Persons, Their Dignity, and Work (John Paul II series)

The encyclical Laborem exercens, written in 1981 while the Polish workers' movement Solidarity resisted its Communist government, speaks to the nature of work and the innate dignity of human beings:

"Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature. . . ." (intro.)

"In order to continue our analysis of work, an analysis linked with the word of the Bible telling man that he is to subdue the earth, we must concentrate our attention on work in the subjective sense, much more than we did on the objective significance, barely touching upon the vast range of problems known intimately and in detail to scholars in various fields and also, according to their specializations, to those who work. If the words of the Book of Genesis to which we refer in this analysis of ours speak of work in the objective sense in an indirect way, they also speak only indirectly of the subject of work; but what they say is very eloquent and is full of great significance.

"Man has to subdue the earth and dominate it, because as the "image of God" he is a person, that is to say, a subjective being capable of acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about himself, and with a tendency to self-realization. As a person, man is therefore the subject to work. As a person he works, he performs various actions belonging to the work process; independently of their objective content, these actions must all serve to realize his humanity, to fulfill the calling to be a person that is his by reason of his very humanity.

"This does not mean that, from the objective point of view, human work cannot and must not be rated and qualified in any way. It only means that the primary basis of the value of work is man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work". Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the pre-eminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that each sort is judged above all by the measure of the dignity of the subject of work, that is to say the person, the individual who carries it out. On the other hand: independently of the work that every man does, and presupposing that this work constitutes a purpose-at times a very demanding one-of his activity, this purpose does not possess a definitive meaning in itself. In fact, in the final analysis it is always man who is the purpose of the work, whatever work it is that is done by man-even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest "service", as the most monotonous even the most alienating work. . . .

"[I]n the light of the analysis of the fundamental reality of the whole economic process-first and foremost of the production structure that work is-it should be recognized that the error of early capitalism can be repeated wherever man is in a way treated on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of his work-that is to say, where he is not treated as subject and maker, and for this very reason as the true purpose of the whole process of production.

"This explains why the analysis of human work in the light of the words concerning man's "dominion" over the earth goes to the very heart of the ethical and social question. This concept should also find a central place in the whole sphere of social and economic policy, both within individual countries and in the wider field of international and intercontinental relationships, particularly with reference to the tensions making themselves felt in the world not only between East and West but also between North and South." (section 6)

John Paul II ties work to the human vocation. For him, it is a biblical idea, one arising from the creation mandates of Genesis. Work must not, however, reduce human beings to their material existence alone. It must play a role in and recognize the nature of human beings--their personhood, their communal existence, their social and ethical existence, their need to make and create, to produce and partake. Human economic systems--socialist, communist, capitalist--that treat persons as objects, rather than as subjects, are to be condemned and brought to repentance.

Simone Weil and Rootedness--Part 3

In the third part of Weil's The Need for Roots she reflects on how the French might be inspired to again love their homes and communities. I confess that I (often) find her overly idealistic, even contradictory, but she is worth listening to here. She is primarily concerned with the means that education possesses to cultivate the imaginative and moral sympathies of persons. She suggests that intimidation, false promises, simple suggestions or examples, or publicly sanctioned statements will not do the trick, that what is needed is the inspiration that comes through organized action. Yet having said this, she goes on to urge the use of inspiring words to reach the heart of the French people. She particularly recommends words that set forth the absolute good which pours from a sure faith in God.

The power of these words from God, she suggests, should be received in much the same way as a soldier receives a command--as an order of a superior. The other option is that of the technician, whom she believes to be subversive of true order and seeking false autonomy. A good command comes to both the mind and the feelings and has the shape of friendship, meaning there is a communique of trust to it. Thus, action "gives the fullness of reality to the incitations which have inspired it. The expression of such incitations, as heard on the outside, only gives them as yet a semi-reality. Action possesses a virtue of quite another order" (206).

Her vision for education, then, is one in which desire and example are married to living acts. We need faith more than realism, she says, and to see political action as spiritual rather than pragmatic. But, she observes, there are four chief obstacles in the way:

1. "our false conception of greatness;
2. "the degradation of the sentiment of justice;
3. "our idolization of money;
4. "and our lack of religious inspiration."

To begin to overcome these, Weil urges that the French revise and renew how they teach history, science, literature and philosophy, and religion. She insists that history should not be reduced to a Darwinian study of war, though war must be taught to do justice to the past. Instead, the gifts of the geniuses of art, activism, and sanctity must be taught, too. In literature, the "current of purity" must be studied, by which she means a healthy commitment to the integrity of the art on the part of writers. The modernist attitude of superiority in general must be jettisoned if the French are to recover true rootedness.

She places much more of the blame at the feet of modern science. Researchers are motivated by power and pragmatism rather than a love for the beauty and truth of the universe itself. As a result, they posit a world of complete determinism where force is the only political option, and in which technique is the overriding value: means without ends. "If justice is erasable from the heart of Man, it must have reality in this world. It is [modern] science, then, which is mistaken" (241). Pragmatism has polluted even the pure faith of Christians, who should know better, Weil believes. "A truth is always the truth with reference to something. Truth is the radiant manifestation of reality. Truth is not the object of love but reality. To desire truth is to desire direct contact with a piece of reality. . . . Pure and genuine love is in itself spirit of truth. It is the Holy Spirit" (250-1).

Weil, then, makes a move typical for her that I find problematic. She insists that Christians should understand God, not as someone who intervenes in response to particular circumstances, but as present in every event: "The sum of the particular intentions of God is the universe itself" (280). The world is, from one view, a closed system of determined action, while from another view, it is completely open to God's comprehensive control. . She goes so far as to suggest that we see the universe as entirely one of "perfect obedience" always acting in love. What we experience as "the blind forces of matter" are really a creature obedient to eternal Wisdom and love. Thus, the pain and suffering we experience are motivated by love and act as the punishment we each deserve that will restore us to faith and holiness.

At first blush, Weil seems to be setting forth the classic Augustinian understanding of providence, but her view would also seem to undercut prayer and regulate God to a Platonic being who does not respond per se to our individual requests. She urges a re-visioning of the world:

"The order of the world is the same as the beauty of the world. All that differs is the type of concentration demanded, according to whether one tries to conceive the necessary relations which go to make it up or to contemplate its splendor. It is one and the same thing, which with respect to God is eternal Wisdom; wth respect to the universe, perfect obedience; with respect to our love, beauty; with respect to our intelligence, balance of necessary relations; with respect to our flesh, brute force" (291).

If this were all she had written, I would accuse of her of promoting fatalism, but obviously, she believes in political action and reform. Nonetheless, her position would seem to render any prayer for these things at best moot, at worst as pragmatism under the cover of middle-class piety. To reach this position, she must, like Marcion, that ancient heretic, deny much of the Old Testament, and thereby, as Eliot points out in his introduction to the English translation, the very basis for the Church.

Physical labor, then, she concludes, is the most holy work because its daily tedium and suffering bring us closer to our deaths and thus force us to a place where repentance is truly possible. Weil concludes that "physical labor should occupy in a well-ordered social life . . . its spiritual core" (298). By ending this way, she offers a vision of the physical world in which place, work, family, and making are at the center of a truly human existence--one marked by gratitude, reverence, and connection with God, the land, and others.

I just don't see that such a vision need exclude the practice of daily intercession. A God who acts in direct ways to special requests can be the same God who guides the every action of his universe of obedient love.

Simone Weil and Rootedness--Part 2

Weil's The Need for Roots begins with a basic assumption: rights and obligations are essentially two sides of the same thing, but with one key difference. Obligations remain whether human beings recognize them as such or not, while rights must be acknowledged. Our obligations to other human beings are eternal and without condition; they are the bond of love that arise from the needs of others. "The possession of a right implies the possibility of making either a good or bad use of it. While, on the other hand, the performance of an obligation is always, unconditionally, a good from every point of view" (275).

This distinction is important for Weil because obligations take root in physical and social relations. Writing in 1943, she sees the French as having been uprooted in the towns because of an education that prizes technical know-how at the expense of an expansive liberal learning. Workers have become alienated from their true obligations; the life of the factories is mechanical and inhumane. It demands work which is neither interesting nor lively. It is too often exhausting and dangerous. What is needed are "forms of industrial production and culture of the mind in which workmen can be, and be made to feel themselves to be, at home." She goes on to line out sixteen or so proposals that bear a striking resemblance to those of Catholic distributism, including the abolishment of large factories for small guild-run workshops; the ownership of the tools and machines invested in the workers themselves, and a system of vocational adaptation for those with superior or inferior talents in any one profession. Each one is intended to return workers to a life of natural obligation because they are connected to their work and their work to their lives.

