The Long View: American Babylon
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus liked to say the first thing about politics is that is not the first thing. Over the course of his life, Fr. Neuhaus was an active player in American politics, but he always tried to keep it in its proper place:
In this understanding, it is not a matter of "balancing" the other-worldly against the this-worldly, or the this-worldly against the other-worldly. Each world penetrates the other. The present is, so to speak, pregnant with the promised future. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," declares the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Charged as in electrically charged; the present is given new urgency, raised to a new level of intensity, because it is riddled through and through with what is to be.
American Babylon
Notes of a Christian Exile
-----------------------------
By Fr. Richard John Neuhaus
-----------------------------
Basic Books, 2009
270 Pages, US$26.95
ISBN 978-0-465-01367-8
The prophet Jeremiah famously exhorted the Hebrew exiles at Babylon to pray for the good of their city, because its good was their good, while hoping for the day of their return to Jerusalem. (Jeremiah 29:5-7). In this last book completed by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus before his death in early 2009, believers in general and American believers in particular are enjoined to extend even more generosity toward their earthly homeland than Jeremiah recommended. It would be too much to say that American Babylon recapitulates the whole of Fr. Neuhaus’s thought, but it does sum up quite well the major themes that he has been developing these many years in First Things, the monthly journal he published through the Institute on Religion and Public Life. Politically topical issues are discussed in the book, but it is by no means a polemical tract, or even a treatise on political science. It is an exposition of the meaning of politics in the light of eternity.
The spirit of this book, its author informs us, is that the old Roman patriot, Saint Augustine. Augustine hoped even in the fifth century for the recovery of the Roman Empire from what would prove to be its terminal crisis. He acknowledged that it had done considerable good, if not always deliberately, during its history. However, he made clear that the empire, and any terrestrial state of affairs, could never be more than the City of Man. The final loyalty of Christians was to the City of God. That City would become manifest at the Second Coming, at the eschaton, but by no means awaited that event for its foundation. It exists in eternity, and is proleptically present in the Church and in the providential action of God in history. Indeed, the effect of the City of God should not normally be to cause Christians to withdraw from public life, but rather to give their citizenship greater depth:
In this understanding, it is not a matter of "balancing" the other-worldly against the this-worldly, or the this-worldly against the other-worldly. Each world penetrates the other. The present is, so to speak, pregnant with the promised future. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," declares the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Charged as in electrically charged; the present is given new urgency, raised to a new level of intensity, because it is riddled through and through with what is to be.
As the title of the book suggests, the author is particularly concerned with how Americans should conduct civil life in the light of the transcendent. The use of the word "Babylon" in the title is not supposed to suggest any particular American wickedness. The import of the book is rather the opposite: the author assures us that he is an American patriot and is not, as some of his detractors have suggested, a Canadian agent of influence. America more than most countries began with the understanding that it marked a new phase in history. "Novus Ordo Seclorum" says the banner on American currency: America is a "new order of the ages," in some deliberately inchoate sense. The Founding Fathers, as we will see below, did not confuse this beginning with the onset of the eschatological Millennium, but that thought has never been altogether absent from American political culture, and was particularly present in the first decades of the republic. One of the most remarkable things about America, according to the author, is the way it has managed to withdraw from that ultimate chauvinism without falling into nihilism:
In the 1860s, the church of the novus ordo seclorum, was shattered by the bloodiest war in our history, and from that catastrophe emerged the most profound theologian of the civil religion. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, with its troubled reflection on the mysteries of providence, is in some ways worthy of Saint Augustine, except, of course, that it is without Augustine’s Church, and therefore without the communal bearer of the story of the world by which all other stories, including the story of America, are truly told.
The author does not presume to set out for us the story of the world. Toynbee is mentioned a few times, but not in connection with Toynbee’s final surmise that history is really about the development of universal churches, a tale to which politics and even the advancement of science are only background. Be that as it may, the author is clear that, though we must be cautious about identifying providence in history, it is a mistake to deny it altogether:
[Reinhold] Niebuhr is undoubtedly right to say that "history is not its own redeemer." But the biblical view—a view that is utterly formative for Western culture in both its religious and secular expressions—is that history does have a Redeemer, and that Redeemer is, however veiled and sometimes hidden, present and active in history.
