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    Voegelin the Revolutionary

    by

    Review of Ellis Sandoz: The Voegelinian Revolution: A Biographical Introduction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

    Original version published October 1982 in Chronicles of Culture.
    Republished with permission.

     

    Eric Voegelin ranks among the major thinkers of the aftermath of the Second World War who are usually classified as `conservative.’ Ellis Sandoz regards him as a revolutionary. Why so?

    Voegelin endured the Weimar Republic and escaped Nazi Germany, becoming a refugee scholar in America. Understandably, he makes much of constitutionalism, insisting that a constitutional order must rule—really rule—in practice as well as on paper, or it may fall to one who will rule without constitutional restraint. He also appreciates that a statesman cannot simply rule ‘by the book,’ treating a constitution like a collection of recipes. Within the restrains imposed by the constitution, the statesman must act, thoughtfully. Voegelin considers practical wisdom or prudence “a compact type of rationality” necessary to any sound political action. By “compact” he means non-discursive, concentrated, reasoning that can make sensible judgments `on the spot’—that is, within a political community, with no thought of radically transforming that community. Hence his appeal to conservatives.

    Prudential reasoning links action within the restraints of a man-made constitution to the restraints imposed by God and nature. In discussing Solon, Voegelin observes that while a statesman must share “the passions of the people” in order to make himself politically acceptable, he can only act with authority for them if “in his soul these passions have] submitted to the universal order” apprehended by reason and/or by faith. Voegelin criticizes those who would simply override ordinary passions. In the fourth volume of Order and History, he observes: “The counsels of the Sermon [on the Mount] originate in the spirit of eschatological heroism. If they were followed by the Christian layman to the letter among men as they are, they would be suicidal…. Since the Sermon is unbearable in its purity, the Church infuses as much of its substance as men are capable of absorbing while living in the world; the mediation of the stark reality of Jesus to the level of human expediency, with minimum loss of substance, is one of the functions of the Church.” He applauds this “Pauline, ecclesiastic compromise with the frailty of man.” God’s revelation serves as a standard—immutable but also unreachable in any thoroughgoing and consistent way; God’s regime as manifested on earth, with its institutions invented in part by human beings, mediates between God and His creatures, providing an institutional framework for prudential rule of the passions. Because it is prudent, such rule will allow for those passions, not attempt to obliterate them.

    Despite the founding of the Church, the Christian Fathers failed to arrange a sufficient number of prudent compromises. They “did not understand that Christianity could supersede polytheism but not abolish the need of a civil theology.” In addition, the Fathers inclined toward a potentially dangerous apocalyticism: “The Pauline myth of the struggle among the cosmic forces validity expresses the telos of the movement that is experienced in reality, but it becomes invalid when it is used to anticipate the concrete process of transfiguration in history. Although in some respects “deeper” than classical philosophy, Christianity is also more dangerous, as “it tempts the pneumatic visionaries into the deformation of expecting the transfiguration of reality in the near future thereby proclaiming the end of history at the epense of the balance of consciousness.” The early Christians’ failure to stay within the bounds of reality on both of these counts left politics vulnerable to those who would give the people a political belief system that refers not to divinity but to the passions. Voegelin calls this system by its first post-Christian name: “Gnosticism.”

    “Gnostics,” Voegelin writes, “will not leave the transfiguration of the world to the grace of God beyond history but will do the work of God himself, right here and now, in history.” Gnostics would replace the “theophanic” world of Athens and Jerusalem with an “egophanic” world. Voegelin sees the heirs of this doctrine as the dominant voices in modern ideological-political life. Ellis Sandoz, who persuaded Voegelin to record a valuable memoir for use in this book, quotes him referring to Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach as “probably the best world-fetish ever constructed by a man who wanted to be God.” Under the auspices of Gnosticism, every major new book becomes, as Voegelin puts it, a “Koran”; it supersedes all previous books and tolerates no criticism of itself. This approach replaces “the oldest wisdom of mankind concerning the rhythm of growth and decay which is the fate of all things under the son” with a “dream world”—”the non-recognition of reality as a matter of principle.” For individuals and for politics this brings on a fit of “moral insanity.”

