The Law and the Life of Persons (John Paul II series)

Here's a fascinating passage from Evangelium vitae, "The Gospel of Life" John Paul II's encylical on culture of life issues:

Life is indelibly marked by a truth of its own. By accepting God's gift, man is obliged to maintain life in this truth which is essential to it. To detach oneself from this truth is to condemn oneself to meaninglessness and unhappiness, and possibly to become a threat to the existence of others, since the barriers guaranteeing respect for life and the defence of life, in every circumstance, have been broken down.

The truth of life is revealed by God's commandment. The word of the Lord shows concretely the course which life must follow if it is to respect its own truth and to preserve its own dignity. The protection of life is not only ensured by the spe- cific commandment "You shall not kill" (Ex 20:13; Dt 5:17); the entire Law of the Lord serves to protect life, because it reveals that truth in which life finds its full meaning.

It is not surprising, therefore, that God's Covenant with his people is so closely linked to the perspective of life, also in its bodily dimension. In that Covenant, God's commandment is offered as the path of life: "I have set before you this day life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you this day, by loving the Lord your God, by walking in his ways, and by keeping his commandments and his statutes and his ordinances, then you shall live and multiply, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land which you are entering to take possession of" (Dt 30:15-16). What is at stake is not only the land of Canaan and the existence of the people of Israel, but also the world of today and of the future, and the existence of all humanity. In fact, it is altogether impossible for life to remain authentic and complete once it is detached from the good; and the good, in its turn, is essentially bound to the commandments of the Lord, that is, to the "law of life" (Sir 17:11). The good to be done is not added to life as a burden which weighs on it, since the very purpose of life is that good and only by doing it can life be built up.

It is thus the Law as a whole which fully protects human life. This explains why it is so hard to remain faithful to the commandment "You shall not kill" when the other "words of life" (cf. Acts 7:38) with which this commandment is bound up are not observed. Detached from this wider framework, the commandment is destined to become nothing more than an obligation imposed from without, and very soon we begin to look for its limits and try to find mitigating factors and exceptions. Only when people are open to the fullness of the truth about God, man and history will the words "You shall not kill" shine forth once more as a good for man in himself and in his relations with others. In such a perspective we can grasp the full truth of the passage of the Book of Deuteronomy which Jesus repeats in reply to the first temptation: "Man does not live by bread alone, but ... by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord" (Dt 8:3; cf. Mt 4:4).

It is by listening to the word of the Lord that we are able to live in dignity and justice. It is by observing the Law of God that we are able to bring forth fruits of life and happiness: "All who hold her fast will live, and those who forsake her will die" (Bar 4:1).

John Paul II puts together the revelation of God's law, the nature of the covenant community, and the respect for human life and dignity that should mark our view of human persons and their communities. Life is not authentic without this fundamental respect for personhood. Once we begin to qualify away human life, deeming some as less than fully human, we risk before long sacrificng our human nature and our basic morality entirely.

Human Freedom and the Moral Law (John Paul II series)

John Paul II in this selection from Veritatis splendor argues that while humans have the freedom to use their reason to explore and understand the natural world and to seek out expressions of ethical action, this freedom is not intended for the radical autonomy preached by modernity. The conscience is not an idol unto itself. He warns that a loss of belief in definitive right and wrong is accompanied by a loss of belief in universal truth that can adjudicate between the claims of various individuals. Instead of a heteronomy, in which each person is a will unto himself or herself, one should recognize the existence of a participatory theonomy, in which persons enter into the law of God with their whole persons:

32. Certain currents of modern thought have gone so far as to exalt freedom to such an extent that it becomes an absolute, which would then be the source of values. This is the direction taken by doctrines which have lost the sense of the transcendent or which are explicitly atheist. The individual conscience is accorded the status of a supreme tribunal of moral judgment which hands down categorical and infallible decisions about good and evil. To the affirmation that one has a duty to follow one's conscience is unduly added the affirmation that one's moral judgment is true merely by the fact that it has its origin in the conscience. But in this way the inescapable claims of truth disappear, yielding their place to a criterion of sincerity, authenticity and "being at peace with oneself", so much so that some have come to adopt a radically subjectivistic conception of moral judgment.

As is immediately evident, the crisis of truth is not unconnected with this development. Once the idea of a universal truth about the good, knowable by human reason, is lost, inevitably the notion of conscience also changes. Conscience is no longer considered in its primordial reality as an act of a person's intelligence, the function of which is to apply the universal knowledge of the good in a specific situation and thus to express a judgment about the right conduct to be chosen here and now. Instead, there is a tendency to grant to the individual conscience the prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly. Such an outlook is quite congenial to an individualist ethic, wherein each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others. Taken to its extreme consequences, this individualism leads to a denial of the very idea of human nature.

These different notions are at the origin of currents of thought which posit a radical opposition between moral law and conscience, and between nature and freedom.

33. Side by side with its exaltation of freedom, yet oddly in contrast with it, modern culture radically questions the very existence of this freedom. A number of disciplines, grouped under the name of the "behavioural sciences", have rightly drawn attention to the many kinds of psychological and social conditioning which influence the exercise of human freedom. Knowledge of these conditionings and the study they have received represent important achievements which have found application in various areas, for example in pedagogy or the administration of justice. But some people, going beyond the conclusions which can be legitimately drawn from these observations, have come to question or even deny the very reality of human freedom.

The rightful autonomy of the practical reason means that man possesses in himself his own law, received from the Creator. Nevertheless, the autonomy of reason cannot mean that reason itself creates values and moral norms. Were this autonomy to imply a denial of the participation of the practical reason in the wisdom of the divine Creator and Lawgiver, or were it to suggest a freedom which creates moral norms, on the basis of historical contingencies or the diversity of societies and cultures, this sort of alleged autonomy would contradict the Church's teaching on the truth about man. It would be the death of true freedom: "But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die" (Gen 2:17).

