William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed; Economics and Christian Desire: Review Part 3

Finally in chapter 4, “Scarcity and Abundance,” Cavanaugh uses the logic of communion to challenge the logic of the market. We are desiring beings, but only in God can our desires be put to rest. An economics that bases itself on the assumption of scarcity is not only based on hunger but also on endless human wants. Shopping, then, is finally about the “pleasure of stroking desire,” for in “scarcity is implied . . . the daily erotics of desire that keeps the individual in the pursuit of novelty” (91). Such a lifestyle, Cavanaugh insists is “the death of Christian eschatology” (93). Instead, of placing our hope in Christ’s kingdom breaking into this fallen world system, we continually distract ourselves with more consumption even as we shrug before “a tragic world of scarcity.” Worse, we come to develop a taste for hearing of global tragedies: “Even the suffering of others can become a spectacle and a consumable item: tsunamis sell newspapers” (94). Cavanaugh holds that the Eucharist should teach us of “the communicability of pain from one person to another” within the Body of Christ. Rather than individuals facing off in competition over a scarce supply, we become truly individual as we impart help to each other, becoming dependent upon each other. We cannot give into despair but must respond in eschatological hope, for Christ daily gives of his self that we may know “where we are going” (100).

There are numerous ways to go about responding to Cavanaugh’s claims. One, for instance, could place his theology within numerous streams of Christian reflection. He draws off the Christian personalism of John Paul II and the economic distributism of early 20^th-century Catholic ethics. He also shows a great debt to the tradition of virtue ethics currently taught by Stanley Hauerwas at Duke Divinity School. Likewise, Cavanaugh is much indebted to the Augustinian tradition of reflection on ordered and disordered loves within the City of God and the City of Man, as well as the new Trinitarian insights of Hans urs von Balthasar, to name only one theologian. Each of these streams of Christian reflection has strengths and weaknesses. One could also ascertain whether he has truly understood the experience and logic of late, global capitalism in the last few decades. Has he, for instance, ignored counter-examples that might go against his theses of hypermobilization of capital, of the creation of constant, movable desire, and of globalization as a false parody of true Christian catholicity?

However, I want to respond more personally as one First World, Christian individual to his book. In my experience, much of what he claims rings true, at least some of the time. I am ashamed to say that I have found myself at various points in my life addicted to the buying of things, and of late, equally tempted by the consumption of short bursts of image and experience though online social networking and news. I, too, have often thrown up my hands in despair at the news of overseas economic abuses, wondering where to buy my clothing, my coffee, or my children’s toys. And I, too, have taken a kind of superficial pride and joy in my “diversity,” listening to African music while I eat fajitas, read a Russian novel, and look forward to watching a Dutch film on video later that evening. I would rather play it safe and not have to interact with the truly poor, unless, of course they seem grateful and don’t smell too much. After I finished reading Being Consumed , I struggled with what I should do in response, and my first desire was to simply and sadly think I could do nothing. Of course, this would simply be to “consume” Being Consumed as part of the endless diet of ideas in a collegiate environment. Instead, I am praying and seeking how my family should act differently in what we eat and buy and give. I have talked to my wife some about the book and will continue to do so.

It does not seem to me that you need be convinced by everything that Cavanaugh claims in order to respond to it with repentance and action. For example, I am somewhat dissatisfied with his theology of the Church and world. He seems to conflate the distinction between them too much at times, the logic of the Eucharist almost dissolving the need for individual repentance. I can’t always tell if his doctrine of the Supper actually merges nature and grace or simply brings them into a particular and local relationship for our time. Likewise, his portrait of multi-national abuses does not reflect the experience of local managers who are attached to their workers and seek to work for change for their benefit. Nonetheless, I am still left crying mea culpa. Well, not only “my fault” per se, for that too is part of his point. I am joined to the Body of Christ, and I must learn to work within the messy, faulty life of that local community called a church if I am to develop with others the habits and practices that help address some of these matters. Happily, Cavanaugh has provided some examples worth learning more about:

• Mondragón Cooperative Corporation, based on the principles of distributism, is worker-owned and governed and contributes greatly to neighborhood health, education, and lower crime.
• CRS Fair trade program in coffee, chocolate, and handcrafted items seeks to deal directly with growers and local artisans to promote fair payment, as well as promote a sense of solidarity with those overseas.
• Church Supported Agriculture (CSA) seeks to create a direct market between local family growers and local churches in hopes of providing a face-to-face buying environment with growers and helping to promote sustainable farming.
• The Economy of Communion Project associated with the Focolare Movement promotes a business model that divides profits into 1/3 aid to the poor, 1/3 education promotion, and 1/3 business sustainability. As of 2006, 700 businesses worldwide had adopted their model.

