary for his life and can carry on a much less toilsome and more expedient profession. It is not on account of locality, the demon suggests, that one pleases God. He can be worshiped anywhere. . . . Thus the demon employs all his wiles so that the monk may leave his cell and flee to the race-course.”

A Real Modern Threat to Faith
Are these temptations that afflict the monk as strange or alien as the unfamiliar Greek word, acedia? I think not. Let me update the whispering voice of sloth: “All things are sanctified by the Lord, and one could just as well worship on the golf course as in a sanctuary made by human hands.” Or: “God is love, and love affirms; therefore, God accepts me just as I am. I need not exercise myself to change.” Or: “We should not want to put God in a box, so the Christian tradition must be seen as a resource for our spiritual journeys, not as a mandatory itinerary. I can pick and choose according to my own spiritual needs.”

In our day, these temptations seem far more dangerous than Emerson’s “trust thyself.” After all, how many people, believers or unbelievers, wish to reign anywhere, in heaven, hell, or even in their own souls? Few, I imagine. Most of us just want to be left alone so that we can get on with our lives. Most of us want to be safe. We want to find a cocoon, a spiritually, psychologically, economically, and physically gated community in which to live without danger and disturbance. The care-free life, a life a-cedia, is our cultural ideal. Pride may be the root of all evil, but in our day, the trunk, branches, and leaves of evil are characterized by a belief that moral responsibility, spiritual effort, and religious discipline are empty burdens, ineffective and archaic demands that cannot lead us forward, inaccessible ideals that, even if we believe in them, are beyond our capacity.

Finding Acedia In The Modern Milieu: Critical Distance
Acedia, then, is a real threat, a deadly sin doing its deadly work in the present age. Its presence can be detected rather clearly in two features of our intellectual and moral culture. The first is the intellectual spirit of dispassion and coolness that grows out of the ideal of “critical distance.” This ideal often contributes to the torpor animi that afflicts any who have entered into the habituating practices of our universities. For many of our professors, the drama of education is to break the magic spell of immediacy. Just as the commonsense observation that the sun revolves around the earth is quite false and must be corrected, so, we are told, we must step back from the moral and social opinions we were taught as children. Nothing that is given should be accepted. We must step back from our initial assumptions and see them as being, at best, merely true-for-us rather than being simply true.

Montaigne
In order to spur us toward critical thought, the dominant strategy of contemporary instruction is shock therapy. Anticipating the method, the early modern essayist Montaigne described his desires to “pile up here some ancient fashions that I have in my memory, some like ours, others different, to the end that we may strengthen and enlighten our judgment by reflection on the continual variation of human things.” Montaigne is confident that by “piling up” these examples, we will be forced to stop thinking parochially and recognize that men and women have lived many different ways according to many different ideals and customs. We will be shocked by the diversity, and for just this reason, we will be levered away from an atavistic loyalty to our particular ways of viewing the world.

But the ancient fashions Montaigne catalogues are not simply diverse. He chooses very carefully, and in a way that also anticipates postmodern historiography and cultural study, his examples tend toward the prurient and base. Montaigne quotes ancient descriptions of how people wiped themselves after bowel movements, as well as peculiar postcoital practices. The shock, then, is redoubled, for not only do we see the diversity of cultures, but as Montaigne insinuates, we begin to worry that those beliefs and practices we think so decisive for human decency and moral rectitude will come to seem as silly and pointless as the ancient Roman expectation that men would pluck all the hairs off their chest, legs, and arms.

What Montaigne sought to achieve has become the very ideal of “critical thinking.” He wants us to step back from our loyalty to the immediate and seemingly self-evident truths of our inherited way of life. He wants us to separate ourselves from our cultural context. To think responsibly about culture, morality, and religion, then, involves establishing critical distance. Just think about biblical criticism. In most cases, the basic strategy of instruction is to force pious students to step back from the immediacy of the canonical form of the text to see how what seems to be a doctrinally consistent and spiritually unified whole is, in fact, a text made up of heterogeneous sources and layers of editorial revision.

The Limits of Critical Thinking: John Henry Newman
The now widespread effect of the modern critical project is to undermine our confidence that any moral or cultural system should properly command our full loyalty. For this reason, as John Henry Newman observed, critical thinking has “a tendency to blunt the practical energy of the mind.” It loosens the bonds of commitment and distances us from the immediacy of truths we once thought unquestionable. Critical distance may free us from prejudice, but it can also undermine the hope that enduring truths might be found. It can engender a humility that sustains tolerance, but it can also so relax the passions of the intellect that our civility comes at the price of conviction. The ways in which this leads to acedia are, I think, obvious…

The very sentiments that the classical Christian authors feared are precisely the virtues modern educators seek to instill in their students. The lento amore, the slow love that Dante thinks must be purged from our souls, is the dispassionate heart that establishes critical distance and waits for compelling evidence. The sterilitas animae that so worries Bernard of Clairvaux describes quite well the ideal of a critical thinker who has purified himself of the corrupting parochialism that limits his larger, more universal vision. When someone prefaces a comment with the confession that he is speaking from a “white, male, upper-middle-class perspective,” it reveals either a competition for the upper-hand (“I am more critical than you are”) or a despair of ever saying anything worthwhile.

The Nobility Of Our Commitments
Critical distance is not the only ideal of our time. We can never achieve an entirely care-free approach to life. Commitment energizes our culture even as critical inquiry encourages dispassionate analysis. Yet the very nobility of our commitments can create a distance that is as debilitating as critique. Since no actual society or movement lives up to that ideal, we can end up unengaged in fact and in action — pushing away evil rather than seeking the good. Controlled by what the old writers called fastidium, a fastidious conscience, we boil with outrage on the surface of our souls, while at a deeper level, we go slack. Thus, many so-called seekers do not seek at all; they wait for something worthy of their allegiance and the waiting becomes habitual and comfortable. Our society has far more of these “waiters” than “seekers.”

The Fastidiousness Of Our Cruelty And Suffering
This fastidiousness is evident in our cultural response to suffering, the second feature of our current intellectual and moral landscape that strikes me as emblematic. We recoil from cruelty, and this dominates our collective conscience as the summum malum. The taboos of traditional morality may evaporate as we cultivate critical distance, but no pure vacuum develops in their place. Instead, our sensitivity to suffering and our horror over cruelty increases. Just consider the case of my grandmother, who went to a public hanging at a county fair in Hannibal, Missouri, when she was a child. Today, we shudder at the thought. How, we ask ourselves, could our forebears have been so insensitive to suffering and cruelty?

Once again, I do not intend a blanket criticism of our present squeamishness. Most likely, we should be thankful that something of moral significance has filled the void created by critical consciousness. At least we cannot gaze upon torture and suffering with a dispassionate and care-free attitude. Nonetheless, we must recognize how contemporary moral sensibilities tempt us toward acedia. Our vague and general moral sentiments — “suffering is evil” — overwhelm our immediate duties and corrupt our ability to function within the complexities of ordinary moral relations. As Judith Shklar wrote, “To hate cruelty more than any other evil involves a radical rejection of both religious and political conventions. It dooms me to a life of skepticism, indecision, disgust, and often misanthropy.”

Our misanthropy is swaddled in kindness, but it manifests the symptoms of acedia nonetheless. How many parents cannot muster the determination to discipline their children because they cannot bear inflicting the suffering it will require? How many educators have despaired of grading, not out of lassitude or neglect, but because they shrink from the thought of the hurt feelings of those who do poorly? The examples are but instances of a broad cultural trend. Demand and expectation are hurtful, and we turn away from zeal in order to soften the blows of discipline. Our general commitment to reduce suffering causes us to hesitate from inflicting the pain of shame. Thus, acedia, a languid disregard for moral and social standards, is now a virtue.

Fearing Evil
For this reason, I do not think our present culture of affirmation is based on an Emersonian conviction that each person is lit with genius. Rather, we hold our tongues and smile politely when people tell us of their divorces, abortions, infidelities, and transgressions because we do not want to make anyone feel bad. We indulge and we trim, because the thought of suffering paralyzes. Fixed on the horror of cruelty, the fastidious conscience is brought to inaction by the very passion of its commitment. Fearing evil — why add to the grief of divorce by condemning it? — we withdraw from action.