41. Man's genuine moral autonomy in no way means the rejection but rather the acceptance of the moral law, of God's command: "The Lord God gave this command to the man..." (Gen 2:16). Human freedom and God's law meet and are called to intersect, in the sense of man's free obedience to God and of God's completely gratuitous benevolence towards man. Hence obedience to God is not, as some would believe, a heteronomy, as if the moral life were subject to the will of something all-powerful, absolute, extraneous to man and intolerant of his freedom. If in fact a heteronomy of morality were to mean a denial of man's self-determination or the imposition of norms unrelated to his good, this would be in contradiction to the Revelation of the Covenant and of the redemptive Incarnation. Such a heteronomy would be nothing but a form of alienation, contrary to divine wisdom and to the dignity of the human person.

Others speak, and rightly so, of theonomy, or participated theonomy, since man's free obedience to God's law effectively implies that human reason and human will participate in God's wisdom and providence. By forbidding man to "eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil", God makes it clear that man does not originally possess such "knowledge" as something properly his own, but only participates in it by the light of natural reason and of Divine Revelation, which manifest to him the requirements and the promptings of eternal wisdom. Law must therefore be considered an expression of divine wisdom: by submitting to the law, freedom submits to the truth of creation. Consequently one must acknowledge in the freedom of the human person the image and the nearness of God, who is present in all (cf. Eph 4:6). But one must likewise acknowledge the majesty of the God of the universe and revere the holiness of the law of God, who is infinitely transcendent: Deus semper maior.

Grace, Love, and Freedom (John Paul II series)

This is part of a series of passages from the late John Paul II's encyclicals, which I as a Protestant can learn from. The following are reflections from the 1993 encyclical Veritatis splendor. Here, he examines the nature of grace and freedom and their role in Christian morality:

"To imitate and live out the love of Christ is not possible for man by his own strength alone. He becomes capable of this love only by virtue of a gift received. As the Lord Jesus receives the love of his Father, so he in turn freely communicates that love to his disciples: "As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you; abide in my love" (Jn 15:9). Christ's gift is his Spirit, whose first "fruit" (cf. Gal 5:22) is charity: "God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us" (Rom 5:5). . . .

"Love and life according to the Gospel cannot be thought of first and foremost as a kind of precept, because what they demand is beyond man's abilities. They are possible only as the result of a gift of God who heals, restores and transforms the human heart by his grace: "For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ" (Jn 1:17). The promise of eternal life is thus linked to the gift of grace, and the gift of the Spirit which we have received is even now the "guarantee of our inheritance" (Eph 1:14).

"And so we find revealed the authentic and original aspect of the commandment of love and of the perfection to which it is ordered: we are speaking of a possibility opened up to man exclusively by grace, by the gift of God, by his love. On the other hand, precisely the awareness of having received the gift, of possessing in Jesus Christ the love of God, generates and sustains the free response of a full love for God and the brethren, as the Apostle John insistently reminds us in his first Letter: "Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love... Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another... We love, because he first loved us" (1 Jn 4:7-8, 11, 19).

"This inseparable connection between the Lord's grace and human freedom, between gift and task, has been expressed in simple yet profound words by Saint Augustine in his prayer: "Da quod iubes et iube quod vis" (Grant what you command and command what you will).

"The gift does not lessen but reinforces the moral demands of love: "This is his commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another just as he has commanded us" (1 Jn 3:32). One can "abide" in love only by keeping the commandments, as Jesus states: "If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love" (Jn 15:10)." [secs. 22-24]

Freedom, as John Paul II reads the New Testament, is not simply a matter of self-expressive choices of the will, but is found first as the gift of the Holy Spirit, whose love and grace enables us to begin keeping the dictates of the law. Following Augustine, John Paul II holds that obedience comes from the love created in our hearts by the grace of God. Rather than a justification by faith or works, though it includes each of these at some level, the key is a justification by love, that is the benevolent action of the Spirit in us.

Max Scheler and an Ethics of Feeling--Part 1

"Whoever has the ordo amoris of man, has man himself. He has for man as a moral subject what the crystallization formula is for crystal. He sees through him as far as one possibly can. He sees before him the constantly simple and basic lines of his heart running beneath all empirical many-sidedness and complexity. And heart deserves to be called the core of man as a spiritual being much more so than knowing and willing."--Maz Scheler (trans. Manfred Frings)

The German ethicist and phenomenologist Max Scheler worked all his life on a theory of ethical personalism that influenced Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) in both positive and negative ways. Scheler's emphasis on a rich description of the subjective emotions of human beings was a method quite conducive to the philosophical and artistic Wojtyla, and as I will try to recount in future posts, and impacted Wojtyla's stress on human feeling and human value. At the same time, Scheler's descriptive project ultimately downplayed the importance of human choice, a stress absolutely necessary to the thought of John Paul II, as well as eventually rejecting theism for a more pantheistic belief in an evolving ground of being with both spirit (Geist) and force (Drang), a position the late pope could also not embrace. Nonetheless, some knowledge of Scheler's hierarchy of values and intersubjectivity is helpful in understanding how he shaped some of Wotjyla's early thought.

Scheler felt that feelings are fundamentally basic, that they have priority to our thoughts and choices. Our hearts tell us something about our values before our minds begin to conceptualize them. He categorized value-feelings (the order of loves) in the following way:

1. Holiness: the highest value-feeling. I suspect he meant something here not unlike Rudolf Ott's mysterium tremendum.
   
2. The mind's values: aesthetic (beauty); juridical (rightness); philosophical (truth).
3. Life-values or vitals: those values that are felt either within one's own body of as appearances in external objects.
4. Utility: all animals experience that something is needed or not needed.
5. Sensations: the lowest feelings, such as comfort, pleasure, and so on.

