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 Last
year, Professor Joseph Lawrence of the philosophy department
wrote an essay
for Holy Cross Magazine, "Rethinking the College," in which he explored the uniqueness
of Holy Cross as a Jesuit and Catholic institution. The essay sparked some lively
debate with Lawrence's colleague, Professor David
O'Brien, Loyola Professor of Roman Catholic Studies and director of the new Center
for Religion, Ethics and Culture. Following is a distillation
of that debate.
Professor O'Brien
writes:
I appreciate Joe Lawrence's rather courageous
call for renewal of liberal arts education. He worries about
learning as technology,
or as a consumer good, and so should we all.
I would like to highlight two points with which I disagree: a) "knowledge for
its own sake" and b) comments that turn the "faith and justice" concerns of
the Jesuits into pragmatics or technology.
First, "knowledge for its own sake."
"Once we are clothed and well fed," Joe suggests, we can turn "away from our
practical pursuits" and "enjoy moments of leisure" and "a pure sense of wonder." This "liberation
from practical concerns" is "the key to a good and happy life" and thus the very "purpose
of liberal arts education."
This ideal has always been attractive to a leisure class that has mastered
the art of obscuring the sources of its freedom and thus the enormity of its
responsibility. The most notable examples are learned English country gentlemen
pursuing philosophical questions supported by the wealth of empire. During
this tragic century of wars and genocides, many thoughtful people questioned
this idea of liberal education, for it seemed to detach knowledge from responsibility.
Still, advocates of the ideal of knowledge for its own sake, which some argued
was authentic classical humanism, persisted, and even enjoyed some prominence
in moments of apparent, if illusory, "peace." At each stage they imagined themselves,
as does Joe, occupying "a standpoint that is free, one that hovers somewhere
outside the current economic and political order." Eventually, in one way or
another, history came crashing in on their fragile, self-constructed enclaves,
shattering their imagined innocence.
The sad truth is that research and education carried
on without conscious, deliberate attention to matters of social and political
responsibility almost
always end up excusing bemused detachment or at best irony in the face of the
suffering of most people. Personally I deeply regret my own lack of a liberal
arts education, and I defer to no one in my hope for its renewal. But I regard
as wrong headed and irresponsible a renewal of the liberal arts that does not
include direct, deliberate confrontation with the human-being made tragedies
of our recent history.
And that's where Joe's dismissal of justice comes in. The hard truth that I
think is missing in his article is that we human beings are already connected,
and responsible, like it or not. So connected in fact that the very notion
of self or spirit cannot and should not be imagined apart from those connections.
And among those with whom we are connected are the victims:
- the world's poor, "the vast majority" not yet "clothed
and well fed" and, as James Carroll recently reminded us,
citing Archbishop Romero, better called "those who have
been impoverished" (By whom? Is that a liberal arts question?);
- refugees, across the globe (How did they get there?
By natural, or by political, disaster?);
- people suffering torture and/or humiliation, or worse,
for standing up for themselves and their friends (like
those American nuns and Jesuit professors in El Salvador.
Do we, do some of our friends, do such things?).
Such persons
are not entirely, or even mainly, "other," and thinking about the meaning of
our connection with them is not "political" as Joe uses the term. Our responsibility
for one another is a fact, not an option. And most of what passes for education,
and for scholarship, including unfortunately the liberal arts, too often obscures
or avoids that hard, empirically and spiritually
verifiable truth.
The option for the poor is a very serious matter, now fully incorporated into
Roman Catholic teaching. The faith and justice commitment of the Jesuits is neither
easy, nor accommodationist, as Joe and others charge. Joe even suggests a comparison
between contemporary Jesuits and those portrayed
by Dostoevsky as "too entangled with the secular order. They had debased spiritual
freedom by seeking pragmatic solutions to the problems of human
injustice." He eases the blow by saying that no college or university would turn
its back on the world, but then quickly adds that "Jesuit pragmatism corresponds
well to the deeply ingrained pragmatism of the world in which
we live."
People rarely live consecrated, celibate lives, much less put their lives on
the
line, for "pragmatism." Far from ingratiating themselves with the powerful
(Dostoevsky's problem), or conspiring with revolutionaries, as contemporary
critics charge, Jesuits, like those murdered in El Salvador, commit themselves
to particular
people, usually people who have been impoverished, and they invite others to
do the same.