Bridging The Distances Demanded By Critical Thought
How can we bridge the distances demanded by critical thought? How can we overcome the fastidious conscience that cannot countenance the “no” of discipline? First, we need to guard against the tendency of modern theology to turn the afflictions of acedia into enticements toward virtue. Consider Paul Tillich’s formulation of the “Protestant Principle.” It is the negation of all positive, finite, and worldly forms of faith and practice. In this way, Tillich makes critical distance into a form of faith. “What makes Protestantism Protestant,” he writes, “is the fact that it transcends its own religious and confessional character, that it cannot be identified wholly with any of its particular historical forms.” The stepping back that marks critical thought is, then, the essence of true religion. “Protestantism,” Tillich continues, “has a principle that stands beyond all its realizations.” “It is not exhausted by any historical religion; it is not identical with the structure of the Reformation or of early Christianity or even with a religious form at all.” Or still again, “The Protestant principle . . . contains the divine and human protest against any absolute claim made for a relative reality.” Thus, Tillich draws a conclusion that is ubiquitous in modern progressive theologies: “Nobody can have the ultimate, nothing conditioned can possess the unconditional. And nobody can localize the divine that transcends space and time.” Or to quote from a bumper sticker version of the same: My God is too big to fit into any one religion.

The Torpor Of Critical Distance
If Tillich’s Protestant principle is true, then why in the world would anyone experience, let alone give in to, a burning desire to come to the Lord in baptism and worship? If nothing conditioned can possess the unconditioned, if the finite is not capable of the infinite, then who would not despair of the religious life? Contrary to Tillich, we must stop pretending that the distance and dispassion of modern intellectual life are covert forms of faithfulness. Critical thought may produce what St. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 7, calls worldly grief, the sorrow that any honest person must feel when he recognizes that sickness, disease, and death conquer finite flesh. But we must be crystal clear. Critical thought does not and cannot produce the godly grief that St. Paul commends. That comes from repentance and personal change, not critical insight.

This leads me to my second observation. In Dante’s Purgatorio, the principle of sacramental penance holds sway. Vices are cured by their contrary, and thus, the slow and tepid love of the slothful is purged by a frenzied fervor. So, in a picturesque scene, just as Dante and Virgil doze off on the ledge of lento amore, they are awakened by a crowd of penitents rushing by, shouting and weeping with overwrought passion. “Sharp fervor,” says Virgil to those who run by, “makes up for negligence and delay which you perhaps used through lukewarmness in doing good.” Here we need to be careful not to moralize, for according to Dante, as for all premodern writers, the great work of charity is first and foremost the work of prayer. To the extent that we are brought to dispassion by critical thought, we must enter into the disciplines of daily prayer with all the greater fervor and commitment. The more we feel the torpor of critical distance, the more swiftly we must run toward the daily office, toward regular study of Scripture, toward the bread and the cup of the Eucharist. An intimacy with divine things is the proper way toward a passion for divine truth. We cannot enjoy that which we hold at a distance.

Desire For Truth
This insight also holds true for the intellectual life. Critical distance easily produces a torpor animi. We must resist the temptation to forever look behind or above or below. At some point, we must train our minds on some aspect of study, whether Wordsworth’s Prelude or a puzzling question in topology. We must allow ourselves to be romanced and ravished by the promise of truth. As St. Bonaventure observes in the prologue to the Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, those who study must be “anointed with the oil of gladness” so that they might be inflamed with desire for wisdom. If we are to fight the noonday devil of acedia, then the lento amore of critical distance needs to be counteracted by forms of intellectual life that hasten toward an embrace of truth. Desire for truth needs to gain the upper hand over fear of error.

Evagrius Ponticus’ Solution: Fight The Agitated Search
Evagrius Ponticus offers a different remedy for sloth. For him, the single great weapon against acedia is stability. This seems to contradict Dante’s rushing throng, but it does not. The penitent are hurrying away from their negligence. Evagrius, however, is not concerned with how to restore the fallen, but how to prevent the monk from falling in the first place. He writes, “The time of temptation is not the time to leave one’s cell, devising plausible pretexts. Rather, stand there firmly and be patient.” When, a few centuries later, St. Benedict made stability the centerpiece of Western monasticism, he did so for the same reason. A great stratagem of the slothful is to hurry about from place to place to find a more congenial locale for their spiritual projects. The moment a postmodern seeker finds worship somewhat cold, off he goes to another church to try to find more “vitality,” or even more likely, he logs onto Amazon.com and orders a book on Buddhist spirituality. We demand immediate results, and should we experience the dryness and tepidness that comes from distance and alienation, we respond by distancing ourselves still further.

This agitated search for something higher, something more transparent — “the pure gospel” — comes at a great cost. One can no more play games with separation and divorce in marriage and expect to enjoy the fruits of intimacy, than one can in one’s union with the body of Christ. One can no more serve Christ by loyalty to theological abstractions than serve human beings by loyalty to sentience. Only a focused love can overcome distance. After all, Dante’s rushing crowds on the ledge of sloth are not going hither and yon. They are all going the same direction — toward Him in whom all will rest.

There Are No Intellectual Solutions To Spiritual Problems
Knowing whether to follow Dante’s advice and rush toward intimacy or to heed Evagrius and remain in stable loyalty cannot be reduced to a formula or principle. There are no intellectual solutions to spiritual problems. Like each of the seven deadly sins, acedia must be fought with spiritual discipline. Such discipline is profoundly alien to our culture, not because we have alternatives, but because we entertain the fantasy of life without spiritual demands. This fantasy is the most important legacy of modernity. For the great innovation of modern culture was the promise of progress without spiritual discipline. All we need to do is adopt the experimental method, calculate utility, institute the rule of law, establish democracy, trust the market. In each instance, scientific knowledge, the machinery of proper procedure, the invisible hand of a well-designed process, will carry us forward. If we will but believe in this promise, we are told, then we will be free to neglect our souls. For according to this modern dream, our virtues and vices are inconsequential matters of private taste and personal judgment. Thus, although our society is increasingly willing to use economic incentives and legal sanctions to influence behavior (welfare reform and laws against smoking are signal examples), we insist that all discipline must remain on the surfaces of life. Once economic and legal requirements are met, we insist upon our right to live as we wish.

This fantasy of life without spiritual demands demonstrates the depth of our captivity to acedia. Pride has no role here, for even when vicious, ambition shapes the soul. Our ideal, by contrast, is shapelessness. We want to be free . . . to be ourselves. Our ambition is a tautology empty of any will to shape or sharpen our lives. Even as we sculpt our bodies in the gyms, we cultivate a languid spiritual disposition, one aptly described by Chaucer:

For ye be lyke the sweynte cate
That wolde have fissh, but wostow what?
He wolde nothing wete his clowes.

In our sloth, we will not wet our feet in the frightening water of any spiritual discipline, Christian or otherwise. For fear of wounding sensibilities, for fear of ethnocentric dogmatism, we abandon discipline, or we individualize discipline to the point that it is not discipline at all.

A Larger Vision Of Journey
We must wet our claws. Neither Dante’s urgent rush toward the truth nor Evagrius’ patient stability leads to an exhausted or desiccated existence. On the contrary, the spiritual disciplines they urge serve the end of intimacy. Their strategies awaken and tether, energize and focus. They wish us to become persons with distinct outlines and deep purposes. Only as such persons can we be partners in fellowship — with the truths we seek and with each other. One can no more desire the blessings of marriage with indifference or a wandering eye, than seek a lasting truth with languid disregard or lack of concentration. This holds true in our relation to God. We must desire holiness to allow the burning coal to touch our lips, and we must be attentive and focused to hear the still, small voice. We should rush toward our Lord, for we can never become too intimate, and we should wait patiently with Him, for He always has something more to give. To do so, we must place the pedagogy of critical distance and the dictates of conscience within a larger vision of journey toward the truth, a journey in which the warm and enduring embrace of love is to be cherished rather than mocked or feared.