Our feelings, felt Scheler, have an inherent drift, for example, towards comfort, beauty, and order. The higher values are more durable, so they are also more fulfilling. They also, then, impart a sense of "oughtness" to particular actions. This sense of kairos, by which Scheler meant inner moral guidance, creates a feeling of the moment in which one's heart, mind, and will converge around the ethical decision. This does not mean that a sense of moral guidance in our feelings can be reduced to one's passions, for distortions of the values can arise.

Scheler also held that the person should be understood as found in one's actions. Each of us has the very early experience of separation from others, as well as subsequent feelings that connect us with others. He also categorized these:

1. "Caught" feelings that people share simply by being in the same place together. This is the experience of the mob.
2. "Fellow" feelings that people naturally share by living with another. This is the experience of the life-community.
3. "Joint" feelings are common feelings that people experience together. These do not occur naturally but are willed by people on the basis of moral principles; thus, they are the ideal basis of a society.
4. Feelings of emotive identification in which the experience is entirely collective are experienced in religious mysticism. Church members often combine the solidarity of the life community with sense of an all-inclusive personhood (Gesamtperson) of shared unity.

In my next post, I will explore further how Scheler distinguishes life-communities and societies, as well as how this gives rise to both perceptions of the divine and of economic and political ressentiment.

Simone Weil and Rootedness--Part 1

The French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil's last work, The Need for Roots, was written in 1943, the year of her death, and published posthumously in 1949, as well as being translated into English in 1952 with an introduction by T.S. Eliot. The Need for Roots offers a passionate call for helping the French return to a sense of true patriotism, tied not to the State, but to place and ideals. In the first part of the book, Weil explores briefly fourteen "needs of the soul" before focusing on her chief concern, the 15th and perhaps most comprehensive need--rootedness.

1. Order, by which Weil means a sense of epistemic coherence. The soul needs a sense that a balance of the forces of the universe exists, that they have a beauty to them, a rationality at some level.
2. Liberty, that is the ability to choose within a system of rules that we trust because they "emanate from a source of authority which is not looked upon as strange or hostile, but loved as something belonging to those placed under its direction." None are free unless they operate out of goodwill and obligation to others, she contends.
3. Obedience of a healthy sort is "necessary food for the soul," and the one who is forced to obey a tyrant must partake of the sickness of such a society.
4. Responsibility of a real sort, that is, of type that actually impacts the person and his or her fellows in a meaningful way.
5. Equality in degree of respect and with a degree of opportunity. There must also be a way for movement to take place up and down the ladder of social equilibrium.
6. Hierarchism, that is a proper veneration of one's superiors who are symbols of what we each desire.
7. Honor in being a part of a noble tradition with a proud past of examples of virtuous actions.
8. Punishment that restores the one who has moved outside the circle of obedience--fully for the one who is truly repentant, and partially for the one who refuses. "Punishment is a method for getting justice into the soul of the criminal by bodily suffering."
9. Freedom of Opinion, that is an unrestricted freedom to explore all opinions, though this pursuit is conducted by one who serves the truth.
10. Security from constant, debilitating fear or terror.
11. Risk that keeps one from boredom even while not descending into terror.
12. Private Property such as owning a piece of land and one's own tools, because these are the means of a necessary and bodily life.
13. Collective Property, a feeling of ownership in public monuments, parks, and ceremonies.
14. Truth: "The need for truth is more sacred than any other need," so we must do all we can to curtail lying in print or in public speech.
15. Rootedness. She defines rootedness in the following way:

"A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future. This participation is a natural one, in the sense that it is automatically brought about by place, conditions of birth, profession and social surroundings. Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw wellnigh the whole of his moral, intellectual, and spiritual life by the way of the environment of which he forms a natural part."

Gabriel Marcel & The Promise of Fidelity to Persons

The Christian "existentialist" philosopher Gabriel Marcel also had an important role in Christian Personalism. In particular, he brought together ethical, emotional, and existential commitments to show their dependence upon each other. (I should say in passing that reading Marcel's existential diary, Being and Having, was an important help to me at a time in which my faith was foundering and I was cut off from trust of God or others.) Here's some of his key ideas:

1. Ours is a broken world characterized by the impersonal relations of technology. The world system is functionalist in its treatment of situations and people. This treatment creates a condition of despair since technology and functionalism can not solve or engage the personal.
2. As persons created in the image of God we are created for ontological wholeness. It is a condition of who we are and of the trajectory of our lives in time and space. To be human is to pursue wholeness.
3. One way we learn to achieve wholeness is to distinguish between what we "have" and what we "are." Both are important ways to relating to reality, but to confuse the two is to distort essential aspects of our selves as things that are disposable.
4. Not all of life is a problem to be solved; much of it is a mystery to be received and lived. Again, to confuse the two is to invite frustration and despair. To treat people as problems is to attempt and reduce them to things that can be manipulated rather than other images of God that we encounter in all their value and difference.
5. Intersubjective experience involves the risk of making oneself disponibilite, that is available, disposable, at hand for another. It involves making oneself a gift to another, offering one's self to another because we are "with" the other; we are part of them.
6. The fullest relationships are ones of mutual reciprocity. They are acts of charity and presence. They require of us fidelity--commitments to be at the disposal of another--and this needs our constant willingness to remain open and accountable to other persons.
7. The power to do this is found in the Christian virtue of hope, which is given actively by God to the human person.