Joe salvages the Jesuits by appealing to their spirituality,
which "elevates
our gaze beyond the empirical order." From that "spiritual standpoint" he says
that there is little to choose between "free enterprise" and "economic
justice" as both are bound by the presupposition that "the only real world is
the material world." Fortunately the Society of Jesus does not understand its
spirituality this way. Moreover this dismissal of economic justice is totally
at odds with the teaching of the current pope, the U.S. hierarchy
and the Jesuits.
The
mission of the Society of Jesus for "the service of faith and promotion
of justice," affirmed and regularly reaffirmed since 1974, requires nothing less
than the dedication to freedom and spiritual growth which Joe rightly claims
are essential to liberal learning and living. It arises from traditional Jesuit
humanism, alerted by this tragic century to humanity's capacity for evil, awakened
to the requirements of human dignity by their freely
chosen "preferential option for the poor." The phrase, "men and women for
others," first coined by the saintly Jesuit General Pedro Arrupe and often used
to define our aspirations at Holy Cross, intends an authentic Christian discipleship
arising not from moralistic demands for self-sacrifice, but from a sense that
this is the way I should live to be most fully human, most fully myself. The
Gospel, after all, is good news-for everybody.
Activism that makes sense begins at the center. The Quakers, among the most socially
responsible among us, have a wonderful poster that reads: "Don't Just Do Something,
Sit There!" Dean Joe Maguire likes to read Jonathan Kozol's Amazing
Grace with new students. Kozol persuades us that the meaning of the fact
that we are here, on this Hill, while brothers and sisters live very hard
lives out there, is the first and most important question on which we should
meditate
as we do our work at Holy Cross. It is at the first
moment a spiritual question.
All of this is not intended as an alternative to but as the proper ground for
the liberal learning Joe Lawrence loves. There is a basic level of self-consciousness,
an imagination of the meaning of life, at which the orientation to justice and
peace, to full humanity, is grounded. It is a spiritual matter first of all.
In America our imaginations are so profoundly individualistic that we can only
think of being "for others" through some kind of enormous personal sacrifice,
as if it were something other than the way to our fullest self-realization, as
the great saints of our times tell us.
Catholics call it solidarity, rooted in the doctrine of the Mystical Body of
Christ. "Communion with the divine," for Joe Lawrence "the ultimate purpose of
education," is another way of describing our communion with one another. The
church is Christ in history; its members constitute His living presence, all
the time, and not just when they are in church. And they do so as sacrament,
signifying, and in some mysterious way already embodying, God's intention for
everybody: unity with one another in the very life of the living God, which is
love. Catholic, Jesuit and liberal arts education converge at that point, do
they not? Unity of all in truth, in justice, in freedom, ultimately in love,
are aspirations which take on empirical force under the mushroom clouds and imaginative
power with earthscape: we are, for
all our diversity, one.
In the reality of ever expanding interdependence is embedded the hope of a single
human family. That aspiration, Pope John Paul II once told an audience of intellectuals,
is no longer a "vain ideal" but a "moral imperative" and "a sacred duty." In
this setting, the implicit individualism of knowledge for its own sake, set off
against a trivialized understanding of social justice, would represent for Holy
Cross a step backward. Together we can
do better than that. Joe Lawrence's passion for humane learning, together with
a more realistic assessment of the liberal arts, and of the world around us,
all enriched by the resources of our Jesuit and Catholic traditions, points us
toward a more responsible, and a more interesting, vision for
Holy Cross.
Professor Lawrence replies:
I welcome
Dave O'Brien's comments and feel honored to be
taken seriously by someone I so respect. I concede, moreover,
that on a very basic level, he is absolutely right. What
I affirmed in my article is the need for renewing the highest
philosophical and spiritual aspirations of the liberal arts.
As Dave reminds us, such renewal must not impede serious
empirical scrutiny of all of the harsh realities of the historical
order. Philosophers have often been faulted for letting their
enthusiasm for reality "in itself" cloud their understanding
of the real world we inhabit. The "come down to earth" gesture
is a healthy one. The search for truth is nonsense if what
motivates it is flight from reality. To that degree, I can
easily make Dave's conclusion my own: a philosophical vision
of the liberal arts requires a proper ground in empirical
investigation that does not shy away from the painful aspects
of experience.