Posted in Readings, Understanding Dante | Tagged A Modern Threat to Faith, acedia, Critical Distance, Dante’s Purgatorio, Defining Acedia, Evagrius Ponticus, Fearing Evil, John Henry Newman, lento amore, Montaigne, No Intellectual Solutions, Pride and Faith, The Demon Of Acedia And Faith, The Fastidiousness Of Modern Cruelty And Suffering, The Torpor Of Critical Distance | Leave a Comment »

Notable Quotations From The Papal Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (The Fortieth Year) Pope Pius XI, 1931

November 11, 2009

Quadragesimo Anno is an encyclical by Pope Pius XI, issued 15 May 1931, 40 years after Rerum Novarum (thus the name, Latin for ‘in the fortieth year’). Unlike Leo, who addressed the condition of workers, Pius XI discusses the ethical implications of the social and economic order. Pius XI calls for the reconstruction of the social order based on the principle of solidarity and subsidiarity. He notes major dangers for human freedom and dignity, arising from unrestrained capitalism and totalitarian communism.

The function of the rulers of the State is to watch over the community and its parts; but in protecting private individuals in their rights, chief consideration ought to be given to the weak and the poor. (#25)

Every effort must therefore be made that fathers of families receive a wage large enough to meet ordinary family needs adequately. But if this cannot always be done under existing circumstances, social justice demands that changes be introduced as soon as possible whereby such a wage will be assured to every adult workingman. (#71)

Twin rocks of shipwreck must be carefully avoided. For, as one is wrecked upon, or comes close to, what is known as “individualism” by denying or minimizing the social and public character of the right of property, so by rejecting or minimizing the private and individual character of this same right, one inevitably runs into “collectivism.” (#46)

Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them. (#79)

…the right ordering of economic life cannot be left to a free competition of forces. For from this source, as from a poisoned spring, have originated and spread all the errors of individualist economic teaching. … it held that economic life must be considered and treated as altogether free from and independent of public authority, because in the market, i.e., in the free struggle of competitors, it would have a principle of self direction which governs it much more perfectly than would the intervention of any created intellect. But free competition, while justified and certainly useful provided it is kept within certain limits, clearly cannot direct economic life…. (#88)

…the riches that economic-social developments constantly increase ought to be so distributed among individual persons and classes that … the common good of all society will be kept inviolate. (#57)

It follows from the twofold character of ownership, which we have termed individual and social, that men must take into account in this matter not only their own advantage but also the common good. (#49)

This concentration of power and might, the characteristic mark of contemporary economic life, is the fruit that the unlimited freedom of struggle among competitors has of its own nature produced, and which lets only the strongest survive; and this is often the same as saying, those who fight the most violently, those who give least heed to their conscience. (#107)

Unbridled ambition for power has succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel. (#109)

How completely deceived, therefore, are those rash reformers who concern themselves with the enforcement of justice alone–and this, commutative justice–and in their pride reject the assistance of charity! Admittedly, no vicarious charity can substitute for justice which is due as an obligation and is wrongfully denied. (#137)

Posted in Readings | Tagged Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno | Leave a Comment »

Dr. Charles Taylor

November 4, 2009

taylor 2007 Templeton Prize and 2008 Kyoto Prize winner Charles Margrave Taylor is reputed to be a genial man with a disposition to laughter, often at himself. Perhaps more importantly, for a thinker who coined the term “malaise of modernity” he is also an optimist. That he, is considered a philosopher’s philosopher by his peers, exhibiting a rare mastery across an impressive spectrum of ideas only increases admiration. The author of more than a dozen books, including the widely praised “Sources of the Self” and the masterful “A Secular Age,” (reading selections in another post) Taylor’s work explores a dizzying array of disciplines — philosophy, religion, political theory, moral theory, and ethics, among others. Lindsay Waters, executive editor at Harvard University Press, has said, “Charles Taylor’s passionate philosophy allows him to zero in on the most distinctively human issues of our time, and not be afraid.”

A Bibliography of Charles Taylor (His comments on each follow the titles)

The Explanation of Behavior. (Routledge and Paul Kegan, 1964) This was my doctoral dissertation. It was an all-out attack on psychological behaviorism, which tried to show that only muddled philosophical thinking could hide from its practitioners that their research program was reaching a dead-end.

Hegel. (Cambridge University Press, 1975; various languages) This was an attempt to write an introduction to Hegel’s philosophy which would make his work understandable to people trained in the analytical tradition. It was originally commissioned for the Penguin series on major philosophers, but it rapidly outgrew the permitted dimensions for this series and had to be published elsewhere. Why Hegel? Because I sensed then that I wanted to attempt the kind of philosophically informed reflection on history, and particularly the rise of modernity, that Hegel had pioneered. Whether one agrees or disagrees with his actual results (and I have big disagreements with it), you have to come to terms with Hegel’s work before you form your own view.

Hegel and Modern Society. (Cambridge University Press, 1979; various languages) This was basically a shortened version of Hegel, without some of the difficult parts (for instance, on the Logic), and with more emphasis on the relevance of Hegel today.

Philosophical Papers Vol. 1: Human Agency and Language.
Philosophical Papers Vol. 2: Philosophy and the Human Sciences. (Cambridge University Press, 1985) In these two collections, I brought together a number of papers written in the previous two decades. These were mostly critiques of mechanistic, and/or reductive, and/or atomistic approaches to human sciences. Following a similar line to The Explanation of Behavior, I tried to show that the popularity of these approaches, which modeled human on natural science, depended on faulty philosophical thinking and /or obviously over-simplified views of human life. One paper in particular in these collections brought together a number of these themes: “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man.”

Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. (Harvard University Press, 1989; various languages) This was my first large-scale attempt to make a philosophically-informed reflection on history. The theme was the development of the modern understanding of the human agent, with its peculiar and often conflicting features: an individual, potentially disengaged from history, society and the body, and yet with inner depths, calling for further definition through expressive activity, with an identity which he or she can contribute to define. My thesis is that we are all caught in the tension between what we have drawn from the Cartesian-Lockean tradition and the Enlightenment on one hand, and what we have learned from the Romantic-expressive movement on the other.

The Malaise of Modernity. (Anansi, 1991; various languages). Published in the United States as The Ethics of Authenticity (Harvard University Press, 1992). This text was the basis for my Massey Lectures, a series of talks given each year on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It tried to explore our conflictual relation to modernity, in particular to modern individualism, the stress on instrumental reason; and it looked at the problems these pose for democracy, largely in a Tocquevillean spirit. I attempted to describe the ethic of authenticity, which emerges from the Romantic-expressive tradition I had articulated in Sources, and to discuss the ways in which this can be led astray and trivialized in contemporary society.

Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”. (with Amy Gutman and others) (Princeton University Press, 1992; various languages) Modernity has produced a new concept of identity, a definition of self which we partly take over from our world and our history, and partly redefine ourselves. This has had a profound impact on our political life. Issues which might have been fought out in terms of equality versus privilege, or the fight against exploitation, in the past, are now frequently framed in terms of personal and collective identities and their alleged non- or mis-recognition. I was trying in this essay to analyze this new phenomenon, drawing heavily on conflicts with which I am (all too) familiar, those surrounding Quebec nationalism, language rights and the issue of independence.

Philosophical Arguments. (Harvard University Press, 1995; various languages) This is another collection similar to the two published in 1985, and it reflects further developments of the same themes, with a greater emphasis on epistemological issues.

A Catholic Modernity? (Oxford University Press, 1999) This is a published version of the Marianist Lecture that I gave in Dayton. I try to cast the issue of how the Catholic Church should relate to the modern world, in the context of an understanding of Catholic Christianity as capable of finding a place in, without ever identifying with, all human civilizations and cultures. I tried to look at modern Western civilization as another such culture, analogous to the unfamiliar cultures which missionaries may find themselves in. I think this kind of move dissolves the too close identification which Western Christians have with the Modern West, seen as a former Christendom partly in the process of apostasy, with all the multiple resentments and attempts to hold on to an idealized past which this entails.

Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited. (Harvard University Press, 2002; various languages) This is one of the (three) products of my Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh in 1999. The theme of those lectures, delivered at the Vienna Institute of the Human Sciences, was the rise of the contemporary secular age in the West (see below A Secular Age). This was an off-shoot, a look back at William James’ Gifford Lectures, also delivered in Edinburgh a century before (1902). I note the often uncanny parallels between what he said then, and what we see now.

Modern Social Imaginaries. (Duke University Press, 2004) This is the second product of the Gifford Lectures, an expanded version of one of the chapters in A Secular Age, where I try to define the shifts in our way of collectively imagining ourselves as a society which occurred in the development of Western modernity and helped to constitute it. I examine particularly the way we have come to understand ourselves as existing in an economy, participating in a public sphere, and being part of a citizen state.

A Secular Age. (Harvard University Press, to be published Fall 2007) This will be the third (and central) product of the Gifford Lectures. It is an attempt to follow the development of the modern Western secular age, which at the same time is an attempt to define what we mean by this term. It is a basic thesis of the book that these two questions: “What is secularity?” and “How did it develop?” can only be properly addressed together. In the course of it, I challenge what for a long time was the dominant “master narrative” of secularization, as the inevitable decline of religion with advancing modernity; and this, of course, involves a rather different understanding of the place of religion and spirituality today.

Reading Selections from Charles Taylor’s Templeton Prize News Conference, March 14, 2007

About the Prize
I want to say first how deeply honoured I am to be chosen for the Templeton Prize. I believe that the goal Sir John Templeton has chosen is of the greatest contemporary importance and relevance: we have somehow to break down the barriers between our contemporary culture of science and disciplined academic study (what the Germans gather in the term “Wissenschaft”) on one hand, and the domain of spirit, on the other. This has been one of the driving goals of my own intellectual work, and to have it recognized as such fills me with an unstable mixture of joy and humility.

Sir John has seen, I believe, that the barriers between science and spirituality are not only ungrounded, but are also crippling. They impede crucial further insight. This case has been eloquently argued by the physicists, biologists and cosmologists who have been awarded the prize in recent years. But I feel that now a further step is being taken. The divorce of natural science and religion has been damaging to both; but it is equally true that the culture of the humanities and social sciences has often been surprisingly blind and deaf to the spiritual, and that in my case, the attempt to break down these barriers is being recognized and honoured.

A Deafness To The Spiritual Dimension
The deafness of many philosophers, social scientists and historians to the spiritual dimension can be remarkable. And this is the more damaging in that it affects the culture of the media and of educated public opinion in general. I take a striking case, a statement, not admittedly by a social scientist, but by a Nobel Laureate cosmologist, Steven Weinberg. I take it, because I find that it is often repeated in the media and in informal argument. Weinberg said (I quote from memory): “there are good people who do good things, and bad people who do bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.”

On one level, it is astonishing that anyone who lived through a good part of the 20th Century could say something like this. What are we to make of those noble, well-intentioned Bolsheviks, Marxist materialist atheists to a man (and occasional woman), who ended up building one of the most oppressive and murderous brace of regimes in human history? When people quote this phrase to me, or some equivalent, and I enter this objection, they often reply, “but Communism was a religion,” a reply which shifts the goal-posts and upsets the argument.

When “Religion” Means The Murderously Irrational
But it’s worth pondering for a minute what lies behind this move. The “Weinberg principle,” if I might use this term, is being made tautologically true, because any set of beliefs which can induce decent people, who would never kill for personal gain, to murder for the cause, is being defined as “religion.” “Religion” is being defined as the murderously irrational.

Pretty sloppy thinking. But it is also crippling. What the speaker is really expressing is something like this: the terrible violence of the 20th Century has nothing to do with right-thinking, rational, enlightened people like me. The argument is then joined on the other side by certain believers who point out that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc., were all enemies of religion, and feel that good Christians like me have no part in such horrors. This conveniently forgets the Crusades, the Inquisition, and much else.

Both sides need to be wrenched out of their complacent dream, and see that no-one, just in virtue of having the right beliefs, is immune from being recruited to group violence: from the temptation to target another group which is made responsible for all our ills, from the illusion of our own purity which comes from our readiness to combat this evil force with all our might. We urgently need to understand what makes whole groups of people ready to be swept up into this kind of project.

A Need For A New Insight Into The Human Propensity For Violence
But in fact, we have only a very imperfect grasp on this. Some of our most insightful scholars, like Ren Girard, or Sudhir Kakar, have studied it. Great writers, like Dostoevsky, have cast great light on it, but it remains still mysterious. What is equally imperfectly understood is the way in which charismatic spiritual leadership, of a Gandhi, a Mandela, a Tutu, can bring people back from the brink.

But without this kind of spiritual initiative, the best-intentioned efforts to put human history on a new, and more humane footing, have often turned this history into a slaughter bench, in Hegel’s memorable phrase. It is a sobering thought that Robespierre, in the first discussions on the new revolutionary constitution for France, voted against the death penalty. Yet the path to this peaceable republic, which would spare the lives of even its worst criminals, somehow led through the nightmare of the Terror.

We urgently need new insight into the human propensity for violence, and following the authors I mentioned above, this cannot be a reductive sociobiological one, but must take full account of the human striving for meaning and spiritual direction, of which the appeals to violence are a perversion. But we don’t even begin to see where we have to look as long as we accept the complacent myth that people like us (enlightened secularists, or believers) are not part of the problem. We will pay a high price if we allow this kind of muddled thinking to prevail.

The Secularization Thesis
The barriers between our social sciences and the spiritual dimension of life are crippling in a whole host of other ways as well. I have recently been working on the issue of what we mean in describing our present civilization in the West as “secular.” For a long time, in mainstream sociology this development was taken as unproblematic and inevitable. Certain of the features of modernity: economic development, urbanization, rising mobility, higher educational levels, were seen as inevitably bringing about a decline in religious belief and practice. This was the famous “secularization thesis.” For a long time, this view dominated thinking in social science and history. More recent events have shaken this conviction, even among mainstream scholars.

But well before this revision occurred, a minority of scholars were already turning the theory inside out. In particular, David Martin in his epochal, General Theory of Secularization. The main thrust of this work, and of others who have followed, is that secularization theory was not just factually wrong. It also misconceived the whole process.

New Forms Of Religious Life
It was indeed, true that the various facets of modernization destabilized older, traditional forms of religious life; but new forms were always being re-invented, and some of these took on tremendous importance. David Martin has traced the development of new congregational forms through Methodism, and various waves of revival in the United States, through the birth of Pentacostal forms about a century ago, which are now spreading with great speed in all parts of the globe. Equally far-reaching changes have occurred in Catholic Churches in many parts of the world.

Breaking out of the old intellectual mould opens up a whole new field of great importance: what are the new forms of religion which are developing in the West? And what relation do they have to those which are growing elsewhere, in Asia, Africa, Latin America? This is part of what I am trying to study in my work, drawing on the pioneering analyses of David Martin, on the writings of Robert Bellah, and on the recent work of younger sociologists, like Jos Casanova and Hans Joas.

Some of these forms, like those in which religion or confessionality becomes the basis of a quasi-nationalist political mobilization, have obviously assumed immense, even threatening proportions in our day. We urgently need to understand their dynamic, their benefits and dangers, an area that the old framework of secularization theory hid from sight.

John Templeton’s Insight
In this domain too, John Templeton’s insight turns out to be valid, a blindness to the spiritual dimension of human life makes us incapable of exploring issues which are vital to our lives. Or to turn it around and state the positive: bringing the spiritual back in opens domains in which important and even exciting discoveries become possible.

