On the impossibility of guaranteeing positive rights without negating negative rights

This is from an article I was reading about positive and negative rights:

The right to life certainly is a fundamental human right. It is a negative right since it only requires that others do not kill one. In this context, one should recall that about 169 million people have been killed by states or their governments in the 20th century. Communists and National Socialists established the most murderous regimes. Among the victims of communism, there are tens of millions of deaths from starvation after the coerced collectivization of agriculture in Stalin’s Soviet Union or Mao’s China. Although the 20th century suffered two world wars and other bloody wars, fewer people died on the battlefield or because of bombing campaigns than have been murdered or starved to death by their own governments. Whoever wants to protect human rights should therefore first of all focus on the necessity of protecting people from the state and its abuses of power.

...

As the balance of achievements and victims of communism demonstrates, the attempt to provide entitlements did not prevent tens of millions of deaths from starvation. Actually, the attempt to provide more than negative rights resulted in something less: the lack of respect of negative and positive rights. As I shall argue, this association between the attempt to guarantee entitlements by a monopoly of coercion and central planning is causally related to the repeated failure to protect even the right to life.

The rest of the article is here.

Chart of the Day - Government spending since 1870

Today's charts show US Government spending in three contexts. The first chart shows various countries' government spending as a share of GDP roughly over the last 130 years (don't try to trace countries, just note the trend; US highlighted in red):

The second chart shows the same info for fewer countries:

The third chart shows the US government spending without being smoothed out. Here we see the peaks during the two world wars, and other minor increases and decreases in the government spending:

What do you think? To me what stands out is the following:

• the world-wide sustained trend of increasing government spending is noteworthy even if unfortunate
• the current (2009) increase in the government spending compares well with the increase during the early part of the Great Depression. Then spending about doubled from about 10% of GDP to 20% of GDP. Now spending is again increasing about 10 percentage points from 35% to 45%.

If history is any guide - don't hold your breath for trend reversal.

I took the data for charts come from Tanzi's book "Public Spending in the 20th century" for the first two charts, and from usgovernmentspending.com for the second chart.

What do you think upon observing the charts?

Chart of the day - Dallas house prices

Here is a nice chart from economix (that's the New York Times econ blog; yes, I do occasionally read the NYTimes):

The blue indicates how much the Dallas house prices changed in a given month as compared to the same month in the previous year. So if last July the prices were on average $100,000 per house, and this July the prices were on average $110,000, then the blue line would show +10%, since the house prices increased by 10% in that one year period.

The gray area shows the same statistic not for Dallas, but the average for all the largest cities in the US.

So - Dallas' prices were 2.2% lower in June 09 than they were in June 08. Notice how prices in Dallas increased by much less than the national average in the boom years, but they also fell much less in the bust years. Maybe we can call our prices 'lukewarm'? :)

Also note the reversal of trend in Dallas and the nation early this year. Seems that the price drops are becomming smaller and smaller, perhaps we will soon see gains again?

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.

Is it better to be cold than lukewarm?

I was just thinking about this. It is clear that it is best to be 'on fire' for Christ. But is it true that the second best is being 'cold' and not 'lukewarm'? Is it better to be cold than lukewarm?

I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other! So, because you are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold—I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

Revelation 3:15-16

Any thoughts?

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.

John Paul II and the Common Good

The last quotations from Redemptor hominis:

"The essential sense of the State, as a political community, consists in that the society and people composing it are master and sovereign of their own destiny. This sense remains unrealized if, instead of the exercise of power with the moral participation of the society or people, what we see is the imposition of power by a certain group upon all the other members of the society. This is essential in the present age, with its enormous increase in people's social awareness and the accompanying need for the citizens to have a right share in the political life of the community, while taking account of the real conditions of each people and the necessary vigour of public authority. These therefore are questions of primary importance from the point of view of the progress of man himself and the overall development of his humanity.

"The Church has always taught the duty to act for the common good and, in so doing, has likewise educated good citizens for each State. Furthermore, she has always taught that the fundamental duty of power is solicitude for the common good of society; this is what gives power its fundamental rights. Precisely in the name of these premises of the objective ethical order, the rights of power can only be understood on the basis of respect for the objective and inviolable rights of man. The common good that authority in the State serves is brought to full realization only when all the citizens are sure of their rights. The lack of this leads to the dissolution of society, opposition by citizens to authority, or a situation of oppression, intimidation, violence, and terrorism, of which many examples have been provided by the totalitarianisms of this century. Thus the principle of human rights is of profound concern to the area of social justice and is the measure by which it can be tested in the life of political bodies." (sec. 17)

What interests me about these two paragraphs are how John Paul II brings together an assumption about the common good of the people with stress on their rights and on an objective moral order in society and nature. He also points out that a totalitarian collective cannot fulfill the conditions for true society and a common good that brings goods to people.