Even so, I believe
that Dave and I have a real and very serious disagreement
that should be
aired, particularly
insofar as it has consequences for the direction
the College should take.
After quoting my remark that "communion with the divine.is the ultimate purpose
of education," Dave introduces his own view that such communion is just "another
way of describing our communion with one another." I emphatically reject
this reduction of God to humanity (and of religion to humanism).
My primary objection is philosophical. The reason I refuse simply to collapse
the command "love God" into the command "love thy neighbor" is because I am
aware that humanity as a whole created itself just as little as I created myself.
When we say "God," we are speaking above all else of the difference between
the creator and the creature. Communion with God as creator-as what essentially
towers above us-opens up the possibility of transcendence.
Transcendence means above all self-transcendence. This does not mean running
away from the world, but transforming our relationship to it. Nowhere is this
clearer than in the sphere of morality, which seems to be the center of Dave's
concern. Morality demands self-sacrifice. As Plato argued in the Republic,
self-sacrifice is possible only when we come to the realization that
while we can belong to the abiding Good, it can never belong to us.
Even as it
offers itself to us in an act of participation and communion that grounds
our being,
it withholds itself from us. We are moral when we learn to love the
Good more than we love ourselves.
The denial of transcendence is the denial that we have anything beyond this
life and this world to aspire toward. Where I see religion and philosophy coming
together is in the attempt to establish a relationship to the "beyond." What
Plato said of philosophy can also be said of religion: above everything else
it is "practicing for death." Now as a father of two young daughters I find
myself in full agreement with Dave when he suggests that love of particular
people is powerful enough that it can lead us to put our life on the line.
Even so, I still believe that there are compelling reasons for distinguishing
between the love of God and the love of other human beings. Perhaps the most
compelling of these reasons is that without the love of God, as the love
of something that transcends even death, we will not be able to come to terms
with the horrible things that can happen to those we love. To come to terms
with suffering and death we have to understand their redemptive capacity.
If we relate only to human beings and not to a God who is separable from them,
the only way we will be able to respond to suffering will be by seeking to eradicate
it entirely. This is what yields the great project of modernity, the effort to
establish a perfectly rational social system, even at the cost of human freedom.
We forget, however, that if history teaches us anything, it teaches us that the
goal of perfect social justice will never be realized. Eyes closed to the possibility
of transcendence, we find ourselves in a profoundly paradoxical situation. Having
made the world itself our project, we are generously rewarded by signs of progress.
But because that progress is not directed towards a coherent and realizable goal,
we find that it is accompanied by a steady descent into emptiness and despair.
Uprooting
suffering, we merely replace it with suffering of a different order.
I
agree with Dave that the unity of truth, love and justice is God's intention
for everybody, and that the heaven of that unity is the right goal for all
human action. At the same time, I believe that wisdom involves the realization
that,
as long as we are bound to this earth, our goals not only will be frustrated,
but very often should be frustrated. It is through our failures that
we are held open to transcendence, a relationship to a God who can be glimpsed
only
in humility.
If the purpose of a philosophically grounded education is to make us happy, it
must be clearly understood that it is a happiness that is limited and human.
There is no need to evoke the specter of the blissfully naive philosopher who
looks down in "irony" and "bemused detachment" at the travails of suffering humanity,
for the philosophical commitment to truth is nothing other than the greatest
possible openness to reality. When I referred in my article
to a "standpoint that is free," I was not talking about an Archimedean standpoint
outside of history as such. Instead, I was talking about a spiritual perspective
that has its home in religion and high culture. While it goes beyond the struggle
for power, it does not go beyond history. Indeed, it is nothing other than
history affirmed and fully unfolded. To assert that cultured humanity attains
a kind
of freedom is not to engage in an act of rhetorical embellishment, for what
is meant can be precisely stated. In their spiritual lives (where they have
something
beyond themselves to live for), human beings are able to break out of the obsession
with power (the infernal need to control everything) that defines the political
and
economic orders.
The key to this breakthrough shows itself most clearly in the relationship to
human suffering. The great works of high culture (art, music, literature and
philosophy) are characterized by a spirit that is humane and compassionate yet
at the same time unabashedly celebratory. What they celebrate is the disclosure
of the heroic, humanity's astonishing ability to endure suffering in patience
and dignity. It is this ability that I call happiness.