The hypothesis of providence in history naturally raises questions about the reality and nature of historical progress. The author says that, in a world whose real story is about the pilgrimage of the Church through secular time to final salvation, progress in some respects is quite possible. Certainly, as John Paul II argued in Fides et Ratio, there is no contradiction between faith and reason, or between religion and the growth scientific knowledge. (Fr. Neuhaus does not venture to say whether progress in a purely secular sense might be necessary as well as possible.) In any case, we are give to understand that progress should not be understood in the sense of historical determinacy, or even as extending to all areas of human experience. The book quotes Benedict XVI’s remarks in the encyclical Spe Salvi (Saved by Hope):
But in the field of ethical awareness and moral decision-making, there is no similar possibility [like that in the physical sciences] of accumulation for the simple reason that man’s freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew...Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions every person and every generation is a new beginning.
But if we can talk about macrohistorical trends of some sort, then which such trends exist in the world today, and which is most important? The author suggests:
A strong candidate for the best answer would be that the most important single thing happening today is the desecularization of the world.
Modern atheism is instructive in various ways, even if it is a perhaps an ephemeral feature of the less vibrant regions of the West. There is a kind of atheism that can be compared to the Dark Night of the Soul, that does not abandon an intuition of the good even in the face of an intellectually serious conviction that the universe is wholly indifferent to it. Most forms of atheism, however, are not this honest; or indeed, this smart. The implosion of American mainline Protestantism may be a cautionary example of what happens when religion misunderstands the ways in which it must seek to engage with its historical environment:
Modern atheism is in many instances the product not so much of antireligion as of religion’s replacement of the God of Abraham with the god of the philosophers, and the subsequent rejection of that ersatz god by other philosophers.
For myself, I would suggest that we should not be too iconoclastic about the models of God given us by the philosophers. As C.S. Lewis observed, every man is an idolater if taken at his word. However, it does seem to be the case that modernizing forms of Christianity have tended to confuse their intellectual icons with what the icons are supposed to represent. This was particularly regrettable, because the icons were designed to omit precisely those features that are distinctive of Christianity:
Absent our sin and God’s judgment and redemption, it is not surprising that people came to dismiss the idea of God, not because it is implausible but because it is superfluous and, yes, boring.
This ill-advised policy of trying to make Christianity small enough to fit into contemporary intellectual fashion was not confined to the 19th century. It was still going strong late in the 20th century:
There is indeed irony in the fact that some who think of themselves as theists eagerly embrace deconstruction’s operative atheism. The reason for this is that among other things that deconstruction deconstructs is an older form of Enlightenment rationalism that excluded religion from the company of rational discourse...[T]here is [an] atheism of putative theists who peddle religious truth claims that are true for you, if you find it useful to believe them true.
* * *
Fr. Neuhaus has a great deal to say about the metaphysical assumptions of the Founding Fathers of America; and, by implication, about the insistences of American political culture:
In the language of philosophical discourse, the founders were "moral realists," which is to say that they assumed the reality of a good not of their own construction. This is amply demonstrated from many sources, not least the Declaration and the Constitution, and especially the Preamble of the latter.
The question the Founders sought to answer was Aristotle’s formulation of the essence of politics: "How ought we to order our life together?" Any serious answer to this question must have deep philosophical roots, but the question is fundamentally practical. If addressed correctly, the answer will be limited:
The American founders did not establish this constitutional order to be a church, although for some secularists it may be closest thing they have to a church. This constitutional order is temporal, provisional, for the time being. It is not the New Jerusalem.
The Founders represented the Enlightenment at its best, but that was by no means inconsistent with the fact that they conceived their new political order in a way continuous with the biblically structured political culture of colonial America; John Locke, yes, but also Abraham and Moses:
In the larger vision of the founders, the social contract is as importantly a compact, and that compact is premised upon a sense of covenantal purpose guiding this novus ordo seclorum, just as Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and the others said.
In the system that the Founders devised, Christians and other religions with a similar view of history as a pilgrimage make peculiarly good citizens:
This regime of liberal democracy, of republican self-government, is not self-evidently good and just. An account must be given. Reasons must be given...Among the best of the good reasons [Biblical theists] give in defending this regime is that it makes a sharply limited claim upon the loyalty of its citizens.
Saint Augustine could not have asked for anything more. Indeed, so friendly is the American system to religion that Christians must be on their guard about getting too comfortable in it:
The temptation is to unpack, settle down in the present, and forget about the pilgrimage. Therein lies the ambiguity of the period we call Christendom, which runs roughly from the fourth century to the sixteenth.