    Such attempts to change human nature fail. But they often succeed in inoculating their advocates against the discovery of that failure by accepting “the non-recognition of reality as a matter of principle,” as Voegelin writes in The New Science of Politics. (In his earlier, brilliant book on Dostoevsky, Political Apocalypse Sandoz quotes Marx as insisting that questions about God must simply be repressed, an insistence that prefigures the enforced forgetfulness dear to Marx’s literal-minded `totalitarian’ disciples). Non-recognition of reality begets “moral insanity,” a comprehensive ignorance that imagines itself to be a full gnosis, or knowledge of all of History’s “laws.” Human consciousness, Voegelin observes, is a given; however we may try to account for it, we unquestionably “have” it. Our consciousness experiences the other, things and relations that at least apparently exist “outside” of ourselves. this, again, is a given, however philosophers may try to explain it away. Although empiricists and some “idealists” try to explain consciousness by referring to “subjects” and “objects,” Voegelin insists that the only genuinely empirical experience we have refers primarily to the consciousness of the other as a genuine other, not as a mere “mental construct.”

    What may seem a purely theoretical and even narrowly epistemological concern actually has political implications for the contemporary world. Modern politics—Voegelin calls it “Gnostic” politics—depends on precisely the sort of epistemology that splits “subject” and “object” so that one can conquer the other. In the modern West, all “values” are said to be “subjective,” in spite of traditional claims for ethical principles rooted in human nature. The modern mind has cut itself adrift from what Voegelin calls “the ground”—from being or reality itself. In the modern East, Lenin teaches (in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism) that the “objective” material world colonizes the “subjective” consciousness. Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot carried this “objectivist” conquest of the other to its insane extreme. “When a person refuses to live in existential tension toward the ground, or if he rebels against the ground, refusing to participate in reality and in this way to experience his own reality as man, it is not the `world’ that is thereby changed but rather he who loses contact with reality and in his own person suffers a loss of reality. Since that does not make him cease to be a man, and since his consciousness continues to function within the form of reality, he will generate ersatz images of reality”—utopian visions—”in order to obtain order and direction for his existence and action in the world.” These images are usually drawn from the passions or the “Ego.” Utopianism, which appears to be a vision of a new society, in fact spins out of nothing more than solipsism. Violence necessarily ensues when reality refuses to cooperate with the solipsist’s illusion. Astutely, Voegelin cites Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror as an example of this—a lethal injection into the life of the mind.

    But, as Voegelin insists, “consciousness is always consciousness of something.” By insisting on consciousness of the other as a given, as irreducible to “subjectivity” or “objectivity,” Voegelin would cure modernity’s radical mental imbalance, restoring the balance between matter and form, process and structure. He calls this rebalanced condition of human consciousness “metaxy.” This balance restores the sense of divine hierarchy, one that is dynamic rather than static. A difficulty arises here because form, process, and structure, in Voegelin’s arrangement, are not material, whereas matter obviously is. He suggests that matter “issues” from the divine, and admits the mystery of that. Mystery allows him to meld reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem. According to Sandoz, “Faith in the reason of the Whole is… the foundation of all philosophizing.” This leaves Voegelin in a bind. If he were to give matter its due by not only observing that it turns into something else, namely energy, under certain conditions, but then (for that very reason) linked matter to his non-material (but not immaterial, or ghostly) divinity, he might fall into just the sort of world-immanent eschatology he justifiably detests.

    In his book Anamnesis (which means “not-forgetting,” and itself recalls an activity of the soul described by Socrates in Plato’s Phaedrus) Voegelin remembers that his favorite childhood schoolbook was called The Book of Realities. “The realities of nature that were to be found in this book I do not remember; but history is still firmly retained.” This interest in history is one of Voegelin’s characteristic signatures, and it misleads those who do not read him carefully. The classical philosophers considered man a rational and political animal; “the genius of the Hellenic philosophers discovered reason as the source of order in the psyche of man.”  Voegelin adds “historical” to “rational and political” in order to emphasize that history remains one matter we surely do not know in full. Voegelin esteems the Socratic insistence that the philosopher knows that he does not know, that this is philosophic wisdom. Socratic philosophy does ascend from the cave, Socrates’ image of the conventions and opinions of the political community in which the philosopher philosophizes. But there is no “vantage point outside of existence” itself.  Socratic perception of the ideas, the forms, the philosophic noesis, must not be allowed to rigidify into doctrine because mere knowledge of doctrine would make the philosophic longing for wisdom dissolve into a complacent mistaking of doctrine—which must always be an approximation of the vastness of being, seem like a comprehensive account of being.  In parallel to the Christian Church Fathers, the Greek philosophers left their enterprise open to the danger “that the new truth about the poles [of participation] turns into propositions about a reality supposedly independent of the perspective of noetic experience.” But this led to a loss of the actual experience of noesis itself, a forgetting of the “metaxy.”