I am happy to be engaged in this work, among a number of others: the sociologists I mentioned above, and some philosophers, like Alasdair MacIntyre. I sense in this prize awarded to me a recognition not only of my work but of this collective effort. This awakens powerful, if somewhat confused emotions: joy, pride, and a sense of inadequacy mingle together. But above all I feel the great satisfaction of knowing that this whole area of work will acquire a higher saliency through the award of this Prize; and I feel the most heartfelt gratitude to Sir John and to the

Templeton Foundation Interview with Dr. Charles Taylor

In the following Q&A, Professor Taylor explains the importance of the concept of mystery to our understanding of the universe, why “God is not Dead,” and whether he is a fox or a hedgehog.

JTF: In your 2007 Templeton Prize statement you spoke of “the deafness of many philosophers, social scientists, and historians to the spiritual dimensions.” What do you think accounts for this deafness? Where is that deafness coming from?

CT: Well, we can go back and back and back … the immediate cause is that people bought into a very simple narrative of secularization. Modernity – however you want to define it, be it economic growth or urbanization or science and technology, or the whole package – makes religion shrink. But that’s not sufficient to explain it intellectually. For a long time people tried to explain the Reformation in economic terms, which is the same kind of deafness. So they buy very deeply into this narrative and I think we all live by narratives. And always have

JTF: The ancient Mayans said the universe is made out of stories.

CT: That’s right and they’re absolutely right. The thing is these people believe in science and they don’t think they are living by narrative. They think they are just picking up the facts.

JTF: Science is just a magnet that picks up facts?

CT: Yes … there is this idea of science, and “God is Dead” as part of the background to this narrative, that tells you that you don’t need to worry about religion.

JTF: Isn’t “God is Dead” getting old as a concept?

CT: You’re right. But there’s a lag. People – and I’ve lived a long time – people in the last few decades are more embarrassed about just saying “God is Dead,” or religion doesn’t count … But these disciplines are like a large tanker. They are not easy to turn. You can’t turn academic disciplines around in six months. They are trained, and they have entire dissertations, and a lot invested (laughter).

JTF: In a certain sense we’re talking about “God is Dead” as an intellectual exercise, but if you take that idea out of the academy and apply it on a global scale, it doesn’t track. Religious activity is very high world-wide and over 90% of Americans say they in fact believe in god. Doesn’t this create a tension for the “God is Dead” narrative?

CT: Well, not necessarily because the people who are really sure of this picture, of this narrative, they have all sorts of ways of accounting for this. They will always account for it by some other factor, be it economic or social factors, etc.

JTF: Is religious belief too big a phenomenon to be explained by one or two reductionistic theories?

CT: Yes, but it’s more than that. This is something that you cannot ultimately prove except by impressing people with the fact that you have a more intelligent interpretation all the time. But it is just evident that human beings are religious animals. There’s something that intrinsically strikes people about spirituality and that’s part of the motivation. It’s part of the reason why it goes on. And it you try to circle around that, you go nowhere.

JTF: What do you make of the Richard Dawkins/Sam Harris argument that religious moderates of all faiths empower, and in some cases allow, religious extremists to exist by dint of their tolerance? In a sense the moderate broad-mindedness enables the extremist’s narrow-mindedness.

CT: This doesn’t make an awful lot of sense to me. I know my Muslim friends are not tolerating extremists. They say, “This is awful, a distortion, a travesty of what I consider my faith.” Now, if they aren’t saying that, then it is a political criticism to make to them very severely, “Why are you shutting up?” But what Dawkins means is that by propounding the core doctrines of Islam or Christianity we are somehow empowering Pat Robertson’s or what have you. That seems to me to be absurd. Particularly if you think these doctrines are correct, and that these doctrines are the only antidote to this kind of rage. I would also throw back to Dawkins, ‘Are you empowering Stalin? Are you empowering Pol Pot?’ These people took their violence out in destroying religious institutions. So is Dawkins empowering them by saying that religion is a terrible curse, a virus that has to be stamped out? I’m sure he would say “no, Joseph Stalin, don’t shoot those priests. Be a nice guy!” But that’s exactly what we’re trying to say to religious extremists! So if we’re supposed to stop promoting these doctrines because people carry them to extremes, then he is surely guilty of doing the same thing.

JTF: Why are we encountering fundamentalism–in all stripes–atheists, Christians, Islam right now?

CT: We’re living in an age of anxiety where everybody is made insecure in their own deep sense of meaning by the fact that there are all these competing elements. One of the ways you can calm down that anxiety about your own sense of meaning is by diabolizing the others, making it absolutely clear and undeniable that they are wrong.

JTF: Some scientists criticize religion for not properly understanding science’s incredible ability to explain the natural world.

CT: The Christian tradition got totally pulled off-track in the 17^th century where a very simple scientific influenced notion–through Newton–arrived at design; thinking of the universe like a clock.

JTF: They thought if we just start to peel off the hands and then we’ll get to the inner cogs and we have just start to really understand the universe as a mechanism.

CT: They saw it as this fantastic design. But they lost the sense of a really great mystery; the sense that there is maybe something here we can’t understand. And a great deal of Christian apologetic since then has been based on this incredible oversimplification of our universe. The result has been, in a certain sense, a kind of not very fruitful spirituality.

JTF: The battle over the mystery that you speak of is one that many scientists are keen to engage in. Will science come up against a fundamental limit?

CT: I don’t know. It’s something you’d have to guess at. We know that Newton had oversimplifying ideas. Although the mystery has been pushed further out, it’s not just the mystery of how it all began that is important here, but there’s also of course the absolutely untouched yet mystery of how we–intelligent beings–arose out of all of this. Today, the equivalent of the Newtonian mind are people in genetics. They say, ‘we’ve got the human genome.’ But it’s laughable, they are no closer to understanding how it really works. People talk about a gene for this, a gene for that. But then you’ve got to press them, how does it really work? They say, ‘something switches it off, and then something switches it on.’ What’s missing here is a holistic account of how it all works. My hunch is that it’s very, very unlikely that we will have a complete resolution on how this extraordinary rise of species came about in terms that are consonant with current molecular biology.

JTF: As a philosopher, what do you think about the role of neuroscience in pushing back this mystery?

CT: I’m not a great expert, but I am a great consumer of it. The people that are really cutting-edge are making a lot of sense, but they are more backing me up than anything else… what we really need is a kind of field theory and nobody really knows what that could be.

JTF: If you were hired to consult with all the great world religions, with the idea toward finding a pluralistic solution that guaranteed mutual respect, how would you get around the obvious problem that the closer the world religions come together, the more they must flatten their beliefs into a universal theme, denying their depth and differences?

CT: It’s a very, very deep question and when I’ve been in dialogues across these barriers, that haven’t been of that watering down kind, but where there’s something else, there’s a deep sense that there’s something very important and valid there even if you don’t end up believing it. That in this other spirituality there is something very deep. I’ve talked to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and I’ve said ‘tell me what really makes you tick, and don’t water it down, and I’ll do the same for you.’ And this has been a remarkably spiritually rewarding experience for me. You don’t need to find some middle-point, some syntheses, that doesn’t make sense . . . The Dalai Lama, someone I admire very much and I’ve had some discussions with said about this issue, ‘you don’t put a yak’s head on a sheep’s body.’

JTF: Do you think the 21^st century is going to be pulled towards religious pluralism? Or do you think the forces of fundamentalism are going to be a wedge into that concept?

CT: Well, the jury’s out. We have a battle on our hands whether we end up getting into a clash of civilizations mindset. At the moment in the West, we have a huge cultural fight within ourselves against Islamophobia. There’s a kind of mindless Islamophobia that says all 1.2 billion Muslims believe the same thing and that what they believe makes them do terrible things. I’ve seen this in Europe and in North America and we have to fight this kind of thinking very, very hard.

JTF: You say in your JTF essay that now more than ever we need “trail-blazers, who will open new or retrieve forgotten modes of prayer, meditation, friendship, solidarity and compassionate action.” Who are some figures that qualify in your mind as past trail-blazers?

CT: Well John Main, who created a Christian meditation practice, and Mother Theresa come to mind.

JTF: There is a long-standing debate about the relationship between science and religion. Some see modern science as a new kind of explanatory power, capable of pushing into territory once held exclusively by religion. Others see science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria?” (To quote Stephen Jay Gould) Where do you fall in this dialogue?