There is much suffering in our world that is simply inhuman. We undoubtedly do
the right thing when we try to alleviate it. At the same time, there is far more
suffering in the world that is rendered human by the feat of ordinary human beings
who endure it in faith and noble tranquility. Instead of peering down at such
suffering in bemused detachment, the great works of human culture unveil it as
culture's own ground and condition. This is what inspires real hope for humanity:
the recognition that suffering, by giving rise to works of lasting beauty,
can be redeemed.
To be educated through these works is to be brought out of our selves, to be
delivered of the temptation to absolutize our own finite perspectives. I can
think of no better example of this than the way we relate to the poor and dispossessed
of the earth. To be locked within our own perspective is to make the patronizing
assumption that those who are downtrodden require nothing more than to become
more like "us." A mark of education may be the realization that we ourselves
should be the ones learning from them.
The only "wealth" that ultimately matters is spiritual strength. And spiritual
strength is never a given. It is a product of freedom, explicitly realized
only where it has been sorely tested.
If we are to acknowledge the harsh reality of poverty,
we might begin by acknowledging our own poverty. Homelessness is as much about
suburban mobility and media addiction
as it is about living on the street. If we cannot see that, if we cannot see
our own poverty and need, then we cannot be educated.
It is wisdom we need. But wisdom, it should now be apparent, has its root in
compassion. For this very reason, English country gentlemen are not our best
models for understanding leisured reflection. P.G. Wodehouse cannot be our guide
here, regardless of how appealing we may find his image of comic and generally
intoxicated "philosophers" who play out their lives on the golf course. Aristotle
warned against that kind of thing. The philosopher, he insisted, must use his
moments of leisure not for idle amusements, but
for the serious work of contemplation.
To
speak of contemplation as "work" is consistent with Aristotle's statement that
it constitutes the highest form of action. But what kind of work has leisure
as its condition? What kind of action is contemplation? Aristotle answers these
questions by appealing to the "Divine." While we human beings are obsessed
with how much we need to change things, God seems astonishingly (and scandalously)
content with things as they are. His is a state of profound rest. He even allows
evil to be. Nevertheless, he is far from being a slouch. The proof that he
does
in fact work is the existence of the universe. Nothing
finite makes itself.
Aristotle
doesn't take us as far as we need to go here. Apart from some interesting observations
about tragedy, his wisdom is too far removed from its root in compassion. His
metaphysics is too abstract, for it knows nothing of the reality of the Incarnation.
For our alternative to the bemused country
gentleman, we need to go to the Gospels.
An image that I find illuminating had its first formulation in Mark 4:35-41.
It portrays Christ asleep in a boat, even as it is tossed about by a raging
storm. "Do something! Do something!" cry his panicked disciples. Awakening from
his restful slumber, he answers: "Have you no Faith?" He then demonstrates
the power of faith by communicating his peace into the heart of the storm
itself.
I
believe that academics on both sides of the interminable "action versus
contemplation" debate have something to learn from the parable. The contemplative
who seeks peace of mind must understand that what he is seeking is what everyone
needs. The peace of the Lord is not only what allows him to sleep as the storm
rages, but it is also the strength that can pacify the storm and deliver others
from their fears.
With
regard to Dave's remarks, we must understand how radically opposed are "knowledge
for its own sake" and "knowledge for my sake." The peace granted through
real knowledge is a communicable peace, precisely because it has its center in
reality itself, not in "me." Contemplation must lead one more deeply into reality,
not more deeply into one's separate ego.
But the activist too has something to learn.
The only guard we have against that deeply rooted utilitarian
presumption
which denigrates human existence by making it a means rather
than an end is the realization that our ultimate goal is
in fact knowledge for its own sake. What that knowledge is,
I believe, is the intuitive understanding that the heart
of God (the center of reality itself) is indeed fully at
rest. Even as his panicked children create havoc for themselves
in their desperate attempts to "fix things," the Lord remains
asleep in the boat. And when he awakens, he refuses to take
up the cry "do something." Instead, he simply says: "relax." What
needs to be done only gets done in faith. This statement
has, moreover, its correlate: what is not done in faith,
will end up causing more harm than good. All of the tyrants
of the world have been activists bent on doing rather than
understanding. Rather than minding their own business and
letting things alone, they have tried to control the world
around them. One has to beware lest the struggle against
evil become complicity in evil.