Weil also laments the loss of rootedness in the countryside. This takes shape in the way "peasants" are denied the private ownership of the land, have no pensions to survive on when they grow old, and the general way in which rural persons are educated away from a love of the land. Weil argues that rural education should inspire in its workers a love of the beauty of the land and of the beauty of the lifecycle. Likewise, she holds that rural Catholicism should seek to prepare the people to engage a life of farming as a truly holy, noble task: "The contemporary form of true greatness lies in a civilization founded upon the spirituality of work" (97).

Nonetheless, for Weil, the most fearful trend towards uprootedness is in the nation a whole. Patriotism upon various levels has been replaced by a singular economy of state. The family, village, district, and region have all ceased to matter before the national interest: "Man has placed his most valuable possession in the world of temporal affairs, namely, his continuity in time, beyond the limits set by human existence in either direction, entirely in the hands of the State" (100). Her point is that life is made up of numerous intermediate communities and associations that stand between the individual and the nation-state, and patriotism has historically been made up of numerous types of loyalty to king, village, children, neighbor, region, and so on. These have been weakened by a nation that has money as its only value: "The State is a cold concern which cannot inspire love, but itself kills, suppresses everything that might be loved; so one is forced to love it, because there is nothing else. This is the moral torment to which all of us today are exposed" (114).

Weil overgeneralizes here; still, what she says has a a note of reality to it. Her key point is that the nation-state does not and cannot easily ask for the same kinds of personal obligations that other social formations more naturally call up. The general French disdain for politcs and for public life she sees as emblematic of this problem, one which has historical causes including that of the abuse of royal power, the large landed aristocracy, the military and social abuses of the republican regimes after the Revolution, and the colonial abuse of the country towards other nations. At the heart of these is the break up of the trades, families, and traditional education for morals. Nationalism has displaced obligations to family, fellows, and truth. To this, she replies that the only authentic patriotism at the moment is one of compassion, the same kind of compassion that one feels for those who are suffering and poor. "If their country is presented to them as something beautiful and precious, but which is, in the first place, imperfect, and secondly, very frail and liable to suffer misfortune, and which it is necessary to cherish and preserve, they will rightly feel themselves to be more closely identified with it than will other classes of society" (174-5).

Taken together, Weil's three concerns with uprootedness point to the local, human, and personal shape of our obligations and loyalties. We love what we know and what we are tied to. We respect, honor, and treat as sacred those to whom we are intertwined in the precious nets of family, neighborhood, town, and congregation. Of course, all of these can be abused, as Weil acknowledges. But they are also natural in a way that the power of national force is not. She concludes that the state is "sacred" only in the way an altar is, that is to serve a higher purpose, not to draw attention to itself. The only other options she thought were anarchy or the idolatry of communism.

Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 5

So was Berlin right to charge Christian hope for the end of history with closet determinism? Are the theist claims of an all-provident God, a known future, and human freedom finally in the last analysis compatible?

For some Christian thinkers the key was to focus on the very question of final things. After all, what might a Christian eschatology have to offer? The biblical pattern of a good creation, a human fall into rebellion and subsequent decay, a redemptive history of covenants with Israel, culminating in the atoning work of Christ and Church, and leading up to a final consummation suggests a directional pattern and outcome to human history. Josef Pieper, while sharing the view that Christians cannot know the future, insisted nonetheless that human beings have a quality of "being-directed-toward-the-End," in which the chaotic events of history become understandable. Not every theologian or philosopher of history agreed.

For Karl Löwith, the promised future is a radical inbreaking into history and at the same time, a future hope not yet seen. The violence and contingency of history has no real discernable direction precisely because the future cannot be inferred from the past; it is a divine, mysterious promise not a human, rational pattern . Eric C. Rust and Carl Michalson concurred. For Rust, outside God's revelation in Christ, "history is generally a realm of meaningless chaos and frustration," while for Michalson, there can be no significant history since Jesus: "Christ is not the eschatological event because he will enter history at some moment of time but because when he appears in history, history comes to an end in its old form and the last, the eschatological age begins."

A divine destiny, some insisted, did not translate into a discernable pattern for human history in general. Jean Daniélou, however, would have us synthesize this eschatological double story. While there can be no progress beyond Christ who is "the culminating and final innovation" of history, yet to separate out secular and sacred history is to declare Christ as less than Lord of history. The Christian mission, he insisted, is not simply "to teach the word to individuals of all countries; it is to evangelize the civilizations . . . so that Christianity may find its appropriate and authentic expression in the idiom of every racial community."

The promised apocalypse, for Pieper, is both the end of history and the promise of a new eternal state which strictly speaking lies beyond time. Only in a willing commitment to martyrdom can the Christian truly understand the legitimacy of human action in history, not as a gnostic who denies the value of creation, but as one who "contains both affirmation of creation and readiness for blood-testimony; only the man who combines in himself this affirmation and this readiness will retain the possibility of historical activity." Martyrdom denies the cultural relativism of historicism. It is a commitment to the future. Eschatology, he felt, does not remove the call to human freedom and to responsible action.

To summarize, the debate about history, in trying to address questions of civilization and Christian culture, had to consider

1. how much one could say about the inner workings of history, as well as the moral nature of its events;
   
2. needed to answer the claims of the historicist persuasion on a number of levels;
3. had to consider questions of freedom and determinism and of idealism and materialism, especially the question whether some aspect of historical normativity still allowed for human free choice;
4. had to explore what a spiritual realm might say to human freedom;
   
5. had to ask what biblical eschatology had to say to the shape of history.
   

In particular, they needed to consider whether the eschatological promise of the gospel had anything to say to the national and cultural concerns of the average historian. For all its pledges of Christian faith, this was not a conversation with an easy consensus, nor I suspect should it have been, for they were seeking to hold together a number of tensions, as well as answer destructive claims from a number of directions. In my next post I will consider what this debate, then, has to teach us, as well as explore briefly how it relates to Christian personalism.

Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 3

The participants in the twentieth-century debate were all in agreement, nonetheless, that the meaning of history, if it had one, was a human meaning. The question as to whether history has socio-psychological laws was not precisely the same as to whether history has an inner dynamic that propels it in a certain direction, though the two were (and are) related. Human freedom as opposed to social and biological determinism concerned thinkers of all persuasions, as did whether history should be considered a matter of progress or of tragedy in light of two world wars. Had the last 40 years of violence disproved the early modern notion of progress? Equally, had the Hegelian notion that the divine Idea was working itself out in history been discredited by Nazi misuse of it?

Individualism and collectivism were, thus, important themes, and not just because of the rise of fascism and Marxism. They were at the heart of what to make of the politic orders of the last 50 years. They were also at the heart of what it means to be a human being within a political and social context. Finally, they were at the heart of whether human culture had any stable meaning at all.

Even deeper, then were what Ernst Troeltsch in 1922 had called the “crisis of historicism,” and what Benedetto Croce in 1916 had identified as the “humanity of history.” Historicism, the predominant worldview of nineteenth and early twentieth century Continental historians, held that each nation has its own intrinsic meaning, its own language, and is shaped by its history and place in nature. For some this suggested a divine guiding hand in giving expression to each nation, while for others this increasingly implied that no overarching human nature existed across cultures. For Troeltsch the crisis was that with historicism no objective laws or truths existed which could be applied to all people. People in their entirety are the product of their culture.

Croce in similar fashion decried the practitioners of individualist and/or collectivist historiography as reducing history to either a few powerful “men of genius” or to collectives as the producers of ideas. “Let him who cuts individuals out of history pay close attention,” Croce warned, “and he will perceive that either he has not cut them out at all, as he imagined, or he has cut out with them history itself.”

The shadow side, some would say the “demonic” side, was how such notions when tied to doctrines of the state led to Nazism or Communism, but just as important and as disturbing was the implication that most or all human choices were meaningless. That historicism actually undercut claims of Enlightenment progress or Hegelian idealism only opened the window for a further sense of meaninglessness. Was history's "truth" finally reducible to set of existential decisions by otherwise culturally-determined individuals?

For some such as Paul Tillich the category of the demonic need not be understand as strictly a spiritual category, but more like a general human Gestalt or archetypal flowering of irrational evil: "The dialectics of the demonic . . . the unity of form-creating and form-destroying strength. That is true of the demon who determines the great destiny which disrupts all forms of existence; it is true of the demon who drives the personality beyond the limits of its allotted form to creations and destructions it cannot grasp as its own. Where the destructive quality is lacking, one can speak of outstanding power, of genius, of creative force, not of demonry."

If history is the product of social and economic forces, if culture is the product of national collectives or even of a few inspired geniuses, or if a non-human force drives history (be it biological and/or spiritual), then human freedom would seem to be an illusion.