I would challenge us all to learn more about these and other Christian options like them.

William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed; Economics and Christian Desire: Review Part 2

Cavanaugh offers an insightful critique of consumerism, which he charges as being driven not by ownership of things but by consumption of things: “Consumerism is not so much about having more as it is about having something else; that’s why it is not simply buying but shopping that is the heart of consumerism” (35). Strangely then, consumerism is a kind of parody of the Christian call to be detached from things and, in giving things away, to become attached to others. Cavanaugh believes the problem is that currently we as consumers are disconnected from almost every stage of the making of things, including being separated from those who make them. Most of us, he believes, are not comfortable with the plight of exhausted and desperate workers in overseas sweatshops, but we are unable to know exactly where and under what conditions our clothing, our toys, or our electronic devices are produced, and since many of these might also be produced in conditions that are somewhat better than starvation in the fields, we are left mostly with a vague ennui and free-floating guilt. What’s worse for us is that increasingly we are even detached from the things we consume, so that marketers must produce simultaneously an “organized creation of dissatisfaction” and yet also invest the products we purchase with positive emotional associations. “Products are made in the factory, but brands are made in the mind,” as one marketer observed (45). What, then, are Christians to do? Cavanaugh, writing in the tradition of Antony of Egypt, Clement of Alexandria, and Thomas Aquinas, suggests that we return to the pursuit of God as our chief desire. To be the Body of Christ is to identify with the “least of these.” We must take practical steps to overcoming our detachment by giving to others in a way that supports a sustainable life for them. We must also make our homes places where food is prepared, musical instruments are played, and people are engaged in making things.

Chapter 3, “The Global and the Local,” is the most densely theological of the book, yet I suspect it is also the heart of Cavanaugh’s attempt to provide a Christian vision that runs counter to consumerism: “[C]ulture and economics are not autonomous spheres with no mutual effect. Economic relationships do not operate on value-neutral laws, but are rather carriers of specific convictions about the nature of the human person” (59). Globalization is a false catholicity; it purports to offer a universal world of multicultural communication and exchange, but it actually tends to flatten out local cultures into a world of McDonalds and Disneys, even as it also works to dismember communities into atomistic individuals. Here, he returns to his concern with the “hypermobility of capital” which can abandon its people easily, thus creating a situation that makes labor unions fairly impossible, as well as negotiations for better working environments, higher wages, and more ownership in the means of production. Cavanaugh is equally suspicious of the claims of religious pluralism and multiculturalism. Both doctrines, he believes, really perpetuate a post-modernist version of persons and reality that is still radically individualistic. We can consume surface-level, multi-cultural experiences without necessarily changing anything about ourselves and our patterns of First World consumption. The global village is a comforting fiction. In response to this, Cavanaugh looks to Jesus Christ as the “concrete universal: “Only in the Incarnation can an individual be universal and the universal be individual” (76), and only in the mission of Christ can we truly discover ourselves, for Christian discipleship teaches us to lay ourselves aside for others: “The true identity of each unique human person is thus founded on the overcoming of an illusory self-sufficiency” (83). This practice is deeply Trinitarian, for we enter into an exchange of mutual giving and receiving. But this Christian exchange is always realized in local places over time. Only then can we truly be and model what God intends for Creation.