    Much of the confusion in understanding Voegelin’s use of the term `history’ derives from a failure to see that by `history’ Voegelin does not mean a course of events determined by a set of knowable laws of motion, as seen in the writings of Hegel and Marx. That is rather the project of historicism: an attempt to derive a dogmatic teaching from history. But if history consists of our experiences of the metaxy itself, our participation in the in-between-ness of the human condition, then historicist doctrines are only the latest and most lethal versions of Gnosticism. `Gnosticism’ literally means `knowing-ism; Gnostics are know-it-alls, but philosophers are wonderers. Far from claiming, with Hegel, that in his thought the philosophic quest has ended and the wisdom  philosophers love has now been attained, Voegelin seeks to recover the groundedness of the human mind in the original delight in noesis, whether it be understood as a revelation of God or as an insight into nature—revelations and insights always understood as limited by our own decidedly un-godlike particularity. Hegel and the other historicists are therefore a-historical; they reject the limits of human nature (“constant in spite of its unfolding”). But “if man exists in the metaxy, in the tension `between god and man,’ any construction of man as a world-immanent entity will desroy the meaning of existence, becaue it deprives man of his specific humanity.” “The substance of history,” Voegelin writes in The New Science of Politics, “consists in the experiences in which man gains the understanding of his humanity and together with it the understanding of its limits.”

    One of those limits is the incapacity to go forward into a future in which human nature has achieved self-transfiguration by means of radical economic, political, and social reform. Another of those limits is the incapacity to return to the economic, political, and social reforms that prevailed in the past—the ancient polis, the medieval estate; in Voegelin’s language, we cannot return to “a former concreteness.” And this is a good thing, inasmuch as Judaism, Christianity, and classical philosophy all succeeded in de-divinizing the world—the religions by worshipping a holy—that is to say—Creator-God, the philosophers by discovering nature as distinguished from the gods. This is why “Jews and Christians [and, it might be added, philosophers] have a disconcerting habit of outlasting the rise and fall of political powers.” To them, neither the rise nor the fall of a political power necessarily indicates God’s approval or disapproval of that power, unless God chooses to reveal this to one of His prophets. The Bible carefully differentiates God and His commands from Man or Adam, and both from the covenant to which each consents. Notably, Voegelin regards the Bible stories themselves as part of a myth pointing to the truth, not as literal truth. “At its core human nature… is the openness of the questioning knowledge and the knowing question about the ground”—about the foundation of being or reality. “Through this openness, beyond all contents, images, and models [of it], order flows from the ground of being into man’s being.”

    By contending that `History’ consists of a set of knowable, deterministic forces aiming at a knowable purpose or `end of History,’ historicist thinkers (in imagination if not in reality) re-divinize the course of events and nature—advocating a new version of the old conception of the divine as immanent in all things. But Hegel’s absolute (as distinct from the Bible’s holy) spirit assumes that man is the leading edge of divinity itself. In Hegel, “the metaxy has been transmuted into immanence,” both with regard to philosophy and Biblical revelation. “In a clean sweep he transfers the authority of both reason and revelation to his system and to himself as its creator.” Voegelin regards this as the delusion of a self-divinizing spirit, and therefore the ruin of the genuinely human, metaxic spirit—an “egophanic revolt against theophanic reality,” and thus an act of Pharaohanic or (more appositely in Hegel’s case) Napoleonic “intellectual imperialism.” “The death of the spirit is the price of progress.” far from progress, this really amounts to “a throwback from differentiation”—from the de-divinization of the world via the distinction between divine Creator and his Creation—”into the pre-historic compactness of the myth”—”compact” in the sense that it takes all reality to be of one piece, and a divine piece at that. Politically, this means that Pharaoh is a god or, in modernity, that Mao embodies the leading edge of historical progress. What is needed is not a fantasized progress toward an unattainable utopia but a recovery of human beings common sense, especially its sense of its own limits. Sandoz identifies this such human participation within the whole of being as “the pivotal conception” in Voegelin’s thought. Participation means thought and action conscious of “the reality of being in contact with reality outside myself.” Voegelin intends his monumental four-volume Order and History as a history of philosophy in opposition to the `philosophy of history’ or historicism.