Berlin labeled any system that posited discoverable laws or outcomes for history as "deterministic," and charged them with being not only fatalistic but even desirous of a system that excused them from human action and freedom. He was especially distrustful of teleological systems: "For the teleological thinker all apparent disorder, inexplicable disaster, gratuitous suffering, unintelligible concatenations of random events are due not to the nature of things but to our failure to discover their purpose."

Strangely enough, history became reduced reduced to theodicy.

Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 2

As I examined in the last post, the question of whether twentieth-century Europe could still be considered a Christian culture occurred amidst the violence of World War I and II. The second world war itself left many with serious questions as to why it had happened and what this revealed about the course of humanity in general. Writing in 1949, E. Harris Harbison observed a hunger for meaning among the young veterans returning to American universities after the war: "[They] made it clear to advisers and teachers that they were looking for answers. . . . Somewhere in history, many of them thought, the answer to how it all came about was to be found." The same year in Britain, historian Herbert Butterfield's six BBC radio lectures on Christianity and history made him a public celebrity, becoming some of the most listened to broadcasts in BBC history. Clearly the public on both sides of the Atlantic was hungry for some sense of what history as a discipline could reveal about Christianity, the West, and civilization. Did the twentieth century invalidate Occidental values and beliefs, and could history give a needed perspective on the past and the future?

After all, one could ask, do the events of history mean anything? Are they, as Elbert Hubbard once remarked, just "one damn thing after another"? Can there be a philosophy, science, or theology of history that speaks in any way to the historical particulars? "Can the thinker who utilizes the empirically achieved data of historical study stand, as it were, outside the historical process and see pattern or meaning in the whole historical process itself?" (Connolly 41) If not, can the historical thinker still offer some intimation of the whole from a more limited vantage point? Likewise, what does the theology of the Christian Church have to say to how history has unfolded? Can the gospel, for example, explain the twentieth century?

Typically, a Christian understanding of history had been understood to be linear as opposed to the wide cycles of history in Greek, Chinese, or Hindu thought, and twentieth-century Christian thinkers mostly rejected the cyclical view of Oswald Spengler’s infamous The Decline of the West, which traced eight “high cultures” through the cycle of birth-development-fulfillment-decay-death, as well as the view of Arnold Toynbee that civilizations arise, grow strong, fall, and die in reaction to cultural problems. Did civilizations, cultures, or societies have life cycles, or was it permissible to divide history into periods, such as ancient, medieval, and modern?

Particularly in response to the fascist claims of historical destiny, Christian thinkers of the period were quite divided on these questions. Jacques Maritain, William Albright, and Eric Voegelin, for example, all held that some order or process was observable in history, though each was cautious as to how much could be predicted or exhaustively understood. For Maritain, historical laws cannot explain history entirely or predict it, but they can help interpret it: axiomatic laws can point to general characteristics of history, while typological laws can suggest various periods in history: a growth is observable, so some periods are better than others. He held that history possessed "two faces."

1. Axiomatic laws included the law of two-fold contrasting progress; the ambivalence of history; the law of the historical fructifications of good and evil ; the law of the world-significance of history-making events; the law of prise de conscience ; and the law of the hierarchy of means.
2. Typological laws included the law of the passage from the "magical" to the "rational" regime or state; the law of the progress of moral conscience; the law of the passage from "sacral" to "secular" or "lay" civilizations; the law of the political and social coming-of-age of the people.

Maritain in general, then, held that one could predict that good and evil would bear results in certain ways, that certain means tend to overshadow others, and that in general history was moving to more secular and rationalistic expressions of culture. (Of course, this is a variation of the secularization thesis that has in the last two decades been called seriously into question.)

Albright, too, held the search for laws was not fruitless, but the larger the scope of observation, the less certain, “until we reach a plane where the number of variables makes prediction impossible.” Albright's simple point was that smaller local changes are more predictable than wide-spread national, continental, and global shifts. These later ones were better observed in hindsight.

Voegelin, not an entirely unrepentant Hegelian, nonetheless broke with Hegel in holding that one cannot predict the outcome of history even if one can understand some of its laws. Humans are too sinful to hold to anything like the ideal, divine plan: “The truth of order has to be gained and regained in the perpetual struggle against the fall from it.” For each of these, some observation of order and direction did not suggest total predictability. The fascist doctrines of an unopposable direction to the spirit of history were to be treated agnostically at best.

Others were even more cautious. Butterfield and Kenneth Scott Latourette stationed themselves in a middle ground. Only general principles and observations are possible from a Christian perspective, though these can still offer much. Though Butterfield himself condemned easy judgments on human actions, he did feel that in the broadest sense one could obviously conclude that human beings were sinful, that the personal nature of historical lives included sinful effects, and that general, historical judgments on evil actions, such as the militarism of Nazi Germany, were conclusive from history itself.

For Butterfield, broadly speaking there are three ways of looking at history:

1. biographically, which offers the meaningful life of individuals;
2. technically, in the study of the law-like social forces of larger history;
   
3. holistically, attempting to view the providence of God in broad strokes.
   

It is significant that while Isaiah Berlin praised Butterfield's position as a "prima facie very humane and convincing thesis," that he finally dismissed it as one in which "individual responsibility is made to melt away" because we declare ourselves never fit to judge, be that by virtue of ignorance or sinful ineffectiveness .

Latourette, the great historian of world missions, in different fashion, sought to provide for the Christian claims for history the sense that these truths, though they cannot be "proved" by history itself, nonetheless have "strong probability for the truth of Christian understanding.”

Still others felt even this went too far, such as Henri-Irénée Marrou and Mircea Eliade who rejected any philosophy of history, though each conceded a theology of history was still possible. Eliade sniffed that attempts at "scientific" laws of history were but the “decomposition product of Christianity,” seeking the sense of history’s meaning while denying “a transhistorical, soteriological intent.” Marrou, in turn, warned against “the sin of immoderation” so tempting to philosophies of history; history is always a subjective reconstruction of the past by the historian, and “[e]very problem in history, no matter how small, gradually and eventually demands a knowledge of universal history in its entirety,” which is impossible for any but God. Marrou, however, did not see this as a counsel of despair, rather humility.

Finally, not all would agree with even this claim. Gerhard Ebeling observed, "Wherever historicity is not taken seriously, there is also a failure to take really seriously either the text of the Scriptures or the man to whom this text must be interpreted." Likewise, voices like Yves Congar and J. P. Mackey insisted that without tradition no Christian dogma existed. Any large meaning in history was rightly obtainable only through God's revelation.

This wide-spread continuum suggests perhaps why no single Christian answer was available at the time to those in search of spiritual and theological insights into the twentieth-century ideological wars. We can still ask today, what did they hope to find in the study of history that might explain their political and social dilemmas? Likewise, what might we hope to find, if anything, in the midst of our own?

Can There Be a Christian Culture? -- Part 1

Over the next week, I will summarize and explore an intellectual debate that took place among a number of theologians, philosophers, social critics, and political leaders in Europe and the United States. I am particularly interested to ask what their concerns might teach us about current Christian reflection on culture, relativism, and the meaning of human existence.

"Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization."

These famous penultimate words were spoken by Winston Churchill before the House of Commons on June 18, 1940. Delivered the day after France surrendered to Nazi invaders, Churchill's speech was intended to steel British resolve, yet perhaps not surprisingly, in retrospect it also raised important questions about the nature of Western civilization itself.In his 1947 Gifford lectures, the theologian Emil Brunner observed, "All Europe uttered a sigh of relief when those words were spoken."

That they were spoken as words of comfort and of determination suggests that a consensus, however fuzzy, still existed among many in Europe. For Brunner, however, Churchill's words raised a rather sticky question: can there be a Christian civilization, and if there can, does it follow that the Occidental world could in any sense still be considered Christian?

These were questions that many twentieth-century historians, philosophers, cultural critics, and theologians struggled with, and between the 1930’s and the 1950’s, a huge number of lectures, essays, articles, and books were generated on the issue of Christian civilization and history. For some, such as philosopher John MacMurray, European civilization could not understand itself or its success and failure without remembering that its origins were in Christian culture: “To understand Christianity is to understand the crisis of civilization in which we are involved." The twentieth century’s violence and loss of meaning were traceable to the incoherence of the West, he contended.

Historian Christopher Dawson, too, felt in 1949 that the relationship between Western and Christian culture had to be delimited. He held that every society at its heart was based on a religious vision. What distinguished the West was its long-term instability; the Christian consensus had always been a dance between temporal and eternal impulses, and this imbalance had led to its productivity and power. such moments of vital fusion between a living religion and a living culture are the creative events in history, in comparison with which all external achievements in the political and economic orders are transitory and insignificant.”

