Augustine's Definition of Peace

Augustine of Hippo in the nineteenth book, thirteenth chapter of City of God explores the need for civic or natural peace even in a society dominated by pagan and temporal purposes. His definition of peace is worth reviewing, which I've broken in up into bullet points for analysis:

• "The peace of the body then consists in the duly proportioned arrangement of its parts.
  
• The peace of the irrational soul is the harmonious repose of the appetites,
  
• and that of the rational soul the harmony of knowledge and action.
  
• The peace of body and soul is the well-ordered and harmonious life and health of the living creature.
  
• Peace between man and God is the well-ordered obedience of faith to eternal law.
  
• Peace between man and man is well-ordered concord.
  
• Domestic peace is the well-ordered concord between those of the family who rule and those who obey.
  
• Civil peace is a similar concord among the citizens.
  
• The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God,
  
• and of one another in God.
  
• The peace of all things is the tranquility of order.
  
• Order is the distribution which allots things equal and unequal, each to its own place. "
  

His set of definitions suggests that order and concord are necessary for many layers and levels of human relations, not only within the self and the human person, but also between families, between polities, and between God and humans ultimately, a peace which arises out of God's own Triune harmony. Only then can all creation be truly at peace. But, Augustine goes onto suggest that Christians have good reasons to promote civil peace within a country even knowing that the non-Christians themselves are cut off from God, are wretched because they are God's enemies:

"And hence, though the miserable, in so far as they are such, do certainly not enjoy peace, but are severed from that tranquility of order in which there is no disturbance, nevertheless, inasmuch as they are deservedly and justly miserable, they are by their very misery connected with order. They are not, indeed, conjoined with the blessed, but they are disjoined from them by the law of order. And though they are disquieted, their circumstances are notwithstanding adjusted to them, and consequently they have some tranquility of order, and therefore some peace. But they are wretched because, although not wholly miserable, they are not in that place where any mixture of misery is impossible. They would, however, be more wretched if they had not that peace which arises from being in harmony with the natural order of things. "

Better to have some order and peace in this world even if it is no lasting version, for it is not up to Christians to increase the wretchedness of their fellow citizens. I think Augustine's point here is the seed of a larger rationale for why Christians should work for shalom and the order of God even in a fallen world that rejects him.

Christopher Lasch on the Need for a 3rd Way

The late Christopher Lasch is perhaps best known for his classic work of cultural critique The Culture of Narcissism in which he examines how the turn to a therapeutic culture set American society on an inward course that undercuts the basic civic structure necessary for healthy and fulfilling social life. The danger is that of the "Promethean self" that evaluates all of life's goods by its own self-centered calculus. In his sequel, The Minimal Self, Lasch examines how amidst an environment of threat and danger (e.g. escalating crime, terrorism, arms races, etc.) people turn from the Promethean self to a reduced minimal narcissism that seems to combine both self-sufficiency and self-renunciation. Survival and pessimism become the centers of such selves. Both options are fianlly deeply inward and selfish.

Lasch's last important work was The True and Only Heaven, a history of the populist movement in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its criticism both of the unfettered market system and of the liberal state and the planned economy. In the last few pages of his groundbreaking history, Lasch offers his own opinion that any new populism would learn from the old populism in its critiques but it would have to offer an entirely different vision of wealth and community.

Lasch was something of a pundit, hated by both the Left and the Right, and was even a measured critic of the communitarianism of those like Amitai Etzioni, which he criticized as being concerned with political agendas without being concerned with moral life and personal change. Here's an example of his basic analysis:

"On the one hand, the market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle--the cardinal principle of liberalism--that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that they must therefore be allowed to speak for themselves in matters that concern their own happiness and well-being. But individuals cannot learn to speal for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and well-being, in a world in which there are no values except that of the market. Even liberal individuals require the character-forming discipline of the family, the neighborhood, the school, and the church--all of which (not just the family) have been weakened by the encroachments of the market. The market notoriously tends to universalize itself. It does not easily coexist with institutions that operate according to principles antithetical to itself--schools and universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognizes--to become a business proposition, to pay its way, to show black print on the bottom line. . . .