Christian Education and Personhood (John Paul II series)

This is the last entry culled from the encyclicals of John Paul II. The following is from Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the encyclical that attempted to give a more Christian course to Catholic university education. Much of what he has to say is true of Christian universities in general. Try replacing the word "Catholic" below with "Christian" and see how much you agree with and how much you can learn from:

4. It is the honour and responsibility of a Catholic University to consecrate itself without reserve to the cause of truth. This is its way of serving at one and the same time both the dignity of man and the good of the Church, which has "an intimate conviction that truth is (its) real ally ... and that knowledge and reason are sure ministers to faith." Without in any way neglecting the acquisition of useful knowledge, a Catholic University is distinguished by its free search for the whole truth about nature, man and God. The present age is in urgent need of this kind of disinterested service, namely of proclaiming the meaning of truth, that fundamental value without which freedom, justice and human dignity are extinguished. By means of a kind of universal humanism a Catholic University is completely dedicated to the research of all aspects of truth in their essential connection with the supreme Truth, who is God. It does this without fear but rather with enthusiasm, dedicating itself to every path of knowledge, aware of being preceded by him who is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life", the Logos, whose Spirit of intelligence and love enables the human person with his or her own intelligence to find the ultimate reality of which he is the source and end and who alone is capable of giving fully that Wisdom without which the future of the world would be in danger.

6. Through the encounter which it establishes between the unfathomable richness of the salvific message of the Gospel and the variety and immensity of the fields of knowledge in which that richness is incarnated by it, a Catholic University enables the Church to institute an incomparably fertile dialogue with people of every culture. Man's life is given dignity by culture, and, while he finds his fullness in Christ, there can be no doubt that the Gospel which reaches and renews him in every dimension is also fruitful for the culture in which he lives.

7. In the world today, characterized by such rapid developments in science and technology, the tasks of a Catholic University assume an ever greater importance and urgency. Scientific and technological discoveries create an enormous economic and industrial growth, but they also inescapably require the correspondingly necessary search for meaning in order to guarantee that the new discoveries be used for the authentic good of individuals and of human society as a whole. If it is the responsibility of every University to search for such meaning, a Catholic University is called in a particular way to respond to this need: its Christian inspiration enables it to include the moral, spiritual and religious dimension in its research, and to evaluate the attainments of science and technology in the perspective of the totality of the human person.

In this context, Catholic Universities are called to a continuous renewal, both as "Universities" and as "Catholic". For, "What is at stake is the very meaning of scientific and technological research, of social life and of culture, but, on an even more profound level, what is at stake is the very meaning of the human person"(10). . . .

21. A Catholic University pursues its objectives through its formation of an authentic human community animated by the spirit of Christ. The source of its unity springs from a common dedication to the truth, a common vision of the dignity of the human person and, ultimately, the person and message of Christ which gives the Institution its distinctive character. As a result of this inspiration, the community is animated by a spirit of freedom and charity; it is characterized by mutual respect, sincere dialogue, and protection of the rights of individuals. It assists each of its members to achieve wholeness as human persons; in turn, everyone in the community helps in promoting unity, and each one, according to his or her role and capacity, contributes towards decisions which affect the community, and also towards maintaining and strengthening the distinctive Catholic character of the Institution. . . .

33. A specific priority is the need to examine and evaluate the predominant values and norms of modern society and culture in a Christian perspective, and the responsibility to try to communicate to society those ethical and religious principles which give full meaning to human life. In this way a University can contribute further to the development of a true Christian anthropology, founded on the person of Christ, which will bring the dynamism of the creation and redemption to bear on reality and on the correct solution to the problems of life.

By its very nature, a University develops culture through its research, helps to transmit the local culture to each succeeding generation through its teaching, and assists cultural activities through its educational services. It is open to all human experience and is ready to dialogue with and learn from any culture. A Catholic University shares in this, offering the rich experience of the Church's own culture. In addition, a Catholic University, aware that human culture is open to Revelation and transcendence, is also a primary and privileged place for a fruitful dialogue between the Gospel and culture.

44. Through this dialogue a Catholic University assists the Church, enabling it to come to a better knowledge of diverse cultures, discern their positive and negative aspects, to receive their authentically human contributions, and to develop means by which it can make the faith better understood by the men and women of a particular culture(36). While it is true that the Gospel cannot be identified with any particular culture and transcends all cultures, it is also true that "the Kingdom which the Gospel proclaims is lived by men and women who are profoundly linked to a culture, and the building up of the Kingdom cannot avoid borrowing the elements of human culture or cultures(37). "A faith that places itself on the margin of what is human, of what is therefore culture, would be a faith unfaithful to the fullness of what the Word of God manifests and reveals, a decapitated faith, worse still, a faith in the process of self-annihilation"(38).