Poet and cultural critic T.S. Eliot was also convinced that a people's religion and their culture were intertwined, "culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people." Culture is "a "lived religion," though no people ever have a perfectly pure religion. By incarnation, Eliot meant neither a simple relation nor an absolute identification but something more like two elements existing in tandem with one another. One cannot finally understood a civilization without having a sense of the religious vision that historically informed it, no matter how faded and shabby it has become. Yet Eliot was not claiming that Europe was somehow nor or had ever been a perfect place. Europe has always been more or less Christian, never totally so.

Theologian John Baillie, following Eliot, believed that what made the past Western civilization Christian was its common belief and opinion, and what made it vaguely one in 1945 was the continued presence of some Christian influence. Baillie, a Presbyterian, compared this to infant baptism, observing that a society with Christian influence need not be wholly full of Christians. He concluded that this was the best one might expect in a fallen world; there can be no final utopia on earth: "no pax Britannica no less than the pax romana, and Christendom no less than Babylon and Troy." Perhaps the days were simply limited in which such a Christian world could continue.

Brunner agreed, but like MacMurray, held that the crisis of the West was already quite far gone, “in some parts . . . more than shaken, in fact shattered and even annihilated.” There was not much of a Christian civilization left to hold on to. Yet even this crisis, Brunner thought, attested to the power of the gospel traditions that they could have such dynamic, long-standing impact “even where life has been only superficially touched by them, or where they are present in very diluted and impure manifestations.”

Notice that to make such claims required a sense of history, as to where the West had been and where Christianity had been with it, as well as some intimations as to where it was going. That these reflections occurred around the global cataclysm of World War II is quite understandable. Much that had seemed solid and stable was now in flux and troubled. Nonetheless, they explore the first question worth considering: could European culture (and the U.S. by extension) have ever been considered a "Christian" culture? And if so, what would that imply?

Charles Péguy on the Failure of a Culture

The French poet Charles Péguy in 1910 wrote a lengthy essay Notre Jeunesse (Memories of Youth) in defense of the actions of the party of Dreyfusards, those who defended Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer of Jewish descent. Dreyfus was falsely accused of selling military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Later exonerated, his case deeply divided the nation along conservative and republican lines, and became a symbol not only for the issue of French antisemiticism, but also for broad political and religious questions, and effected important changes in the official status of the Roman Catholic Church in the country.

Péguy, a Catholic convert and a committed socialist, was also an ardent nationalist, and he wrote Notre Jeunesse to defend the patriotism of his convictions when many saw him as a betrayer of country and of religion. Conservative Catholics on the right were to charge him with disloyalty to the Church, while republicans often held that Catholics could not be true Frenchmen. Yet Péguy also ending up writing an essay that set out his own theory of social and political authenticity.

Péguy held that authentic action for a community arose out of a mystique, a word that can be translated as a faith, a mystery, a tradition, and an operation or action. A mystique is not held by a people consciously, at least not in a way that one debates and studies. It is a more settled way of life and set of convictions that come naturally to a community. The problem is that its mystique could over time become a politique, a political party or theory, an institution imposed from without, a set of values that are debated and proven or disproven but that no longer have a grasp on the community's heart. "Everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politique," he lamented.

As a Catholic and political progressive, Péguy took the radical step of arguing that "the derepublicanization of France is essentially the same movement as the de-Christianization of France. Both together are one and the same movement, a profound demystification." Both are a kind of idolatrous and yet sterile modernization that substitutes profound belief and action for cynical theorization and manipulation of an older language.

Péguy goes on to point out that mystiques treat each other in different ways that politiques even when they are in disagreement. The former are far less violent and oppressive, and when they are enemies, the distinction is "at a much deeper, more essential level, and with an infinitely nobler profundity." It is as simple as the distinction between rival virtue and rival malice. Péguy insists, then, that it is a mistake to compare the mystique of one position with the politique of another. The worst sin of all, however, is to pretend to be of a mystique while actually playing the game of the politique: "To steal from the poor is to steal twice. To deceive the simple is to deceive twice over. To steal the most precious thing of all, belief. Confidence."

A true mystique is marked by ardent loyalty, by love. Only what one is prepared to die for can reveal what one truly believes. "The only strength, the only dignity that exists, is to be loved. . . . Puns will not restore a culture." Péguy's formulation raises a profound and important question for social and political change: how do you know when a people, tradition, culture, or community is truly possessed by a faith rather than theoretical language alone that can be easily adopted without conviction? Moreover, once that mystique is lost, can it be recovered, and it political action useful unless it is?

Addendum to the Two Cultures

Cynthia Ozick in her essay "Crocodiled Moats in the Kingdom of Letters" argued that C.P. Snow and F. R. Leavis were in the long-run both wrong. Snow at the time was already wrong, and should have known(probably did know) better: "[W]e had already had well over a hundred years to get used to the idea of science as a multi-divergent venture--dozens and dozens of disciplines, each one nearly a separate nation with its own goverance, psychology, entelechy." Yet, Ozick, insisted that natural science nonetheless had a kind of polythiesm or animism that held its disparate parts together.

Leavis, on the other hand, at the time was right--there really was one culture of the humanities--the belles-lettres--that held it together. But this is now lost, she laments. Instead, "the culture of the humanities has split and split and split again, always for reasons of partisan ascendancy and scorn." Novelists, poets, journalists, and critics are divided from each other in their sour professionalism. Furthermore, there is no longer a unifying theory or philosophy that offers a center around which to gather even in good-hearted debate.

Is she right? Have we come to a vast broken mirror of a thousand cultures without a frame?

Three Cultures?

H. Newton Malony insists that there are three intellectual cultures in American society:

1. science, which strives "the general conditions that regulate the physical and social world through replicable experiments, sensate experience, and logical reasoning;"
2. the humanities, which strive to explicate cultural matters in history, philosophy, anthropology, and the arts;
3. religion, which "attempts to deal with ultimate struggles . . . in facing the enigmatic, the tragic, and the mysterious."

Malony's trifurcation shows not only the distinctions that C.P. Snow, like so many others came to assume, but also indulges in the problematic nature of "religion" as a general identifiable category of human experience, and one that is existentially removed form the other two. SHould we really see religion as a "culture"?

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow--Part 4

So Snow held science to offer a this-worldly salvation, while Leavis in turn held to the humanities as the promise of salvation for the individual through culture. Is it possible for our students to partake of culture in a different way? Consider the following two areas of literary value: the nature of multicultural literature and the need for ecumenism in matters of taste. As to the first, I trust we are long past the canon wars of the 80's and 90's; however, one aspect of that later debate remains; namely, the question as to whether education in general, and the humanities in particular, function to free us from oppressive collectives or whether they must free us by acknowledging those communities of origin as essential to identity. Both, as we shall see, have their limitations. Charles Taylor in his famous essay, "The Politics of Recognition" notes that the politics of equal identity and dignity assume "universal human potential," as well as a concern with survival of the self. But increasingly this potential includes a politics of the equal recognition of one's identity group and of its survival. Survival policies seek to nurture--his word is "create"--continuing members (58).

Educational policies (such as canonical inclusion) work to protect collective identity from national structures that work against their continued importance. The difference-blind society, it can be charged, is actually highly discriminatory in its imposition of one kind of culture (43). Taylor notes, "The very idea of such a liberalism may be a kind of pragmatic contradiction, a particularism masquerading as the universal '" (44). We must face that even standards of worth are not transcultural (67). Taylor points out that by prejudging equal worth we already act on our Western standards as presupposing the correct ones. Ironically, our predisposition to finding all cultures of positive value actually flattens the actual horizons of encounter across cultures:

The peremptory demand for favorable judgments of worth is paradoxically -perhaps one should say tragically- homogenizing. For it implies that we already have the standards to make such judgments. The standards we have, however, are those of North Atlantic civilization. And so the judgments implicitly and unconsciously will cram the other into our categories. For instance, we will think if their "artists" as creating "works," which we then can include in our canon. By implicitly invoking our standards to judge all civilizations and cultures, the politics of difference can end up making everyone the same. (71)

I would contend that something like this happens in Arnold and Norton's treatment of culture as the religion of cultivation. Even if we bracket out the particular aspects of their life and thought that were highly prejudicial to non-Western societies, what remains is still a set of claims as to what constitutes cultivation and culture. They cannot step outside a particular judgment to what culture is, both in its pedagogical and purported descriptive summations. This phenomenon can be seen in the Snow-Leavis debate. Culture is judged by both authors in differing ways as salvific in that it imparts existential meaning (and or creature comfort) to help shore us up against a world "red in tooth and claw." One strand of history behind the discourse of salvation in Leavis and Snow is the creation of culture as a substitute for piety and the specialization of education into disciplines that undergirded, one could contend even helped create, science's disciplinary existence. They formed a subculture offering material salvation, of "more jam" as Leavis derided it. To judge faith as but one expression of the larger mythos of Kultur, indeed, perhaps even to accept "religion" as an ultimate sociological category, is to render it one humanism in the matrix of many.