"In the attempt to restrict the scope of the market, liberals have therefore turned to the state. But the remedy often proves to be worse than the disease. The replacement of informal types of association by formal systems of socialization and control weakens social trust; undermines the willingness both to assume responsiblity for oneself and to hold others accountable for their actions; destroys respect for authority; and thus turns out to be self-defeating. Consider the fate of neighborhoods that serve so effectively, at their best, as intermediaries between family and the larger world. Neighborhoods have been destroyed not only by the market. . . but also by enlightened social engineering. . . .

"Communitarians regret the collapse of social trust but often fail to see that, in a democracy, trust can only be grounded in mutual respect. They properly insist that rights have to be balance by responsibility, but they seem to be more interested in the responsibility of the community as a whole--its responsibility, say, to its least fortunate members--than in the responsibility of individuals. We have become far too accommodating and tolerant for our own good." ("Communitarianism or Populism? 60-1, 64)

True Community & Health Care

The following is from the essay "The Work of Local Culture" by Wendell Berry. While Berry is discussing the general failure of community life and place in the United States, his insights on trust, story, local place, and doctors, I think have ramifications for how we should think about the prospect of a national health care system in this country. First, Berry:

"When a community loses its memory, its members no longer know one another. How can they know one another if they have forgotten or have never learned one another’s stories? If they do not know one another’s stories, how can they know whether or not to trust one another? People who do not trust one another do not help one another, and moreover they fear one another, and this is our predicament now. Because of a general distrust and suspicion, we not only lose one another’s help and companionship, but we are all now living in jeopardy of being sued.

"We don’t trust our “public servants” because we know that they don’t’ respect us. They don’t respect us, as we understand, because they don’t know us; they don’t know our stories. They expect us to sue them if they make mistakes, and so they must insure themselves, at great expense to them and to us. Doctors who are in a country community must send their patients to specialists in the city, not necessarily because they believe that they are wrong in their diagnoses, but because they know that they are not infallible and they must protect themselves against lawsuits, at great expense to us. . . .

"Several decent family livelihoods are annually paid out of the county to insurance companies for a service that is only negative and provisional. All this money is lost to us by the failure of community. A good community, as we know, insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy. It depends on itself for many of its essential needs and is thus shaped, so to speak, from the inside-unlike most modern populations that depend on distant purchases for almost everything and are thus shaped from the outside by the purposes and the influences of salesmen." (157-158)

"The loss of local culture is, in part, a practical loss and an economic one. For one thing, such a culture contains, and conveys to succeeding generations, the history of the use of the place and the knowledge of how the place may be lived in and used. For another, the pattern of reminding implies affection for the place and respect for it, and so, finally the local culture will carry the knowledge of how the place may be well and loving used, and also the implicit command to use it only well and lovingly."(166)

(From the 1990 collection What Are People For?)

Berry argues that local culture is dependent upon relationships of face-to-face trust and mutual life and involvement in the day-to-day business of work and worship and play. Without that trust, we have a culture of personal protectionism and tort that renders our healthcare fraught with impersonality and consumerism. While Berry does not suggest this directly, I think his chief insight is that healthcare should not be commodified to begin with. Medicine does involve money, but when we make medicine and health a matter of market relations we have already started down the road to a broken system, one lacking personhood and genuine compassion; that is, one that is is neither healthy nor caring.

Of course, I am not denying that doctors should have a reasonable livelihood, as should medical researchers and educators. (Though, pharmaceutical reps are another matter entirely. . . ). Nonetheless, we currently have a system where much of our health and sickness is turned over to people we do not know and that we must trust despite our lack of any true knowledge of who they are or what their characters are like. And because we have commodified medicine and medical care, the natural and unnatural inequities in wealth have given rise to a state where strangers decide whether our sickness is worth giving much or any attention to, and where expensive procedures may easily devastate poor and working families in short order. We decontextualize health by making it a matter of management and numbers, rather than persons, their stories, and our relations with them in our communities.

A national system, which hopes to fix these problems, may or may not help curb the current excesses, but I doubt whether it can finally heal them. It participates in the anonymity and dangerous policy-decisions of technocrats who believe they know best what others need, though in all honesty, these are just numbers on a ledger to be balanced. Any system that robs us of our personhood and reduces us to an aggregate of material individuals is already shoddy in its workmanship from the get go.

If you demand of me money for numbers on a ledger to serve those I do not know, then understandably, it might feel like robbery, but if you speak to me of helping Toby and his premature twin daughters or David's cherished aging father or my own brother with mental retardation, then health and care become meaningful again, matters involving people whom we love.

