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.

John Paul II and the Common Good

The last quotations from Redemptor hominis:

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

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

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

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.

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.

Simone Weil and Rootedness--Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simone Weil and Rootedness--Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can There be a Christian Culture?--Part 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strangely enough, history became reduced reduced to theodicy.

Nikolai Berdyaev and Personality's Gnostic Turn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charles Péguy on the Failure of a Culture

The French poet Charles Péguy in 1910 wrote a lengthy essay Notre Jeunesse (Memories of Youth) in defense of the actions of the party of Dreyfusards, those who defended Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer of Jewish descent. Dreyfus was falsely accused of selling military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Later exonerated, his case deeply divided the nation along conservative and republican lines, and became a symbol not only for the issue of French antisemiticism, but also for broad political and religious questions, and effected important changes in the official status of the Roman Catholic Church in the country.

Péguy, a Catholic convert and a committed socialist, was also an ardent nationalist, and he wrote Notre Jeunesse to defend the patriotism of his convictions when many saw him as a betrayer of country and of religion. Conservative Catholics on the right were to charge him with disloyalty to the Church, while republicans often held that Catholics could not be true Frenchmen. Yet Péguy also ending up writing an essay that set out his own theory of social and political authenticity.

Péguy held that authentic action for a community arose out of a mystique, a word that can be translated as a faith, a mystery, a tradition, and an operation or action. A mystique is not held by a people consciously, at least not in a way that one debates and studies. It is a more settled way of life and set of convictions that come naturally to a community. The problem is that its mystique could over time become a politique, a political party or theory, an institution imposed from without, a set of values that are debated and proven or disproven but that no longer have a grasp on the community's heart. "Everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politique," he lamented.

As a Catholic and political progressive, Péguy took the radical step of arguing that "the derepublicanization of France is essentially the same movement as the de-Christianization of France. Both together are one and the same movement, a profound demystification." Both are a kind of idolatrous and yet sterile modernization that substitutes profound belief and action for cynical theorization and manipulation of an older language.

Péguy goes on to point out that mystiques treat each other in different ways that politiques even when they are in disagreement. The former are far less violent and oppressive, and when they are enemies, the distinction is "at a much deeper, more essential level, and with an infinitely nobler profundity." It is as simple as the distinction between rival virtue and rival malice. Péguy insists, then, that it is a mistake to compare the mystique of one position with the politique of another. The worst sin of all, however, is to pretend to be of a mystique while actually playing the game of the politique: "To steal from the poor is to steal twice. To deceive the simple is to deceive twice over. To steal the most precious thing of all, belief. Confidence."

A true mystique is marked by ardent loyalty, by love. Only what one is prepared to die for can reveal what one truly believes. "The only strength, the only dignity that exists, is to be loved. . . . Puns will not restore a culture." Péguy's formulation raises a profound and important question for social and political change: how do you know when a people, tradition, culture, or community is truly possessed by a faith rather than theoretical language alone that can be easily adopted without conviction? Moreover, once that mystique is lost, can it be recovered, and it political action useful unless it is?

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.

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 Materialism

To answer one of my own questions from my last post on Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, he condemns excessive materialism (consumerism?) as leading to civic weakness in a people and even to the eventual loss of humanity. He argues that the prosperity that comes with democratic freedoms may eventually undercut them because its people will not longer possess the virtues to use that freedom wisely:

"There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint at the sight of the new possessions they are about to obtain. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all. It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. The discharge of political duties appears to them to be a troublesome impediment which diverts them from their occupations and business. If they are required to elect representatives, to support the government by personal service, to meet on public business, they think they have no time, they cannot waste their precious hours in useless engagements; such idle amusements are unsuited to serious men who are engaged with the more important interests of life. These people think they are following the principle of self-interest, but the idea they entertain of that principle is a very crude one; and the better to look after what they call their own business, they neglect their chief business, which is to remain their own masters.

"As the citizens who labor do not care to attend to public affairs, and as the class which might devote its leisure to these duties has ceased to exist, the place of the government is, as it were, unfilled. If at that critical moment some able and ambitious man grasps the supreme power, he will find the road to every kind of usurpation open before him. If he attends for some time only to the material prosperity of the country, no more will be demanded of him. . . . A nation that asks nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart, the slave of its own well-being, awaiting only the hand that will bind it." (474-5)

"Whatever elevates, enlarges, and expands the soul renders it more capable of succeeding in those very undertakings which do not concern it. Whatever, on the other hand, enervates or lowers it weakens it for all purposes, the chief as well as the least, and threatens to render it almost equally impotent for both. Hence the soul must remain great and strong, though it were only to devote its strength and greatness from time to time to the service of the body. If men were ever to content themselves with material objects, it is probable that they would lose by degrees the art of producing them; and they would enjoy them in the end, like the brutes, without discernment and without improvement." (480)

Have we reached this point in the United States?

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. "