Archive for the ‘Understanding Modernity’ Category

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Reading Selections from Difficulties Confronting The Faith In Europe Today – Benedict XVI

April 2, 2013

1,280 years ago today[732AD], Charles Martell, the leader of the army of the Frankish-Germanic kingdom, saved Europe from Moslem armies that were storming upon them. This decisive battle is also called in Arabic the “balat ash-shuhada” (“road of the martyrs for the faith”). This outrageously quick expansion of the Moslems who left the area now called Saudi Arabia with the objective of conquering the world for Allah finally found it’s end here, thank God. Now as the Faith recedes from Europe “only by learning to understand that fundamental trait of modern existence which refuses to accept the faith before discussing all its contents, will we be able to regain the initiative instead of simply responding to the questions raised. Only then can we reveal the Faith as the alternative which the world awaits after the failure of the liberalistic and Marxist experiments. This is today's challenge to Christianity, herein lies our great responsibility as Christians at the present time.”

1,281 years ago today[732AD], Charles Martell, the leader of the army of the Frankish-Germanic kingdom, saved Europe from Moslem armies that were storming upon them. This decisive battle is also called in Arabic the “balat ash-shuhada” (“road of the martyrs for the faith”). This outrageously quick expansion of the Moslems who left the area now called Saudi Arabia with the objective of conquering the world for Allah finally found it’s end here, thank God. Now as the Faith recedes from Europe “only by learning to understand that fundamental trait of modern existence which refuses to accept the faith before discussing all its contents, will we be able to regain the initiative instead of simply responding to the questions raised. Only then can we reveal the Faith as the alternative which the world awaits after the failure of the liberalistic and Marxist experiments. This is today’s challenge to Christianity, herein lies our great responsibility as Christians at the present time.”

A meeting of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith with the Presidents of the European Doctrinal Commissions was held at Laxenburg (Vienna), 2-5 May 1989). This text is a translation of the opening address delivered by Cardinal Ratzinger, then-Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Published in L’Osservatore Romana (24 July 1989). My reading group and I met to discuss this Communio piece a couple weeks back and all were unanimous in their appreciation for the compactness and density of expression the former Pope achieves in his writings.

We can give a meaningful answer to the questions raised only if we … are able to express the logic of the Faith in its integrity, the good sense and reasonableness of its view of reality and life.

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A Particular Notion Of Human Freedom
As we can see, there are quite different issues linked together in this litany [of objections to the practice and teaching of the Church]. The first two [contraception and homosexuality]claims pertain to the field of sexual morality; the second two [the admission of the divorced who remarry to the Church's sacraments;ordination of women to the priesthood]to the Church’s sacramental order. A closer look makes it clear, however, that these four issues. their differences notwithstanding, are very much linked together.

They spring from one and the same vision of humanity within which there operates a particular notion of human freedom. When this background is borne in mind, it becomes evident that the litany of objections goes even deeper than it appears at first glance.

What does this vision of humanity, upon which this litany depends, look like on closer scrutiny? Its fundamental characteristics are as diffuse as the claims which derive from it, and so it can he easily traced. We find our starting point in the plausible assertion that modern man would find it difficult to relate to the Church’s traditional sexual morality. Instead, it is said, he has come to terms with his sexuality in a differentiated and less confining way and thus urges a revision of standards which are no longer acceptable in the present circumstances, no matter how meaningful they may have been under past historical conditions.

The next step, then, consists in showing how we today have finally discovered our rights and the freedom of our conscience and how we are no longer prepared to subordinate it to some external authority. Furthermore, it is now time that the fundamental relationship between man and woman he reordered, that outmoded role expectations be overturned and that complete equality of opportunity- be accorded women on all levels and in all fields.

The fact that the Church, as the particularly conservative institution that she is, might not go along with this line of thinking would certainly not be surprising. If the Church, however, would wish to promote human freedom, then ultimately she will be obliged to set aside the theological justification of old social taboos, and the most timely and vital sign of such a desire at the present moment would be her consent to the ordination of women to the priesthood.

The roots of this opposition continue to emerge in various forms and make it clear that what we are dealing with in our imaginary but quite pointed litany is nothing less than a very coherent reorientation.

“Conscience” And “Freedom” In The Modern World
Its key concepts present themselves in the words “conscience” and “freedom,” which are supposed to confer the aura of morality upon changed norms of behavior that at first glance would be plainly labeled as a surrender of moral integrity, the simplifications of a lax conscience.

No longer is conscience understood as that knowledge which derives from a higher form of knowing. It is instead the individual’s self-determination which may not be directed by someone else, a determination by which each person decides for himself what is moral in a given situation.

The concept “norm” — or what is even worse, the moral law itself — takes on negative shades of dark intensity: an external rule may supply models for direction but it can in no case serve as the ultimate arbiter of one’s obligation. Where such thinking holds sway. the relationship of man to his body necessarily changes too. This change is described as a liberation, when compared to the relationship obtaining until now, like all opening up to a freedom long unknown. The body then comes to be considered as a possession which a person can make use of in whatever way seems to him most helpful in attaining “quality of life.”

Bodiliness
The body is something that one has and that one uses. No longer does man expect to receive a message from his bodiliness as to who he is and what he should do, but definitely, on the basis of his reasonable deliberations and with complete independence, he expects to do with it as he wishes. In consequence, there is indeed no difference whether the body be of the masculine of the feminine sex, the body no longer expresses being at all, on the contrary, it has become a piece of property.

It may be that man’s temptation has always lain in the direction of such control and the exploitation of goods. At its roots, however, this way of thinking; first became an actual possibility through the fundamental separation — not a theoretical but practical and constantly practiced separation — of sexuality and procreation.

This separation was introduced with the pill and has been brought to its culmination by genetic engineers so that man can now “make” human beings in the laboratory. The material for doing this has to be procured by actions deliberately carried out for the sake of the planned results which no longer involve interpersonal human bonds and decisions in any way.

The Distinction Between Man And Woman
Indeed, where this kind of thinking has been completely adopted, the difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality- as well as that between sexual relations within or outside marriage have become unimportant. Likewise divested, of every metaphysical symbolism is the distinction between man and woman, which is to be regarded as the product of reinforced role expectations.

It would be interesting to follow in detail this revolutionary vision about man which has appeared behind our rather haphazardly- concocted litany of objections to the Church’s teaching. Without a doubt this will be one of the principal challenges for anthropological reflection in coming years. This reflection will have to sort out meticulously where quite meaningful corrections to traditional notions appear and where there begins a truly fundamental opposition to faith’s vision of man, an opposition that admits no possibility of compromise but places squarely before us the alternative of believing or not.

Change Of “Paradigms”
Such reflection cannot be conducted in a context which is more interested in discerning the questions which we have to pose for ourselves today than in looking for the answers. Let us leave off this dispute for now; our question instead must be how does it happen that values which presuppose such a background have become current among Christians?

It has become quite evident at the present time that our litany of objections does not turn upon a few isolated conflicts over this or that sacramental practice in the Church, nor is it over the extended application of this or that rule. Each of these controversies rests upon a much more far-reaching change of “paradigms,” that is, of the basic ideas or being and of human obligation. This is the case even if only a small number of those who mouth the words of our litany would be aware of the change involved.

They all breathe in, so to speak, the atmosphere of this particular vision of man and the world which convinces them of the plausibility of this one opinion while removing other views from consideration. Who would not be for conscience and freedom and against legalism and constraint? Who wishes to be put into the position of defending taboos?

If the questions are framed in this way, the faith proclaimed by the Magisterium is already maneuvered into a hopeless position. It collapses all by itself because it loses its plausibility according to the thought patterns of the modern world and is looked upon by progressive contemporaries as something that has been long superseded.

The Disappearance Of The Doctrine On Creation From Theology
In the first place. we have to point out the almost complete disappearance of the doctrine on creation from theology. …Notwithstanding all this, it remains always a disagreeable fact that “nature” should be viewed as a moral issue. An anxious and unreasonable reaction against technology is also closely associated with the inability to discern a spiritual message in the material world. Nature still appears as an irrational form even while evincing mathematical structures which we can study technically. That nature has a mathematical intelligibility is to state the obvious, the assertion that it also contains in itself a moral intelligibility, however, is rejected as metaphysical fantasy. The demise of metaphysics goes hand in hand with the displacement of the teaching on creation.

A Philosophy Of Evolution
Their place has been taken by a philosophy of evolution (which I would like to distinguish from the scientific hypothesis of evolution). This philosophy’ intends to discard the laws of nature so that the management of its development may make a better life possible. Nature, which ought really to be the teacher along this path, is instead a blind mistress, combining by unwitting chance what man is supposed to simulate now with full consciousness.

This relationship to nature (which is, to be sure, no creation) remains that of one who acts upon it; it is in no way that of a learner. It persists as a relationship of domination, then, resting upon the presumption that rational calculation may be as clever as “evolution” and can therefore lift the world to new heights. The process of development up to this point had to struggle along without human intervention.