Interesting questions

Interesting questions from Bill Frezza:

Do you find it natural to accept the varied religious beliefs of others even if they contradict your own? On the other hand, are you often at odds with people who espouse different economic beliefs and policies? Why, especially if the former forms the foundation for the latter?
...
Are you careful not to judge people by the color of their skin yet sometimes quick to make judgments based on economic status? If so, do you make distinctions based solely on wealth or lack thereof or does it make a difference to you how an individual became rich or poor?
...
Do you resent being asked to justify your economic beliefs or the moral foundation they rest on? Do your ends always justify your means? Do you feel entitled to having your beliefs respected solely because they are yours? Would you feel the same way about your mathematical beliefs?

Feel free to answer!

John Paul II and Human Freedom

Two fascinating passages from Redemptor hominis that examine what Christ and the Church mean to human freedom:

"Jesus Christ meets the man of every age, including our own, with the same words: "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free." These words contain both a fundamental requirement and a warning: the requirement of an honest relationship with regard to truth as a condition for authentic freedom, and the warning to avoid every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world. Today also, even after two thousand years, we see Christ as the one who brings man freedom based on truth, frees man from what curtails, diminishes and as it were breaks off this freedom at its root, in man's soul, his heart and his conscience. What a stupendous confirmation of this has been given and is still being given by those who, thanks to Christ and in Christ, have reached true freedom and have manifested it even in situations of external constraint!" (sec. 12)

"The Church cannot abandon man, for his "destiny", that is to say his election, calling, birth and death, salvation or perdition, is so closely and unbreakably linked with Christ. We are speaking precisely of each man on this planet, this earth that the Creator gave to the first man, saying to the man and the women: "subdue it and have dominion". Each man in all the unrepeatable reality of what he is and what he does, of his intellect and will, of his conscience and heart. Man who in his reality has, because he is a "person", a history of his life that is his own and, most important, a history of his soul that is his own. Man who, in keeping with the openness of his spirit within and also with the many diverse needs of his body and his existence in time, writes this personal history of his through numerous bonds, contacts, situations, and social structures linking him with other men, beginning to do so from the first moment of his existence on earth, from the moment of his conception and birth. Man in the full truth of his existence, of his personal being and also of his community and social being-in the sphere of his own family, in the sphere of society and very diverse contexts, in the sphere of his own nation or people (perhaps still only that of his clan or tribe), and in the sphere of the whole of mankind-this man is the primary route that the Church must travel in fulfilling her mission: he is the primary and fundamental way for the Church, the way traced out by Christ himself, the way that leads invariably through the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption." (sec. 14)

John Paul II here stresses that our freedom is tied to the truth of Jesus. Real freedom is not found in the unfettered expression of our wills, but in the grace that lays aside all that would burden and enslave us. This is not to suggest that our free actions themsleves are not meaningful. We each have a history made up of our numerous relations and choices. These various spheres of existence to which we are joined and which give us meaning are places that the mission of God moves within, offering the way of Christ. There is much here to reflect upon concerning the ethics and politics of culture. Since the work of the incarnation and redemption of Christ is encultured in each of us, who are in turn joined to our spheres of existence, the Church must always address us in our personal and social and community beings.

Chart of the day - Dow indicates recovery?

Here is a chart comparing the several deep recessions preceding this one. The chart shows Dow performance following the low period in each recession. Hopefully we are not in a period like the early 1930 (light gray line) when Dow had rallied significantly just to fall and stagnate over the coming decade , but I am not so sure...

The chart comes by the way of Calculated Risk.

John Paul II & the Nature of Human Dignity

Over the next few weeks, I plan to post passages from some of John Paul II's encyclicals as they help unpack his understanding of personalism. The first few passages are from Redemptor hominis (1979):

Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This, as has already been said, is why Christ the Redeemer "fully reveals man to himself". If we may use the expression, this is the human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption. In this dimension man finds again the greatness, dignity and value that belong to his humanity. In the mystery of the Redemption man becomes newly "expressed" and, in a way, is newly created. He is newly created! "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly-and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being-he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must "appropriate" and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself.