As John Millbank has famously said, "The pathos of modern theology is its false humility. . . . once theology surrenders its claim to be a metadiscourse, it cannot any longer articulate the word of the creator God" (1). Either Kultur as anthropological culture or as incarnational history will function as the parameters for the others' meaning. Culture as a category of value already carries with it assumptions about the nature of humans, their purpose, happiness, morality, and so forth. Literary study defined as the study of cultural texts is not a neutral practice that is transferable from one social end to another.

This raises then the second issue: that of the possibility of an ecumenical view of beauty and art. If we do accept Christian faith as the point of functional discourse and not as an expression of Leavis, Trilling, and Norton's cultural salvation, can one avoid the trap Taylor has outlined above? Can a theological reading of a work of literature avoid flattening the work into a two-dimensional purpose? Can we remain open to the Other? Or as, Trilling admits in a sober moment, can we "no more escape from the cultural mode than we can escape from culture itself" (175).

Frank Burch Brown in his Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste has suggested that such an openness is indeed possible, though "even ecumenical and inclusive Christian taste must also be in some ways discriminating" (25). Art objects, Brown contends, do not entirely self-generate their own values. Religious texts, for example, are informed by theological readings and practices. More specifically, for our purposes, Christian taste has to be shaped by the virtues of generosity and of charity, of gratitude and being easily taught (193). Such taste begins with a set of community practices, humbles itself in learning a differing set of practices, and eventually reaches a point where the text in question may transcend those cultures of taste in unpredictable ways. Indeed, following Taylor, to attempt to predict how would be to already close down part of what can be learned. Such pedagogy does not preclude our own soteriology. Brown notes, "life typically finds various and surprising ways of turning religious" (251). However, Christian taste must be informed by the enculturation of certain capacities with certain ends in mind. Not any old culture will do. In his reflections on culture, T. S. Eliot warns that at the heart of both individualism and collectivism there is the temptation to idolatry, as well as demonization of opponents:

But for most people, to be able to simplify issues so as to see only the definite external enemy, is extremely exhilarating, and brings about the bright eye and the springy step that go so well with the political uniform. This is an exhilaration that the Christian must deny himself. It comes from an artificial stimulant bound to have bad after-effects. It causes pride, either individual or collective, and pride brings its own doom. For only in humility, charity and purity- and most of all perhaps humility- can we be prepared to receive the grace of God without which human operations are vain. (75)

And thus, literary culture and teaching of a Christian sort must have as its end a purpose other than simply freeing the individual from a parochial ghetto of the mind, more than empowering the individual by recognizing his or her cultural worth, or more than creating a socially useful literature that honors material matters of economic justice and of scientific invention. Each of these may have their place within a larger practice, but that caritas of taste must be cultivated with the end of loving God and neighbor.

As André Maurois has said, "In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others."

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow -- Part 3

The Humanities as Salvific Culture

From here on I would like to focus more on the literary side of this debate and the history that undergirds it.

Snow himself rightly understood that Trilling's "freedom from society" was at odds with his own social collective project (96). From whence comes this salvific mission for the teaching, indeed, the politics of the humanities? The mid-to-late 19th century was an important shift in pedagogy from the study of classics for language, logic, rhetoric, and general "mental toughness" to the study of the humanities as cultivating refinement and nobility of mind and eventually as new specialized academic disciplines. "One wonders how much Milton's prominence in literature classes after 1860 owes to his earlier ubiquity in rhetoric courses:" observe historians John Robert and James Turner, "if you could parse Paradise Lost, you could parse anything" (77).

This shift away from classical studies was due in part to the growing loss of a Protestant Christian cohesive vision of education before the Darwinian onslaught, but it was as much due to the in-flux of the German research model, The specialization that Snow would come to partially lament in the next century was required by the new sciences. The humanities ironically first arose in response to this division of knowledge. President Charles W. Eliot, for example, most noted for Harvard's move to the elective system, felt that the students needed some sort of civilizing influence to replace the old Protestant hegemony and looked to the humanities to provide it (81). Specialization at the time was an academic novelty because the classic, old-time college could not conceive equipping one student in a different fashion from another. Despite its adaptation at Harvard and the rise of Brown as the first American research university, the new practice was resisted at many colleges well until after 1900 precisely because it conceived of professorial loyalty as beholding to national and disciplinary organizations rather than to the local college and its surrounding community (Roberts and Turner chapter 5).

And it was precisely non-specialization that the humanities seemed to require. The realm of "culture" was handed the civilizing mission once accorded the senior capstone study of moral philosophy in the old colleges. In the place of its synthesis of Scottish Common Sense Realist philosophy, republican democratic political theory, and broadly evangelical piety, stood sympathy and feeling through an exposure to culture. Humanities instructors and scholars, like Charles Eliot Norton, held that cultural items--art, architecture, music, literature--revealed the spirit of a people; this had both objective and subjective qualities--it could be taught and it could be observed. Norton saw in the rise of the humanities three elements to replace the fading of Christian conviction:

1. the nurture aesthetic sensibilities through literary and artistic works;
2. the professorial linkages across cultural eras and times;
3. and the praise of European civilization as a kind of supercultural whole, though in all fairness Norton did not see Europe as the sole bearer of "civilization" (102-103).

Culture, however understood, became encoded with secular soteriological claims. Its purpose was to provide a comprehensive set of values, meanwhile leaving the physical condition of life to the natural (and eventually social) sciences.

As Turner points out, Norton substituted the vertical connection of humanity to God with a horizontal one of people to people (380). For Norton, the intuition of beauty was a product of human cultural progress. He understood beauty to be tied to moral desires, so that to cultivate one was to nurture the other. Imagination was at the heart of perceiving beauty; he saw this as an intellectual faculty obtained through "reflection, comparison, and remininscence" of images and other sense impressions (Liberal Education 382). In this sense, Norton's project represented the transition between other common sense realist claims for the moral sympathies and the eventually move to moral pragmatism. Turner claims that "Norton invented Western civilization" (384) in the sense that he put together a pedagogical and ideological program out of what others were suggesting piecemeal (384).

Yet at the project's heart were the conditions for its demise. Philology as the study, reconstruction, and interpretation of ancient texts formed the backbone of 18th and 19th century German university research and formed the basis for Norton's project. Philology was guided by cultural context and historicism (Roberts and Turner 97ff.); the first demanded a sense of the ancient culture's differences, while the second taught the constant change and evolution of cultures over time. In the end philological historicism within the humanities worked against anything like holism and eventually opened the way for a non-Christian soteriology to take its seat at the heart of university education, dismissing a unified or normative knowledge. It created a religion of cultivation, but one increasingly subject to emotivist ethics and relativistic truth claims.

By positioning ultimate meaning within the social and artistic milieu alone, it opened the door for William James' judgment of religion as capacity of supernatural feeling, but one without any final truth claims. For James, "Christianity makes sense only as disguised humanism" (Hauerwas 64). Prayer is only subjective authenticity and theological claims are only "over-beliefs" arising from religious feeling (66-68). There can be no final adjudication of what is true. Theologian Ernst Troeltsch would come to label this phenomena the "crisis of historicism" (119), one in which human culture could make only an agnostic gesture to the possibility of something beyond.

And this is what is at the heart of the Snow-Leavis debate. The two were, ironically, more in agreement than one might first think: both see the individual as primary and the conditions of life as finally oppressive and needing to be mitigated. Both also put something like an implicit trust in the humanities as offering the individual some surfeit from societal and biological meaninglessness. For Snow, however, only science can offer physical prosperity, which must be approached collectively while for Leavis and Trilling, the "criticism of life" offers a chance for freedom from the technopoly's oppression and operative conformity. Yet neither can reach a common basis for their pedagogical platforms. It is also highly questionable whether Trilling's attempt to adjudicate the two is any more successful.

Compare their assumptions with contemporary definitions of culture that Trilling recommended to his fellow Liberals in the 1940 Parisian Review, not for their "allegiance" but for their serious "consideration" (22). Historian Christopher Dawson and T.S. Eliot, whom Dawson influenced as part of The Moot and The Sword of the Spirit intellectual and ecumenical circles, held that culture and religion could not separated; indeed, a culture's without a religion was in the process of dying. Dawson held, "We cannot separate culture from religion any more than we can separate our life from our faith. As a living faith must change the life of the believer, so a living religion must influence and transform the social way of life" (Historic Reality 68). Religion, even if observed sociologically, is not one more sociological section of culture; it is not a sign system giving ritual meaning to otherwise material and psychological insufficiencies. Dawson charged that the material reading of history is not wrong to judge some "spiritual aspects of culture as conditioned by its material elements, but in the assertion of an absolute casual dependence of the former on the latter" (Enquiries vii). For Eliot, a people's religion and their culture are intertwined, perhaps really two aspects of the same thing, "culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people" (101). Culture is "a whole way of life" (103) and a "lived religion" (104). But no people ever have a perfectly pure religion. Europe, thinks Eliot, has always been more or less Christian but not totally so. By incarnation, the, he means neither a simple relation nor an absolute identification (105ff.). Instead, he sees the two as operating in something like a tandem:

An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian could have reproduced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. (200)

As we move into what many see as a post-Christian Europe, the jury remains out as to whether Eliot is correct.