    Voegelin’s not-forgetting of history (which, as he conceives it, is not a succession of external events but “the unfolding of the typical in meaningful concreteness,” an aspect of the metaxy) and his forgetting of material nature (relegated to the status of the mysterious basis, but not the form, process, or structure, of life) allows him to do to the “Gnostics” what the “Gnostics” try to do to him: silent questioning. Silence can be discreet or crude. “Gnostic” silence, which usually results in totalitarianism on one extreme or libertinism on the other, deserves classification as a crude silence. Voegelin’s silence, conceived in resistance to “Gnosticism,” deserves the esteem we feel for refinement. Whereas crudeness teaches us only about itself, refinement can teach us about itself and about matters beyond it. The education Voegelin offers excels modern education even when it ends in the silence of unresolved paradox. Or perhaps because it does: Voegelin may deliberately leave his readers with something to think about, on their own.

    All of this illuminates Ellis Sandoz’s description of Voegelin’s thought as revolutionary. Voegelin, he remarks, presents “a new language of philosophical discourse.” He does so in order to `revolve’ modern minds back to the original experiences of human thoughtfulness, to recover “commonsense experience” from the solipsistic and often dangerous dream world of Gnosticism. By seeking to understand human events and thoughts through “the self-understanding of the persons involved,” Voegelin searches “the trail of symbolisms in history as the chief means of recovering the engendering experiences which have given rise to them,” never forgetting—always mindful—that “truth lies at the level of experience, not of the symbols.” The “symbols” or thought-structures of thinkers, taken in isolation, will cover over the noetic perception that they are meant to express. What we must never forget, Voegelin argues, is that “the experience of the transcendence of consciousness” antecedes any systematic reflection upon that experience; anamnesis recalls the “experience of the transcendence of consciousness” from which philosophic reflection issues. This is why, for example, Aristotle describes natural justice as valid everywhere but also changeable; the insight is permanently true but the prudential instantiation of justice in the real world must change with the changing circumstances of life.  This is also why Voegelin begins his book by saying that he does not write a definitive commentary on Voegelin’s doctrines but rather as what he has been “for many years, Eric Voegelin’s student and friend.” If you want to philosophize, don’t memorize a philosopher’s doctrines. Befriend a philosopher.

    Buber’s Anti-utopian Utopianism

    by

    Review of Maurice Friedmann: Martin Buber’s Life and Work. Volume I. The Early Years: 1878-1923. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1982.

    Earlier version published in Chronicles of Culture, October 1982.
    Republished with permission.

     

    Education defines political life more fully than brute power does. Admit that “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can.” The real questions remain: Which gods? Which men? Ruling for what purpose? The kind of education they propose for their regime will tell us.

    Education reveals purpose not only in subject matter and in doctrine but also in the tension between teacher and student. In tyrannies this tension consists mostly of fear; in democracies, it often consists of egoism and un-platonic eros; the best regime would encourage the loving tension between a genuine teacher and a genuine student. And the genuine teacher, remaining also a genuine student, will feel this tension within himself, too.

    Martin Buber seeks knowledge of a personal sort, and he seeks to impart it–or, more accurately, to inspire his readers to seek it. “Going forth” to seek the truth is “unteachable in the sense of prescriptions” although he quickly goes on to prescribe the giving-up of the “false drive for self-affirmation” as a preliminary to this quest. The celebrated and succinct way he puts this is to celebrate the “I-Thou” relationship, not the “I-It” relationship. He regards the impersonal, “I-It” relationship as foundational to the corrupt and lethal utopias that had arisen a century before his birth and flourished virally in his own century. In Paths in Utopia, Buber observes that the decline of religion, the traditional frame of education, did not eliminate dreams of paradise: “the whole force of dispossessed eschatology was converted into utopia at the time of the French revolution,” a utopia Marxists tried to win by conquest–by treating their enemies as things, not as persons. Thus education, religion, and politics each reveals the same problem in a different way. The problem of subject and object confronts teachers and students, gods and men, rulers and ruled, would-be conquerors and supposed slaves.