. . . . This amazement, which is also a conviction and a certitude-at its deepest root it is the certainty of faith, but in a hidden and mysterious way it vivifies every aspect of authentic humanism-is closely connected with Christ. It also fixes Christ's place-so to speak, his particular right of citizenship-in the history of man and mankind. Unceasingly contemplating the whole of Christ's mystery, the Church knows with all the certainty of faith that the Redemption that took place through the Cross has definitively restored his dignity to man and given back meaning to his life in the world, a meaning that was lost to a considerable extent because of sin. And for that reason, the Redemption was accomplished in the paschal mystery, leading through the Cross and death to Resurrection. (sec. 10)

This material is profound because it understands that our human dignity is recovered and rediscovered in the Incarnation and redemptive work of Jesus. Human meaning is returned to all of us because God became a human being and because of what he has accomplished through his suffering, death, and resurrection. And at the heart of all this is the human need for love, which is essential to our very personhood.

Max Schler and an Ethics of Feeling-- Part 2

"There can be no society without a life-community (though there can be a life-community without society)."--Max Scheler

Manfred Frings in his discussion of Max Scheler's ethics traces the ethicist's distinction between a life-community and a society:

1. Natural thinking vs. conceptual thinking
2. Immediate membership (co-living) vs. contractual relations (the alien other)
3. Members not of age vs. individuals of age
4. Trust, solidarity vs. distrust
5. No criteria for truth vs. criteria for truth
6. Life-values vs. divisible values
7. Duration vs. no duration
8. Territory vs. non-spatial relations

There is much to disagree with in this list, though there is much to commend about Scheler's overall observational structure. he understands life-communities to be much more organic, to grow out of natural relationships, and therefore to be more stable, conservative, and personal. People are born into life-communities, and thus, they are nurtured to accept many conceptions of the world without critical reflection.

On the other hand, societies lack the trust that forms the basis of a life-communities because they are made up of multiple communities. Instead of natural relationships, they must be based on concepts that hold adult individuals together, and their differences are negotiated legally through contracts. Thus, they lack the durability of communities, and they tend to lack the geographic center that holds a community together.

I think Scheler overlooks how communities do have implicit good and methods by which they pursue and adjudicate those goods. I would also argue that the truths that supposedly hold societies together arise out of previous life-communities and their belief structures, and when these truths are divorced from the organic practices that originate them, they quickly become vapid over a few generations.

Scheler also holds that along with life-communities and societies, there exist "all encompassing persons" (Gesamtperson) who in religious, cultural, and political expressions represent comprehensive identities that create solidarity in people otherwise separated by life-communities and even national borders. Such persons (or perhaps one can say, personhoods) bring together the experiences and insights of the life-community and the society. Yet Scheler also seems to use the concept to point to individuals who radically change the ideals and directions of people. They sum up in themselves some key element of the Gesamtperson. The Buddha, Picasso, and Napoleon represent each type respectively.

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.

Guardian Lions

I ran across today this amazing story from a few years back. What do you make of it?

"Only 12-years-old, and in a moment one Ethiopian girl’s world turned into a nightmare. Seven violent men abducted the pre-teen, intending to force her into marriage. The men held the girl for seven days, beating her repeatedly.

"Such incidents are common in Ethiopia, as several men band together to abduct young girls for the purpose of securing a bride. The girls are typically beaten into submission and raped. In this particular instance, there was not a human being within earshot to hear the cries of this girl. But her cries were heard.
The unlikely heroes were three majestic Ethiopian lions. Famous for their large black manes, these lions are the national symbol of the country. In response to the girl’s cries for help, three large lions leapt from the brush and chased her captors away. Perhaps the child thought she had traded one danger for another, but remarkably, her heroes formed a protective perimeter around her. A half-day later, when the police arrived, the guardian lions simply stood up and walked away. Sgt. Wondimu Wedajo said, “They stood guard until we found her, and then they just left her like a gift and went back into the forest.”

"Among the explanations for the lions’ unusual behavior, one wildlife expert suggested the girl’s whimpering could have sounded like a lion cub. For whatever reason, the predator served as protector. The carnivore became a sentinel. “Everyone thinks this is some kind of miracle,” Wondimu commented.

"This 12-year-old girl was helpless, powerless to change her horrific circumstances. Her deliverance had to come from a power greater than, and outside of, herself. In the same way, we are powerless to save ourselves from sin and death. Our only hope is in Christ, the Lion of
Judah."

Anthony Mitchell, “Lions Rescue, Guard Beaten Ethiopian Girl
Yahoo News (6-21-05); “Lions Free Kidnapped Girl,” CNN.com (6-21-05)

Dorothy Day's Personalism--Some Resources

Since I don't have time to summarize the way personalism was worked out by Catholic Worker activist Dorothy Day, a few links are in order:

The Catholic Worker on Day's Personalism and Distributism

The Influence of Emmanuel Mounier upon Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day

Dorothy Day's Radical Hospitality (Baylor Center for Christian Ethics)

Simone Weil and Rootedness--Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simone Weil and Rootedness--Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."

Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can There be a Christian Culture?--Part 4

In light of the threat to stable meaning and ethics that historicism brought, one of the urgent needs was for Christian thinkers to account for human choice in a meaningful way. Are human beings really free? Can they make decisions and choices that are meaningful in any way that the average person could point to? Thinkers, again, took different directions. Some looked to raise human beings above the material and social world, offering two levels of existence. They were faced with trying to bridge the Kantian divide between the material and moral worlds.

Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, condemned the modern attempt to master the historical process as sin and hubris; nonetheless, he looked to a kind of self-transcendence of history in which the repentant person’s heart is given "agape power" from on high, rising with the promise of Christ from the edge of history. For Niebuhr, who seems to finally deny the reality of a resurrection of the body or an afterlife, this transcendent freedom is somewhat limited: "Man, in both his individual life and in his total enterprise, moves from a limited to a more extensive expression of freedom over nature. If he assumes that such an extension of freedom insures and increases emancipation from the bondage of self, he increases the bondage by that illusion." Niebuhr by reducing the claims of Christianity to existential "heart" truths rather than real claims about the actual universe actual created a kind of ghostly neather-world. Niebuhr was no gnostic, but neither was he finally looking to a real eschaton.

Russian philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev went even further, seeing history not as a material but as a metaphysical work. Memory, being essentially non-material, points to the spiritual quality of human culture and its final eternal destiny. As such, a philosophy of history is to teach that the historical process is not “something that is alien to us, that is imposed upon us, that crushes and enslaves us.” As I've observed in another post, Berdyaev's personalism gave way to a real gnosticism.

Others, rather than posit a kind of two-tier world, embedded human responsibility within historical patterning itself. According to Herman Dooyeweerd, societies have religious ground motives that propel them along. What others identified as laws or forces of history are really God-given norms which can be obeyed or rebelled against with consequences: "Historicism . . . is the fatal illness of our 'dynamic' times. There is no cure for this unwholesome view of reality as long as the scriptural creation motive does not regain its complete claim on our life and thought." Dooyeweerd held that as long as historicism acted as a relativizing poison, anything like God-given norms could not be easily seen, but that did not mean they were not there,

For Brunner, too, human freedom is only true freedom when it acknowledges its dependence upon God. Human attempts to be autonomous from their Creator end in slavery. A “false liberalism,” which believes itself the ego-driven creator of reality, and “false determinism,” which robs human beings of any real creativity or action, both ultimately deny God’s existence. Yet this freedom was always to be bounded by the action of God in history.

For many Christian thinkers, the Incarnation of Christ was central to resolving the tension between destiny and freedom, for Christ made present what God promised for the future. For Eliot, as Dawson noted, religion is what gives spiritual freedom because “it alone brings man into relation with a higher order of reality than the world of politics or even culture.” While Eliot also believed in a more vertical world where eternity penetrates the world of time, he would not reduce that world to anything less than an incarnational one.

Hans Urs von Balthasar, too, recognized in Christ the concrete universal. Human freedom is a gift of God’s freedom, a locale for human action, yet “this space belongs to Christ,” and Christ’s incarnation as a human being and by extension in his people, “generates an inexhaustible abundance of Christian situations” in which his meaning may be imparted.

For each of these thinkers and writers, then, Christ in some manner freed people from the material relativism and determinism of history, but they differed significantly on how to conceptualize that salvation. What they did agree on was that Christians must navigate between the twin dangers of complete egotism and pure determinism.

Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strangely enough, history became reduced reduced to theodicy.

"Good is the Flesh" by Brian Wren

What an amazing new hymn! Well worth pondering in it's Christ-centered and sacramental understanding of our bodily existence.

Good is the Flesh by Brian Wren

Good is the flesh that the Word has become,
good is the birthing, the milk in the breast,
good is the feeding, caressing and rest,
good is the body for knowing the world,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body for knowing the world,
sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground,
feeling, perceiving, within and around,
good is the body, from cradle to grave,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body, from cradle to grave,
growing and aging, arousing, impaired,
happy in clothing, or lovingly bared,
good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
longing in all, as in Jesus, to dwell,
glad of embracing, and tasting, and smell,
good is the body, for good and for God,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

from Bringing Many Names. Carol Stream: Hope, 1989.

Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can There Be a Christian Culture? -- Part 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Freedoms You Could Lose. . . .

in the new proposed health plan. Worth pondering what ever your position.