What Trilling found attractive in Eliot's position was the promise of something beyond dialectical materialism of the Left: "What is meant negatively is that man cannot be comprehended in a formula; what is meant positively is the sense of complication and possibility, of surprise, intensification, variety, unfoldment, worth" (29-30). Trilling found in Eliot's politics the hope of a humanity not reducible to the Soviet overman nor the capitalist consumer. He approved in Eliot that "politics is to be judged by what it does for moral perfection, rather than the physical easement of man" (27). Trilling longed for something like a spiritual component to the human culture, even if was unable to conclude that "supernaturalism can aid us" (32).

Even if one finds aspects of Dawson and Eliot's historiography wanting, nonetheless, their insights leave those of us who teach literature in a confessional setting with a particular dilemma that I can only sketch in outline here: Can Trilling and Leavis' answer to Snow be our own? In light of the soteriological substitution each is making, should we be seeking to liberate our students from their cultural parameters? Likewise, what is the relationship between the cultures we study and the faith culture we consciously or unconsciously cultivate in our students' educations?

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow -- Part 2

Whose Culture? Which Collective?

Like many in his generation, Snow saw the condition of the individual and of the society as differing problems. He wrote, "Each of us is solitary: each of us dies alone: all right, that's a fate against which we can't struggle--but there is plenty in our condition which is not fate, and against which we are less than human unless we do struggle" (6-7). Human life is bounded by the tragedy of death, and thus, the best hope for humanity in the meanwhile is an end to physical want and suffering. The dilemma as Snow saw it is that the literati fall back in despair, idealizing a traditional aristocratic past, while the scientists seek to reverse suffering, functioning as optimistic stoics in the face of biological decay.

Leavis, as Roger Kimball notes, did understand what was at stake in Snow's distinction between a tragic existential solitaire and a supposed social deliverance. Leavis charged: "What is the 'social hope' that transcends, cancels or makes indifferent the inescapable tragic condition of each individual? Where, if not in individuals, is what is hoped for … to be located? Or are we to find the reality of life in hoping for other people a kind of felicity about which as proposed for ourselves . . . we have no illusions?" (53). Snow held scientists to be "a culture on the rise," while the literary culture he charged with fearing the future. Leavis, on the other hand, held out hope for what Matthew Arnold had called, "the criticism of life" as giving the individual some measure of success against a technologically oppressive society. Close to the heart of this debate was (and still is) the nature of human meaning and of human happiness and the location of both.

Part of this search for happiness had to do with the very nature of culture as a concept. Snow took a fair amount of criticism for his own use of the word "culture" in the Rede Lecture to describe his two sets of intellectuals. Some objectors insisted that he was really describing a struggle inside one culture, while others argued the term itself was ambiguous at best. Many thought the word was obscurely employed. Yet he defended the word as being clear for most of his audience, indicating "intellectual development, development of the mind." At the same time, he admitted the anthropological definition was also present in his argument since culture indicated a certain shared behavior (62-64).

For Snow, culture meant both a way of living and the educational development of students' native abilities. Leavis, sensing the battle lay in this direction, charged Snow with using "culture" as a mask for intellectual conformity and dull bias; Leavis labeled the Rede Lecture "a document for the study of cliché" (50). Snow's tomfoolery was in reducing intellectual culture to the anthropological--an "everyone knows" mentality. Snow, it seems, had four cultures on his hands, not just two, and quite possibly many more--not only the culture of science and the humanities, but culture as a thing to be cultivated and as a description of social existence, as well as culture as intellectual practice and as pedagogical methodology. His faith in his audience's understanding was in that sense misplaced. "Culture" by the 1950s and 60s, as I've noted in previous posts, was already a deeply contested term, one with a chameleon's ability to ever shift in the hands of its user. Indeed, the pedagogical and anthropological meanings were by no means in easy consensus, and Leavis' vehement response only shows this.

For some the jeremiads of Snow and Leavis amounted to what place the individual had in the collective. With his own 1962 Commentary essay, "The Leavis-Snow Controversy," literary humanist and cultural critic Lionel Trilling entered the debate, which he described as "a miasma of personality-mongering" (150). Trilling believed that Leavis, despite his personal vendetta and bile, held that "moral consciousness, which is also the source of all successful creation, [is] the very root of poetic genius" (151), a position to which Trilling was somewhat sympathetic. Leavis he felt saw literature in much the same way as Arnold saw the "criticism of life." Snow's lecture was, then, a counter-attack on literature seen as a threat to national and global prosperity. It insisted that the literary culture must follow the scientific lead and not act "the part of a loyal opposition" (161). But for Leavis and Trilling this could only deny literature's prime purpose, that is to offer its audience an escape from the confines of the techno-social bondage of modernity, to explore and be free. Trilling recognized in both Snow and Leavis a Christian rhetoric, though one long secularized. Trilling himself was suspicious of Leavis' talk of pedagogical deliverance through a class of aesthetes:

It assumes that all things are causative or indicative of the whole of the cultural life, it proposes to us those intensities of moralized feeling which seem appropriate to our sense that all that is good in life is at stake in every cultural action. An instance of mediocrity or failure in art or thought is not only what it is but also a sin, deserving to be treated as such. These passions are no doubt vivifying: they have the semblance of heroism. (174)

Trilling felt a more moderate approach was needed. Of course, Snow and Leavis were each in turn blind to this soteriological undercurrent. Snow would remark in passing that for certain scientists with religious faith "the sense of the tragic condition [might] not be so strong," but for "most people of deep feeling" this very secular tragedy of existence could not be evaded (6). In turn, Leavis could dismiss Snow's "social hope" as the typical religious "refus[al] to live on the spot where one is" (54). If international community of science seemed to offer one kind of cultural salvation, an end to the poor relations across the Iron Curtain, the "whole man" theory of education (as Trilling would later write) "now stands virtually in the place of religion and may even be thought of as itself a religion" and is "directed toward moral and spiritual renovation; its subject is damnation and salvation" (219, 231).

Trilling observes, "No, the world will not be saved by teaching English at universities, nor, indeed, by any other literary activity. It is very hard to say what will save the world. But we can be perfectly certain that denying the actualities of the world will not work its salvation" (163). Of what Leavis could accuse Snow, Trilling could in turn accuse Leavis and Snow. Each it seems was dealing in the evangelistic revival business. Both, he thought were suspiciously blind to "a politics of a quite ultimate kind . . . the disposition of the modern mind" (148). Trilling recommended a bridge between the two positions, a kind of clinging to the hope of the life of the mind: "The idea of mind which had taught the bookbinder's apprentice to embark on his heroic enterprise of self-instruction also taught the great scientist to place himself beyond specialness of interest which groups prescribe for their members" (176-177).

That we can no longer recommend this disinterestedness without a snort of incredulity is itself a cause for reflection.

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow-- Part 1

Over the next week or so, I want to indulge in a little intellectual history. I want to explore a debate from the 1950s and 60s about the nature of culture, science, and the humanities. What I want to show is how even "secular" debates often mask religious desires. I hope you'll find this interesting.
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"We accordingly rejoice in the fact of the increased popularity of the university in both of its functions--that of culture and that of specialization"
--William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education (1898)

In his 1959 Rede Lectures, the scientist-novelist C.P. Snow argued that the intellectual world of the West had become bifurcated between the culture of scientists and that of literary intellectuals. While Snow purported to seek a détente between the literary academy and the scientific one, his sympathies were clearly with the later. "Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor," he charged,

It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation-- do a modern Walden, if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of you aesthetic revulsion. But I don't respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. (25-26)

In Snow's view, the literati who wanted to naysay a world of industrial progress are pampered and naïve at best. They exist in isolation from the world's need, living off the prosperity that science has brought their own nations. In his 1963, "A Second Look," Snow went further, painting the modernist school of Lawrence, Eliot and Pound as Luddite and Fascist all at once. He expressed incredulity and contempt, charging that those who dream of a pre-industrial world, really are ignorant as to what makes their own ease possible:

What is a machine-tool? I once asked a literary party; and they looked shifty. Unless one knows, industrial production is as mysterious as witch-doctoring. Or take buttons. Buttons aren't very complicated things: they are being made in millions every day: one has to be a reasonably ferocious Luddite not to think that that is, on the whole, an estimable activity. Yet I would bet that out of men getting first in arts subject at Cambridge this year, not one in ten could give the loosest analysis of the human organisation which it needs. (30)

Snow put much of the blame for this on an educational system arising out of Oxford and Cambridge that stressed over-specialization. The literary types simply never had enough mathematical training. Snow admitted that dangers could lie with natural science, as well, especially of the applied sort, but he felt the greater problem was with a culture of literature that denied applied science's promise for ending global poverty: "Literary intellectuals represent, vocalize, and to some extent shape and predict the mood of the non-scientific culture: they do not make the decisions, but their words seep into the minds of those who do" (61).