CT: Science and religion are not quite totally non-overlapping magisteria, but he is right in the sense that if anybody said, ‘I’m going to solve all the problems of the meaning of life, by only looking at the evolutionary view,’ they would be mad, they do not understand the limitations. Or, on the other hand, reading the Bible to understand how human beings evolved, that’s equally unrealistic.

JTF: So it is perfectly reasonable to believe in both God and evolution…

CT: Yes, of course.

JTF: Aristotle talked about the good life and what it means to live a good life. What is the Taylor view of how to live the good life in the 21^st century?

CT: You have to look at it like this: what do you want to give to your children and grandchildren? You want to give them some range of these very profound spiritual languages that have come down to us, with the understanding that they will always have to tweak them and change them, but you want to give them some starting insight. What is really disconcerting in a lot of the modern world is how many young people no longer have contact with Shakespeare, or what a biblical reference is, and they are really cut off.

JTF: You work has focused on some of the most horrifying realities of human existence: religion and violence, the malaise of modernity, and yet in so much of your writing contains real optimism. Where does that come from?

CT: Yes, it’s terrible. It’s just temperamental, I can’t stop myself! My friends keep saying I’m ridiculously optimistic.

JTF: Isn’t being optimistic a little bit at odds with philosophy?

CT: Definitively, it’s at odds with the zeitgeist. But I recognize that I must be as realistic as possible and that I must not get carried away. On the other hand, if you don’t have optimism you just give up in a way that I don’t want to do.

JTF: You studied under the famed political philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin at Oxford, Are you a fox or hedgehog?

CT: (laughing) Oh very definitely a hedgehog.

JTF: You’re a hedgehog? He said you were a hedgehog, but I’m surprised to hear you say that.

CT: Everything connects.

JTF: Everything connects, but I see in your range of interests and your ability to go across multiple disciplines, a fox-like demeanor. Are you not a hedgehog disguised as a fox?

CT: Yes, ok, as a fox. (laughs). But don’t blow my cover!

Posted in Readings, Templeton Prize Winners | Tagged A Charles Taylor Bibliography, Charles Taylor, Reading Selections from Charles Taylor’s Templeton Prize News Conference | Leave a Comment »

A Tribute to Henri de Lubac by Avery Cardinal Dulles

October 21, 2009

Henri_de_Lubac A few posts back I did a book recommendation on Henri de Lubac’s The Drama of Atheistic Humanism. I referred to it again in yesterdays post on Doestoevksy’s The Brothers Karamazov. It struck me that I really knew nothing about De Lubac at all, aside from the fact that he had been one of the key participants in Vatican II and a seminal Catholic Theologian. So I went digging and found this tribute written by Avery Cardinal Dulles that explained everything. Reading Selections follow:

Together Rahner, Lonergan, Murray, von Balthasar, Chenu and Congar, Henri de Lubac stood among the giants of the great theological revival that culminated in Vatican II (1962-65). His death on Sept. 4, 1991, leaves Yves Congar, O.P., ill and hospitalized, as the only surviving member of this brilliant Pteiade. (Congar died in 1995)

Early Background
Born in 1896, de Lubac entered the Society of Jesus in 1913. After serving in the army and being severely wounded in World War I, he studied for the Jesuit priesthood under excellent masters. During his studies he gained an enthusiasm for Thomas Aquinas, interpreted along the lines suggested by Blondel, Rousselot and Marechal. Without any specialized training or doctoral degree he was assigned to teach theology in the Catholic faculty at Lyons, where he taught, with some interruptions, from 1929 to 1961. There, and in his occasional courses at the neighboring Jesuit theologate at Fourviere (1935-40), de Lubac quickly began to forge new directions in fundamental theology and in comparative religion.

Catholicism (1938)
DeLubac’s first book, Catholicism (1938), was intended to bring out the singular unitive power of Catholic Christianity and its capacity to transcend all human divisions. Developing his interest in the fathers of the church, he founded in 1940, with his friend Jean Danielou, S. J., a remarkable collection of patristic texts and translations, Sources Chrétiennes (French “Christian sources”), which by now includes more than 300 volumes. During the Nazi occupation of France, he became coeditor of a series of Cahiers du Témoignage Chrétien (Christian witness notebooks).. In these papers and in his lectures, de Lubac strove particularly to exhibit the incompatibility between Christianity and the anti-Semitism that the Nazis were seeking to disseminate among French Catholics. On several occasions his friends had to spirit him away into hiding to prevent him from being captured and executed by the Gestapo, as happened to his close friend and colleague, Yves de Montcheuil, S.J.

Post War
After the war, de Lubac developed his theology in several directions. In an important study of medieval ecc1esiology, Corpus mysticum (completed in 1938 but not published until 1944), he demonstrated the inner bonds between the church and the Eucharist. To his mind, the individualism of modern Eucharistic piety was a step backward from the great tradition, which linked the Eucharist with the unity of the body of Christ. Seeking to stem the spread of Marxian atheism, he wrote on the intellectual roots of French and German atheistic socialism. He also composed several shorter works on the knowability of God and the problems of belief.

Surnallirel (1946)
DeLubac’s most famous work, Surnallirel (1946), maintains that the debate between the Baianists and the scholastics in the 17th century rested on misinterpretations both of Augustine and of Thomas Aquinas. Both parties to the debate, it maintains, were operating with philosophical and juridical categories foreign to ancient theology. Contemporary neoscholastics, especially in Southern France and Rome, taking offense at de Lubac’s attack on their methodology and their doctrine, interceded with the Holy See for a condemnation. When Pius XII published the encyclical Humani gcneris (1950), many believed that it contained a condemnation of de Lubac’s position, but de Lubac was relieved to find that the only sentence in the encyclical referring to the supernatural reproduced exactly what he himself had said in an article published two years before.

Notoriety
Seeking to deflect accusations against the Society of Jesuits in France, which was being accused of promoting a supposedly modernistic “new theology,” the Jesuit General, John Baptist Janssens, removed de Lubac and several colleagues from their teaching positions and required them to submit their writings to a special process of censorship. These regulations did not affect de Lubac’s work on Origen’s interpretation of Scripture, Histoire et Esprit, which came off the press in 1950, just as the storm was breaking. Because of the restrictions placed on his theological research, de Lubac in this period turned toward the study of non-Christian religions. He published three books on Buddhism, which interested him as an example of religion without God.

In 1953, during his “exile” in Paris, de Lubac published a popular work on the church constructed out of talks given at days of recollection before the war. (He was embarrassed by the triumphal sound of the title given to the English translation, The Splendor of the Church, as well as by suspicions in some quarters that his expressions of love and fidelity toward the church in this book were intended to atone for the offense given by his previous works.) Pained though he was by the widespread doubts about his own orthodoxy, de Lubac was even more distressed that some disaffected Catholics used his troubles as an occasion for mounting bitter attacks on the magisterium and the papacy.

The 1950′s
The clouds over de Lubac began to dissipate in the late 1950’s. In 1956 he was permitted to return to Lyons, where he began research for his major study of medieval exegesis, which was to appear in four large volumes between 1959 and 1964. In 1960 Jesuit superiors, fearing that the works of Teilhard de Chardin were about to be condemned by Roman authorities, asked de Lubac to write in defense of his old friend, who had died in 1955. Beginning in 1962, de Lubac published a series of theological works on Teilhard and edited several volumes of Teilhard’s correspondence. Probably more than any other individual, de Lubac was responsible for warding off the impending condemnation.

Career in Vatican
In 1960 Pope John XXIII, who, as papal nuncio in France, had gained an admiration for de Lubac, appointed him a consultant for the preparatory phase of Vatican II. As a consultant, he found much to criticize in the schemas prepared by the neoscholastic Roman theologians. These schemas, which contained statements intended to condemn both him and Teihard de Chardin, were rejected when the council fathers assembled. De Lubac continued to serve as an expert (peritus) at the council, making his influence felt on many documents such as the Constitution on Divine Revelation and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Some of his ideas are reflected also in the Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity and in the Declaration on the Non-Christian Religions.