"The possibility of despair is bound up with liberty. It is the essence of liberty that it is able to be exerted in self-betrayal. Nothing which is outside [us] can shut the door to despair. . . . Fidelity [should be] considered as the recognition of something permanent . . . [and] witness considered as the beginning of things--the Church a perpetutated witness, an act of fidelity. It is an essential characteristic of the being to whom I give fidelity to be not only liable to be betrayed, but also in some manner affected by my betrayal.

"Fidelity [then is] regarded as witness perpetuated, but it is the essence of witness that it can be obliterated and wiped out. . . . Fidelity can only be shown towards a person, never at all to a notion or an ideal. An absolute fidelity involves an absolute person. Question: does not an absolute fidelity to a creature presuppose Him in whose sight I bind myself?"

Christian Personalism

In the mid-twentieth century, a loose movement called Christian personalism arose in response to what it perceived as the extremes of totalitarian collectivism and atomizing individualism. Participants in the movement, Protestant and Catholic, argued that the human person must be understood as a relational and communal being, that one's personal fulfillment came from participating in relational social structures, that one's personality and growth were based in interacting with others in a healthy and holy way for the common good, and that ultimately community has its person-centered basis in Christ the Logos of the Universe. While personalist thinkers did not share a common political vision, they did hold that personalism had political and economic implications. Namely, to conceive of the body economic as only the market exchanges of otherwise isolated individuals was to ignore the material and cultural soil of our personhood. Likewise, to see individual persons as products of material, historical forces and thereby, subject to the all-powerful collective was to rob each one of his or her freedom expressed in community.

Individualism without some sense of how our persons are designed by God to be complementary cuts us off from the fruits of interpersonal aesthetic, ethical, and liturgical development. Collectivism without recognizing our personal free will and diverse identities robs us of the same.

Here's some brief passages from this school of thought that I think are worth pondering:

"Collectivism is no solution to the problem of modern individualism. Individualism and collectivism are two antithetical extremes which have in common only that they both leave the individual on his own. They both miss the essence of the human person who finds happiness and peace only in personal union, in common values and goals, in mutual giving and the sharing of personal values"--Walter Kasper

"[There is] an interdependence and reciprocity between the person and society: all that is accomplished in favor of the person is also a service rendered to society, and all that is done in favor of society redounds to the benefit of the person" --John Paul II

"Theological development and wholeness are found in community, not in isolation. Theological research in the spirit of communio is a search for the common truths and insights that bind me to others in Christ. The solitary thinker who follows no guidelines but his own mind, thinks himself into further isolation and loneliness. The thinker who is attuned to the Mind of Christ in the Church, is never alone. He is in communion with Christ and with the whole community of Christ's faithful who have lived in fellowship, and thought and believed in it, since apostolic times"--Cormac Burke

"Personality tends by nature to communion. . . . For the person requires membership in a society in virtue both of its dignity and its needs. . . . The common good is common because it is received in persons, each one of whom is a mirror of the whole. The end of society, therefore, is neither the individual good nor the collection of the individual goods of each of the persons who constitute it. . . . The common good of the city is neither the mere collection of private goods, nor the proper good of a whole. . . It is the good human life of the multitude, of a multitude of persons; it is their communion in good living. It is therefore common to both the whole and the parts into which it flows back and which, in turn, must benefit from it." --Jacques Maritian

"It is the sharing of a common life which constitutes individual personality. We become persons in community, in virtue of our relations to others. Human life is inherently a common life. Our ability to form individual purposes is itself a function of this common life. We do indeed enter into specific relations with our fellows in virtue of specific purposes of our own; and we must do so in order to realize, in concrete experience, the common humanity which makes us persons. . . . Community is prior to society."--John MacMurray

Physician's Oaths

Honor physicians for their services,
for the Lord created them;
for their gift of healing comes from the Most High,
and they are rewarded by the king.
The skill of physicians makes them distinguished,
and in the presence of the great they are admired.
The Lord created medicines out of the earth,
and the sensible will not despise them.
..........................................................
. . . give the physician his place, for the Lord created him;
do not let him leave you, for you need him.
There may come a time when recovery lies in the hands of physicians,
for they too pray to the Lord
that he will grant them success in diagnosis
and in healing, for the sake of preserving life.
He who sins against his Maker
will be defiant towards the physician.
--Sirach 38: 1-3, 12-15
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Charles S. Yanofsky has complied a series of physician's oaths. What's interesting is how they each ground their medical ethical commitments in differing metaphysical ways. His own reflections at the bottom of the page are worth reflecting on and disagreeing with in some cases. To me, a fundamental discussion of health care should begin with what its purpose and role is under God in relation to human beings:

1. How does the Trinitarian nature of our faith shape our view of the community's role in health care?
2. How does the ecclesial shape of our Christian experience speak to health care?
3. How does our understanding of human beings as the imago dei guide our views on health care as a service and potentially as a gift?
4. How does a Christian view of economy, ecology, culture, and market shape our treatment of the social and ethical realities of modern health care?
   

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.

Individual and Community in Potok's My Name Is Asher Lev

My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok is a novel that I have read seven or eight times, each time to my lasting benefit. More than the fiction of Saul Bellow, the memoirs of Elie Wiesel, or the short stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Potok's story taught me to understand why many Jews dread and fear Christianity. It was from Potok that I first learned of the shameful pogroms and of the suffering of the Jews in "Christian" cultures. It was also a window into the Hassidic culture of New York, giving me a view of its education, its worship, and its ethics. I can truly say the book has been a gift to me.