Creating a Culture of Advent

There is more than one way to talk about expectation and education. We should remember as Christian educators and students that we are a people "outside the city" still awaiting the full vindication of God on that last of all days, and even in that vindication we expect our academic service and ministry to be tried by the fire of Christ's judgment seat. Our programs, lesson plans, and papers will be purged. What will remain of my own, I wonder?

The season of Advent, for example, stresses not only the first coming of Christ, but also the second coming. It is a season about being prepared, and such annual preparation is good for our academic calendar-driven mania. Advent reminds us that we are called to waiting, to patience between the first and second advents of our savior. To wait is to remember how fragile our egos, how empty our claims for ourselves are, how partial our self-concepts are. When we wait, we may be left alone for a season, staring into the silence, unable to be propped up by another's friendship or false praise or kind mercy. When we wait, we may face temptations to be afraid, to fear that God will not act. When we wait, we also face the temptation to onui, to boredom and to cynicism. In the midst of our longing and our vulnerability, we may even be tempted to disbelief, to wonder if any of this that we hold to is true at all.

But this waiting, this "being put on hold" is good for us. In our flattened-out economy of instant everything, we need to learn to wait in silence. Silence is an important preparation for learning, a fertile field sowed in both peace and suffering. To create a culture of Advent is to place our honors and awards within the context of eternity, to see them as gifts to be given away. They are accolades in the academy that we sometimes achieve in sweat and tears and sleepless nights, yet they are finally still gifts--not paper and parchment we can hold on to forever. It is better to wear them lightly as Thomas, Archbishop Beckett secretly wore a hairshirt under his Canterbury robes. We either undertake this voluntarily or what we are left with is finally a far more painful separation. T.S. Eliot's masterful Little Gidding reflects on this strange choice of persecution or of apostasy:

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire (sec. IV).

This I admit seems entirely counter-intuitive to the mission of higher education. We are accustomed to the work of words and knowledge. To consider that our calling might deserve divine wrath seems offensive at best, and possibly sadomasochistic. Paul warns us, however, that "[w]e know that we all possess knowledge. Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know" (I Cor. 8:1-2). We need to go without; we need to find ourselves alone; we need to be left with ourselves trembling before the throne of the Almighty Judge and before the Master of All Things.

During our waiting, we remember that we need Jesus to come and to tear down our career pretenses, to curse our pedagogical inadequacies, and to pronounce a warning to our inflated souls in order that we might be saved. Only when we give ourselves over to such a place can we receive the blessing of renewal that God has for us, including the form it must take in the academy. Only when we ourselves are aware of our own limitations, our self-deceptions, and our sin are we then prepared to extend the promise of God's good peace, his good wholeness, his honor to others. Only then can we begin to see our students and teachers as Christ sees them. May this prayer be our own:

May God be merciful to us and bless us,show us the light of his countenance and come to us.
May your ways be known upon earth,your saving health among all nations.
May the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you.
May the nations be glad and sing for joy, for you judge the peoples with equity and guide all the nations upon earth.
May the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you.
The earth has brought forth her increase; may God, our own God, give us his blessing.
May God give us his blessing, and may all the ends of the earth stand in awe of him (Psalm 67, BCP)

Advent, after all, means "appearing." We are each to prepare our hearts to be images of God, to be an advent of Christ--an appearing of Christ-- in our circle of influence, wherever that may be. The nations need his saving health. If the primary ontological reality is participation (caritas), then a history based on power abuse is a partial history, a history of evil only as negation. We look for our eschatological bodies to be perfect and to behold the beatific vision. What we are is not lost but refined.

A culture of Advent is a culture of forgiveness, living in two times: the past offense and God's completed restoration held together but the later like a counterpoint revising the former's meaning. Our final unction is a pledge of our final healing. The beatific vision need not be understood as a static vision that privileges the theoretical disciplines over the applied as more reflective of the eschaton's final state. If the energies of God are active, ever circulating in love, then as the children realize in C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle, we can go forever "further up and further in."

The Vanity of a University Education

"I said to myself, ‘I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge.’ And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind.

For in much wisdom is much vexation,and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow." (Eccl 1:16-18)

Why, then, do we university professors, students, staff, and administration often fail in this Christian pedagogical project? We should begin by recognizing this implication of Scripture: The university is full of lies.