Conscience, to which appeal is made, is essentially mute, just as nature, the teacher, is blind, it just computes which action holds the best chances for betterment. This can (and should, according to the logic of the point of departure) occur in a collective way. for what is needed is a party which, as the vanguard of history, takes evolution in hand while exacting the absolute subordination of the individual to it. Otherwise, things occur individualistically and conscience then becomes the expression of the subject’s autonomy which, in terms of the grand world picture, can only seem absurd arrogance.

It is quite obvious that none of these solutions is helpful, and this is the basis for the deep desperation of mankind today, a desperation which hides behind an official facade of optimism. Nevertheless there is still a silent awareness of the need of an alternative to lead us out of the blind alleys of our plausibilities, and perhaps there is also, more than we think, a silent hope that a renewed Christianity may supply the alternative. This can be accomplished, however, only if the teaching on creation is developed anew. Such an undertaking then, ought to be regarded as one of the most pressing tasks of theology today.

The World’s Having Been Created ”In Wisdom”
We have to make evident once more what is meant by the world’s having been created ”in wisdom” and that God’s creative act is something quite other than the “bang” of a primeval explosion. Only then can conscience and norm enter again into proper relationship. For then it will become clear that conscience is not some individualistic (or collective) calculation; rather it is “conciens” a “knowing along with” creation and, through creation, with God the Creator. with God the Creator.

Then, too, it will be rediscovered that man’s greatness does not lie in the miserable autonomy of proclaiming himself his one and only master, but in the fact that his being allows the highest wisdom, Truth itself, to shine through. Then it will become clear that man is so much the greater the more he is capable of hearing the profound message of creation, the message of the Creator. And then it will he apparent how harmony with creation. whose wisdom becomes our norm, does not mean a limitation upon our freedom but is rather an expression of our reason and our dignity.

Then the body also is given its due honor: it is no longer something “used,” but is the temple of authentic human dignity because it is God’s handiwork in the world. Then is the equal dignity of man and woman made manifest precisely in the fact that they are different. One will then begin to understand once again that their bodiliness reaches the metaphysical depths and is the basis of a symbolic metaphysics whose denial or neglect does not ennoble man but destroy him.

The Decline Of Metaphysics
The decline of the doctrine on creation includes the decline of metaphysics, man’s imprisonment in the empirical, as we have said. When this occurs, however, there is also of necessity a weakening of Christology. The Word who was in the beginning quite disappears. Creative wisdom is no longer a theme for reflection. Inevitably the figure of Jesus Christ, deprived of its metaphysical dimension, is reduced to a purely historical Jesus, to an “empirical” Jesus. who, like every empirical fact, contains only what is capable of happening. The central title of his dignity, “Son,” becomes void where the path to the metaphysical is cut off. Even this title becomes meaningless since there is no longer a theologv of being sons of God, for it is replaced by the notion of autonomy.

Jesus as Representative
The relationship of Jesus with God is now expressed in terms such as “representative” or the like, but as regards what this means, one must seek an answer by the reconstruction of the “historical Jesus.”

There are today two principal models for the alleged figure of the historical Jesus: the bourgeois-liberal and the Marxist-revolutionary. Jesus was either the herald of a liberal morality, struggling against every kind of “legalism” and its representatives; or he was a subversive who can be considered as the deification of the class struggle and its religious symbolic figure.

Evident in the background are the two aspects of the modern notion of freedom, which are seen embodied in Jesus; this is what makes him God’s representative. The unmistakable symptom of the present decline of Christology is the disappearance of the Cross and, consequently, the meaninglessness of the Resurrection, of the Paschal Mystery. In the liberal model, the Cross is an accident, a mistake, the result of short-sighted legalism. It cannot therefore be made the subject of theological speculation; indeed it really should not have occurred and a proper liberalism makes it in any event superfluous.

In the second model Jesus is the failed revolutionary. He can now symbolize the suffering of the oppressed class and thus foster the growth of class consciousness. From this viewpoint the Cross can even be given a certain sense, an important meaning, but one which is radically opposed to the witness of the New Testament.

Now in both these versions there runs a common thread, namely, that we must be saved not through the Cross but from the Cross. Atonement and forgiveness are misunderstandings from which Christianity has to be freed. The two fundamental points of the Christian with of the New Testament writers and of the Church in every age (the divine sonship understood in a metaphysical sense and the Paschal Mystery) are eliminated or at least bereft of any function. It is obvious that with such a basic reinterpretation all the rest of Christianity is likewise altered — the understanding of what the Church is, the liturgy, spirituality, etc.

Naturally- these crude denials, which I have described here with all the severity of their consequences are seldom spoken of so openly. The movements, however, are clear and they do not confine themselves to the realm of theology alone. For quite some time they have entered into preaching and catechesis; on account of the ease of their transmission they are even more pronounced in these fields than in strictly theological literature. Quite clearly, then, the real decisions today fall once again in the field of Christology; everything else follows from that.

The Decline of Eschatology
Finally, I should like to refer briefly to a third field of theological reflection which is threatened by a thoroughgoing reduction of the contents of faith, namely, eschatology. Belief in eternal life has hardly any role to play in preaching today. A friend of mine, recently deceased, an exegete of note. once told me of some Lenten sermons he had heard at the beginning of the 1970s. In the first sermon, the preacher explained to the faithful that Hell does not exist; in the second, Purgatory went the same- way; in the third, he eventually undertook the difficult task of trying to convince his hearers that even Heaven does not exist and that we should seek our paradise here on earth. To be sure, it is seldom as drastic as that, but diffidence in speaking about the hereafter has become commonplace.

The Marxist accusation that Christians justified the injustices of this world with the consolation of the world to come is deeply rooted. and the present social problems are now indeed so serious that they require all the powers of moral commitment. This moral requirement will not at all he called into question by the one who views the Christian life in the perspective of eternity, for eternal life cannot be prepared for otherwise than in our present existence. Nicholas Cabasilas, for example, expressed this truth in a wonderful reflection in the fourteenth century. Only those attain to it ( that is, the future life) who already are its friends and have ears to hear. For it is not there that friendship is begun, that the ear is opened, that the wedding garment is readied and all else prepared, it is rather this present life which is the work place where all this is fashioned. For just as nature prepares the embryo, even while it leads a dark and confined existence, for living in the light and forms it, as it were, according to the pattern of the life that is to come, just so does it happen with the saints.

Only the exigency of eternal life confers its absolute urgency on the moral duty of this life. If however, heaven is only something ”ahead” of us and no longer “above” us, then the interior tension of human existence and its communal responsibility are slackened. For we indeed are not “ahead.” and whether this prospect of what is ahead is a heaven for those others who appear to us to have gone ”ahead.” we are not in a position to determine since they are as free and as subject to temptation as we are ourselves.

The Idea Of The “Better World
Here we find the deception inherent in the idea of the “better world,”’ which, nonetheless, appears today even among Christians as the true goal of our hope and the genuine standard of morality. The “Kingdom of God” has been almost completely substituted in the general awareness, as far as I can see, by the Utopia of a better future world for which we labor and which becomes the true reference point of morality — a morality which thus blends again with a philosophy of evolution and history, and creates norms for itself by calculating what can offer better conditions of life.

I do not deny that it is in just this way that the idealistic energies of young people are unleashed and that the results are fruitful in terms of new aspirations to selfless activity. As an all-embracing norm for human endeavor, however, the future does not suffice. Where the Kingdom of God is reduced to the “better world” of tomorrow, the present will ultimately assert its rights against some imaginary future. The escape into the world of drugs is the logical consequence of the idolizing of Utopia. Since this has difficulty in arriving, man draws it to himself or throws himself headlong into it. It is dangerous, therefore, if the better world terminology predominates in prayers and sermons and inadvertently replaces the faith with a placebo.

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The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac By James Campbell

February 15, 2013
Jack Kerouac at Columbia University

Jack Kerouac at Columbia University

James Campbell is an editor at The Times Literary Supplement. His books include a biography of James Baldwin, “Talking at the Gates,” and a collection of essays, “Syncopation.” This is a review of The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac by Joyce Johnson.

There is something that I always resisted when a much younger me came to reading the Beats (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, et. al.) Reading these sordid tales of their existence, I have to confess to a no-wonder realization all these years later. I still don’t understand how shitheads produce great art…

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IN January 1949, Jack Kerouac failed to appear for an afternoon date with a woman called Pauline. He had told Allen Ginsberg he planned to marry her “the finest woman I’ll ever know” — once she had unshackled herself from her truck-driver husband, who, according to Joyce Johnson, was accustomed to “slapping her around to keep her in line.” In the meantime, Kerouac began an affair with Adele Morales (later to become the second Mrs. Norman Mailer).

His failure to keep the rendezvous with Pauline, however, had nothing to do with affection for Adele; rather, he had overslept after a night of sex games with Luanne Henderson, whom Jack’s muse Neal Cassady had married when she was 15, and who, according to their friend Hal Chase, was “quite easy to get … into bed.” The tryst had been engineered by Cassady, who was hoping to watch, Johnson says, to show Luanne, by then 18, “how little she meant to him.”