Reading it again this summer against the background of other Jewish literature, My Name Is Asher Lev has yet again given me a gift. It has helped me enter more deeply and sympathetically into the dilemma of the individual and the community. The book explores a profound and intriguing scenario: what if a visual artist of powerful and undeniable talent, like that of Marc Chagall, Chaim Soutine, or Amedeo Modigliani, was born into a Brooklyn Hassidic community? The character of Asher Lev is who he is because he has been born with a painter's eye. Asher is also who he is because he is a religious Jew and an only child whose father often must travel abroad for the community's Rebbe and whose mother, having suffered the loss of her brother, battles with debilitating fear that she will lose her husband or her son. Asher's painting will eventually wound his parents, as well as his small religious community, deeply.

He is torn between two traditions--that of the art world and that of Hassidic Judaism. The wounding comes not just because many Hassidic Jews distrust painting, or think it a frivolous activity at best, but because Asher must turn to the painting of nudes if he is to truly absorb the tradition of Western art, and worse, he must turn to the painting of crucifixions if he is to find a form of ultimate suffering to embody in his personal vision his mother's pain. This last act is one of utterly bewildering betrayal that ends the novel and the artist's coming of age.

Potok labels this experience "core-core culture confrontation," that is when the values of one's community come into conflict with those of the larger general culture. Both the uniqueness of the individual and the particularity of the community are woven into their "sense of identity":

(1) You learn early on in your life the stable values of your particular community.
(2) You learn early on in your life that your life makes sense; that it's important, it counts.
(3) You learn that human actions are meaningful. They resonate. One cannot act without in one way or another affecting.
(4) You learn early on in your life that action and value ought to be in harmony. You cannot have a viable sense of self worth if you value one thing and act contrary to what it is that you value. When this happens, a dichotomy or split in the self is established.
Finally it seems to me that fundamental to an awareness of the nature of a core of both a tradition and an individual in that tradition is (5) that the individual be made aware of what is right and what is wrong, as far as the community is concerned, and that the individual be able to choose between the two.

In My Name Is Asher Lev, Asher experiences confrontation in his identity because the art world would hold that individual expression and personal honesty are essential to art's greatness, while in Asher's community, one learns to channel one's self into given roles. But it is not just that Asher's community has no real place for his vocation, it is that the worldview underlying it cuts against their deepest values. The struggle for the young artist is in seeking a way between these rival polities.

Asher, after all, cannot entirely jettison his community. They are at the core of his art--its subject matter, its mythic power, and its raw emotion. And Potok the novelist is sure to offer us a vision of his community that is human and multi-dimensional. They try to listen, to understand his art, to account for him, and to find a place for him: "Everyone is listening," his mother tells him in response to his complaints, "There would be no problem if no one were listening to you, Asher" (111). Yet this vision of the young's artist's individuality must still wrestle with counter-vision of secular modernity. When Asher later explains that he is accountable to his community because "All Jews are responsible one for the other," his teacher Jacob Kahn responds, "As an artist you are responsible to no one and to nothing, except to yourself and to the truth as you see it. Do you understand? An artist is responsible to his art. Anything else is propaganda" (218).

Is Kahn entirely correct, however? As a Christian, I would contend that there may be a third way forward. Jacques Maritain thinks that art comes from an internalized habit of work and reflection. The artist is a maker of art objects. The subjectivity, the imagination, and the act of confession in the true artist are all subsumed to the act of making the beautiful work. Much like people as moral beings learn a kind of ethical prudence, an inner sense of what a given situation calls for, so artists over time develop certain habits of seeing and working. A poet, for example, has to put in the time and work with language, metaphor, observation, etc. in order to develop a poetic craft. The poet’s subjectivity is meant to serve the work and not the reverse. Maritain stresses that the Christian who would make art should focus on the task at hand:

If you want to make a Christian work, then be Christian and simply try to make a beautiful work, into which your heart will pass; do not try to "make Christian." [. . .] The entire soul of the artist reaches and rules his work, but it must reach and rule it only through the artistic habitus. Art tolerates no division here. It will not allow any foreign element, juxtaposing itself to it, to mingle, in the production of the work, its regulation with art’s own. Tame it, and it will do all that you want it to do. Use violence, and it will accomplish nothing.

The artist can only make what she has learned over time to practice. It has its own demands, concerns, and rules. These are only right and natural and should be respected. Indeed, trying to bypass these in the name of religion is only bound to failure. The same can be said of the other arts, too. Poet Rod Jellema would warn us against using the label "Christian poet" too lightly: "It invites a poet who is a Christian into a frame of mind in which, proud of his humility, he can knock the tough commitment to art as merely arty, shrug off the world’s expected indifference to his work as the price he must pay for his martyrdom, and isolate himself in mutual-admiration groups of like-minded poets."

The artist as maker is a humbler definition of vocation than that of the prophet or truth-creator, and I would contend that it is more Christian, and yes, more Jewish. Such a vision does not deny the talent or the genuine inspiration of the artistic process, but it reminds us that the artist in serving a tradition of art is nevertheless still serving the truth, and a truth found in more than an individual

Pedagogy and Friendship

John Henry Newman understood only too well that professors influence students; the question is not if influence will take place but what kind of influence. He held that a pedagogy without the friendship of professor and student can only expect an environment of distrust and hostility: "An academic system without the personal influence of teachers upon pupils is an arctic winter; it will create an ice-bound, petrified, cast-iron University and nothing else."

Strangely, this is a result that many in the modern university not only accept as normal but practice as a virtue. The pedagogical practices inherent in Alasdair MacIntyre's encyclopedic method and the genealogical critiques may not know it, but they exist in ethical practices, though ones gone terribly array. Their methods of objective distance and power distrust have been made more believable by being offered in an ethical and pedagogical environment that reinforces their claims-- its very structure, at once supposedly objective yet lacking in anything like a curricular common vision.