Thus, he envisioned a literary culture committed to the promise of applied science's technology, taking their lead from those who knew better how to mitigate the suffering of the physical world. "Changes in education are not going to produce miracles," he observed, but specialized education was a roadblock to a sympathetic public committed to such an expansive social hope.

Between the Rede Lectures and A Second Look, Snow had had cause to stop and consider the other side. His 1960 Godkin Lectures at Harvard, later published as Science and Government examined the inflated scientific council F.A. Lindemann had given the British government during World War II in regards to bombing in Germany. Snow wondered, "Will they say . . . we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity?" (Shusterman 27-28). He understood that especially in applied science, ethical reflection was a necessity, and he seemed to hope that the artistic culture might offer some help, but clearly he conceived this as one that takes its lead form the inevitable industrial, technological revolution.

While Snow himself was more interested in the larger social mileu within which higher education played a role, his claims about education nonetheless touched a real cord in the nerves of many academicians. His lectures set off an angry public contest, what one writer called, "the Great debate of our age" (Shusterman 25). Literary critic F. R. Leavis' 1960 Richmond Lecture “Two Cultures? The Significance of Lord Snow,” being the most infamous moment, was more a diatribe and a rant than a reasoned answer, so much so that it outraged even the literary set. He accused Snow's culture of science being nothing but unthinking materialism, where "no one will long consent to be without abundant jam, salvation, and lasting felicity to mankind" (59). Leavis' attack was in fact a response to The Two Cultures being used as a secondary school text and was given before a private audience. He only released the text publicly once it had been leaked by one of the attendees and had made its way into the papers.

Unfortunately Leavis' most insightful questions were obscured by the bile and dismissal of Snow's own abilities as a novelist. Nor did it slow down the public's interest in the lectures. By 1961, Snow's original work had already gone through seven printings. Leavis followed in 1966 with "Luddites? Or There is Only One Culture," insisting that human understanding, language, and the university function "as a focus of consciousness and human responsibility" (96) in imparting Western civilization to the next generation, so the humanities should be at the core of a college education.

Part of what makes Snow's and Leavis' polemics still worth reading is that they exemplify fundamental disagreements as to the sciences and the humanities' educational roles within modern society, and yet I will charge when seen from the vantage point of theological conviction, they are curiously alike.

They are, as I will argue this week, two competing soteriologies, seeking to free the individual in some way from an oppressive world of biological or technological necessity. Both seek a reform in education as a way of creating a new class of persons able to work social and moral change, yet both are blind to the spiritual dimension of the polis they seek.

Too Many Cultures -- Part 2

Before the work of 20th-century ethnographer Franz Boas, culture was still a matter of human freedom, variously expressed in terms of corporate or particular acts of creativity; after Boas, the twentieth century entered a debate as to free or determined action of human beings; namely, does a culture create its members or do they create the culture? For example, within Ruth Benedict's work, cultural relativism took only an absolutist quality and strangely is no final authority for the cultural interpreter. Yet she judged cultures on their ability to satisfy personal gratifications and avoid personal suffering. In other words, despite her relativist stance, she had overriding assumptions about the nature of human life and suffering.

Thus, despite the claim to be objective, anthropological studies were freighted with their personal worldviews and value judgments. Indeed, how could they not be? Alfred Kroeber, famously identified 171 definitions in 13 subsets, concluding that to describe without evaluation is simply impossible. Leslie White in 1959 would hold that culture is a mentalist notion of the symbolism of material objects, a supra-organic system that resides outside of any one individual. Culture is not "intangible, imperceptible, and ontologically unreal abstractions" but "real, substantial, observable subject matter" (234). In other words, the culture of the observer inevitably shapes his or her findings about another culture. By 1960, the term culture had the quality of what Mikhail Bakhtin has called heteroglossia; the word's history carried conflict within its unstated assumptions, which only when challenged, revealed themselves as contestable traditions as to what "culture" actually warranted.

As Terry Eagleton observes, "Culture is said to be one of the three most complex words in the English language, and the term which is sometimes considered its opposite--nature-- is commonly awarded the accolade of being the most complex of all." Culture fluctuates between referencing

1. the immaterial culture that transcends and informs physical civilization;
2. the high culture or aesthetic cultivation that makes one "cultured;"
3. the educational training of the intellectual and moral abilities;
4. the sociological and anthropological use of the word, that is the beliefs and life-ways of a group of people.

Culture can, thus, carry resonances of the loft elite and the broadly popular, of the pristinely spiritual and the socially constructed, of the intellectually astute and the unthinking mass appeal, of the traditional and the experimental. In short, it is can everything and nothing. One is reminded here of Walt Whitman's quintessential claim to bragging rights: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

This leaves those who claim that cultures can be understood and compared via a set of scientific claims with several questions to answer:

• How does one coherently speak of an ethic of anthropological (i.e. cultural) description, given that an ethic is always the product of a social way of life?
• What guarantees a good, fitting, or well-done analysis of one culture from that of another?
• Likewise, how does one cultivate culture and why should one? Can one?
• Or does the lifeway of a people set the terms for anything like significant meaning to begin with?
• Can the "culture" of science or the "culture" of literature observationally offer truth about another's rituals, arts, and words?
  

Too Many Cultures--Part 1

The anthropological meaning of culture has its origins in attempts to be both descriptive and proscriptive. The typical definitions of culture by their very claim to be objective hide from themselves their own assumptions, that is the history of inquiry out of which they function. The way they observe the world doesn't come out of a vacuum. Instead, it has a history of seeing and asking certain questions about things. A short history of the word "culture" helps make this point.

The word "culture" has its origins in the Latin cultura Cultura described the practice of cultivating plants and domestic livestock. This meaning by the Renaissance expanded to include the idea of human development. William Caxton's Golden Legend (1483), for example, could decry the loss of correct worship: "Whan they departe fro the culture and honour of theyr god." (81.1). In similar fashion, Thomas More's Life of John Picus, Earl of Mirandula (1510), could speak of "the culture and profit of theyr minds" as opposed to the "pomp and ostentation of their wit" (1.369). By the Enlightenment, Thomas Hobbes could write of the training of the human body as culture, and as the eighteenth-century closed, one could speak of a culture of human improvement (OED). The Romantic and pre-Romantic uses of the German Kultur also remained undefined because they had yet to suffer the linguistic rupture that the late 19th century would bring. One could still be cultured, i.e. trained by others to cultivate for oneself a spiritual, aesthetic, intellectual, and material way of life, one embodied in a people and period. Culture, as far as they were concerned, must be encultured.

By Sir Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) and by Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy (1869) "culture" already contained within itself fundamental disagreements as to the nature of human meaning and happiness. The way of life of a people as a Geist was to be studied in an objective manner. For the ethnographer Tylor, culture was a system of human development that may be objectively observed and whose laws may be discovered. "The condition of culture among the various societies of mankind, in so far as it is capable of being investigated on general principles, is a subject apt for the study of laws of human thought and action."

For Arnold, on the other hand, culture was a particular capacity that has been cultivated, an aesthetic and moral ability that is educated and matured: "Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good" (31).

These two definitions ironically contain the apotheoses of each other. The Darwinian Tylor's approach to culture enshrined a set of investigative virtues and values: knowledge of principle, disinterested, detached study, an ability to extrapolate natural laws from environment and social behavior, and so on. These are social and ethical values with a certain standard in view arising from a certain point in history. Arnold's protest against the philistines also contained a measure of detachment, in that the good and pleasing are considered something that can be kept in view; they are in a sense presumably undisputable. In other words, the idea of culture now faced a potential set of contradictions: To observe culture in Tylor's sense one had to cultivate a culture of learning in Arnold's sense. Likewise, culture in Arnold's sense could be rendered simply relativistic by students of culture in Tylor's sense. But this raises a unique dilemma: how can observer of culture in Tylor's sense claim to stand in a objective (i.e. cultureless) space in order to reach such conclusions?