Two days later, Kerouac called on Ginsberg and found Luanne “covered with bruises from a beating Neal had given her.” Johnson describes Kerouac as “shocked” by the sight; nevertheless, “they all went out to hear bebop,” partly financed by money stolen by Cassady. In response to being jilted, Pauline confessed her affair to her husband, who tried to burn her on the stove. Kerouac described her in his journal as a “whore.” All the while, Ginsberg can be heard in the background: “How did we get here, angels?”

This is an everyday story of the Beat Generation in late-1940s New York, a tale of crazy mixed-up kids who took a lot of drugs, dabbled in criminality — with, two homicides among the statistics — lapsed into madness, were fond of identifying one another as “saints, saints,” but often had the barest notion of what it means to respect the individuality of other human beings. Yet three members of the inner circle, Kerouac, Ginsberg and William Burroughs, created experimental literary works of remarkable originality — in particular, “On the Road,” “Kaddish” and “Naked Lunch” — which read as freshly today as they did 50 years ago; perhaps, in an instance of that trick that the best art sometimes plays on us, more so.

Kerouac certainly makes a good subject, but there already exist about a dozen biographies (by Ann Charters, Barry Miles, Gerald Nicosia, among others), not to mention memoirs, an oral history – the excellent “Jack’s Book” (1978) — and wider surveys of the Beat Generation. In “Minor Characters” (1983), Johnson wrote about her affair with Kerouac at the time of publication of “On the Road.” She now steps back to a period of Kerouac’s life with which she has no direct acquaintance, tracing the story from his origins in a French Canadian family in Lowell, Mass., to New York in 1951, where the book ends with a rare citation from Kerouac’s journals: “I’m lost, but my work is found.”

Johnson justifies the retelling of what is in outline a familiar tale by the fact of having gained access to the vast Kerouac archive, “deposited in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library in 2002.” So far, so good. No large-scale Kerouac biography, so far as I am aware (“The Voice Is All” lacks a bibliography), has appeared since that date. Unfortunately, Johnson was apparently refused permission to quote at length from the journals and working drafts among Kerouac’s papers. The result is a life in paraphrase.

The method gives rise to frustration. In 1945, for example, Kerouac began writing a novel called “I Wish I Were You,” a reworking of the story of the killing of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr in 1944. Together, Kerouac and Burroughs had previously written “And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks,” a collaboration on the same subject that eventually saw the light of day in 2008. According to Johnson, “I Wish I Were You” is a different beast: “In two successive drafts of the first 100 pages, Jack put in all the textural detail that had been left out of `Hippos’ and even returned with renewed confidence to the lyricism he had abandoned just the year before.. It was really quite brilliant, the best prose he had written so far.”

A single paragraph from the manuscript, and from some of the many others in the Berg, would have helped breathe life into these sentences. Puzzlingly, however, Johnson observes a similar reticence with respect to works by Kerouac and others in the public domain.

“The Voice Is All” devotes more attention to Kerouac’s French Canadian background than most biographies. Johnson’s account of the unhappy household, in which Jack felt himself a guilty survivor after his brother, Gerard, died at the age of 9 (Jack was 4), is the best part of the book. The family’s frequent moves, combined with a burdensome dual heritage, left Kerouac with a lifelong feeling of rootlessness, which contributed to his reluctance to give or accept romantic love, and undermined every promise of domestic stability. His domineering mother emerges from these pages with no more appeal than from any other history.

Johnson makes strong claims for the force of French influence in Kerouac’s work. Quoting the famous passage from “On the Road” — “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad’ to live, mad to talk;’ etc. – she says, “It was a voice that would seem to his future readers as American as apple pie, but it had been born in French.” Part of the justification for the assertion derives from a 57-page manuscript with the title “Les Travaux de Michel Bretagne” in which Kerouac attempted the “experiment” of writing in French. Johnson states that he wished to try out “the language of blunt, plain-spoken people who were not given to nuance or imagery the sort he had grown up with in Lowell.

This has the potential of a new departure in Kerouac biography. Johnson believes the switch produced “some of the most eloquent prose he had ever written. His French voice was plainer than the more fluidly associative one he’d used in his letters to Neal.” But we are offered so minute a glimpse of the manuscript that it is difficult to gain any sense of how far the experiment went, just as it is hard to identify French- rhythms in the prose. I counted a total of 17 words quoted from “Les Travaux,” not counting the title, eight of which are in — English.

Johnson cites a letter from Kerouac to Yvonne Le Maitre, who had written a critical review of his first.novel, “The Town and the City.” Kerouac introduced himself by saying, “I have no proficiency at all in my native language, and that is the lame truth:’ I know this because the letter is printed in “Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters, 1940-1956; edited by Ann Charters. In “The Voice Is All,” it is paraphrased, as usual. Some deeper discussion would have been welcome.

Similar confusion lingers with the information that “in one month alone, he had read Burroughs’s entire bookshelf of Symbolist -poets, all of whom wrote in classical French.” It would subtly alter our view of the Beats to learn that Burroughs had a substantial collection of works by Baudelaire, Mallarme and Rimbaud in the original, and- that –Kerouac was capable of making his way through them. Or were they in translation? Once again, the reader is left in the dark. (How long is an “entire bookshelf” anyway?)

Johnson seems -to have conducted no interviews for”The Voice Is All”  and has found it necessary to set aside only half a page for acknowledgments. When a biographer authorized by the Kerouac estate is enabled to quote freely from the archives, the questions posed by those “really quite brilliant” manuscripts might be answered: if not by the biographer, then by that most competent of all judges, the reader.

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Beauty Will Save the World — Gregory Wolfe

December 7, 2012
The Birth of Venus, one of the most recognized paintings by Botticelli, depicts Venus, the goddess of love, born out of a seashell, a fully mature woman. It is worthy to note that in classical times, the seashell was the symbol for the female genitalia, and as such, Botticelli was artfully referencing the goddess’s actual birth. Although a mythical figure, there is no exact literary context depicting the scene painted by Botticelli, leading to much speculation. As to its commission, the painting was solicited by a member of the Medici family, which is thought wanted to have a reproduction of an earlier work by a different artist, which had been lost after the rule of Nero.

The Birth of Venus, one of the most recognized paintings by Botticelli, depicts Venus, the goddess of love, born out of a seashell, a fully mature woman. It is worthy to note that in classical times, the seashell was the symbol for the female genitalia, and as such, Botticelli was artfully referencing the goddess’s actual birth. Although a mythical figure, there is no exact literary context depicting the scene painted by Botticelli, leading to much speculation. As to its commission, the painting was solicited by a member of the Medici family, which is thought wanted to have a reproduction of an earlier work by a different artist, which had been lost after the rule of Nero.

Gregory Wolfe (Weaver Fellow, 1981-82) is a graduate of Hillsdale College. He received an M.A. in English Literature from Oxford University. Formerly the Publications Director of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, he is now the editor of Linage: A Journal of the Arts and Religion.
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Toward the end of my undergraduate days, I came across a passage in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Lecture which I found startling and even a bit disturbing. Solzhenitsyn begins his address on the nature and role of literature with a brief, enigmatic quotation from Dostoevsky: “Beauty will save the world.” Solzhenitsyn confesses that the phrase had puzzled and intrigued him for some time. And yet, he told the distinguished audience, he had come to believe that Dostoevsky was right.

For a young college student, possessed of a boundless confidence in rational debate and political action, the implication that beauty alone could harbor such redemptive powers was unsettling, to say the least. It was the kind of idea one would expect of an Oscar Wilde or some other fin de siècle decadent; it seemed perilously close to a hedonistic endorsement of “art for art’s sake.” What of Truth and Goodness, the other two “transcendentals”? And yet here were two great Russian novelists, known for their stern, prophetic, and intensely moral sensibilities, as well as their stark depictions of nihilism and human degradation, applauding the redemptive force of beauty.

But the phrase stuck in my mind, and found corroboration in my studies of the role of the imagination in the social order. Like Solzhenitsyn, I have been won over by Dostoevsky’s wisdom.

Whereas I once believed that the decadence of the West could only be turned around through politics and intellectual dialectics, I am now convinced that authentic renewal can only emerge out of the imaginative visions of the artist and the mystic. This does not mean that I have withdrawn into some anti-intellectual Palace of Art. Rather, it involves the conviction that politics and rhetoric are not autonomous forces, but are shaped by the pre-political roots of culture: myth, metaphor, and spiritual experience as recorded by the artist and the saint.

My own vocation, as I have come to understand it, is to explore the relationship between religion, art, and culture in order to discover how the imagination may “redeem the time.”

In the process of discovering this vocation, conservatism played a somewhat paradoxical role: it both inspired and hampered my search. On the one hand, conservative thinkers helped me to understand what culture is, and they introduced me to the riches of our Western heritage. But on the other hand I found that conservatives were so deeply alienated from modern culture that they had retreated from any serious engagement with it. This retreat, it seems to me, has had damaging consequences for the longterm success of the conservative mission.