Mark Schewn places much of the blame for this at the heart of the nineteenth-century German research institution, as well as the Weberian distrust of emotion and relationship in university education. Phillia, Weber holds, always pollutes the objectivity necessary for true research. But is this really the case?

Michel Polanyi observed that research is more intuitive in nature than is mostly admitted, and it is often passed along in non-verbalized ways to its new initiates. He called this "conviviality," the communication of true knowledge on the inarticulate level. Such knowledge involves a fair level of trust between teacher and student, and is therefore, essentially a-critical in nature. As such it is a tacit knowing: "We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of cultural heritage . . . No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework."

The modern university by its overt distrust of friendship creates a world where encyclopedia and genealogy tragically seem true, though at the most human level they must continue to teach and research despite this, living off the cultural capital of intellectual honesty, collegiality, freedom of conscience, trust in rational discourse, scholarly discipline, a dependence on continuity with the past, even the desire for mentorship between student and teacher--all ethical practices which must be taken on faith, as Polanyi observes, even when honored in the breach.

Note how in Henry James' story, "The Figure in the Carpet" that once the narrator experiences knowledge as utility and as mastery, it soon replaces joy and delight in the love of learning:

[W]hat now occurred was simply that my new intelligence and vain preoccupation damaged my liking. I not only failed to run a general intention to earth, I found myself missing the subordinate intentions I had formerly enjoyed. His books didn't even remain the charming things they had been for me; the exasperation of my search put me out of conceit of them. Instead of being a pleasure the more they became a resource the less; for from the moment I was unable to follow up the author's hint I of course felt it a point of honour not to make use professionally of my knowledge of them. I had no knowledge - nobody had any. It was humiliating, but I could bear it - they only annoyed me now. At last they even bored me, and I accounted for my confusion - perversely, I allow - by the idea that Vereker had made a fool of me. The buried treasure was a bad joke, the general intention a monstrous pose (293).

Treating your education in a purely instrumental way is to succumb to the encyclopedia project of which MacIntyre warned, which only too quickly leads to the distrust and suspicion of genealogy. Such a disposition of mind and heart can occur in any educational environment, but the modern ethical chaos of individualism only lends it a deeper epistemic credulity. We have literally created academic structures that make the modern and post-modern assertions feel true, even as our humanity must struggle against them. As such, these structures are traditions who have hidden from themselves their former purpose for existence, living in a practice that once had the higher end of the love of knowledge from a dedication to the truth as the gift of God.

This current state of things suggests that Christian institutions of higher learning need to be cognizant and intentional about friendships between faculty and students. Learning is not just factual but intuitive and initiatory. Mentoring is often a two-way street because education is founded on the practice of submission, initiation, cultivation, and eventual contribution and clarification. As Jaroslav Pelikan reminds us,

The moment of truth comes . . . [as] the student begins to arrive at conclusions different from those of the master, as the largely unilateral power relationship of apprenticeship gradually yields, or should yield, in a healthy relationship--to authentic community and a deepening collegiality between teacher and student . . . it is a rite of passage filled with joy and fulfillment for all concerned, as well as with moments of deep anxiety.

What renders this "moment of truth" and "rite of passage" meaningful is a shared commitment to something like the academic ideal, a belief in freedom of inquiry as an essential aspect of our true humanness. As such, it demands of us personal virtues, fiduciary skills of trust and time, and they can exist for a season in systems of thought that mitigate against themselves.

Yet the cultures of encyclopedia and genealogy are finally pedagogically incoherent. These virtues cannot stand by themselves for very long. What they need is the larger theistic framework of the purpose of knowledge and of intellectual service to humanity to render their academic ideal an ultimately meaningful practice. Faithfulness in this context means an investment in others; it requires a certain speed--a slow listening and speaking that "hears" the tacit dimension in the other person. We all have favorite teachers in our lives, and those of us in higher education can each recall very significant professors who shaped our future callings, answered our questions, guided our thinking, assuaged our doubts, and disturbed our complacency.

In a Christian context, we need the hypergood, the telos, or final end we are pursuing set before us always, what the Westminster Confession so lovingly made proverbially:

Question 1: What is the chief and highest end of man?
Answer: Man's chief and highest end is to glorify God, and fully to enjoy him forever.

Lenten Pedagogy -- part 4

As Christ's faithful bride, as his priests for this world, we are called to extend hands of mercy to those in need. This is a high calling wherever it is practiced. I have often toyed with the idea of introducing a speaker by talking about his or her character qualities, by calling attention to what God has done in a person’s life despite himself, or by calling attention to the testimony of love from those nearest her. Of course, such doesn’t easily fit the genre of introductions, and it could come across as too precious.

Likewise, there are certain virtues in showing gratitude to someone for their accomplishments, yet how do we work within an academic hierarchy of honors, awards, and padded vitas while remembering that the Man of Sorrows had no place to rest his head? John Mogabgab has written,

Far from removing us from the messiness of the world, spiritual formation plunges us into the middle of the world's rage and suffering. It was to this place of pain and bewilderment that Jesus Christ was sent as a visible image of the invisible God . . . Through us love is extended to the furthest recesses of human sorrow and need. God's love for the world--in us because we are in Jesus Christ--becomes a sign of hope and a source of transformation in the world.

This to me seems a profound statement of what Christian education in general, and honors education in particular, should seek to accomplish. Service learning cannot truly be effective without formation in the spiritual disciplines that form our capacities. If we wish to serve as the imago dei, we must embrace the sacramental nature of our confession and discipline. Service learning to be truly sacramental must grow out of baptism and communion, vocation and the nuptial meaning of our bodies, and it must be the product, as well as the instrument, of repentance.

