Jacques Maritain, Materiality, and Personhood

Jacques Maritain, the important neo-Scholastic philosopher of the mid-twentieth century, also contributed to the conversation on Christian Personalism. His most important book on the subject was his 1946 The Person and the Common Good. In this work, Maritain distinguishes individuality and personality:

"As an individual, each of us is a fragment of a species, a part of the universe, a unique point in the immense web of cosmic, ethnical, historical forces and influences-and bound by their laws. Each of us is subject to the determinism of the physical world. Nonetheless, each of us is also a person and, as such, is not controlled by the stars. Our whole being subsists in virtue of the subsistence of the spiritual soul which is in us a principle of creative unity, independence and liberty" (38).

Maritian is invoking and answering the Kantian distinction between the physical and moral universes. For Maritain it is important that we recognize that we are both material and spiritual:

1. We are each individual. We exist separately in a material manner from other material organisms and objects. We each occupy distinct places in space. Our material existence receives a particular form-a particular shape and identity which is an expression of a more general type. We are each members of and particular examples of a species. Our bodily lives are grounded in our senses and desires.
   
2. Yet we are also persons. We have particular personalities. "Personality is the subsistence of the spiritual soul communicated to the human composite" (41), and because of this, persons communicate with other persons; they commune with them to a greater or lesser degree. Persons are oriented to each other by love and faithfulness, by recognizing the innate dignity in another who is made in the image of God.
   

For Maritain, our orientation to one of these has all to do with what we become. If we are dominated by our material selves, our higher personalities become debased and wanton. If we are dominated by our spiritual call and direction, our selves take on admirable and truly human expansiveness:

"If the development occurs in the direction of material individuality, it will be oriented towards the detestable ego whose law is to grasp or absorb for itself. At the same time personality, as such, will tend to be adulterated and to dissolve. But if the development occurs in the direction of spiritual personality, man will be oriented towards the generous self of the heroes and saints. Thus, man will be truly a person only so far as the life of the spirit and of liberty reigns over that of the senses and passions" (44-5).

Thus, true personhood points to the shape of the political society. Human beings are innately political because they are innately social. Will our common polis then be a society of individuals each tearing at the other in demands and negotiations, or will our common life be orientated to a common good? "The common good is common because it is received in persons, each one of whom is as a mirror of the whole" (49). Maritain is quick to stress that if we misunderstand the common good to be a collective goal other than the good of each person, we end with a totalitarian collective. If however, there is no common good, we end with radical individualism and no higher vision of human life.

The common good should be the development of the good life, the life of virtue, friendship, happiness, family, and so on. When this is the case, then the common good flows back to the benefit of each member, helping him or her to develop true liberty and freedom. But even this will eventually go wrong if it is not oriented to the greater end of the love of God and the beatific vision: "The common good of the city or the civilization . . . does not preserve its true nature unless it respects that which surpasses it, unless it is subordinated, not as a pure means, but as an infravalent end, to the order of eternal goods and the supra-temporal values from which human life is suspended" (62).

Any good political society will consider that the goods it imparts to its persons will ultimately recognize that as persons they are oriented to the eternal: "the common good by its essence must favor their progress toward the absolute goods which transcend politcal society" (76). Persons are created to serve their communities, but communities/societies that treat persons as material individuals will enslave most of them for the profit of a few. The Church is thus a society that models for other political societies God's best. Maritian sums it up this way:

"If we consider this grand City as living in its entirety upon the common good which is the very life of God, communicated to the multitude of the just and seeking out the errant, then each stone is for the city. But if we consider each stone as living itself, in its personal participation in this common good, upon the very life of God that is communicated, or as sought after personally by God, who wills to communicate His own life to it, then, it it toward each one that all the goods of the city converge to receive of their plenitude. In this sense, the city is for each stone" (86-7).

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?
   

The Image of God in Education--Part 4

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

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

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

The Image of God in Education--Part 3

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

The Zeitgeist may be demonic.

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

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

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

The Image of God in Education--Part 2

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

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

As J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote:

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

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

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

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

The Image of God in Education--Part 1

We should remember as Christian professors that creation was ordered by God’s love for worship. Students are doxological or they become deranged, and thus, creation is dependent upon love of God and of human to realize its very nature. At the heart of a biblical notion of personhood is the belief that human beings are the imago dei, the image of God (Gen 1:26-27, James 3:9), we are created to be illuminated by the Spirit and to participate in the whole cosmic sign language, ballet, and concert concerning God's beauty.

Christians have differed over where to locate this imaging of God in humans. Theologians have categorized these different understandings, thusly:

1. Substantive Views: The imago dei refers to certain kinds of innate qualities people have (e.g. reason, the will, our ethical sense, etc.)
   
2. Relational Views: The imago dei is found in humanity's relationship to God and/or the creation. To be the image of God means to be able to encounter God or others as God does, that is personally.
   
3. Functional Views: Our imaging of God is found in our acts as human beings, particularly in carrying out the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:28-29.

The imago dei has, therefore, been placed in the will, consciousness, reason, intuition, imagination, embodiment, an ability to respond relationally, an openness to future, our actions, and in a composite unity of all these.

It is this last option that I am most convinced by (Rom 12:1-2, I Cor 15:45). Our full humanity is what, in differing ways, images God. The right use of our reason as humbly guided by God's law is an expression of his purpose for education. But our reason cannot be entirely isolated from our desires, emotions, intuitions, and so on. Likewise, our volitional capacity, our free will, is always conditionally free as it finds fulfillment in learning and living out God's form of truth for us. Personhood offers a model of learning that is social in many of its elements, and the cultural nature of cultivating the creation points to a purpose for our learning--a set of mission statements and objectives to guide what we give priority to in our institutional evaluations.

The biblical conception of the heart is useful here (Prov 4:23, 27:9, Deut 6:5, Rom 2:29, II Cor 3:3, Rom 1:32, II Cor 9:7, Heb 4:12). The "heart" (whether the Hebrew Leb or the Greek kardia) implies the full person of a human being—the intellect, emotion, volition, even body. As Karl Barth affirmed: "[T]he heart is not merely a but the reality of man, both wholly of soul and wholly of body" (436) As such, to know with our heart is to employ our whole person. Human beings, indeed, all creation, has meaning as it references and imitates God: "Borrowing is the highest authenticity which can be obtained" (James K. Smith).

As our colleague David Naugle has suggested, worldview is an embodied way of living, not just a perspective, and it is one embedded in our contexts not a claim to absolute knowledge. It is, to use his coinage, kardi-optic. We need kardioptic pedagogy that recognizes this full measure of learning.