For a time, I concurred with most conservatives in their wholesale rejection of modem culture. But eventually I saw this as a very un-conservative position to take. A culture is a delicate, organic thing; however ill it may become, we simply cannot stop caring for it, shutting down the life-support machines. When a civilization truly dies, it cannot be easily resurrected.

In what follows, I’d like to retrace of few of the steps that led to my sense of vocation and current ambivalence about the conservative attitude toward culture and redemptive power of the imagination.

Literature in The Waste Land
I was singularly fortunate in having two distinguished conservative scholars, Russell Kirk and Gerhart Niemeyer, as teachers throughout my undergraduate years. They took me — a raw youth very much caught up in the ephemera of the present — and provided me with a past. By grounding me in the Western tradition, they taught me, in M.E. Bradford’s phrase, the importance of “remembering who we are.” Only then was I prepared to return to the present. Armed with that knowledge, I become aware that the crisis of modernity was not merely the work of Democrats and Communists, but the product of a deeper spiritual malaise.

The essence of modernity, according to Kirk and Niemeyer, is the denial that man can know and conform to the transcendent order, and that he must therefore construct his own order, as an extension of his mind. The motto of the modern project was first uttered by Francis Bacon, who said that “knowledge is power.” Later, Karl Marx would proclaim: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” The political expression of modernity, of course, is the ideological regime, founded on a rigid system of abstractions which are imposed on society by force.

But totalitarian regimes are not the only expression of ideology, or else the dissolution of the Soviet Union would signal the end of modernity. As Kirk, Niemeyer, and other conservatives, such as Richard Weaver, have pointed out, ideology also infects Western liberal societies. Though it can take many forms — logical positivism, radical feminism, deconstruction, and so on — ideology involves a fundamental alienation from being.

While ideology often claims the certainties of an absolutist intellectual system, its effects on the actual experiences of individuals tend to produce feelings of alienation and dislocation. The modern project, which began with the elevation of the self and the assertion of its nearly limitless power, has resulted in a world in which the individual self is a precarious fragment, without ties to true community or allegiance to legitimate authority.

Of course, the alienated self, wavering between dreams of power and bouts of angst, is the subject of most of modern art and literature. Given my love of literature, it was the work of the poets, novelists, and playwrights who explored the fallout of modernity that most attracted me. From Niemeyer I received insights into the novels of Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn, ArthurKoestler and Thomas Mann. And from Kirk I was introduced to T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wyndham Lewis — a group of extraordinary writers who were once known as the “Men of 1914.”

The figure of Eliot, however, loomed largest in my mind. Eliot was not only the subtlest chronicler of the modern malaise, but also the most reliable guide out of the morass. In poems like “Gerontion” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” Eliot portrays, in dramatic monologues, the alienated, detached, and despairing modern self. Eliot’s The Waste Land gave the age its appropriate metaphor.

Yet even in this poem of spiritual aridity, Eliot reveals his struggle for spiritual healing, listening to “What the Thunder Said.”  From the images of hell and limbo in the early poems, Eliot moves on to the experience of purgatory in Ash Wednesday. Finally, Four Quartets speak of the irradiation of grace into the world, and of redemption through suffering. This final masterpiece records the journey of the isolated self toward integration, which includes a renewed sense of the presence of the past, and fleeting glimpses of union with God.

What gave added excitement to studying Eliot with Kirk was that he had known Eliot and Eliot’s friends, Wyndham Lewis and Roy Campbell. I have always been fascinated by the literary and intellectual communities formed by writers with similar insights into their age, such as Samuel Johnson’s “Club” and C.S. Lewis’ Inklings. These meetings of the minds seem to me to be the essence of living culture, models of artists-in-community engaged with the challenges and opportunities of their time. Even though Kirk had known these writers only in their later years, I felt somehow touched by their vital presence, a fellow participant in their imaginative endeavors.

Modernity vs. Modernism
But there was a contradiction in my thinking at the time that slowly worked itself up to the surface of my mind. Like many conservatives I extolled Eliot as the supreme critic of the modern waste land, which had produced art and literature characterized by chaos and fragmentation, squalor and ugliness, egotism, sensual excess, and an obsession with primitive paganism as opposed to Western Christianity. Yet I counted among my heroes Eliot and Wyndham Lewis, whose works were prime examples of the aesthetics of High Modernism. How could these facts be reconciled?

When I compared Eliot’s works to those of Stravinsky and Picasso — two modern villains in the conservative hall of infamy — I could not help noticing striking similarities. All three employed the technique of fragmentation of time and space. One could plausibly argue that Eliot’s The Waste Land is a Cubist poem, a series of disjointed angles and multiple perspectives. Both Eliot and Picasso were aware that technology and ideology had fragmented our perception of reality; in their art, they used that fragmentation as a starting point, and sought to move through it to new visions of unity.

Another example of the conservative attack on “modern art” concerns the issue of paganism. Here too I found that the reality was more subtle than the caricature. Just as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring evoked a pagan ritual and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles D’Avignon used African tribal masks, so Eliot in The Waste Land brought in primitive vegetation myths, as well as the insights of Buddhism and Hinduism. I found that all three artists were interested in paganism precisely because it seemed to possess the awe, sacramentality, and reverence for mystery that had been drained out of late nineteenth-century bourgeois liberal Christianity.

As it happens, Stravinsky, like Eliot, went on to become an orthodox Christian and a self-described “classicist.” Picasso did not make such a pilgrimage, nor did his life reflect a depth of spiritual understanding or moral rectitude. But to deny the imaginative insight Picasso possessed on the basis of his intellectual and moral failings, I came to realize, was both petty and closed-minded. Similarly, when I read D.H. Lawrence I found a penetrating critique of technology and the modern dichotomy between mind and body. Yet I have found that most conservatives prefer to dismiss Lawrence on the basis of his ideas about sexual liberation. Though it may seem a truism to most people, it eventually dawned on me that one can learn from an artist or thinker who asks the right questions, even if one may disagree with many of his answers.

Thus I was forced to account for the fact that many conservatives had succumbed to philistinism: Why did they utter these blanket condemnations of “modem art”? Why would anyone demand that art — a subtle medium, characterized by the indirection of irony, ambiguity, and hidden meaning — preach the “truth” directly? Why categorize artists and writers as good or bad in terms of ideology, rather than of imaginative vision?

The root of the problem, I believe, is a misunderstanding of, or aversion to, the nature of the imagination itself. Part of this can be traced to the Puritan and pragmatic strains in the American character. Conservatives have, by and large, focused their energies on political action and the theoretical work necessary to undertake action. The indirection of art, with its lack of moralizing and categorizing, strikes the pragmatic mind as being unedifying, and thus as inessential. Insofar as the great artists and writers of the past are admired, it is for their support of some idea, rather than for the complex, many-sided vision of their art.

The artist, like anyone else, is a representative of his time. His role, to paraphrase Hamlet, is to reveal “the form and pressure of the age.” By “pressure,” Shakespeare means impression or stamp. While it is true that some art can portray the ideal, the primary burden of art is to grapple with the reality of the present. Only by engaging the present can art achieve universal meaning. Modern artists create works that reflect modern conditions; they explore modernity, as it were, from the inside. The least imaginative of them reflect mere surfaces — such artists deserve censure. But the great artists dramatize the conflicts of their time, embedding meaning deep within their works.

It was Eliot himself who formulated the best response to those who want art merely to depict idealized forms of beauty. “We mean all sorts of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential advantage for a poet is not to have a beautiful world with which to deal. It is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness; to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory.”

Eliot’s perception is the natural extension of Dostoevsky’s prophecy that “Beauty will save the world.” Just as Christians believe that God became man so that He could reach into, and atone for, the pain and isolation of sin, so the artist descends into disorder so that he might discover a redemptive path toward order.

Posted in Understanding Dostoevsky, Understanding Modernity | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments »

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Gaudium et spes: The Community Of Mankind

November 16, 2012

All men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.
1 Peter 1:24-25

23. One of the salient features of the modern world is the growing interdependence of men one on the other, a development promoted chiefly by modern technical advances. Nevertheless brotherly dialogue among men does not reach its perfection on the level of technical progress, but on the deeper level of interpersonal relationships. These demand a mutual respect for the full spiritual dignity of the person. Christian revelation contributes greatly to the promotion of this communion between persons, and at the same time leads us to a deeper understanding of the laws of social life which the Creator has written into man’s moral and spiritual nature.

Since rather recent documents of the Church’s teaching authority have dealt at considerable length with Christian doctrine about human society, this council is merely going to call to mind some of the more basic truths, treating their foundations under the light of revelation. Then it will dwell more at length on certain of their implications having special significance for our day.

24. God, Who has fatherly concern for everyone, has willed that all men should constitute one family and treat one another in a spirit of brotherhood. For having been created in the image of God, Who “from one man has created the whole human race and made them live all over the face of the earth” (Acts 17:26), all men are called to one and the same goal, namely God Himself.

For this reason, love for God and neighbor is the first and greatest commandment. Sacred Scripture, however, teaches us that the love of God cannot be separated from love of neighbor: “If there is any other commandment, it is summed up in this saying: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself…. Love therefore is the fulfillment of the Law” (Romans 13:9-10; cf. 1 John 4:20). To men growing daily more dependent on one another, and to a world becoming more unified every day, this truth proves to be of paramount importance.