For reasons clearest to his detractors, Fr. Neuhaus was often accused of trying to foment theocracy in America. That project is sometimes called "theonomy," and though it has few adherents, it could boast Fr. Neuhaus as one of its opponents. He repeats his position in this book:
Countering a distortion [the alleged anti-theism of the Founders] runs the risk of producing a counter-distortion. It is not true that all the founders, or even almost all, were devout, Bible-believing Christians along the lines we associate with twenty-first-century evangelical Christians. Evangelical Christians who lack a vibrant ecclesiology and are therefore inclined to turn the nation into their church are sometimes tempted to embrace this counter-distortion. The result is a hyper-patriotism in which people are able to bow the knee to the nation while telling themselves this is not idolatry, which it is.
* * *
America, then, is the embodiment of Enlightenment realism and optimism. Certainly it is connected to the "Enlightenment project," which the author defines as the attempt to formulate standards of thought and behavior whose authority all rational beings, by virtue of their rationality, would be obliged to accept. Part of the problem with our period of history, of course, is that the Enlightenment project in this strong and confident form has collapsed. The author is keen to critique the proposed substitutes, particularly the incompatible ones that nevertheless cohabit in many a 21st-century head. For instance:
One can choose to be a Darwinian or a Nietzschean, but, were they aware of the intellectual incoherence of our time, I am rather sure those two brilliant thinkers would insist on the obviousness of the fact that one cannot be both. We cannot be, at the same time, both the captives and the masters of nature.
The author has perhaps too much fun with irony. Like the Augustinian understanding of history, irony recognizes that the institutions of this world are not worthy of our final loyalty, but this recognition takes the form of "an amused posture of superiority toward a world unworthy of one’s singular self." The vicar of irony on Earth, in Fr. Neuhaus’s understanding, seems to have been the philosopher Richard Rorty. Rorty held that philosophy could not offer a compelling answer to such questions as "Why not be cruel?" Rorty was unperturbed by this, not because he was indifferent to cruelty, but because he did not think it was philosophy’s business to provide such answers.
Readers more familiar with Richard Rorty’s philosophy than I am may have a clearer idea why Fr. Neuhaus devoted so much time to him. It seems to me, at least, that Rorty was simply a fideist. Be that as it may, a whole chapter of the book is a witty broadside against irony.
A possibility that the book fails to explore is that Rorty’s ideas are not likely to age well. Fr. Neuhaus quotes him as saying about the contingency and indeterminacy of language that we "see language as we now see evolution..." "Now" in that sentence means in the 1970s, and particularly in the popular science of the 1970s, which emphasized the hypotheses that evolutionary history is chaotic, unrepeatable and directionless. Those ideas have not stood up particularly well in the interim. Rorty seems to have embraced this model because it suggested, by analogy, a practice of philosophy that would be an unlimited field of Nietzschean caprice. Like the god of the liberal Protestants, this model is not just untrue; it is also uninteresting.
In any case, Fr. Neuhaus warns us that the ironic stance Rorty adopts would be particularly toxic for the American experiment, and indeed for any society that hopes for a future:
[Rorty says] "What [the ironist] is looking for is a redescription of that canon which will cause it to lose the power it has over him—to break the spell cast by reading the books that make up that canon."...It follows that successors are the enemy...as the ladders of the past must be kicked away, so also with the ladders from ourselves to the future.
The odd thing is that Rorty insists that readers should look on his philosophy as in the service of liberal democracy. Fr. Neuhaus has trouble seeing how the young of any society could be socialized using by an ethic of irony; so, apparently, did Rorty:
[P]erhaps he is reluctant to say right out that his liberal ironism is parasitical, dependent upon other people who sustain society with beliefs—and a readiness to act on beliefs—that the ironist does not share.
Moreover:
Since his philosophy is in the service of such politics, it provides no measures by which such politics can be either criticized or affirmed.
That would be a most ironic outcome for tradition of philosophically informed political criticism. As Hegel used to say, go figure.
* * *
The book emphasizes Fr. Neuhaus’s understanding that both Judaism and Christianity are religions of pilgrimage, whose final hope cannot be realized by any historical outcome within time:
When under Cyrus [the Jews] were allowed to return to Jerusalem, and many centuries later, in 1948, when the state of Israel was established, it did not mean the end of exile.
