Charity and the Politics of Honors

Caritas is the ancient Christian notion of love as concretely expressed in public and private actions. As a Latin term it almost functions as a cognate to the New Testament notion of agape. The two certainly overlap. Love (caritas, agape, call it what you will) can expose the hidden motives behind our attempts at honors, including that of academic programs.

Marilyn McCord Adams has observed that evils in life are not limited to questions of pain and morality. Esteem and disesteem make up a serious component in the way we value our lives: “[T]he category of honor centers, not on the evaluation of deeds, but on the sacred quality of persons," which is not to deny there is any relationship existing between conduct and honor. As a public and social system of regard, honor is something that is garnered because it is both owned by the person and given by the society. That universities regularly trade in systems of honor and shame: grades, awards, regalia, scholarships, and so on, should give us pause. As Adams further notes, honor (or shame) takes both “ascribed” and “acquired” forms: the former is given because of a person’s birth, class, or station; the later results from highly regarded deeds or misdeeds. The emphasis, rather than being on the quality of the actions themselves, however, falls on the person in toto. (The honors student is, well, more honorable, right?) We should not forget that symbolic systems of identity such as these are real matters of import for our students. Honor and shame have painful implications. The experience of even minor evils can disgrace a person, and that loss of honor can result in real anguish and humiliation. Psychic pain is as real as physical pain, and at times even more important for how it deforms and even destroys human self-regard.

Nothing about this understanding need assume the academic "innocence" of the “victims” who are "robbed" of self-respect. A poor performing student is a poor performing student. But our gifted students, the kind I tend to see in honors education, even more often have their reputations and self-conceptions tied to the academic system of rewards. The student in question may not think of himself or herself as a participant in a combative academy of honor, but something like that does continue to exist. A system of honor and shame takes place inevitably in an environment of challenge and riposte. Honor is a symbolic quality that must be maintained by the person in question. One either continues to gather and defend one’s honor, or one loses it. Any challenge--let us say, an average or poor grade-- to a person’s honor calls for some kind of response:

1. “positive rejection,” in which the person (or professor) making the challenge is deemed inferior and therefore unworthy of consideration at all;
2. “negative refusal,” in which case the person is now considered shamed--always a dicey approach in academics; or
3. “acceptance of the challenge” which can result in a war of wit (or arms) in a cycle of counter-challenges (Adams 109-110).

This pattern can take academic forms, even in a Christian environment that prides itself as a supportive atmosphere.

We need to take a long look at how their system of honor feeds into the modern social imaginary. The economic state of the West appears to be built more and more on a new pagan desire for libidio and power and for a stable control of human destiny; it wants to offer a revised salvation of personal prosperity and life needs satisfied. What kind of honor are we preparing our students to receive?

An eschatological structure, as I've discussed in the last two posts, can move in repentant or rebellious directions, moving toward or away from God's intended pattern of development. Offering a new millennium, the current libidinal world economy offers a false eschatology, narratives of sexual and consumerist salvation--an end to repression, an awakening to utter multiplicity of desire; the body as pseudo-sacramental hypersexualization able to endlessly buy and consume products of desire. The modern media and consumerist state functions as a secular soteriology which will not permit the claims of Christ as the only Lord (Caesar). Our modern social spaces are what Graham Ward calls cities of aspiration and desire; unable to offer a true community, they only manage autonomous individuals in their personal choices. "It is not good to eat much honey, or to seek honor on top of honor. Like a city breached, without walls, is one who lacks self-control." (Prov 25:27-28). Such a statement, I realize, sounds faintly puritanical and bizarre, maybe even unpatriotic, to modern ears.

To speak of the "politics" and "economy" of the Christian Church is to risk confusion because to speak of the Church (and the Christian university) as a counter-polis is to expand the definition of Realpolitik to a sacramental vision of virtue-oriented traditions. These traditions have the end of God's kingdom reigning over all. The libertarian society of atomic individuals, by contrast, is a truncated politics. The purpose of power and honor is forgotten; or worse, it is made into insatiable desire itself. To train our students for this, to make them leaders in such a system, is problematic. The church as public polis is really trans-political in the modern sense of that word, and the local and the small may reflect far better the kind of honor and worth we wish to train our students to undergo and to give away. In the same way the oikos of God, God's household, transcends our normal conceptions of economics as certain macro and micro-systems of human monetary exchange.

Admittedly, this seems like an uphill battle when we as Americans, for example, treat our educations as economic counters of the more limited kind, but we as global Christians have the gifts of congregation and scripture to counter them with. The cross of Christ is, after all, an apocalypse, a revelation of God's judgment on the powers that be. His stigmata are signs of compassion. Atonement makes our education both polis and oikos, politics and economy, but of a far wider place. The sacrifice and splendor of a cross-shaped teaching will be wasteful in its love for and on the students. The crowns of heaven we receive can be cast down at the feet of Jesus, and now we multiply honor when we freely pour it out in sacrifice.

We cannot squander what we cannot exhaust. The love of God is a generative principle within our pedagogies.