Indeed, the Lord Jesus, when He prayed to the Father, “that all may be one. . . as we are one” (John 17:21-22) opened up vistas closed to human reason, for He implied a certain likeness between the union of the divine Persons, and the unity of God’s sons in truth and charity. This likeness reveals that man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.

25. Man’s social nature makes it evident that the progress of the human person and the advance of society itself hinge on one another. For the beginning, the subject and the goal of all social institutions is and must be the human person which for its part and by its very nature stands completely in need of social life. Since this social life is not something added on to man, through his dealings with others, through reciprocal duties, and through fraternal dialogue he develops all his gifts and is able to rise to his destiny.

Among those social ties which man needs for his development some, like the family and political community, relate with greater immediacy to his innermost nature; others originate rather from his free decision. In our era, for various reasons, reciprocal ties and mutual dependencies increase day by day and give rise to a variety of associations and organizations, both public and private. This development, which is called socialization, while certainly not without its dangers, brings with it many advantages with respect to consolidating and increasing the qualities of the human person, and safeguarding his rights.

But if by this social life the human person is greatly aided in responding to his destiny, even in its religious dimensions, it cannot be denied that men are often diverted from doing good and spurred toward and by the social circumstances in which they live and are immersed from their birth. To be sure the disturbances which so frequently occur in the social order result in part from the natural tensions of economic, political and social forms. But at a deeper level they flow from man’s pride and selfishness, which contaminate even the social sphere. When the structure of affairs is flawed by the consequences of sin, man, already born with a bent toward evil, finds there new inducements to sin, which cannot be overcome without strenuous efforts and the assistance of grace.

26. Every day human interdependence grows more tightly drawn and spreads by degrees over the whole world. As a result the common good, that is, the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment, today takes on an increasingly universal complexion and consequently involves rights and duties with respect to the whole human race. Every social group must take account of the needs and legitimate aspirations of other groups, and even of the general welfare of the entire human family.

At the same time, however, there is a growing awareness of the exalted dignity proper to the human person, since he stands above all things, and his rights and duties are universal and inviolable. Therefore, there must be made available to all men everything necessary for leading a life truly human, such as food, clothing, and shelter; the right to choose a state of life freely and to found a family, the right to education, to employment, to a good reputation, to respect, to appropriate information, to activity in accord with the upright norm of one’s own conscience, to protection of privacy and rightful freedom even in matters religious.

Hence, the social order and its development must invariably work to the benefit of the human person if the disposition of affairs is to be subordinate to the personal realm and not contrariwise, as the Lord indicated when He said that the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.

This social order requires constant improvement. It must be founded on truth, built on justice and animated by love; in freedom it should grow every day toward a more humane balance. An improvement in attitudes and abundant changes in society will have to take place if these objectives are to be gained.

God’s Spirit, Who with a marvelous providence directs the unfolding of time and renews the face of the earth, is not absent from this development. The ferment of the Gospel too has aroused and continues to arouse in man’s heart the irresistible requirements of his dignity.

27. Coming down to practical and particularly urgent consequences, this council lays stress on reverence for man; everyone must consider his every neighbor without exception as another self, taking into account first of all His life and the means necessary to living it with dignity, so as not to imitate the rich man who had no concern for the poor man Lazarus.

In our times a special obligation binds us to make ourselves the neighbor of every person without exception and of actively helping him when he comes across our path, whether he be an old person abandoned by all, a foreign laborer unjustly looked down upon, a refugee, a child born of an unlawful union and wrongly suffering for a sin he did not commit, or a hungry person who disturbs our conscience by recalling the voice of the Lord, “As long as you did it for one of these the least of my brethren, you did it for me” (Matthew 25:40).

Furthermore, whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraceful working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are supreme dishonor to the Creator.

28. Respect and love ought to be extended also to those who think or act differently than we do in social, political and even religious matters. In fact, the more deeply we come to understand their ways of thinking through such courtesy and love, the more easily will we be able to enter into dialogue with them.

This love and good will, to be sure, must in no way render us indifferent to truth and goodness. Indeed love itself impels the disciples of Christ to speak the saving truth to all men. But it is necessary to distinguish between error, which always merits repudiation, and the person in error, who never loses the dignity of being a person even when he is flawed by false or inadequate religious notions. God alone is the judge and searcher of hearts, for that reason He forbids us to make judgments about the internal guilt of anyone.

The teaching of Christ even requires that we forgive injuries, and extends the law of love to include every enemy, according to the command of the New Law: “You have heard that it was said: Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thy enemy. But I say to you: love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who persecute and calumniate you” (Matthew 5:43-44).

29. Since all men possess a rational soul and are created in God’s likeness, since they have the same nature and origin, have been redeemed by Christ and enjoy the same divine calling and destiny, the basic equality of all must receive increasingly greater recognition.

True, all men are not alike from the point of view of varying physical power and the diversity of intellectual and moral resources. Nevertheless, with respect to the fundamental rights of the person, every type of discrimination, whether social or cultural, whether based on sex, race, color, social condition, language or religion, is to be overcome and eradicated as contrary to God’s intent. For in truth it must still be regretted that fundamental personal rights are still not being universally honored. Such is the case of a woman who is denied the right to choose a husband freely, to embrace a state of life or to acquire an education or cultural benefits equal to those recognized for men.

Therefore, although rightful differences exist between men, the equal dignity of persons demands that a more humane and just condition of life be brought about. For excessive economic and social differences between the members of the one human family or population groups cause scandal, and militate against social justice, equity, the dignity of the human person, as well as social and international peace.

Human institutions, both private and public, must labor to minister to the dignity and purpose of man. At the same time let them put up a stubborn fight against any kind of slavery, whether social or political, and safeguard the basic rights of man under every political system. Indeed human institutions themselves must be accommodated by degrees to the highest of all realities, spiritual ones, even though meanwhile, a long enough time will be required before they arrive at the desired goal.

30. Profound and rapid changes make it more necessary that no one ignoring the trend of events or drugged by laziness, content himself with a merely individualistic morality. It grows increasingly true that the obligations of justice and love are fulfilled only if each person, contributing to the common good, according to his own abilities and the needs of others, also promotes and assists the public and private institutions dedicated to bettering the conditions of human life.

Yet there are those who, while possessing grand and rather noble sentiments, nevertheless in reality live always as if they cared nothing for the needs of society. Many in various places even make light of social laws and precepts, and do not hesitate to resort to various frauds and deceptions in avoiding just taxes or other debts due to society. Others think little of certain norms of social life, for example those designed for the protection of health, or laws establishing speed limits; they do not even avert to the fact that by such indifference they imperil their own life and that of others.

Let everyone consider it his sacred obligation to esteem and observe social necessities as belonging to the primary duties of modern man. For the more unified the world becomes, the more plainly do the offices of men extend beyond particular groups and spread by degrees to the whole world. But this development cannot occur unless individual men and their associations cultivate in themselves the moral and social virtues, and promote them in society; thus, with the needed help of divine grace men who are truly new and artisans of a new humanity can be forthcoming

31. In order for individual men to discharge with greater exactness the obligations of their conscience toward themselves and the various group to which they belong, they must be carefully educated to a higher degree of culture through the use of the immense resources available today to the human race. Above all the education of youth from every social background has to be undertaken, so that there can be produced not only men and women of refined talents, but those great-souled persons who are so desperately required by our times.

Now a man can scarcely arrive at the needed sense of responsibility, unless his living conditions allow him to become conscious of his dignity, and to rise to his destiny by spending himself for God and for others. But human freedom is often crippled when a man encounters extreme poverty just as it withers when he indulges in too many of life’s comforts and imprisons himself in a kind of splendid isolation. Freedom acquires new strength, by contrast, when a man consents to the unavoidable requirements of social life, takes on the manifold demands of human partnership, and commits himself to the service of the human community.

Hence, the will to play one’s role in common endeavors should be everywhere encouraged. Praise is due to those national procedures which allow the largest possible number of citizens to participate in public affairs with genuine freedom. Account must be taken, to be sure, of the actual conditions of each people and the decisiveness required by public authority. If every citizen is to feel inclined to take part in the activities of the various groups which make up the social body, these must offer advantages which will attract members and dispose them to serve others. We can justly consider that the future of humanity lies in the hands of those who are strong enough to provide coming generations with reasons for living and hoping.

32. As God did not create man for life in isolation, but for the formation of social unity, so also “it has pleased God to make men holy and save them not merely as individuals, without bond or link between them, but by making them into a single people, a people which acknowledges Him in truth and serves Him in holiness.” So from the beginning of salvation history He has chosen men not just as individuals but as members of a certain community. Revealing His mind to them, God called these chosen ones “His people” (Exodus 3:7-12), and even made a covenant with them on Sinai.