The author notes that Lincoln’s remark that Americans are "an almost chosen people" was a wisecrack. However, it does express a sense of connection between America and the Jews that he does not entirely dismiss:
Providential purpose is a troubled subject, and the idea of America’s providential purpose is even more troubled, but I think we would not be wrong to believe that this dialogue [between Christians and Jews in America], so closely linked to the American experience, is an essential part of the unfolding of the "story of the world."
At some points, the author repeats the Franz Rosenzweig’s views about the continuing relationship between Christianity and Judaism:
When we Christians do not walk together with the Jews, we are in danger of regressing to the paganism from which we emerged.
However, Fr. Neuhaus makes clear that although he rejects "supercessionism" in the sense of the doctrine that the New Testament Covenant abrogates that of Sinai, he emphasizes that, in the Christian view, the two are moments of the same process. The relationship between them is not merely historical:
The end of supersessionism, however, cannot and must not mean the end of the argument between Christians and Jews...It is not simply that [the Church] drew sustenance [from the Jews] in her beginnings; she now, and perhaps until the end of time, draws sustenance.
The argument about the significance of Jesus, it seems, can be settled only at the eschaton. Meanwhile, he argues, the Jewish and Christian understandings of the story of the world are largely congruent. This bodes well for their cooperation in the civil sphere.
* * *
As the discussion about Jewish-Christian relations makes clear, Fr. Neuhaus was satisfied with provisional solutions that create stability through dynamic tension. (As Goethe put it, Und alles Drängen, alles Ringen, ist ewige Ruh’ in Gott dem Herrn; All stresses, all struggles, are eternal peace in God the Lord.) Perhaps predictably, he finds this insight to be among the merits of American political culture:
It is a wisdom that is regularly celebrated as the genius of the American constitutional order. This is an order that allows for political interventions animated by lofty aspirations. One might even say that it is inspired by such aspirations. At the same time, however, it is constructed on the assumption that aspirations are tethered to interests...The national motto, E pluribus unum, refers not only to many people becoming one but also to many purposes vigorously pursued ending up, through ways usually circuitous and unforeseen, in serving all. That at least is the idea.
Fr. Neuhaus is perhaps best known for coining the phrase "naked public square," meaning a deplorable state of political society in which transcendental or philosophically comprehensive reasons cannot be used on behalf of any proposal for public action. Much of his life as a public intellectual was devoted to trying to ensure that such reasons would not be censored. However, he was by no means proposing instead a mode of political discourse fit for for a theocracy:
The sacred public square is located in the New Jerusalem. The best that can be done in Babylon is to maintain, usually with great difficulty, a civil public square...The politics of those who live in the temples of Babylon takes on an ultimate significance...It is very different with those who know themselves to be in exile from a better city.
Nonetheless, there were issues that he believed necessarily involved transcendent questions. One that particularly engaged his attention was bioethics. In his view, the "life" issues concern nothing less than "who belongs to the we?" of the Constitution’s "we the people." He makes several substantive points on this are, but here we may note this bit of procedural advice:
Not for nothing are the biblical commandments on how we are to treat others framed in the negative. Cutting through our rationalizations and indulgence of appealing possibilities, they declare, Do not do this and do not do that.
We are told that we will not get much else right if we do not get the "we" question right. For myself, I might point out that comprehensive accounts will have to be excluded from any public square where such accounts are constitutive of identity and identity, as distinguished from civil liberties, is protected. American political culture is a robust operating system, but it is being asked to run software that is not really compatible with it.
* * *
In many ways, the most interesting sections of the book are those dealing with the nature of the eschaton, which is still to come but effective at every point in time:
We remember Jerusalem. So one might say that life feeds not on hope but on memory. Yet the return to the remembered, the restoration of the remembered, is hope.
Hope is not the same as optimism, a point that every moralist who has discussed the subject has pointed out. We are given this quote from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
"The virtue of hope responds to the aspiration to happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man; it takes up the hopes that inspire men’s activities and purifies them so as to order them to the Kingdom of heaven..."
Fr. Neuhaus seems to suggest that hope is a necessary feature of sanity:
To be human is to live in hope, however vague and inchoate in our minds may be the object of that hope, or the reasons for that hope.
Human beings find the life they live unsatisfactory with uncanny consistency, even human beings who live in comfortable circumstances where there is little objective reason for them to complain. This satisfaction can take the form of an intuition that the world we know is transitional, and the people in it are on their way to somewhere else.