Lenten Pedagogy -- part 3

Consecration is an important element of Christian education, especially when we are tempted to look for greener pastures during the stressful times of grading and writing that every semester brings. Gerald May puts it this way:

Consecration means dedication to God. It occurs when we claim our deepest desire for God, beneath, above, and beyond all other things. We may not understand the full meaning of consecration: the ups and downs, the joys and agonies of the journey that must follow. And certainly we will be unable to grasp the overarching cosmic meaning of our small assent, the joy it gives to God, the deepening love it will bring to humanity, the . . . covenant it has enriched. But our yes comes from some bare recollection of all these things. In a tiny space our hearts can say yes.

Confession and spiritual mortification call us to self-examination that we may forget ourselves and to alms-giving that we may gain great blessings. Monks often take a vow of stability, pledging to stay in the place their life has been planted. While I am certainly not arguing that professors or students should never change universities, I do think we need to acknowledge that certain aspects of our growth require the suffering of endurance and the humility of choosing perhaps the lesser of places, at least in some academics' estimation. Calvin sees a similar kind of stability in the very vocations we are called to by God:

The last thing to be observed is, that the Lord enjoins every one of us, in all the actions of life, to have respect to our own calling. He knows the boiling restlessness of the human mind, the fickleness with which it is borne hither and thither, its eagerness to hold opposites at one time in its grasp, its ambition.

Therefore, lest all things should be thrown into confusion by our folly and rashness, he has assigned distinct duties to each in the different modes of life. And that no one may presume to overstep his proper limits, he has distinguished the different modes of life by the name of callings. Every man's mode of life, therefore, is a kind of station assigned him by the Lord that he may not be always driven about at random. (Institutes 3.10.6)

While Calvin’s model is perhaps more static than our lives necessitate, there is a real truth to this; namely, we are tempted by selfish motives that drive, even infect, our noble callings. This native presumption of the fallen mind can only too easily be attested to in education, so the gift of stability has much to pedagogically commend it. When we train in God’s kingdom, we are not training for ourselves alone, but for the needs of a hurting world, and this is true of the end and purpose of our teaching and the Christian educational project as a whole.

This training includes a counter-cultural approach to success. We need, I need, a self-check each time I blanch before those teaching at Yale, Princeton, or Oxford.

Lenten Pedagogy -- part 2

Having authority carries with it its own spiritual dangers. Leading carries the temptation to forget our dependence on others. As a teacher, one can easily become accustomed to students doing what you say or agreeing with you because you control the grade.

We need a practice of self-confrontation. We need to confess our sins, remember who we are, and most importantly renew our dependence on the larger work of the kingdom of God. The classic disciplines of the Church—fasting, prayer, study, corporate worship, silence, service, and so on--when we engage in them, we do so not to punish ourselves in unhealthy ways, but so that we might better conform to the person of Jesus. Such practices are a call to holy exercise. As Paul says, “I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should. Otherwise, I fear that after preaching to others I myself might be disqualified.” There are, of course, good ways and bad ways to exercise.

Richard Swinburne has noted that in the Christian faith a Lenten principle is deeply pervasive. Human beings have trouble rightly ordering their desires; we take things that are good and turn them into idols. We hold on to what is simply ours to steward. We take too much of what should be shared. We hoard when only a little is needed. This is why scripture teaches that Christians must fast, give to those in need, and learn to suffer the little irritants of life. This is also why we at times may be called to endure the death of some of our most cherished dreams and desires. We must at times intentionally frustrate those desires because they influence us more than they should.

Even those things that are otherwise good can not always be indulged. We must enter the desert of the spirit so that we may receive the wellsprings of life. This is certainly true of the kind of discipline and decision-making that are necessary for effective study and scholarship. We limit part of ourselves, that is we consecrate ourselves in order to be changed by God, so that we may truly partake of all that is his.

Individual Action is Relational Action

Graham Ward in an essay entitled "A Christian Act: Politics and Liturgical Practice" sets out a model for describing human action. His terms are similar to Kenneth Burke's dramaturigal model. Ward suggests that Christians begin with the principle "Your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col 3:3). He then asks, "What kind of act is a Christian act?" He examines this question from six perspectives, all of which overlap to a large extent:

1. Agent: The actions of the Christian are not those of an autonomous individual who claims self-sufficiency but of an individual who is wrapped in a vinculum caritatis, a bond of love. The Christian act is one that abides in Christ, that imitates Christ. The Christian agent is one who sojourns in this world, even while claiming it for Christ. This journey is traveled within the koinonia fellowship of the Church and experienced in the unity of the Lord's supper. As such, each Christian is called to resist individual privitization of his or her life and recognize the "interrelationality" of being a being on his or her way to a "final recognition of who she is in Christ."
2. Nature of the Action: Our actions, then, are Christological in orientation; they are discovered to be such at the level of our practices. We reach an understanding of them by participating in the Christian practice, which God names us through. We cannot name the nature of the action ourselves, for it is God who decides this as we participate in his will.
3. Evaluation of the Action: We are limited in our ability to judge our actions, though we must attempt to do so even as we are aware of our limitations. "We name and judge far better the more we are subject to God," and this happens as we enter into his eschatological expectations. We orient ourselves to his end purposes.
4. Object: We truly discover the object of our actions as we submit all things to Christ. The object of our actions is to be situated within the economy of redemption; thus, we learn to pursue the good , true, and beautiful as God intends. When we do so, our objects become worship. "In such a labouring, the agent is priestly, the act liturgical, and the object sacramental."
5. Effect of the Act: The effect of the act upon object and agent is transfiguration: to be obedient and desire what God desires. We learn that we are not truly transparent to ourselves even as we obey and grow in obedience.
6. Dispositions and Affections: These operate within a Christ-centered form of reasoning; we become more and more inclined to a direction of discipline, that inclined to the way of Jesus.