Greatly esteemed by Pope Paul VI, de Lubac was one of the 11 council theologians chosen to concelebrate with him at the Eucharist preceding the solemn promulgation of the Constitution on Revelation in November 1965. (During the council de Lubac established a close working relationship with Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, who as John Paul II was to elevate him to the rank of cardinal in 1983.)

For several years after 1965, de Lubac traveled widely to explain the achievements of the council. He visited the United States and Latin America, as well as many parts of Europe. He published an important commentary on the Constitution on Revelation, and in other writings sought to clarify the relationships between primacy and collegiality, and between the universal and the particular church. Perceiving the advent of a new crisis of faith, he wrote La foi chretienne and L’Eglise dans la crise actuelle (both 1969). His preoccupations with the present state of the church, however, did not prevent him from continuing his studies in the history of theology, such as his work on Pico dell a Mirandola (1974) and on the spiritual posterity of Joachim of Fiore (2 volumes, 1979, 1981).

His Work
By his own admission, de Lubac was not a systematic thinker. He never tried to articulate any set of first principles on which to base his philosophical or theological findings. Many of his books are composed of historical studies loosely linked together. Although he made forays into many areas, he never composed a treatise on any of the standard theological disciplines. In his last work, an autobiographical reflection published in 1989, he chided himself for having failed to undertake the major work on Christology that he had once projected.

For all that, de Lubac’s work possesses a remarkable inner coherence. As his friend and disciple Hans Urs von Balthasar pointed out, de Lubac’s first book, Catholicism, is programmatic for his entire career. The various chapters are like limbs that would later grow in different directions from the same trunk. The title of this youthful work expresses the overarching intuition. To be Catholic, for de Lubac, is to exclude nothing; it is to be complete and comprehensive. He sees God’s creative and redemptive plan as including all humanity and indeed the entire cosmos. For this reason the plan demands a unified center and a goal.

That center is the mystery of Christ, which will be complete and plainly visible at the end of time. The universal outreach of the church rests on its inner plenitude as the body of Christ. Catholicity is thus intensive as well as extensive. The church, even though small, was already Catholic at Pentecost. Its task is to achieve, in fact, the universality that it has always had in principle. Embodying unity in diversity, Catholicism seeks to purify and elevate all that is good and human.

His Love of Patristic and Early Medieval Writers
In the patristic and early medieval writers de Lubac found an authentic sense of Catholicism. He labored to retrieve for our day the insights of Irenaeus and Origen, Augustine and Anselm, Bernard and Bonaventure. He remained a devoted disciple of Thomas Aquinas, whom he preferred to contemplate in continuity with his predecessors rather than as interpreted by his successors.

In de Lubac’s eyes, a serious failure occurred in early modern times, and indeed to some extent in the late middle ages. This was the breakdown of the Catholic whole into separate parts and supposedly autonomous disciplines. Exegesis became separated from dogmatic theology, dogmatic theology from moral, and moral from mystical. Worse yet, reason was separated from faith, with the disastrous result that faith came to be considered a matter of feeling rather than intelligence.

His Most Controversial Act
One step in this process of fragmentation, for de Lubac, was the erection of an order of “pure nature” in the scholasticism of the Counter Reformation. The most controversial act of de Lubac’s career may have been his attack on Cajetan and Suarez for their view that human nature could exist with a purely natural finality. For de Lubac, the paradox of a natural desire for the supernatural was built into the very concept of the human.

De Lubac was convinced that the newness of Christ was both a fulfillment and a gift. Somewhat as nature was a preparation for grace, while grace remained an unmerited gift, so the Old Testament foreshadowed the New, without however necessitating the Incarnation. In his exegesis, de Lubac sought to show how the New Testament gave the key to the right interpretation of the Old Testament, which it fulfilled in a surpassing manner.

De Lubac’s exegesis has often been depicted as anticritical or precritical, but it was neither. It might with greater justice be called, in Michael Polanyi’s terminology, postcritical. De Lubac practiced what Paul Ricoeur was to call a “second naivete.” After having studied the literal sense of Scripture with the tools of modern scholarship, he returned to the symbolic depths of meaning with full awareness that these depths go beyond the literal. The “spiritual” meaning transcends, but does not negate, the “historical.”

Understanding His Theology
At the root of de Lubac’s theology stands an epistemology that accepts paradox and mystery. Influenced by Newman and Blondel, Rousselot and Marechal, he interpreted human knowing as an aspect of the dynamism of the human spirit in its limitless quest for being. Without this antecedent dynamism toward the transcendent, the mind could form no concepts and arguments. Concepts and arguments, however, arise at a second stage of human knowing and are never adequate to the understanding they attempt to articulate. In every affirmation we necessarily use concepts, but our meaning goes beyond them.

De Lubac And Vatican II
De Lubac was satisfied that Vatican II had overcome the narrowness of modern scholasticism, with its rationalistic tendencies. The council, he believed, had opened the way for a recovery of the true and ancient tradition in all its ple.nitude and variety. But Catholics in France, and indeed in many parts of the world, having imbibed too narrow a concept of tradition, took the demise of neoscholasticism as the collapse of tradition itself. In postconciliar Catholicism de Lubac perceived a self-destructive tendency to separate the spirit of the council from its letter and to “go beyond” the council without having first assimilated its teaching. The turmoil of the postconciliar period seemed to de Lubac to emanate from a spirit of worldly contention quite opposed to the Gospel.

For his part, de Lubac had no desire to innovate. He considered that the fullness was already given in Christ and that the riches of Scripture and tradition had only to be actualized for our own day. In a reflection on his own achievement he wrote: “Without pretending to open up new avenues of thought, I have rather sought, without any archaism, to make known some of the great common sources of Catholic tradition. I wanted to make it loved and to show its ever-abiding fruitfulness. Any such task required a process of reading across the centuries rather than critical application at definite points. It excluded too privileged an attachment to any particular school, system or period” (Memoire sur l’occasion de mes ecrits).

Neither Liberal Nor Conservative
Terms such as “liberal” and “conservative” are ill suited to describe theologians such as de Lubac. If such terminology must be used, one would have to say that he embraced both alternatives. He was liberal because he opposed any narrowing of the Catholic tradition, even at the hands of the disciples of St. Thomas. He sought to rehabilitate marginal thinkers, such as Origen, Pico delia Mirandola and Blondel, in whom he found kindred spirits animated by an adventurous Catholicity of the mind. He reached out to the atheist Proudhon and sought to build bridges to Amida Buddhism.

But in all of these ventures he remained staunchly committed to the Catholic tradition in its purity and plenitude. He humbly and gratefully accepted what the tradition had to offer and made it come alive through his eloquent prose and his keen sense of contemporary actualities. His eminent success in enkindling love for Christ and the church in the hearts of his readers stemmed, no doubt, from his own devotion, humility and selfless desire to serve. The suffering of his long years of adversity, including two world wars and decades of great tension in the church, are still bearing fruit. In the last few years, as his earthly life drew to a close, his disciples and admirers became more numerous and influential. De Lubac’s creative reappropriation of the ancient tradition has earned him a place of honor in a generation of theological giants.

Posted in Readings | Tagged Avery Cardinal Dulles, Catholicism (1938), Henri de Lubac, Henri de Lubac Biography, Surnallirel (1946) | 1 Comment »

Be Thankful

September 30, 2009

In 1918, an elderly man named Charles Wilden entered the photographic studio of Eric Enstrom in Bovey, Minnesota, and a photograph was taken which became world-famous. The photograph taken by Enstrom, showing Wilden praying over his meal, was titled "Grace." Enstrom's daughter, Mrs. Rhoda Nyberg, later created a hand-painted version, and the scene became so popular, as it expressed the theme of contentedness and thankfulness for the simple things in life, that it was reproduced throughout the world. This iconic image (which is in the public domain) is, as of 2002, Minnesota's state photograph.