45. A Catholic University must become more attentive to the cultures of the world of today, and to the various cultural traditions existing within the Church in a way that will promote a continuous and profitable dialogue between the Gospel and modern society. Among the criteria that characterize the values of a culture are above all, the meaning of the human person, his or her liberty, dignity, sense of responsibility, and openness to the transcendent. To a respect for persons is joined the preeminent value of the family, the primary unit of every human culture.

Family, Work, and "Dominion" (John Paul II series)

This is section 10 of John Paul II's encyclical Laborem exercens. It raises a number of important questions about not only the nature of work, but also what Christians should believe about the nature of the family and community:

"Work constitutes a foundation for the formation of family life, which is a natural right and something that man is called to. These two spheres of values-one linked to work and the other consequent on the family nature of human life-must be properly united and must properly permeate each other. In a way, work is a condition for making it possible to found a family, since the family requires the means of subsistence which man normally gains through work. Work and industriousness also influence the whole process of education in the family, for the very reason that everyone "becomes a human being" through, among other things, work, and becoming a human being is precisely the main purpose of the whole process of education. Obviously, two aspects of work in a sense come into play here: the one making family life and its upkeep possible, and the other making possible the achievement of the purposes of the family, especially education. Nevertheless, these two aspects of work are linked to one another and are mutually complementary in various points.

"It must be remembered and affirmed that the family constitutes one of the most important terms of reference for shaping the social and ethical order of human work. The teaching of the Church has always devoted special attention to this question, and in the present document we shall have to return to it. In fact, the family is simultaneously a community made possible by work and the first school of work, within the home, for every person.

"The third sphere of values that emerges from this point of view-that of the subject of work-concerns the great society to which man belongs on the basis of particular cultural and historical links. This society-even when it has not yet taken on the mature form of a nation-is not only the great "educator" of every man, even though an indirect one (because each individual absorbs within the family the contents and values that go to make up the culture of a given nation); it is also a great historical and social incarnation of the work of all generations. All of this brings it about that man combines his deepest human identity with membership of a nation, and intends his work also to increase the common good developed together with his compatriots, thus realizing that in this way work serves to add to the heritage of the whole human family, of all the people living in the world.

"These three spheres are always important for human work in its subjective dimension. And this dimension, that is to say, the concrete reality of the worker, takes precedence over the objective dimension. In the subjective dimension there is realized, first of all, that "dominion" over the world of nature to which man is called from the beginning according to the words of the Book of Genesis. The very process of "subduing the earth", that is to say work, is marked in the course of history, and especially in recent centuries, by an immense development of technological means. This is an advantageous and positive phenomenon, on condition that the objective dimension of work does not gain the upper hand over the subjective dimension, depriving man of his dignity and inalienable rights or reducing them."

1. Should we see work and family as intimately related? Why or why not?
2. Is human dignity tied to our work, to its place in our homelife, and its place in the larger community?
3. What role should technology play in the humanizing of work, especially as a part of family and community?
   

Persons, Their Dignity, and Work (John Paul II series)

The encyclical Laborem exercens, written in 1981 while the Polish workers' movement Solidarity resisted its Communist government, speaks to the nature of work and the innate dignity of human beings:

"Work is one of the characteristics that distinguish man from the rest of creatures, whose activity for sustaining their lives cannot be called work. Only man is capable of work, and only man works, at the same time by work occupying his existence on earth. Thus work bears a particular mark of man and of humanity, the mark of a person operating within a community of persons. And this mark decides its interior characteristics; in a sense it constitutes its very nature. . . ." (intro.)

"In order to continue our analysis of work, an analysis linked with the word of the Bible telling man that he is to subdue the earth, we must concentrate our attention on work in the subjective sense, much more than we did on the objective significance, barely touching upon the vast range of problems known intimately and in detail to scholars in various fields and also, according to their specializations, to those who work. If the words of the Book of Genesis to which we refer in this analysis of ours speak of work in the objective sense in an indirect way, they also speak only indirectly of the subject of work; but what they say is very eloquent and is full of great significance.