    Maurice Friedmann narrates Buber’s life and work leading to the publication of his best-known book, I and Thou. Although labeled a mystic, Buber was no such thing; Friedmann shows that Buber never undertook mysticism’s project, transcending the world by uniting with God. He respected but finally rejected Hasidism. Buber regarded this world as the place to encounter God. The “I-Thou” means refusing to regard nature, men, and spirit as objects to be owned or used, which is the “I-It” relation. “I-Thou” means the kind of participation with the other that a sentence cannot state but which lovers know. Buber equally rejects Hegel’s idea of the Absolute Spirit, the dialectical unfolding of freedom conceived as ever-increasing human control over the congealed Absolute Spirit that is matter. Such control is a matter of mastery, not reciprocity. But “we live in the currents of universal reciprocity” and not dominance, not any `overcoming’ by means of conflict followed by synthesis. Unlike Hegel or any non-philosophic pantheist, Buber regards God’s immanence not as a fact but as a task yet to be accomplished and perhaps never to be fully accomplished but always to be striven for. This striving must not be erotic/desiring or thumotic/ambitious but patient, a matter of attentive readiness to enter into relations of reciprocity with others, whether they are fellow humans or any other natural beings.

    In describing this, Friedmann refuses to let us imagine that Buber’s love partook of sentimentality, let alone eroticism. Sentimental love idealizes its object; erotic love desires to possess it. “I-Thou” love thinks and feels with the other, wants the best for it. It is the love translated as `compassion’ in many English-language versions of the Bible: agape in the Greek, Chesed in Hebrew. Love is not a feeling but a cosmic force, “a responsibility of an I for a Thou.” To be animated by that love inoculated Buber from certain temptations. Friedmann quotes Buber’s recollection of Lou Salomé, the veteran seductress who claimed numerous intellectuals: “Every man fell in love with her, but I didn’t.” If every man does something but I do not, does this make me more than a man? Or less? Buber sanely, wisely, understood the limits of “I-Thou” love as well as its strength: “even love cannot persist in direct relation: it endures but only in the alternation of actuality and latency.” God sustains this love steadily, but Buber never made that claim for himself.

    Despite his intellectual prowess, Buber ruled out the love philosophers know, the love of wisdom. He goes so far as to call intellect a “parasite” of nature, contending that reason’s law, the law of non-contradiction, requires the separation that makes the “I-It” inevitable. As Friedmann puts it, “Plato’s logical categories of the same and the other and Aristotle’s logic of A and not-A can never comprehend the simultaneous reality of distancing and relating, separateness and togetherness, arrows going apart and arrows coming together, concrete situation and free response, which make up the meeting of I and thou.” And to those who would reply that that is what the Socratic dialogue, as a conversation between persons, must be intended to illustrate, Buber would say he admires that dialogue but it remains nonetheless dialectical, a dual of `points of view’ and not “an interaction between persons.” Crucially, he admits that he never experienced Plato’s eros for ideas, any more than he lusted for Miss Salomé. This presents a problem. Without the principle of non-contradiction, no one could distinguish the “I-Thou” from the “I-It.” Buber makes that distinction very clearly, but he may have failed to distinguish between the nature of Platonic eros, which longs for wisdom not merely to possess it but to incorporate it into oneself, to become wiser, indeed to participate in what truly is, and the modern or Machiavellian call to (as we continue to say) grasp reality, to possess, control, manipulate, caress or annihilate it.