This communitarian character is developed and consummated in the work of Jesus Christ. For the very Word made flesh willed to share in the human fellowship. He was present at the wedding of Cana, visited the house of Zacchaeus, ate with publicans and sinners. He revealed the love of the Father and the sublime vocation of man in terms of the most common of social realities and by making use of the speech and the imagery of plain everyday life. Willingly obeying’ the laws of his country He sanctified those human ties, especially family ones, which are the source of social structures. He chose to lead the life proper to an artisan of His time and place.

In His preaching He clearly taught the sons of God to treat one another as brothers. In His prayers He pleaded that all His disciples might be “one.” Indeed as the redeemer of all, He offered Himself for all even to point of death. “Greater love than this no one has, that one lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). He commanded His Apostles to preach to all peoples the Gospel’s message that the human race was to become the Family of God, in which the fullness of the Law would be love.

As the firstborn of many brethren and by the giving of His Spirit, He founded after His death and resurrection a new brotherly community composed of all those who receive Him in faith and in love. This He did through His Body, which is the Church. There everyone, as members one of the other, would render mutual service according to the different gifts bestowed on each.

This solidarity must be constantly increased until that day on which it will be brought to perfection. Then, saved by grace, men will offer flawless glory to God as a family beloved of God and of Christ their Brother.

Posted in The State of the Catholic Church, Theology, Understanding Fellowship, Understanding Modernity, Vatican II | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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Truthiness And Catholicism – Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

September 21, 2012

The roots of truthiness? “’When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.’”

Stephen Colbert, the youngest of eleven children from an Irish Catholic family, created one of the shrewdest political satire television shows in recent years, The Colbert Report.

In his first appearance, Colbert launched the show’s trademark word: truthiness. He put it this way:

Now I’m sure some of the word police, the wordanistas over at Webster’s, are gonna say, “Hey, that’s not a word.” Well, anybody who knows me knows that I am no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist, constantly telling us what is or isn’t true; or what did or didn’t happen. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart. And that’s exactly what’s pulling our country apart today. Because face it, folks, we are a divided nation. Not between Democrats or Republicans, or conservatives and liberals, or tops and bottoms. No, we are divided between those who think with their head, and those who know with their heart … The truthiness is, anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news at you.‘

Speaking out of character about modern political debate, Colbert later said: “It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything … I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?” He added: “Truthiness is, `What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.’ It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality.”

People laugh because Colbert is right. Once upon a time, words had weight. Now they float. In the past, Americans understood equality as something basic that we all share before God and the law. Now it means that almost everyone feels anointed to have his or her views taken seriously, no matter how unfettered by fact, logic, civility, or common sense. Unfortunately, experience teaches the opposite. Some ideas are bad. Some opinions are foolish. Some feelings are vindictive. And some people lie. The American genius for marketing, however, is a neutral skill. It can sell sand in a desert, and cigarettes just as artfully as vitamins. So it becomes very important for citizens to think their politics, not feel them; to examine the language of public discourse for what the words really mean.

In his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946), George Orwell observed that “one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.” Writing at the close of a world war that killed more than 30 million people, Orwell warned that the deliberate abuse of language had played a big role in the political collapse the world then suffered. If Joseph Stalin could claim to be a “democrat,” the word meant nothing at all; or even worse, the opposite of its original meaning. Orwell argued that, in the modern era, political language has become mainly a tool to obscure or defend the indefensible.

Orwell knew that words have power because they convey meaning. Words shape our thinking, which shapes our actions. Dishonest public debate with its misuse of words leads to bad laws and dangerous politics. When. the meaning of a word is subverted, it acts like a virus.

It infects other words and ideas. It spreads the habit of adjusting the facts and what they mean to serve predetermined political ends. In a different age, we called this lying. Now we call it spin. But whatever we name it, voter cynicism and a weaker democratic life are the result.

Massaging the facts to get elected — what candidates call “framing the issues” — is hardly new to American politics. It goes with the messiness of an open society. This is why George Washington and other founders spoke so forcefully about the need for a literate, educated citizenry. Democratic life depends on a people with the reasoning skills to see through the chicanery that often goes with political debate.

The new mass media that shape our views, however, have much more power than in the past. Americans now spend large parts of the day watching television, listening to the radio, or exploring the Internet. More books than ever are in print, but serious reading has declined.

This has political implications. Just as the American idea of human rights depends on a vocabulary shaped historically by religion, so does our political process depend on an ability to judge and reason shaped by the printed word and the culture it helped create. Reading cultivates the skills of abstract thought, mental acuity, and attention to the logical structure of a sentence. At its best, reading breeds an appropriately critical mind; that is, a mind able to sustain focus, judge information, imagine alternatives, and choose logically. It’s no accident that Tocqueville noticed two striking qualities about the newly independent Americans: their religious practice and their love of the printed word.

This doesn’t mean that electronic media are bad. In any case,, we can’t avoid them. But it does mean that we need to develop what Bertrand Russell called an “immunity to eloquence” as we experience them. In other words, we should know how the media work, and especially how they work on us. The “eloquence” of the new electronic media is their entertainment effect: their stress on brevity, energy, variety, emotion, and visual imagery. We need to remember that the form of information is part of its content. As Neil Postman once observed, every new. information medium is “not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.” The new media breed and feed an audience — including voters — with little patience for complexity or sustained debate.

This is exactly the opposite of early American civic literacy. In the postcolonial years, most ordinary people not only could read and did read but eagerly joined in political debate. When Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote The Federalist Papers, they already knew that an educated citizenry wanted to read and debate them. A culture like this forms minds that can retain and weigh large amounts of conceptual information; minds able to follow arguments — even dense and abstract ones.

In an electronic culture, vast chunks of incoming in formation have no importance at all. They simply gum up our ability to distinguish and rank issues. Politics tends to dumb down into what Christopher Lasch called “ideological gestures.” A serious marketplace of ideas, a place where opposing views get fairly debated and the best course of action emerges as the winner, simply can’t survive in a climate ruled by the sound bite. “The problem,” Neil Postman wrote, “is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.” Crime, war, public humiliation, sexual intimacy, pain, and political leadership — much of our experience of these things comes from watching them on network shows. We begin to judge their value by how prevalent they are on television and how well they hold our attention there.

The new media have two other key flaws. First, in their immersive effect, they obscure the large amounts of important information they don’t communicate. The need for brevity creates an artificial need for simplicity. Facts that don’t fit within the forms or appetites of the media often get ignored. But the real world, including human motives, is a huge and tangled place. Thus, despite a modern tidal wave of certain kinds of data, we actually live in what Bill McKibben famously described as an UnEnlightenment, an age of missing information.’

Second, in their persuasive effect, the new media instruct the public on how to think and what they need. Some of this subtle tutoring can be funny, especially in advertising. It led Neil Postman to see American television commercials as a form of “religious parables, organized around a coherent theology. Like all religious parables, [television commercials] put forward a concept of sin, intimations of the way to redemption, and a vision of Heaven.

They also suggest what are the roots of evil, and what are the obligations of the holy. George Orwell put it more bluntly when he equated consumer advertising with “the banging of a spoon in a swill bucket,” but the point is that selling a product, an idea, or a political candidate requires much the same skill set. Even major print-news organizations, while paying lip service to fairness, tend to frame complex stories in a streamlined and ideologically loaded way.

When Orwell wrote his 1946 essay on the political debasement of language, he spoke to a culture that was still largely typographic; that had been formed by the mental disciplines of print. The English language today has vastly more power because of the new technologies that carry it. Those same tools make it easier to mislead, confuse, and lie to citizens, and then coach them to smile while they’re being robbed.

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‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ Lewis Carroll wrote those words more than a century ago in Through the Looking Glass, but Humpty Dumpty might do very well in public office today. Dissembling in political life is now a national habit. Mass media tools make it easy. If we love our country — and we have that duty as citizens – we must try to recover and insist on the real meaning of our public vocabulary. Truth, pluralism, consensus, choice, the common good, democracy, conscience, love, equal rights, tolerance — all of these words are now routinely misused in public debate to serve selfish or destructive ends.

Pluralism is a demographic fact. Nothing more. It is not a philosophy or ideology or secular cult. It does not imply that all ideas and religious beliefs are equally valid, because they’re not. We live in a diverse country. That requires us to treat each other with respect. This makes sense both morally and pragmatically. But “pluralism” does not require us to mute our convictions. Nor does it ever excuse us from speaking and acting to advance our beliefs about justice and the common good in public. Catholics who use “pluralism” as an alibi for their public inaction suffer from what the early church described as dypsychia. In other words, they’re ruled by two conflicting spirits. They may speak like disciples, but their unwillingness to act paralyzes their words.

Tolerance is a working principle that enables us to live in peace with other people and their ideas. Most of the time, it’s a very good thing. But it is not an end in itself, and tolerating or excusing grave evil in a society is itself a grave evil. The roots of this word are revealing. Tolerance comes from the Latin tolerare, “to bear or sustain,” and tollere, which means “to lift up.” It implies bearing other persons and their beliefs the way we carry a burden or endure a headache. It’s actually a negative idea. And it is not a Christian virtue.