"Man has to subdue the earth and dominate it, because as the "image of God" he is a person, that is to say, a subjective being capable of acting in a planned and rational way, capable of deciding about himself, and with a tendency to self-realization. As a person, man is therefore the subject to work. As a person he works, he performs various actions belonging to the work process; independently of their objective content, these actions must all serve to realize his humanity, to fulfill the calling to be a person that is his by reason of his very humanity.

"This does not mean that, from the objective point of view, human work cannot and must not be rated and qualified in any way. It only means that the primary basis of the value of work is man himself, who is its subject. This leads immediately to a very important conclusion of an ethical nature: however true it may be that man is destined for work and called to it, in the first place work is "for man" and not man "for work". Through this conclusion one rightly comes to recognize the pre-eminence of the subjective meaning of work over the objective one. Given this way of understanding things, and presupposing that different sorts of work that people do can have greater or lesser objective value, let us try nevertheless to show that each sort is judged above all by the measure of the dignity of the subject of work, that is to say the person, the individual who carries it out. On the other hand: independently of the work that every man does, and presupposing that this work constitutes a purpose-at times a very demanding one-of his activity, this purpose does not possess a definitive meaning in itself. In fact, in the final analysis it is always man who is the purpose of the work, whatever work it is that is done by man-even if the common scale of values rates it as the merest "service", as the most monotonous even the most alienating work. . . .

"[I]n the light of the analysis of the fundamental reality of the whole economic process-first and foremost of the production structure that work is-it should be recognized that the error of early capitalism can be repeated wherever man is in a way treated on the same level as the whole complex of the material means of production, as an instrument and not in accordance with the true dignity of his work-that is to say, where he is not treated as subject and maker, and for this very reason as the true purpose of the whole process of production.

"This explains why the analysis of human work in the light of the words concerning man's "dominion" over the earth goes to the very heart of the ethical and social question. This concept should also find a central place in the whole sphere of social and economic policy, both within individual countries and in the wider field of international and intercontinental relationships, particularly with reference to the tensions making themselves felt in the world not only between East and West but also between North and South." (section 6)

John Paul II ties work to the human vocation. For him, it is a biblical idea, one arising from the creation mandates of Genesis. Work must not, however, reduce human beings to their material existence alone. It must play a role in and recognize the nature of human beings--their personhood, their communal existence, their social and ethical existence, their need to make and create, to produce and partake. Human economic systems--socialist, communist, capitalist--that treat persons as objects, rather than as subjects, are to be condemned and brought to repentance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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 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 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.

Emmanuel Mounier and Realities of Personalism

Emmanuel Mounier's 1949 volume Personalism represents his mature thought on the ideological and political position by that name that he helped promote in France during the first half of the twentieth century. While Mounier's career as a writer and social critic had been dedicated to a criticism of bourgeois liberal society, the Second World War forced him to recognize the potential for totalitarian abuse in both communist and fascist governments. Unlike his Catholic counterpart Jacques Maritain who came to support something like Wilsonian democracy, Mounier in his remaining few years was more drawn to a socialist vision. Nonetheless, Personalism,as Mounier himself admitted, did not necessarily obligate its adherents to one political platform. Indeed, one wonders that if Mounier had lived, might he have developed a personalist critique of socialism as well?

Mounier begins his slim volume by observing how the Christian notion of the person challenged ancient Greco-Roman notions:

1. Christianity counters the classic distrust of multiplicity with a notion of God's unity working itself out in the diversity of human actions of love.
2. The human being is increasingly understood as "an indissoluble whole" rather than a conglomerate of various elements.
3. God is personal and offers a personal relationship of intimacy and participation to each person.
4. The kingdom of God is not an abstract ideal but a promise of a transformed world and a changed inner heart.
5. God created persons as free creatures to grow and mature.
6. The Incarnation brings together heaven and earth, the mystical and the physical into a complex and affirming unity.