For-Profit, for God

Interesting article. I know librarians from each of the schools mentioned (Grand Canyon University and Crichton College). The one at Grand Canyon was library director through the whole process of the school failing as a private institution and coming back as a for-profit one. Her library staff was cut in half and she was so unhappy there that she left the position without having another one lined up.

Nikolai Berdyaev and Personality's Gnostic Turn

The Russian philosopher and exile Nikolai Berdyaev in his 1944 Slavery and Freedom set forth his mature position on the human person, the political state, and freedom. He contrasted the triumphant existential subjectivity of God and of the human with the enslaving objectification brought by nature, by the collective, and by false views of religion. One caveat: Berdyaev especially prized the subjective and contingent nature of philosophy, so trying to describe his position is a bit like trying to track a moving target. He defended his pursuit of truth as necessarily contradictory in places because that is how humans think.

He did set out in Slavery and Freedom, however, his chief categories of thought: "the primacy of freedom over existence, of spirit over nature, subject over object, personality over the universal, creativeness over evolution, dualism over monism, love over law. The acknowledgement of supremacy of personality involves metaphysical inequality, distinction, dissent from fusion, the affirmation of quality against the power of quantity" (10). But these can perhaps be best summed up as the "principle of personality and freedom and the principle of compassion, sympathy, and justice" (11). Any system that seeks to crush human creativity does so because it denies the infinite creativity of each person. At the same time, without some measure of compassion and sympathy persons can turn inward and wither up, losing their freedom yet again.

Berdyaev, a former Marxist, was suspicious of the language of the common good, the collective, or even at times that of society or community. He feared any system that claimed to absorb the individual person into a collective whole, and thus, he also rejected any claims that the person's good came from society or that of the community as a unity. He also rejected any sense of social hierarchy except that of the natural hierarchy that arose from differences in talents and abilities, and even this he warned against encoding into a social or political hierarchy. Nonetheless, Berdyaev was an advocate of personalism, holding that personality could enslave itself in egoism and that individualism was not true personality unless it discovers itself in turning outward towards others.

For the Russian philosopher, each personality is truly unique, "unrepeatable," one of a kind, yet each personality must grow into itself, becoming a Gestalt of its parts. Like Martin Buber and the German phenomenologists, Berdyaev feared the self, the Thou, being enslaved by any force that objectified it. He saw this potential in the natural world and in human egoism, but he especially warned of it in political forces that sought to conform each person to a utopian vision. He did understand and value the language of communion, the turn outward 0f persons in relationships of compassion and love. Freedom is found in being subject to the truth, he insisted, but that truth is to discovered for each person. Obedience to the truth does not call for obedience to the claims of tyrants, and truth is not given but found.

Bedyaev has been charged with testing the boundaries of orthodox Christianity, and I think rightly so up to a point, for he held the nature of Christ as divine-human to be emblematic of all persons. We all have "theandric existence" he insisted (45). At its best, this approach does recognize that the image of God in all persons includes a spiritual element of supreme worth. At its worst, though, this approach can exalt too quickly the human person while excluding the communal nature of our personhoods. Berdyaev was quick to isolate anything like truth from its community of origins:

"To freedom belongs supremacy over tradition, but the possibility of free living lies in the fact that there has been truth in the tradition. . . . Not for a moment does personality become a part of any organism whatever or of any hierarchical whole. . . . The source of human freedom cannot be in society; the source of human freedom is in the spirit. Everything which proceeds from society is enslaving; everything which issues from the spirit is liberating" (106).

There are immense problems with this, not the least of which is a lack of any real rationale for the social form of communion other than separate persons reaching outward in their isolation. Much of this begins with his over dependence upon a Kantian view of the universe as broken into a subjective moral law within and an objective deterministic world of nature without. Berdyaev doesn't consider a truly Trinitarian interpersonal world where individuals are made up in part by each other and, therefore, are truly dependent upon each other, not in an oppressive uniform anthill, but in a pattern of relations that only draws out the vocation of each more fully and yes, unrepeatably.

His position lead him also to treat the authority of God as limited to a kind of existential offer of relationship while distrusting the Creator's role as King and Lord. He held that God was not the provident master of the natural, physical world, but only ruled in the realm of spirit. Of course, this then, creates a dilemma as to why Christ needed to come to earth at all. The world, for Berdyaev is finally not the home of persons but a place of temporary suffering that offers some measure of personal growth. He comes close to being a Christian Gnostic, his persons trapped in and warring against an oppressive physical world of ilusion. Thus, his position shows us a danger of personalism without any metaphysical sense of community's value as more than just a meeting place of sovereign selves.