Catholics have the duty not to “tolerate” other people but to love them, which is a much more demanding task. Justice, charity, mercy, courage, wisdom — these are Christian virtues; but not tolerance. Prudence too is a vital Christian virtue, the “right rudder of reason,” but not when we use it as a cover for political cowardice. Real Christian virtues flow from an understanding of truth, unchanging and rooted in God, that exists and obligates us whether we like it or not. The pragmatic social truce we call “tolerance” has no such grounding.

In like manner, building a consensus around laws and policies is usually a worthy goal. But whether such a consensus is good or evil depends on the content of the specific laws and policies. A consensus — which simply means the “agreement of the people” — is never a source of truth. It says nothing at all about whether a policy is good or a law is evil. In fact, a consensus is often wrong. A great many unjust wars and bad leaders have been very popular.

And this leads us to another brutalized word, democracy, which couples the Greek words demos (people) and kratos (power). Switzerland and North Korea both claim to be democracies. The latter’s official name is the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. In the United States, however, democracy means “majority rule by the citizens through representative, constitutional government.” American democracy does not ask its citizens to put aside their deeply held moral and religious beliefs for the sake of public policy. In fact, it requires exactly the opposite. People are fallible. The majority of voters can be uninformed or biased or simply wrong. Thus, to survive, American democracy depends on people of character fighting for their beliefs in the public square — legally, ethically, and nonviolently, but forcefully and without apology. Anything less is a form of theft from the nation’s health.

Other key words in our political conversation suffer from the same vocabulary drift. Choice is worthless — in fact, it’s a form of idolatry — if all the choices are meaningless or bad. Our basic rights don’t emerge or exist in a vacuum. They come to us as endowments from our Creator, and we have obligations that go along with them. Community is more than a collection of persons with the same appetites or complaints. A real community requires mutual respect, a shared past and future, and submission to each other’s needs based on common beliefs and principles. It is not an elegant name for an interest group.

Nor is the common good merely the sum of what most people want right now. The “common good” is that which constitutes the best source of justice and happiness for a community and its members in the light of truth. In the mind of the Second Vatican Council, it includes all those conditions of social life that enable individuals, families, and organizations to achieve their true fulfillment (GS 74). This “true fulfillment” presumes that external, fundamental truths about human nature and meaning preexist us. We don’t invent those truths.

Finally conscience, as Cardinal Newman once said, “has rights because it has duties.” In Newman’s words, “We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.” As Catholics, we must act according to our conscience. But we should also remember that we all have great skill at self-deception when it suits us. Conscience is never merely a matter of personal preference or opinion. Nor is it a self-esteem coach. It is a gift of God; the strong, still, uncomfortably honest voice in- side us that speaks the truth if we let it. In fact, to continue with Newman,

the more a person tries to obey his conscience, the more he gets alarmed with himself for obeying it so imperfectly … But next, while he grows in self-knowledge, he also understands more and more clearly that the voice of conscience has nothing gentle, nothing of mercy in its tone. It is severe and even stern. It does not speak of forgiveness, but of punishment. It suggests to him a future judgment; it does not tell him how he can avoid it.

Conscience has the task of telling us the hard truth about our actions. The church has the task of expressing God’s love and leading us to salvation. For Catholics, “conscience” demands a mind and heart well formed in the truth of Jesus Christ. And these come foremost through the teaching of the Catholic faith. Obviously, faith is not a mathematical equation. People often face difficult issues in daily life. Some Catholics may find themselves sincerely unable, in conscience, to accept a point of Catholic teaching. When that happens, the test of a believer’s honesty is his humility; that is, his willingness to put the matter to real prayer and the seriousness of his effort to accept the wisdom of the church and follow her guidance. If after this effort he still cannot reconcile himself with the teaching of the church, he must do what he believes to be right, because ultimately, every Catholic must follow his or her conscience.

At the same time, we should remember that honest private decisions — the kind that come from hard self-examination — are very different from the organized, premeditated, public rejection of Catholic belief by persons who use their Catholic identity to attack what the Catholic faith holds as true.

Organized dissent in the name of “conscience,” especially in a media age that celebrates almost anyone who challenges authority, very easily — and much too conveniently — lends itself to vanity and evasion. It tribalizes Catholic life by turning the church into a battleground for interest groups and personal ego. In fact, one of the saddest qualities of the current American Catholic scene is that, when it comes to the meaning of Catholic, quite a few of us are Lewis Carroll fans without knowing it.

“’When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.’”

Posted in Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, The State of the Catholic Church, Understanding Modernity | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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Understanding The Crisis Of Modernity

October 1, 2010

Newton used the Bible’s Book of Daniel to calculate the date for the Apocalypse. "No sooner than 2060" was his conclusion.

Many may be unfamiliar with Robert Spaemann. Spaemann is a conservative philosopher whose focus is on Christian ethics. He is known for his work in bioethics, ecology, and human rights. Although not yet widely translated into languages other than his native German, Spaemann in considered to be one of the most important virtue ethicists alive today, and his work is highly regarded by his native countryman Pope Benedict XVI. I first came across his name in a reading on Benedict XVI’s criticism of Modernity.  Second part here.

This brief tour d’horizon of the crisis of modernity cannot but fail to provide an adequate account of the wide spectrum of responses to the spirit of modernity. Yet this quick sketch, as well as the equally sketchy account of the late modern situation, offers a background against which one can consider an examination of Robert Spaemann’s philosophy that engages in both an explicit and, more often, an implicit conversation with many of the philosophers, writers, and theologians mentioned above, as well as with the dialectical spirit of modernity itself. More selections from Robert Spaemann’s Philosophy of the Human Person by Holger Zaborowski will be coming.

The End Of The Modern World
It is almost a truism to speak of the ‘end of the modern world,’ of the crisis of modernity, or, in a less extreme way, of the critical condition of modern rationality. Modern consciousness, as the German philosopher Robert Spaemann has often argued, ‘nears its end.’ Because of this, he further reasons, we can now describe it and attempt to understand and criticize it. We may also endeavor to go beyond modernity, as have many so-called post-modern philosophers, whose attitude toward modernity, almost by definition, is critical and censorious. Those philosophers, most of whom are inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, argue that modernity has failed irretrievably and needs to be surpassed philosophically. It is therefore time, they think, to announce, more or less triumphantly, the end of modernity and to enter into a new, ‘post-modern’ age.

While some interpret the current crisis as symptomatic of modernity as such, others argue that it is simply a failure of modernity to realize itself. Jurgen Habermas, for instance, who would doubtless not go so far as to associate the crisis with key presuppositions of Enlightenment rationality, characterizes modernity as a yet ‘unfinished project’ that is in need of further attention.

Begging the Question
Whether modernity is considered a failed or an unfinished project, it is plausible to argue that the catastrophic course of the twentieth century has demonstrated the long-disguised implications and ambiguities of many key ideas that constitute modernity, and that human beings are thus, as Romano Guardini argued, in need of a new ‘search for orientation.’ The current crisis of modernity also discloses, Spaemann states, that ‘modernity, as a “scientific Weltanschauung”., does not have arguments; it is based on petitiones principii (the logical fallacy of assuming the conclusion in the premises; begging the question) and thus relies on often well-hidden assumptions that are not sufficiently explicated and proven.

It is particularly these hidden assumptions that have become questionable and problematic and may explain why modernity gives the impression of being subject to a dialectic that progressively undermines it. In the course of this crisis of modernity it has become obvious to some that the modern mind can only shape culture in a human manner as long as it is not merely modern. ‘It cannot be the case that the only essential thing about modernity’, Spaemann points out, ‘is its being modern.’

In this perceived situation of crisis accounts of the legitimacy, genesis, and development of modernity have been produced, as well as numerous critical appreciations of the fundamental principles of modern reason. These latter raise the issue of why modernity has developed signs of a crisis, and what accounts for the dialectical structure of modernity which C. S. Lewis has pointedly called the ‘tragic-comedy of our situation’, in which ‘we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible.’

The Abstract Universality Of Modern Reason
One explanation for the crisis of modernity is that the abstract universality of modern reason is inclined to dismiss nature itself and the particular social and historical context within which reason needs to be positioned (because it is always already positioned in this very context). The enterprise to set aside not only nature but also history and society, however, cannot but fail, for it tends to turn against itself and its own presuppositions. What does this mean? We may try an initial and rather sketchy answer at this point in our argument. Emancipation, for example, only makes sense as long as freedom is not made an absolute and strictly opposed to nature. Otherwise, freedom turns into arbitrariness and, finally, becomes mere nature and is thus annihilated.

The language of rights, therefore, can, in the end, only be spoken as long as the vocabulary of the common good, characteristic of the classical political tradition, maintains some purchase. Otherwise, liberalism may become a totalitarian ideology that is closed to every other view of reality, making real freedom impossible. ‘Empty subjective freedom,’ Spaemann argues with regard to the French Revolution, thus implicitly referring to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, ‘could not but spawn terror.’ The idea of universal and inalienable human rights, furthermore, only makes sense as long as every human being — and not only some groups of human beings — is the subject of those rights, simply by being a member of the natural human species. To put it more precisely, every human being needs to be understood not to have rights that can be attributed or not, but essentially to be a demand for recognition and to disclose a specific dignity, the inalienable dignity of the human person.