Personalism, Mounier insisted, is not Hegelian idealism, but a recognition of the embodied nature of human beings who in transforming the material, natural world are to "liberate things as well as humanity" (12). Wisdom, in its industry, does not exploit material existence but humanizes the natural world, a world "red in tooth and claw" (to recall Tennyson) which so often seems against us. Thus, we are possessed of a "tragic optimism," even in the face of struggle and effort.

Personalism is also not individualism, which Mounier dismissed as "a system of morals, feelings, ideas, and institutions in which individuals can be organized by their mutual isolation and defense" (18). Personalism is instead fueled by the drive to "decentralize" the human self, to give of oneself, donate oneself to others. Without communication comes madness; without giving comes destruction. We become fully persons as we embrace "an economic of donation, not of compensation nor of calculation," as we give ourselves to others in self-bestowal. This also requires a stability of faithful relations with persons across time and space. We can best be faithful to those we remain with long-term.

Mounier had little patience with romanticizing a communal past of small villages, and he upheld not only the notion of human equality but human rights as that which protects and makes human freedom possible. Yet he also stressed the need for people to divest themselves of property and wealth in giving to others, thereby achieving their own personal and spiritual maturity. He imagined this affirmation of love as one requiring struggle both inwardly and outwardly, for the virtue of fortitude was absolutely necessary for personal growth.

Mournier also rejected notions of freedom either as indifference to the physical world or as pure spontaneity of action. Freedom is instead human love working its way out in responsibility. "Our liberties can be no more than opportunities offered to the spirit of freedom" (62). Freedom and personality fulfill themselves in the higher transcendence of a divine purpose: "My freedom itself comes to me as something given: its supreme moments are not those in which I exercise most will-power; they are moments rather of giving-way, or of offering myself to freedom newly encountered or to a value that I love" (66).

Still, Mounier the activist realized that political responses were inevitably compromised. He held that the political and prophetic voices must listen to each other, as well as other kinds of gestures and movements, such as those of industry and contemplation. "Nevertheless, though to 'engage' oneself is to consent to make-shift, to something impure, . . .and to accept one's limitations," he observed; "it does not sanctify one's abdication of personality to any abandonment of the values that it serves. . . . The troubled and sometimes agonized conscience caused by the impurities of our cause should keep us far from fanaticism, in a state of vigilant criticism. . . . The risks we have to run, and the partial obscurity in which we have to take decisions, put us in the state of dispossession, insecurity and hardihood which is the climate of all great action" (92-3).

Mourier held out hope that the slow death of Christendom promised a Christianity "slowly returning to it first position; renouncing government upon earth and outward appearance of sanctification to achieve the unique work of the Church, the community of Christians in Christ, mingles among all men in the secular work,--neither theocracy nor liberalism, but a return to the double rigours of transcendence and incarnation" (122).

Tocqueville on Egoism vs. Individualism

Alexia de Tocqueville in the second book of his justly famous Democracy in America proposed to differentiate simple egoism (or selfishness) from the more seemingly benign motive of individualism. Tocqueville feared that democracy in its positive promotion of individuals and their freedom, as left to itself led to a society that eventually discouraged its people from civic participation and virtuous action:

"Our fathers were only acquainted with egotism. Egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with himself and to prefer himself to everything in the world. Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Egotism originates in blind instinct; individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in deficiencies of mind as in perversity of heart.

"Egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness. Egotism is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another; individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition. (446-7)

"Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart." (448)

Tocqueville's thought here raises some important questions:

1. How does a society that sets its people free to pursue their own ends hold together any notion of the common good?
2. Does democratic individualism naturally lead to a breakdown in community and tradition?
3. How would Tocqueville account for modern consumerism and technologies?
   

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.

Jacques Maritain, Materiality, and Personhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John MacMurray & the Personal Structure of Freedom

"Until we recover our sense of proportion, until we recognize our creaturliness and our dependence, we shall continue to frustrate our freedom by desiring what cannot attain, and by using our resources for our own destruction. Humility is the handmaid of freedom. It is the meek who inherit the earth."--John MacMurray

Moral philosopher John MacMurray was particularly concerned with how the intersubjective nature of personhood shaped the conditions of freedom. For MacMurray, the personal and the community are tied together. The personal does not exist without the life of the community. How can this be the case?