Psalm 138
I give you thanks, O Lord, with my whole heart; before the gods I sing your praise;
I bow down toward your holy temple and give thanks to your name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness; for you have exalted your name and your word above everything.
On the day I called, you answered me, you increased my strength of soul.
All the kings of the earth shall praise you, O Lord, for they have heard the words of your mouth.
They shall sing of the ways of the Lord, for great is the glory of the Lord.
For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly; but the haughty he perceives from far away.
Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve me against the wrath of my enemies; you stretch out your hand, and your right hand delivers me.
The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever. Do not forsake the work of your hands.

Word of God
And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly; teach and admonish one another in all wisdom; and with gratitude in your hearts sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
Colossians 3:15-17

Happiness Is A Gift
Because our turning toward happiness is a blind seeking we are, whenever happiness comes our way, the recipients of something unforeseen, something unforeseeable, and therefore not subject to planning and intention. Happiness is essentially a gift; we’re not the forgers of our own felicity…Surely the “attainment of created good” can frequently be brought about by purposeful activity. By cleverness, energy, and diligence one can acquire a good many of the goods which are generally considered adjuncts of the happy life: food and drink house, garden, books, a rich and beautiful wife (perhaps). But we cannot make all these acquisitions, or even a single one of them, quench that thirst so mysterious to ourselves for what we call “happiness,” “reflected beatitude.” No one can obtain felicity by pursuit. This explains why one of the elements of being happy is the feeling that a debt of gratitude is owed, a debt impossible to pay. Now, we do not owe gratitude to ourselves. To be conscious of gratitude is to acknowledge a gift.
Happiness and Contemplation – Josef Pieper
Josef Pieper (May 4, 1904- November 6, 1997) was a German Catholic philosopher, at the forefront of the Neo-Thomistic wave in twentieth century Catholic philosophy. Among his most notable works are The Four Cardinal Virtues, Leisure, the Basis of Culture, The Philosophical Act, and Guide to Thomas Aquinas (published in England as Introduction to Thomas Aquinas). He translated C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, into German.

No One Is Owed Anything
A basic truth of Christian spirituality is this: no one is owed anything. Creation is the act by which God gives rise, every moment, to the totality of the finite world. Because God makes literally everything ex nihilo, nothing in the universe has a claim on its existence; rather, everything that exists holds its being as a gift. And therefore when we complain that we are not receiving the praise or the attention or the status that we deserve, we are speaking ontological nonsense. In light of the sheer gratuitousness of creation, the only proper response to existence is one of gratitude and admiration. Since no one deserves anything, all beauty and goodness that we see, in ourselves or in someone else, ought simply to be appreciated — and neither clung to nor resented.
The Strangest Way – Fr. Robert Barron
Father Barron is a nationally-renowned speaker, author and professor of theology at the University of St Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary in the Archdiocese of Chicago.

The Incomparable Value Of Gratitude
In one of his letters Ignatius explains more at length his thought regarding gratitude. In speaking of what is for him the almost unendurable thought of ingratitude, Ignatius energetically describes — both by negation and by affirmation — the unique power of gratitude in our relationship with God and with each other. He writes:

“May the highest grace and the everlasting love of Christ our Lord be our never-failing protection and help.

It seems to me, in the light of the divine Goodness, though others may think differently, that ingratitude is one of the things most worthy of detestation before our Creator and Lord, and before all creatures capable of his divine and everlasting glory, out of all the evils and sins which can be imagined. For it is a failure to recognize the good things, the graces, and the gifts received. As such, it is the cause, beginning, and origin of all evils and sins. On the contrary, recognition and gratitude for the good things and gifts received is greatly loved and esteemed both in heaven and on earth.”

It would be difficult to express more strongly a sense of the incomparable value of gratitude. If you and I were asked to name the most unbearable of all evils and sins in this world, what might we choose? If you and I were asked to identify “the cause, beginning, and origin of all evils and sins” in our world, how might we reply? For Ignatius, who has become so conscious of God as constantly pouring out gifts of love upon our world and upon each one of us, the answer to both questions is utterly clear: it is the simple failure to recognize (des-conocimiento) “the good things, the graces, and the gifts received” from God, simply not to know that there is a God who loves us and who is unceasingly, even this very day, bestowing gifts of love upon us.

What will happen in our lives and in our world when the recognition (conocimiento) of these gifts begins to grow within us? When day after day we consciously choose to recognize these gifts and the Giver’s love for us that is revealed through them? Then, Ignatius says, something “greatly loved and esteemed both in heaven and on earth” will come into our hearts, bringing great blessings into our lives. The first step in the practice of Ignatian examen is exactly this: “to give thanks to God our Lord for the benefits received” (Spiritual Exercises, 43) in the course of the hours we are reviewing — to recognize these gifts and, through them, God’s personal love for us.

In its first step, then, the examen begins with what is most fundamental in our spiritual lives. When the Scriptures record the history of God’s saving work in the world, the primary reality is always what God does. The people’s response is vital to their relationship with God as salvation history unfolds, but it is never the first reality; that is always the work of God, who takes the initiative in leading the people toward salvation. And what God continually does, Ignatius says, is to pour out gifts upon this people, past and present. The first step in the examen consists of recognizing the primary reality that shapes our daily lives. Some examples will concretize what this might mean in practice.
The Examen Prayer – Fr. Timothy M. Gallagher
Father Timothy M. Gallagher, O.M.V., was ordained in 1979 as a member of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, a religious community dedicated to retreats and spiritual formation according to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. He obtained his doctorate in 1983 from the Gregorian University. He has taught (St. John’s Seminary, Brighton, MA; Our Lady of Grace Seminary Residence, Boston, MA), assisted in formation work for twelve years, and served two terms as provincial in his own community. He has dedicated many years to an extensive ministry of retreats, spiritual direction, and teaching about the spiritual life.

The Test Of All Happiness Is Gratitude
The strongest emotion was that life was as precious as it was puzzling. It was an ecstasy because it was an adventure; it was an adventure because it was an opportunity. The goodness of the fairy tale was not affected by the fact that there might be more dragons than princesses; it was good to be in a fairy tale. The test of all happiness is gratitude; and I felt grateful, though I hardly knew to whom. Children are grateful when Santa Claus puts in their stockings gifts of toys or sweets. Could I not be grateful to Santa Claus when he put in my stockings the gift of two miraculous legs? We thank people for birthday presents of cigars and slippers. Can I thank no one for the birthday present of birth?
Orthodoxy G.K. Chesterton
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (May 29, 1874 – June 14, 1936) was an influential English writer of the early 20th century. His prolific and diverse output included journalism, philosophy, poetry, biography, Christian apologetics, fantasy and detective fiction.

The Sense Of Wonder
“It is in fact the sense of wonder which transforms every littlest thing in the universe into a divine mystery…The sense of wonder expresses itself in gratitude, and I know of no finer exposition of the mysticism of gratitude than the concluding pages of Chesterton’s Autobiography: “The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them”.
Alan Watts, 1960’s Counter-Culture Guru on G.K. Chesterton

Posted in Readings | Tagged Alan Watts, Colossians 3:15-17, Fr. Robert Barron, Fr. Timothy M. Gallagher, G. K. Chesterton, Gratitude, Happiness and Contemplation, Ignatius, Josef Pieper, Orthodoxy, Psalm 138, The Strangest Way | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for the ‘Readings’ Category

Reading Selections From The Great Liberal Death Wish — Malcolm Muggeridge

Reading Selections From “The Illusion of Moral Neutrality” by J. Budziszewski

Against The World But For The World

Abortion And The Catechism

An Introduction to Dante Alighieri

Reading Selections From Fighting the Noonday Devil by R. R. Reno

Notable Quotations From The Papal Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (The Fortieth Year) Pope Pius XI, 1931

Dr. Charles Taylor

A Tribute to Henri de Lubac by Avery Cardinal Dulles

Be Thankful

Pages

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Categories

Blog Stats

Top Posts

Subscribe

Archives

Recently Featured Books

Follow “Paying Attention To The Sky”