    If Buber often sounds as much Christian as Jewish, it is because in a way he was. “From my youth onward,” he wrote, “I have found in Jesus my great brother.” The “communal immediacy” of early Christianity superseded the legalism of the Judaism that Jesus encountered. Buber never flirted with conversion, however, as he considered true Christianity a revival of true Judaism, and never believed Jesus to be divine. To Buber, the “I-Thou” love forms the core of both religions, and I think he is right about that. The real distinction between Buber and the Bible–both Testaments–and Plato is not so much their manner of loving as the beings loved. For Plato the final reality is nature; except for human nature, nature is not a person. Knowledge therefore mostly aims at intimacy with an `It’ or with many`Its,’ not at intimacy with a Person (or, in polytheism, Persons). Human beings, nature in the form of persons, want to know their place within that natural cosmos. Hence the indispensable value of ideas, of abstractions from the concrete manifestations of reality, abstractions that enable us to see the relations among things of a kind, and among the various kinds of things. The Bible reveals that the ultimate reality is a Person. To know the most important `thing’ is not to know a thing, and therefore not to abstract or generalize among things, but to know this Person, with love.

    Friedmann offers a lucid explanation of why Buber expected Biblical love to prevail, why the Word would become flesh in society at large, and not only in the persons of God’s prophets. “Buber’s statement in I and Thou, `In the beginning is the relation,’ is not an alternative to the Johannine `In the beginning was the Word’ but a restoration to it of the biblical dynamic and mutuality of the words as `between.'” By this Friedman means that “the true beginning of relationship is the speech of God which creates the world and addresses man. The world really becomes through God’s word, and the world takes place and becomes real for man in the word. Speech is thus the face-to-face existence of the creatures, and pure creation coincides with pure speaking. That we can Thou is to be understood from the fact that Thou is said to us.” God love us first, Person to person. This is why the Logos of Jerusalem surpasses the logos of Athens, philosophic speech. Buber mistakenly supposes that Socrates wanted his regime-in-speech to come to fruition in practice, but even and perhaps especially if he had seen that Socrates likely intends no such consummation he would prefer God’s kind of speech all the more.

    Intensely private, love translates into the realities of public life only with difficulty. Buber rejected the secular-political Zionism of Theodore Herzl because he thought Herzl wanted to `Americanize’ Palestine, make it into a state that defended rights that were human-all-too-human; Herzl was “a whole man, but not a whole Jew.” Buber wanted the land of Israel to become again the land of Judaism. Buber had the courage to try to the translation of love into politics not only `on paper,’ in his writings, but in political practice.  I and Thou does not ignore economic and political reality: “Man’s will to profit and will to power are natural and legitimate as long as they are tied to the will to human relations and carried by it…. The statesman or businessman who serves the spirit is no dilettante,” as he tries to define the limits of spirit and will “every day anew, according to the right and measure of that day.” This seems to indicate Buber’s interest in what Plato and the other classical philosophers called phronesis, usually translated in English as `prudence,’ although without the connotation of self-serving calculation it has sometimes acquired.

    The thought deserves an example that Buber never gives. But Friedmann steps up to the biographer’s rightful task by supplying one. After World War I, he recounts, Buber resumed the Zionist activities that had involved him (and would continue to involve him) for most of his life. He hoped that Palestinian Jews, practicing the “I-Thou” way of living, could live harmoniously with Palestinian Arabs instead of “turn[ing] them into sworn enemies.” Friedmann sees this as prophetic, for “the situation had not yet polarized… into Zionism and anti-Zionism.”

    Given the characteristics of Islam, one may doubt that this polarity was avoidable. Islam forthrightly assigns the status of subordination, dhimmitude, to non-Muslims. Islamic law builds the “I-It” relation into the Muslim’s soul. (Does this follow from the Islamic emphasis on God-as-will, not God-as-love? It might.) Evidently, Buber’s colleagues also had their doubts. At the Twelfth Zionist Congress in 1921, Buber wrote a resolution calling for Arab-Jewish unity in Palestine. It was amended into innocuousness. Friedmann quotes Buber: “My role as a `politician,’ i.e. as a man who takes part in the political activity of a group was finished…. [H]enceforth I would not start anything where I had to choose between the truth as I saw it and what was actually being achieved.” That is exactly the choice that statesmen and businessmen make every day. It requires the prudence that Buber seems to esteem but finally cannot practice. In Buber’s defense, it is true that at some point compromise might go too far; withdrawal might be the only decent recourse, as the American founders thought in declaring their independence.