1. MacMurray starts by stressing the action of a person. A person intends to act in a certain way; this requires a motive. Persons have free will which allow them to choose to act for certain reasons before they act.
2. But free will defined this way is only the beginning of freedom. The conditions of true freedom are achievable only by having a moral end which governs our techniques. Thus, we absolutely need self-control, and one is not truly free without it.
3. Action is inevitably interaction. MacMurray insisted that the arena of human action is for the most part that of persons-in-relation not that of individuals as a simple aggregate. Persons are still individuals but they are are truly persons only in their nexus of relations.
4. The highest relationships are that of persons in interaction together exhibiting true love, not that of unequal master-slave relations based on fear and desire for power. Persons cannot be reduced to relations of power.
5. "Community," for MacMurray is closer to friendship than society. True freedom is found in community, not society.
   
6. "Society," as he defines the term, is an impersonal interaction of persons based on mutual cooperation but motivated by fear and a concern with a justice of the distribution of goods, duties, and burdens.
7. "Community," on the other hand, has a common life based around a common purpose. Its end is itself. It pursues the living of its friendship. It is motivated by love, not self-interest and fear, and according to MacMurray is always universal in its potential scope--all are invited.
8. The common purpose and end that creates this community is genuine religion. God as the Wholly Personal Other is the ground of a community's love and friendship. Religion both creates and celebrates community. It is what gives rise to the tradition that offers some continuity of the community over space and time.
   
9. Without true community, society-whatever its democratic claims--can only offer a limited freedom of negotiation and fear. Society's justice is a thin project of mediating competing claims.

"Friendship reveals the positive nature of freedom. It provides the only conditions which release the whole of the self into activity and so enable a man to be himself totally, without constraint. It is in this sense, in particular, that freedom is a constitutive principle of friendship. "

Gabriel Marcel & The Promise of Fidelity to Persons

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

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

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

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

Paul Tournier & the Meaning of Persons

The psychologist Paul Tournier was another important contributor to Christian Personalism. Especially important to his work as a therapist and a medical doctor was the stress on treating patients as persons with full dignity and not as simple cases to be solved. His thinking was clearly influenced by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber who distinguished between I-Thou relationships and I-It relationships.

Tournier defined persons as those characterized by both a separation from others and a connection to others: "the double movement" of "a separation followed by a relation. By the secret the person is formed, and then by communication of the secret is affirmed." In other words, we each have things that are ours particularly yet they are also communicated in acts of trust to others. In doing so, we open ourselves as more than atoms in relations of defense and negotiation. We risk our inner beings with others.

This leads to another aspect of personhood, that of commitment and responsibility. "The personage," according to Tournier is "an external appearance which touches the personage of others from outside," while "the person communicates inwardly with the second person, the 'thou'." In Tournier's thinking, this inward offering is essential to our growth and development as moral and aesthetic beings. He sees this as important in marriage and in healthcare:

"The true dialogue [in marriage] is not the first easy communion, wonderful though it be--the impression one has of sharing the same feelings, saying the same things and thinking the same thoughts. The true dialogue is inevitably the confrontation of two personalities, differing in their past, their upbringing, their view of life, their prejudices, their idiosyncrasies and failings--and in any case with two distinct psychologies, a man's and a woman's. . . . Marriage thus becomes a great school of the person, through the level of personal commitment it entails and the exacting quality of the dialogue that demands it."

"For me as a doctor to become a person, to attain completeness as a human being, the road is the same as for my patients, and I must commit myself to it before I can hope to lead them along it. It is the road of personal dialogue with God and with my fellows. There is a decisive turning I must take, that leads me into the word of persons . . .It is this aptitude for personal contact, which is created and nourished by being sincerely sought after, which is the proper medicine of the person. . . . There comes into being a 'reciprocity of consciousness,' to use M. Nedoncelle's admirable expression. I allow my person to be discovered and known, and at the same time discover and know the person of my patient. It is in this that the medicine of the person demands a personal commitment which is not called for by technical medicine."