Nothing illustrates this quandary better than the unraveling bankruptcy of the term in anthropology in the 20th century.

The Image of God in Education--Part 4

Pentecost in Acts 2 is about the restoration of Babel. It is a bringing together of diverse, Spirit-inspired voices, no longer as a curse on the hubris of humanity, but as blessings of communication and fire. The Pentecostal, ecumenical catholicity of the Church reminds us that cultures are not completely incommensurable to each other. They can communicate across diverse languages and practices. Yet at that same, our particular denominational experience keeps in view the hard work of that communication. Cultural exchange is difficult not because translation is impossible but because languages favor certain economies of expression; they privilege certain words and their referents. The terms and vocabulary we favor shape the ease with which we discuss and debate certain ideas. Thus, learning calls for a "multi-lingual" attempt at learnign the language of other tribes.

The Pentecostal experience is always a diverse one, for while something like Jürgen Habermas' ideal speech situation arises within it, it need not be accomplished by a liberal public sphere that actually elevates modern individualism and the state’s best interests. We may desire in education to be guided by the dictates of a common reason and common rules of dialogue; however, each moment of contact, of understanding or confusion, is unique though not as an atomic solitary. We should be in education always striving toward a dialogue bounded by faith, hope, and love. This requires a more intuitive, flexible learning, not one subject to predetermined limits as to how conversation will advance.

It does have in mind a certain character of learning. Like any good drama, there are some expected qualitative outcomes to the performance. The Church advances in understanding together with mutual discipleship and holy agape. Our education should have both sides of this cautious truth-seeking at its center. There is, then, an ethic of multi-cultural education, but I would argue that it is not to be found in relativism nor in a supposed neutral secular marketplace of ideas. Instead, a particular practice of incarnational learning must undergird our cultural negotiations, and this calls for humility of learning, even while eschewing a relativism of “equal regard” that hides from itself its worldview. In short, we come to the conversation with a particular set of stories already in place. The language, views, and assumptions of each culture are not left at the door; they are not artifically shifted out by the "rationality" of modern Western Enlightenment. They are each partners in education, even as one tradition acts as the host to the conversation.

The Image of God in Education--Part 3

Nothing about this pedagogical model should demand that we treat all cultural creations and patterns as equally important or valuable. We are in a fallen world, now.

The Zeitgeist may be demonic.

Instead of the politics of recognition and equal identity and dignity, we need a Christian polity of learning that knows how to balance our non-negotiables with the embedded lessons in the wider world. It is the nature of convictions that some beliefs and practices are more long-lived than others. Some are more central to a tradition; some have greater explanatory power. Furthermore, some are so central, so justified, that we have strong expectation and thick confidence in their endurance as the hypergoods (to use Charles Taylor's term) that shape and reorient other goods, evaluating them and defining them. Reorientation and revaluation are in the nature of education. A hypergood can literally take something once considered a mark of excellence and make it a vice or a temptation.

In turn, some beliefs may be fundamentally destructive in their centrality. A Christian view of culture and of education sees an element in all cultures that is self-blinding to the truth, that is subject to the fallen powers, and that invests itself in false promises. However, cultural depravity and cultural vice neither suggests an imperial project that settles on only one all inclusive pedagogy as "civilized" nor a hard relativism which leaves it unexposed to critique from the outside. We can’t expect to learn one method of critique and learning and then apply it across the board to all global and disciplinary subjects or even to every particular historical moment. I would contend this is as true of the natural sciences as is it the social sciences and humanities.

But neither does this mean that every textual or pedagogical encounter carries equal weight or equal fecundity. This is why a certain preference for the Christian tradition is incumbent in Christian education. Wisdom is to take in the multiplicity of good counsel with its refracting diversity, especially when this diverse counsel comes from others along the same broad axis of understanding. The church's experience of diversity is like canonical diversity. It is not a hodge-podge of alterity and relativity, but an interacting set of close practices that complement and course correct each other over time guided by the gift of the Spirit. Our pedagogy is to search for the same--it must take in the diversity of the Christian church and the cultural embeddedness of its global existence, all the while recognizing incompleteness and need for mutual help in pursing the truth together.

The Image of God in Education--Part 2

Learning may a postlapsarian necessity, but it was a prelapsarian gift. Awareness and questioning; the mutual existence called male and female--how we complemented each other, imaging God together; the Adamiac naming of the creation; and the vocational gift of the garden, all these remind us that the purpose of art and imagination, of science and work, is to stir us up to know God.

The arts and the sciences, which we often now treat as conflicting visions of reality, were meant to meet in the personal character of knowledge, in the metaphor making and modeling, and in the iconic referencing we see in the Garden of Eden. This is all the opposite of idolatry and the false exaltation of our heretic images. We were meant to share in the created order, its differentiation, classification, and inherent goodness. We were created to make and name and model.

As J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote:

The heart of Man is not compound of lies,
but draws some wisdom from the only Wise,
and still recalls him. Though now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed.
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not dethroned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned,
his world-dominion by creative act:
not his to worship the great Artefact,
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragons, 'twas our right
(used or misused). The right has not decayed.
We make still by the law in which we're made.

This ability to model and name and make, shared in such differing ways by the arts and sciences, was also never intended to produce a uniform content. Miroslav Volf, following Cornelius Plantinga, notes that in Genesis 1, God is about both "separating out" various aspects of creation, distinguishing between light an dark, earth and sky, sea and land, plant and animal, and "binding together" these creational entities in a web of co-dependence. God, especially, binds human beings to his creation with the responsibility of being its stewards and caretakers. In God’s pattern, differentiation encompasses both "separating-and-binding (Exclusion 65-66). Human nomenclature, logic itself, requires that we distinguish things one from another. What this model of differentiation reminds us of is that a thing can be understood not only as a point in and of itself, but also as a part of a larger process or system. When we define or differentiate something, we place boundaries around it, but to place boundaries around something is not to close it off from the larger system. Boundaries are permeable.

What this creation narrative suggests is that God designed human beings for difference/diversity. We shouldn’t be shocked that humans take on differing cultural characteristics and patterns. Our cultural creativity is an extension of being the imago dei. Nor should we be surprised when these cultural and disciplinary creations shift and evolve. A biblical balance is needed that not only recognizes boundaries but also sees how porous they are. We must also recognize how these differences bind us together. Cultures are diverse, and because they are so, they carry on debates and dialogues.

This negotiation over meaning is an aspect of God's creational intent for them--looking back to the Triune divine life. This flourishing diversity, therefore, points to a cultural and pedagogical practice that is always dialogical. The subcreative abilities of human beings, the naming and modeling and making, reveal themselves in numerous styles and trends and practices within various peoples. Ideally, the end of shalom was meant by God to guide the debates and practices within traditions that give rise to new cultural combinations and creations, and this higher end of love and fellowship should shape all incompleteness this side of the eschaton. In an unfallen world, if you will, there would still have been diverse models that complemented one another. Humans would still have learned within creational limitations and worked together to uncover more truth.

Life Together, Life Alone--Part 1

"Whoever cannot be alone should beware of community. Such people will only do harm to themselves and to the community. . . . But the reverse is also true. Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone. You are called into the community of faith: the call was not meant for you alone."--Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

I've just finished reading Bonhoeffer's wonderful little book, Life Together, and while the work is not directly concerned with the matters of the political economy and polity that we have been exploring in this blog, it nonetheless contains a number of wise insights that may suggest at least the prophetic witness that the church should model in its critique of the City of Man. For Bonhoeffer, Christian freedom can only be understood within the drama of Christian salvation. Freedom is our delivery from sin by the power for righteousness. We are crucified with Christ, buried with him, and raised with him. The end for our identity in Christ is shalom, a restored relationship with God that therefore restores relations with humanity and nature. We are for Bonhoeffer, "scattered like seed" in the world as a "visible community" in "gracious anticipation of the end time" (28).

Because we are being redeemed in Christ, we model through confession to one another, service to all, speaking the Word in truth, learning to truly listen, and so on, a community that is based in Christ and not in our unmediated psychological need. Bonhoeffer warns that a community not based in Christ turns to self-seeking, self-justification, and selfish emotion. In the former, we learn to lay aside our unredeemed definitions of community, while in the later, we grow quickly angry when community does not match our self-defined needs: "Those who want more than what Christ has established between us do not want Christian community. They are looking for some extraordinary experiences of community that were denied them elsewhere" (34).

Bonhoeffer explores in some detail the nature of corporate morning and evening prayer, the public reading of scripture, daily and yearly cycles of worship, the praying of the Psalter, singing together, and eating together. Each of these practices has a formative element. They make us more like Christ and his Body. They act as a different way of living than the cultures we are residing in.