    For Buber, though, withdrawal to what, where? Paths in Utopia ends with praise for the kibbutzim. To what extent could communalists defend themselves against large armies?  Buber evidently formed what Tocqueville would have called a civil-social strategy to achieve communalist self-defense. Rather than approaching the problem of peace politically (as, for example, U. S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson envisioned when he encouraged the proliferation of commercial-republic regimes in the New World), Buber wanted to “deprive the political principle of its supremacy over the social principle” by encouraging “the resolute will of all peoples to cultivate the territories and raw materials of our planet and govern its inhabitants, together.” But of course if the social principle is to achieve “supremacy” over the political principle, the social principle rules, and thus becomes effectively a new political principle. It can do so, Buber surmises, because politics as ordinarily understood consists of putting things in order, but the fundamental order of the cosmos cannot be put in order because it is already orderly. Communalism would (so to speak) tap into the loving order of reality–align human life with the dynamic and permanent I-Thou. This seems to mean the gradual establishment of kibbutzim under the protective carapaces of actual states, worldwide. And this would require those states to have regimes sympathetic to, or at least very tolerant of, such communes. This difficulty notwithstanding, the “I-Thou” did save Buber from state socialism, the only practicing `communism’ that has actually achieved the status of sovereign rule in the modern world, but which yields community only by uniting workers against the self-described `workers’ state.’ Among socialists, Buber’s sober and decent view can only serve the cause of sanity, if not prudence. And among socialists, sanity must always be a cause, the object of longing, for it is surely not a given.

    America’s Founding “On Two Wings”

    by

    Review
    Michael Novak: On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2001.
    Originally published in The Washington Times, January 30, 2002.

     

    In arguing for a renewed recognition of the religious dimension of the American founding, the eminent Catholic scholar Michael Novak navigates a rocky coastline, Although the Founders explicitly and repeatedly refer to Nature’s God, our Creator, and divine Providence, readers of their correspondence know that some of them defined `God,’ `Creator,’ and `Providence’ in decidedly heterodox ways. Many of the founders unquestionably remained faithful to Christian teachings–the Reverend John Witherspoon of New Jersey and the philanthropist John Jay of New York being among the finest examples. But Thomas Jefferson privately denied the divinity of Christ and defended materialism, and the logic of Benjamin Franklin’s portrait of the great preacher George Whitefield inclines toward blasphemy.

    Even if one argues, as Novak does, that the orthodox outnumbered the heterodox, probably among the Founders and surely among the people they represented, how should one understand this, especially today? If the founding was a Christian event simply, does that not leave Jewish, Moslem, and other non- and un-Christian Americans on the outside looking in, at odds with their own country? In redeeming the founders’ Christianity do we undermine their authority among too many Americans now?

    Fortunately, Novak proves a skillful pilot. His carefully-drawn navigational chart features two coordinates one religious and one philosophic. Together, they guide us home.

    The first coordinate consists of a spirited but never overly sectarian religious polemic, determining biblical points obscured by secularist weather. For example, Novak rightly observes that the founders do not simplistically set Biblical revelation against human reason. They knew that Jesus Himself commands His followers to exhibit the prudence of serpents as well as the harmlessness of doves. The Founders’ Enlightenment was not the Enlightenment of Voltaire; it was the Enlightenment of Locke, a man ever at pains not to tread heavily on Christian sensibilities. The spiritedness that spirituality lends to reason gives strength to the quest for liberty, which might otherwise run to anarchy, on one extreme, or curl up in terror at its enemies, on the other. Christian faith honors the marriage bond, providing stable homes for the inculcation of virtues that free men and women will need, given the dangers of living in freedom. Christians hold themselves under the scrutiny of an all-seeing God; insofar as they do, they are likely to behave better than citizens who suppose that they have no stern if forgiving Judge.

    To skeptics who might reply that such a defense of Christianity smells more of utility than piety, Novak has a ready reply. No less a Christian, and no less a mathematician, than Pascal deems faith a prudent wager. What is more supremely useful than the one thing most needful for the salvation of your soul? And where is the impiety of acknowledging such utility?