This
takes me to Dave's second objection to what I have written. He believes that
I failed to take seriously the Jesuit commitment to "faith and justice" issues.
Indeed, he even alludes to my "dismissal of justice." Part of my response to
this remarkable reading is to echo what I said above. The "standpoint that is
free" is never detached from history as such. Philosophers too must suffer. They
too must experience hurt and outrage at the tremendous evil that has been loosened
upon our world. In other words, they too must
yearn for justice.
At the same time, their real commitment is indeed to wisdom. It is the wisdom
of Christ asleep in the boat, a wisdom that has another name: faith. In
the "faith and justice" pairing, it is faith that comes first. Those who reduce
the slogan to the political pursuit of social justice need to remember that.
Seeking justice out of faith is profoundly different from seeking it out of fear.
The difference shows itself nowhere so poignantly as in
the hard word: "Resist not evil" (Matthew 5:39). It is hard, because it is so
human to want to lash out at whatever hurts us. At the same time, it is a profoundly
reassuring word for beings like ourselves who must one
day die-and in the midst of a world where evil will continue to hold sway.
This
brings me to what I regard as Dave's most serious misunderstanding of my article.
I introduced Dostoevsky's critique of the Jesuits, not because I embrace it as
critique, but because I wanted to indicate the danger of severing justice from
its ground in faith.
Dave
assumes that Dostoevsky's concern was simply with the way Jesuits of old allied
themselves too closely with the prevailing secular powers. On this assumption,
contemporary Jesuits who support revolutionary causes appear to escape the force
of the critique.
Not so. The danger Dostoevsky had in mind was not that
religion might reconcile itself with injustice by becoming entangled in secular
power. Instead, the danger
he warned against was that religion might become so blinded by the need for achieving
justice that it would turn to power as a substitute for faith in God. In the
story, the Grand Inquisitor accuses Jesus of having ignored the harsh realities
of existence when he refused the temptations of Satan in the desert. He claims,
in other words, that Jesus should have seized upon the power offered him, above
all, the power to transform the stones of the desert into bread and the power
to rule over all nations.
By
replying that "man does not live by bread alone," Jesus affirmed a spirituality
that goes beyond the reach of most human beings (the Inquisitor dismisses it
as being "elitist"). By refusing to rule over all nations, Jesus let slip away
the opportunity for politically securing world peace.
Dostoevsky's point was not to disparage the pursuit of social justice and world
peace, but to show that the requirement of spiritual freedom is that these goals
cannot be attained. God towers above us. His will is an inscrutable will. His
goodness transcends any good that we can achieve. The Incarnation takes none
of this away. Christ refused the temptation of power. While he did indeed reveal
the possibility of fully actualized goodness, he did so in a way that must frustrate
the political utopian: he sacrificed himself. His mission accomplished, he left
us and ascended into a realm that transcends our understanding. His ascent, moreover,
was the condition for the coming of the Spirit. To be alive in the Spirit we
must endure the absence of
our heart's desire.
Dave and I clearly agree that there is room in the academy for pursuing both
wisdom and justice. Our disagreement is about priorities. My own hope is a simple
one. I believe that, even in an age like our own in which business and technology
flourish, while culture languishes, the academy should remain a place where spiritual
and intellectual concerns override practical concerns. I know that the world
itself will never follow suit. But does that matter? Let the world go the way
of the world. We, on the other hand, should strive to maintain the academy as
an island of peace and leisured reflection even within (and especially within)
the frenzied "busyness" of the contemporary world. If ever there is panic on
the boat, the world will discover the value of remaining calm. The key to such
calm is the fullest possible awareness
of "harsh reality," not its denial. But for awareness to remain focused, it has
to go beyond the ravages of time. It has to orient itself, in faith, to the possibility
that savagery may very well end where history itself comes to an end. The beyond,
for all we know, could be filled with holy light. Indeed, if we could just swallow
our pride long enough to turn our attention back to the most sublime works of
human culture, we might even encounter evidence that the wondrous possibility
is in fact reality and
truth.
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