All of this suggests that our motives and intentions are mixed and failable and only become less so through the actions of grace upon us even as we enter in and seek to obey. We cannot truly act in a free manner as God intends without the relationships of Church and Triune God.

Wisdom and Phronesis

Much that can be said of phronesis can be said of wisdom. It, too, has a kind of concrete, specific pattern of reasoning. Walter Bruggemann has noted that “[w]isdom is found in the experience of the world . . . a more qualified experience of the community." Wisdom both embraces what can be known and what cannot be known.

God is both the giver and withholder of knowledge. Wisdom, in all its variations, invites us to find a fit between our behavior and the divine order of the world we live in. Christians believe that God constructed the world with Wisdom at his side and, therefore, that there is a continuum between our personal lives and that of creation. They also believe that sophia is perfectly revealed in Christ; thus, while certain behavior leads to success, and other behavior leads to failure, christocentric obedience is at the heart of wise living. However, it is not quite so simple to say that we easily understand what success and failure add up to. Wisdom also teaches us what our limits are--what we do not understand, how blind we may be to God's true wisdom for our lives. Wisdom is kenotic and apophatic to a point.

There is, thus, more than one kind of wisdom. The kind of wisdom praised by Proverbs is practical. It amounts to a skill in living, an insight into varying circumstances, and a certain shrewdness in dealing with a variety of personalities. In this sense, it is very much like phornesis. This method of wisdom at its best is discipleship. More than the technical mastery of a few key insights, practical wisdom cultivates an internalized habit, a way of living in the world. Wisdom grows into a cultivated good-sense that sizes up situations, but as we have indicated above, the practice of wisdom only makes sense if the ethical pursuit that undergirds it is present.

Job and Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, teach us that wisdom has a limited potential. It cannot solve everything. God may leave us with questions, or we may discover that what we thought was wisdom breaks apart before the circumstances. These aspects of wisdom, then, are more interrogative in nature. The nature of God as both self-giving and concealing is exhibited in the systematic study of the universe. Kenotic learning, communal learning--these are not separate streams for phronetic learning.

Because of wisdom's practical side, some have suggested that the wisdom tradition of Ancient Israel is essentially neutral. There is some truth to this suggestion because many of the proverbs of Israel share the same kinds of concerns that other ancient wisdom traditions share. Proverbs' God-inspired editor was quite willing to adapt several Egyptian proverbs (cf. Prov 22:17ff.) Like its other Near eastern counterparts, the later chapters of Proverbs mainly teach ethical maxims and day-to-day management of circumstances.

Take, for example, the biblical portrait of the foolish and the wise. The fool is one who refuses apt words, who is lazy, and who is always undercuting others. The wise are those who speak fitting words, who care for others in the community, and who know how to avoid misunderstandings. These are observations that can be found in almost any culture. However, it would be a mistake to understand this wisdom as finally translatable from one context to another without phronetic reviewing. Israel's wisdom ultimately begins in the fear of God and has its confirmation in the Torah. Even supposedly "secular" insights are recontextualized within the worship and service of God. This suggests a manner for us in approaching the limited wisdom of human texts.

Practical wisdom is both inductive and deductive. It works by observing specific cases in life and applying general maxims to those circumstances, yet it also begins with a sense of divine revelation, for Yahweh has spoken to what is good and evil. Other texts, as a source of wisdom, can be evaluated from two complementary directions: 1) we can take an inductive approach that seeks to gather together principles for living from these sources, and 2) we can take a deductive approach that tests these examples by scripture and tradition.

This practice by itself can become rather reductive if we do not keep in mind, however, that wisdom also has an interrogative side. It asks questions to bring us to the end of our easy answers. We run the risk of a kind of "wisdom" that treats literature as ethical material to evaluate but then dispose of, as if literature were simply content to master. The impulse to wisdom, if it is shorn from its foundation in God, can prize itself for technique, for the ability to manipulate situations and manage persons. The author of Ecclesiastes reminds us that such an approach is finally empty; it is but grasping wind. Our attempts at achieving success are vain, for the end of the matter is to fear God (12:13).

The New Testament also reminds us that human wisdom, conceived of in yet another way, with all its pretensions, may end up seeing God's wisdom as foolishness. Human wisdom has its noetic blindness, after all. Erasmus suggested as much when he observed that those of the world and those of God each believe the other to be insane:

For those who, despising all earthly things and even life itself, embrace the heavenly philosophy with all their heart, seem insane to those for whom nothing is pleasant but the earthly and perishable. He who pours out his inheritance for the poor is insane in the opinion of the man who places the defense of his life in riches. The man who, for the Gospel, willingly exposes himself to exile, poverty, imprisonment, torturing, and death, in hope of eternal blessedness, is a lunatic for the man who does not believe that, after this life, there is a more blessed one for the pious. He who spurns the honors of princes and of the people so as to obtain glory with God, is mad for those who really are mad.

To pour out your life on something other than the brightest, richest, and most powerful makes no sense to the person who does not believe in an eternal reward or the one who does not think bliss is possible with God. In some sense, then, human wisdom is also a matter of control beliefs, those essential assumptions that shape the rest of the way we see and understand existence. This is one reason that a Christian may evaluate a work of text in very different fashion from a person of another persuasion.

The practice of disputation, then, faces the question of commensurability, but as I suggested above, this occurs within a position, not from a supposedly, objective "positionless" space.