    This religiouse-polemical coordinate of Novak’s chart, taken by itself, might navigator and crw off course. Novak too easily overlooks the radical, Machiavellian challenge to Christianity embedded in the writings of such modern natural-rights philosophers as Hobbes and Locke, to say nothing of their march-of-history descendant-critics, Hegel and Marx, who do not merely secularize Christian providentialism but transform it into a vast and (as it turned out in practice) disastrous attempt to conquer God’s creation and eradicate religion itself. So, to say that the Founders share the biblical understanding that something called `history’ undergoes something called `progress’ entirely misses a simple fact: neither the Bible nor the Founders speak of `history’ as an ontological object. The Declaration of Independence speaks of “the course of human events,” not `history.’ For the Founders, history remains what it was for Aristotle: a literary genre, distinguished from poetry (for example). History is not a process moving inexorably toward the realization of Utopia–an illusion prepared by Machiavelli’s tempting suggestion that one might conquer Fortune. If it were, Leninist fanaticism would have taken firmer hold here, and Washingtonian common sense would have disappeared long ago.

    Other examples of religious-polemical overstretch may be seen in such claims that “the very form of the Declaration was that of a that of a traditional prayer” (rather more a logical syllogism and a legal indictment, actually); that faith better than reason fortifies us in performing those acts of virtue no one else can see (that depends upon the nature of the soul performing the acts); that Alexander Hamilton’s refutation of the materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes implies or requires a Christian understanding of natural right (several non-materialist philosophical doctrines will do). The worst of these distortions comes in the charge that pre-Christian philosophers saw no foundation for equality in nature, that previous human thought on natural right justified conquest and slavery. A careful reading of Aristotle’s teachings on slavery and just war belies this claim, and the philosopher’s understanding of political life as reciprocal ruling and being-ruled contradicts it as well. The Founders could find equality and hierarchy in nature, rationally, even as the ancient philosophers had done.

    Novak’s second navigational coordinate corrects such excesses of zeal. The philosophic dimension of his study refines and redefines the meaning of faith. “I am using `faith’ for all propositions about God,” he writes, “even those that in earlier times would have been reached by pre-Christian `pagan’ philosophers who wrote of God.” That is, Novak intends to recover for reason the terrain philosophers imprudently ceded when they cut themselves off theoretically from metaphysics and practically from the commonsense reasoning of classical ethics and political science. The dogmatic atheism of the continental Enlightenment and of German historicism left their proponents stranded on the shoals of tyrannical fanaticism–from Robespierre to Pol Pot. Novak would reclaim the saner reaches of political reasoning.

    Doing so yields excellent results, two of which speak to a familiar dilemma in contemporary American politics. Our political landscape has been wracked by storms caused by the icy wind of secularism meeting the warmer wind of religiosity. School prayer, church-state separation, abortion, and censorship of pornography all seem matters of insoluble controversy between determine and irrational partisans. Yet, as Novak indicates, the Founders saw their way clear of such perils.

    First, recognizing that no sectarian appeals could persuade many of their fellow Americans (then as now given to diverse religious opinions), Christian statesmen in and out of the pulpit had recourse to that part of the Bible all denominations honored: the Jewish part, the `Old’ Testament, whose eternal newness they acknowledged. “The idiom of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was a religious lingua franca for the founding generation”; one need not agree on, say, the relations among the persons of the Trinity to revere the virtues of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people, those wise and courageous nation-builders. Then as now, American could offer political participation to all `the peoples of the Book.’

    Second, recognizing that not everyone is a person of the Book, but that unbiblical persons may still bring considerable virtues to public life, the Founders established their new regime “in carefully modulated language, which could be understood by freethinking atheists in one way by `broadminded’ Unitarians such as Jefferson in another, and by devout Presbyterians such as Witherspoon and partially secularized Puritans as John Adams in yet others.” “While the American eagle rises on both wings, some individuals use both wings comfortably, but others feel at home only on the propulsion of one or the other.” One might add that the eagle’s head, which commands both wings and gives them direction, cries out in the accents of the Declaration of Independence, the accents of a reason that encompasses parts of Revelation.

    Natural right, understood as the gift of the Creator-God (however conceived in the privacy of conscience) will be secured by citizens who prudently deliberate with one another about the political institutions and policies they pursue and courageously defend against tyrants who deny and defy natural right. On this point the American Founders can continue to teach us, even as their Constitution, amended, governs us. On this point too, Novak navigates well, so that we can better govern ourselves.