Reality Is Fully Explainable In Scientific Terms
A second cause of the crisis of modernity is that very often the natural and social sciences tend not to see the limits of their methods; that is to say, they assert that reality is fully explainable in scientific terms. Modern natural sciences and their technological application have undoubtedly improved the conditions of human life and helped us to understand reality to a previously unimaginable degree; so any unqualified criticism of the natural sciences and modern technology cannot but miss the point. This needs to be said against some radical critics of modern technology who speak of its failure or its demonic character where more moderate language would be much mote appropriate, language as moderate (and realistic) as Heidegger’s ‘“yes” and at the same time “no” toward modern technology.

Yet the natural sciences are based on a methodological reductionism that was initially acknowledged but is now increasingly disregarded. What originated in a deliberate methodological restriction came to be constructed as an epistemological and ontological statement about reality as such, so that scientific hypothesis has become the paradigm for any reality-related predication. A scientific culture of this kind is incapable of understanding not only moral and ontological absolutes or the meaning of human life, but also its own purpose, its nature, the scientist’s desire for knowledge, and his personal subjective involvement in his research. Moreover, science so conceived contradicts itself in not seeing the limits of a paradigm of what is, after all, only hypothetical knowledge.

The Functionalistic Outlook Of Modern Sciences
Modern sciences also have a functionalistic outlook; that is, they tend to understand reality in terms of functional relations. Let us consider this a bit further. Until the rise of the modern sciences and epistemologies, the sciences and epistemology were regarded as being inseparable from ethics and ontology. The search for scientific knowledge and its understanding was thus embedded in the wider context of the search for goodness and truth. This changed notably in modernity.

According to an important, perhaps the predominant, epistemological framework of the modern sciences, all reality, including goodness and truth, is understood with respect to the functional conditions of its genesis and existence. The questions pertaining to how something came about and how it functions have replaced the older, and more fundamental, question of what something essentially, or by its very nature, is and how it is related to the human pursuit of goodness and truth.

We raise no criticism against a methodological functionalism as this is a means to understanding certain dimensions of reality. There is, however, much to be said against functionalism made an absolute; for functionalism turns into a ‘new dogmatism’ if we do not think about those basic truths which cannot be defined from a functionalistic point of view, but in fact serve to justify functions themselves. Given these tendencies of the modern sciences and the desire for objectifiable knowledge, human nature is vulnerable to being set equal to non-human objects.

This conflation has huge implications. Just one maybe briefly mentioned here. The intentional structure of human action and thus the difference between actions and merely natural events (such as a thunderstorm) can no longer adequately be understood.’ Ethics is consequently clothed in quasi-scientific dress — depending on the latest fashion, it may be utilitarianism, futurology, behaviorism, other kinds of psychology, sociobiology, or evolutionary ethics.

Reality Is Ultimately Reduced To Process
Hence, a third element in the crisis of modernity is that reality is ultimately reduced to process. Thomas Hobbes paradigmatically maintained that ‘by Philosophy, is understood the Knowledge acquired by Reasoning, from the Manner of the Generation of any thing, to the Properties; or from the Properties, to some possible Way of Generation of the same; to the end to be able to produce, as far as matter, and humane force permit, such Effects, as humane life requireth.’ Hobbes defines philosophy as genealogy; that is to say, as genetic analysis of reality. This implies that the whole is entirely explainable in terms of its parts and their coming-into-existence. Being, strictly speaking, has been made a by-product of the universal process of becoming. Hobbes, furthermore, transforms philosophy into a practical science, the results of which are supposed to be applicable ‘as humane life requireth.’

Philosophy As An Instrumentalist Viewpoint
Therefore, a fourth explanation of the crisis of modernity is that philosophy is treated as a practical, applied science and thus tends to be valued from an instrumentalist viewpoint. The French philosophes, as Spaemann points out, already defined themselves with reference to their social function within the Enlightenment context. Their nature was their function; that is to say, to enlighten society. A merely theoretical contemplation of reality no longer played the fundamental role that ancient and medieval philosophers would have attributed to it.

God And Religion As The ‘God Meme’
Furthermore, not only philosophy but even God and religion have been interpreted as merely serving a certain function for the individual or for society — a functionalism affirmed by the French counter-revolution, for instance, while being dismissed as an idle projection by nineteenth-century Marxist, Feuerbachian, and Freudian, as well as contemporary sociobiological criticisms of religion. Religion is then entirely understood with respect to its function and not with respect to its truth claim or its own self-understanding, which — in most, if not cases of traditional religion — does not support a merely functionalist view of religion as outlined by Richard Dawkins, for instance.

Dawkins speaks of the ‘god meme’, which exists because of its ‘great psychological appeal’, for ‘it proves a superficially plausible answer to deep and troubling questions about existence.’

However, if religion has been entirely dismissed (which is not a necessary implication of a functionalist view of religion), a ‘functional equivalent’ is required. Political parties or different philosophies have eagerly, and, indeed, often disastrously, taken over the role of religion. What religion essentially is, namely the glorification and love of God for God’s sake alone (an answer that is not only found in Christianity but common to many world religions), has been lost sight of within the functionalistic paradigm for modern reason.

While many modern thinkers still relied heavily upon their pre-modern legacy — and, more often than not, on transformations or secularizations of Christian doctrine, such as the doctrines of original sin, the hypostatic union of divinity and humanity in Christ, or the coming of the kingdom of God — late modern philosophy has attempted to radicalize the thrust of modern thought against its pre-modern predecessors. Friedrich Nietzsche, as Spaemann rightly points out, was aware that modernity still presupposed the Platonic and Christian notion of truth that ‘God is truth and truth is divine.’

Irrationalism And The Crisis Of Modernity
Hence, to become fully modern meant to overthrow this awkward pre-modern inheritance. Enlightenment rationalism, one can argue, turned into the irrationalism of a metaphysics of will, whether the will is ultimately denied in a manner reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s Western Buddhism or affirmed à la Nietzsche This irrationalism may be an important element of the crisis of modernity which has not yet been overcome; it is still apparent in important strands of the ‘post-modern situation’ –which may, after all, better be called a late modern situation.

Given the crisis of late modernity, there seems to be a need for philosophers, who are, as Robert Spaemann states, ‘specialists in the management of intellectual crisis.’ In Spaemann’s interpretation, philosophy is even a very important, if not, indeed, a necessary ‘condition for the public continuity of notions such as “freedom” and “human dignity” in the modern epoch of science — a milieu which has huge implications for our understanding of these notions.

Every Philosophy Becomes Naïve
This is why the end of philosophy, Spaemann further argues, would be the end of free humanity. The crisis of modernity is therefore not only the crisis of philosophy, but also the time when philosophy is most required. Thus, there is a need for philosophy today, and today’s philosophers need to think about their own times, that is about the crisis of our time; for otherwise, Spaemann frequently argues, ‘every philosophy becomes naive and thus does not fulfill what it is supposed to do.’

So-called post-modern philosophy (unless it is very widely conceived) is not the only response to the shortcomings of modern reason. There is also a multifaceted trend to reconnect to a pre-modern knowledge and to bring back into consciousness what has been lost sight of in modernity. The representatives of this tendency are often closely related to one another. While there are some substantial differences, primarily between religiously committed and non-committed thinkers, many differences are rather differences in emphasis. All these writers converge in that they do not share basic presuppositions of modern rationality and recollect an older more primordial view of reality that, as they argue, has not yet been irretrievably lost, but needs to be rediscovered. They vary, however, with respect to their specific presuppositions and with respect to the remedy that they claim to provide. Three different counter-modern tendencies are significant for our purposes.

There is, most prominently, the rediscovery of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Thomist philosophies, and the re-appreciation of natural-law theories, virtue ethics, pit modern political philosophy, and teleological philosophies of nature. One might think of philosophers as diverse as Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, Peter Geach, G. E. M. Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre, and John Finnis, and also of Leo Strauss, Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt, Charles Taylor, Joachim Ritter, and their respective schools.

A second group differs from this first one especially in its method. While the philosophers of the first group prefer a strictly philosophical and very often highly technical style, the second group has a greater variety of styles — very often relatively accessible ones — at its disposal. Here one might think of G. K. Chesterton, Charles Péguy, Iris Murdoch, George Grant, C. S. Lewis and many others.

A third group also differs in method, but in a more substantial way. Modernity has found its theological opponents, most of whom do not consider themselves ‘post-modern’ (in the philosophical sense of the term) and cannot appropriately be labelled as such. Their enterprise, too, is characterized by the recollection of ideas that modern reason tends to dismiss. The borders, again, are fluid. One might think of Karl Barth and subsequent post-liberal theologians such as Hans Frei, George Lindbeck, Oliver O’Donovan, John Webster, and Colin Gunton; of Radical Orthodoxy and its exponents, such as John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward; and of Hans Urs von Balthasar and the increasing interest that his theology arouses.

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