But, then, so is every aspect of human life. This ubiquity and immersion of evil is the meaning of total depravity: not that human beings are incapable of good, even great good, but that every aspect of our good is subject to corruption and that our “good” is inevitably mixed in its motives and ends. The language and lessons of paradox are profitably invoked before our attempts at the true understanding, the righteous act, and the sublime beauty. Sometimes the honorable and the dishonorable are impossible in practice to tease apart, as are the wise and foolish, the noble and ignoble, the selfless and selfish, and the attractive and repulsive. There is no perfect Christian education. Every university begun by people of faith is subject to the same forces of sin that infect everyday life. Thus, we must be willing to face the truth about our best efforts even in the name of Christ. All our efforts contain a measure of vanity. We should not be shocked to discover this worm at the heart of our pedagogical projects. Instead, such knowledge should force us back on God’s grace and mercy.

I would contend that Ecclesiastes is a good “prelude” to the Christian college or university and is especially instructive to honors students who strive, even expect, to thrive in the collegiate academic environment. It offers an astringent lesson on the failure of temporary happiness. The author of Ecclesiastes (hereafter Qohelet, meaning “teacher,” “preacher” or “gatherer”) invokes vanity (hesed) not just as an observation about life, but also as a judgment on its qualities. Hesed for Qohelet is the finding of evil in what we count as important and in what we suffer. The inevitable nature of death (Eccl 12:1-8) haunts our mirrors of self-delusion, and the limits of human memory haunt the shelf life of our scholarly reputations and our past students’ recall of our curriculum (Eccl 12:11-12; 8:13-18). The ephemeral nature of what we seek to attain and to retain is often invoked in satires on education such as Erasmus’ Praise of Folly or John Trumbull’s The Progress of Dullness, to name only two of multiple examples, but admittedly it is not a subject we are prone to return to. Critical realism suggests that we should.

Qohelet’s dissatisfaction with his various explorations of happiness is a sharp challenge to the promises by which universities sell themselves. He recounts the inevitable disappointment with pleasure, consumption, great works, ownership, power over others, possessions—monetary, aesthetic, territorial, sexual, even pleasure in work and in fame (Eccl 2). This is in part why the tradition of American education distorts the self as a basis and end for learning--because education is held out as the key to the promised good life, one built on all the above. Offering ourselves as a necessary step to career success may have a measure of truth to it, but we commit ourselves to an economy other than Jesus’ when we also tacitly suggest that this is the center of human meaning and purpose. "Since it is hard to market subversion, that creates a certain cognitive dissonance for colleges that retain the liberal arts ideal as more than a shibboleth," so says Merold Westphal. But at the same time, this negative potential is also true of a promotion of liberal arts as in itself being fulfilling.

Without the context and telos of the Christian eschaton, the liberal arts as career pursuits are also false gods subject to disappointment and human pretension. Qohelet treats work in a complex way—it is a burden and a labor, as full of conflict, danger, and the perversion of power, yet it is also a gift from God. This can be said of careers in academics and in politics, in business, in the human services sector, and so on. Work inevitably contains suffering, and that personal “happiness” is not itself a guarantee of anything, especially the condition of true blessedness which carries with it the deep joy of true happiness. Ordinary happiness is right and good, but it should not become a god, an attempt to escape the conditions of our existence as God’s creatures (Eccl 8:16-17; 9:7-12). The Christian university should offer a more full-bodied portrait of human existence and vocational fulfillment, including its sinfulness.

By themselves, career success and the liberal arts are both subject to the corruption of instrumentalism. Qohelet here, too, is instructive. We are all subject to nature’s limitations, to the seeming caprice of the world (Fortuna), to death. The university can overcome none of these, and we fool ourselves if we claim to be able. Ecclesiastes is a lesson that evil is not a question of systemic mismanagement or of an environmentally defective upbringing. Better organization and better education do not of themselves eradicate evil. To speak of the foolishness of the university may seem counter-intuitive to us, but we must recognize that its educational pretensions are finally empty. The disappointment surrounding portions of the postmodern multiversity is similar to the sage’s dark wisdom. Only when we come to understand deeply the failure of the university may we pursue a Christian education that seeks to align itself with God’s wise order for creation and the human person.