It is the Christian proposal that this point of arrival, this home for the homeless, is ensured in the victory of Christ and the promise of his oncoming Kingdom.
Hope is necessary but not inevitable. It has its alternatives:
Despair is the first real-world alternative to hope...Personal despair of the possibility of forgiveness and salvation is of a piece with the denial of hope for the project that is God’s creation...Hope is faith disposed toward the future, and it is beyond doubt...The second [real-world alternative to hope] is presumption...There was really no need for Christ to have gone to the bother of his death and resurrection...Presumption, like despair, is a decision against living in the promise.
Pride, we are told, is the link between these two alternatives, though the application of this observation is more obviously relevant to the second alternative than to the first. Still, even in that first connection, we might imagine the "denial of the project that is God’s creation" as of a piece with Denethor’s self-immolation in The Lord of the Rings, when he destroys himself rather than face a new age, even a new age in which the king had returned.
Again, the eschaton and its effects are not merely future:
Eternal life is the fulfillment anticipated by all that is good, true, and beautiful in this life. . .[M]ost of us, and especially the great mystics more than most of us, have moments of encounters with the good, true, and beautiful in which we are moved to say, "Ah, it must be something like this"... The Christian proposal is that in Jesus the unknown has made itself known in the finitude of space and time.
The fact that no temporal political order can ever quite be what human beings finally hope for is just a special case of one of the fundamental features of the spiritual life:
The via negativa, also called the apophatic way, arrives at positive truth about God by describing what God is not rather than what he is. So it is with ultimate hope proposed by Christianity.
There are, of course, some positive things we can say about the eschaton. Fr. Neuhaus quotes Benedict XVI from Spe Salvi several times in this connection. The pope, for instance, notes that the New Jerusalem is a reversal of the curse of Babel, which divided mankind, a reversal that can be expressed in part in history.
"[Redemption] appears as the reestablishment of unity, in which we come together once more in a unity that is anticipated in the community of believers."
Fr. Neuhaus notes throughout the book that modernity has not invariably been friendly to Christianity, and that forms of the Enlightenment were militantly anti-Christian, or even atheist. (Of course, he also notes that Richard Rorty did not think that there was nickel’s worth of difference between Enlightenment rationality and theism, since both assumed that reality is objective: irony would be the antidote for both.) Still, the Enlightenment project was a noble undertaking in many ways, and Benedict, in Neuhaus’s view, sometimes waxes rhapsodic about its accomplishments in science and political theory:
Benedict understands himself to be an apostle of reason and freedom, and also understands that reason and freedom are firmly grounded in the Western synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem.
Reason divorced from faith however, would in the pope’s view (paraphrasing Immanuel Kant) be "a new slavery to a power aptly described as ‘the Antichrist.’" Indeed, the pope, and presumably Neuhaus in quoting him, suggests that there may be utopian projects that would be a catastrophe for the human race if they worked: "If there were structures which could irrevocably guarantee a determined—good—state of the world, man's freedom would be denied, and hence they would not be good structures at all." On the other hand, Fr. Neuhaus suggests that visions of possible futures that are not believed to be mechanically predetermined should by no means be discouraged: "Hoping in such a future is little more than leaving a greeting card for future generations, wishing them luck."
Such futures would not satisfy the definition of the eschaton as the place that humans would recognize as their final home. However pleasant Utopia incarnate may be, it would still not make all previous history worthwhile. Fr. Neuhaus notes:
Despite centuries of arduous effort by the greatest of minds, there is finally no intellectually satisfying answer to the question of theodicy: the question of how to justify to man the ways of God.
Benedict sums up the capacity of mere history in this way:
"A world that has to create its own justice is a world without hope...No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering."
In this view, it seems to me, the moral calculus of the world is very like a complex logical system, of the sort that Kurt Gödel noted would necessarily produce undecidable sentences, statements whose truth value cannot be decided within the system but must refer to something outside. As several commentators have pointed, this is how Aquinas’s Five Proofs work: no "comprehensive account" of the world, either in physics or ethics, can explain itself. The books will never balance, in other words, if we look only within the world. It is the burden of American Babylon, and perhaps of Fr. Neuhaus’s ministry, that we can get quite a lot done in history precisely because we know there is a way out.
Comments ()