The misuse of academic power calls for Christian hospitality, as the economics of education must be chastened by Christian concern. As Jacques Ellul points out, “Our pursuit of money is infinite;” we can never have enough. Economic unrest is devouring in its service to the god Mammon. It is lost before death’s nullification: “The evil lies in the fact that money makes everything possible, yet it is nothing." In similar fashion, liberal arts, which in theory are for “nothing” but themselves, really become instruments of human pretension, a belief in career success, over-therorization as a tool for locating and creating illusions of order. “The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings. . . Of anything beyond these, my child, beware. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Eccl 12:11-12).

Qohelet’s wisdom, we should not forget, is not at the center of the canonical truths, but functions (as does all the wisdom tradition) as an expression of creational and covenantal purpose. To fear the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov 1:7). “The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God, and keep his commandments” (Eccl 12:13).

Lenten Pedagogy -- part 4

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

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

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

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

Ratio et Fidei -- part 3

Stephen K. Moroney has attempted to offer a more complete model of the ways in which sin and rationality impact the Christian:

1. Our minds engage knowledge in both subjective and objective ways, though perhaps the two are finally intermingled.
2. God, humanity, and creation can all be treated as both subjects and objects.
3. The regenerate mind or new nature, the communities which shape our knowledge, and individual traits of our personalities all have a part in this rational engagement.

This question of personal capacity and personal caprice is joined to covenant community, a community formed by God's Spirit and expressed in the Church. Rationality and ecclesiology are deeply joined for Christian conviction and teaching, and as such, must develop and use wisely the vocabulary of Christian insight into the world.

Rationality begins with the disciple's trust that the master has something to offer, and this trust is absolutely necessary to develop the skills intrinsic to ever understanding the truth in practice. Critical thinking that never trusts in authorities is incapable of anything like critical realism. There is no engaging the reality that is there until the capacity to embrace both theory and practice is in place. Not even this committed involvement suggests a uniform pedagogy for all learners. As Paul Griffiths points out, a teacher cannot adopt "identical argumentative strategies" for differing persons with different stages of "catechetical preparation" (152). This is especially a disturbing question when we deal with resistant learners, ones who have a "volitional depravity" that robs them continually of the humility necessary to undertake the discipline in question. The psychikos are not neutral but rebellious, even when willfully blind to that interior antagonism.

Nonetheless, as Reinhold Hütter has reasoned, our mental judgments can be redeemed. This restoration comes about alongside a "metaphysics of creation: "[a] knowledge of creatures that is not directed to its dutiful end, namely, the knowledge of God, is a distorted, sinful knowledge. . . . sinful knowledge by its lack of reference to and reverence for the One who grants being in the first place."

Curiosity is not always a virtue; it sometimes kills the cat when he takes to sniffing poison. A reorientation of our desire to answer questions must be directed to the contemplation of God and God's good creation, including the creaturely component called humanism. A metaphysics of creation and an ordering of our loves centers upon the contemplation of God and the signs of his goodness.

When Christian education does this it resists the critical distance so prized by the modern university; instead, it enters into a divine dance of desire, partaking of the proximity and distance of the lover, ever drawing into delight, not curious, but committed and ecstatic. The offering of God's presence and the offering of his perceived absence are both acts of one who would seduce us with his own divine, The triune community of love, and approaches to God and his truth are both intertwined as freedom and obedience are always mixed in love.

In such a vision of education, nihilism is replaced with laughter.

Interesting Story!!!

Interesting Story!
28 Prisoners in the Mississippi State Penitentiary received their bachelor's
degrees in Christian Ministry on Wednesday from the New Orleans Baptist
Theological Seminary. Most of them are long-term prisoners and have been
working on obtaining their degrees since 2004. Among the prisoners were
murderers, rapists, and robbers who will probably never be released from
prison. For them it was a great accomplishment and a way for them to be able
to minister their fellow inmates. Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps said
the prison is "going to allow them to go to different units in this prison
and minister to the other inmates" and also says "As we invest in them, we
wean them to work back in the system". One of the inmates that graduated
said "The Lord put it in my heart that I needed to make a change, I want to
open their eyes up that God really loves them".
What an amazing story of redemption, God's grace, and an awesome way to
minister to the other inmates in the prison!
http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090521/NEWS/905210338

One Nation, Seven Sins

Researchers at Kansas State University examined the prevalence of the "seven deadly sins" across the United States and created maps of them.

Article:
http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/mar/26/one-nation-seven-sins/

Here are the maps:
http://flowingdata.com/2009/05/12/maps-of-the-seven-deadly-sins