Volume 7 Issue 1 Winter 2014
A Journal of Georgetown University’s Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy
Editor-in-Chief Hannah Schneider Executive Editor Jordan Rudinsky Managing Editor Christina Eickenroht Section Editors Amanda Wynter (The Forum) ZongXian Eugene Ang (The Chamber) Andrew Schilling (The Archive) Michael Lessman (The Sanctuary) Christina Eickenroht (The Parlor) George Prugh (The Clock Tower)
Utraque Unum Georgetown University’s seal is based directly on the Great Seal of the United States of America. Instead of an olive branch and arrows in the American eagle’s right and left talons, Georgetown’s eagle is clutching a globe and calipers in its right talon and a cross in its left talon. The American seal’s eagle holds a banner in its beak that states, E Pluribus Unum, or “Out of Many, One”, in reference to the many different people and states creating a union. The Georgetown seal’s eagle holds a banner in its beak that states, Utraque Unum. As the official motto of Georgetown University, Utraque Unum is often translated as “Both One” or “Both and One” and is taken from Paul’s epistle to the Ephesians. This motto is found in a Latin translation of Ephesians 2:14: ipse est enim pax nostra qui fecit utraque unum. The King James Version of the Bible says, “For He [Christ] is our peace, who hath made both one”. Utraque Unum is the Latin phrase to describe Paul’s concept of unity between Jews and Gentiles; that through Jesus Christ both are one. In view of the Georgetown seal, the motto represents pursuing knowledge of the earthly (the world and calipers) and the spiritual (the cross). Faith and reason should not be exclusive. In unity faith and reason enhance the pursuit of knowledge.
Acknowledgements The publication of Utraque Unum was made possible by the generous support of Bill Mumma, Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service Class of 1981, as well as the Collegiate Network. The Tocqueville Forum on the Roots of American Democracy additionally wishes to acknowledge the generous support of The Veritas Fund as administered by the Manhattan Institute, the Thomas W. Smith Foundation, and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The Tocqueville Forum promotes events and activities devoted to furthering and deepening student understanding of the American constitutional order and its roots in the Western philosophical and religious traditions. The Tocqueville Forum sponsors these activities solely through the contributions of generous supporters of its mission. If you would like further information about supporting the Tocqueville Forum, please e-mail tocquevilleforum@georgetown.edu or visit http://government.georgetown.edu/tocquevilleforum. As always, we welcome your thoughts and comments regarding this journal. If you are or once were a Georgetown University student, professor or staff member we would welcome the opportunity to review your work for publication in Utraque Unum. In addition to writers, we are looking for section editors, artists, graphic designers and web designers. Please e-mail the editors at utraque. unum@gmail.com for these inquiries.
Cultivating Knowledge of America and the West
TO CQ U EV I LLE F O RU M AT G E O RG E TOW N U N I V ER S I T Y
www.TocquevilleForum.org | Ph 202.687.8501
T
| Utraque Unum Winter 2014 Volume 7, Issue 1
Table of Contents From the Editor-in-Chief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
About The Tocqueville Forum The University, by Professor Joshua Mitchell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
The Forum (Feature Articles) Lactantius & Religious Freedom, by Louis Cona . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Morality and the Mortal God, by ZongXian Eugene Ang . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 American Individualism and Its Discontents, by Amanda Wynter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
The Chamber (Articles on Law and Politics) The Nexus between Religious Homogeneity and Political Stability, by Su Lyn Lai . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Marriage and the Constitution, by Andrew Schilling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
The Sanctuary (Articles on Religion and Theology) A System of Love: Understanding “Faith” through Newman and Balthasar, by Christopher Cannataro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Interfaith Dialogue and Ethics of Authenticity, by Aamir Hussain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 A Tale of Two Cities: The Dialectic of Law and Grace and the Political Realism of Martin Luther’s Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms, by Caleb Morell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
The Archive (Articles on History) The Rise and Fall of Doubt: The Development of the Office of the Promoter of Faith in the Canonization Proceedings of the Roman Catholic Church, by Peter Prindiville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 The “Genocide” Controversy: A Historical Re-Reinterpretation of the Ukrainian Famine (1930-33), by Joshua Schoen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Monumental Warning, Guilt, and Invisibility, by Sofia Layanto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
The Parlor (Articles on Literature, Film, Music, Theater, and Art) From the Unity of Two, The Diversity of One: Eve, The Tragic Hero in Paradise Lost, by Beatriz Albornoz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Illustrations of Don Quixote: Art and Music Since 1605, by Maria Teresa Roca de Togores . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60 Reflections on Storytelling: Metaliterature in the Decameron, by Irene Kuo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
The Clock Tower (Articles on Georgetown) “An Intense Interrogation of Self”—An Interview with John Glavin, by Michael Fischer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Opening the Vault: Unleashing Georgetown’s Hidden History, by Kevin D. Sullivan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 On the Disposition of All Things: Reflections for Hoyas from Georgetown Legend Father James V. Schall, S.J. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76 Endnotes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
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The Editor’s Desk
D
ear Reader, In an age of waning attention spans, when it seems only Buzzfeed and blockbusters succeed in holding captive audiences, those of us who labor over far less flashy creations— scholarly journals—must ask ourselves the obvious question: why do we even bother? Political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville predicted that as America marches toward the democratic age, Americans would become more and more fond of “general ideas.” As a result, he argued, it will be increasingly difficult to find a person with an original idea, and once he is found, he will be ostracized. All of us in the democratic age will grow afraid of differing opinions. It seems that even in the university original ideas are almost as unwelcome as they are in political discourse, or among the public in general. What seem to be original ideas are often simply bedizened versions of the same politically correct, sanctioned concepts—Hollywood’s new versions of “believe in yourself” or postmodernism’s battle cry of relativism. A student must only ask a faculty member behind closed doors about the struggle of choosing research topics while seeking tenure to realize that the university is not the threshold for open discourse that it once was. Researchers who seem to be demonstrating unpopular conclusions can easily be excluded from scholarly forums. This is why we bother with journals. We do not expect this collection of unusual ideas to hold the attention or win the approval of every member of the American public because that is precisely not the point. We must, however, begin our revanche into territory that at least permits us to disagree. This journal is for those who still want to engage in the grappling of minds that has produced great thinkers from Plato to Tocqueville himself. This journal is for those who believe that truth is an important enough concept to be argued about. I must commend all of the editors for their conscientious attention to each essay and for never forgetting that it is by tending to the seemingly insignificant details that delicate habits of thinking are formed. I must especially thank my executive editor, Jordan Rudinsky, for the countless ways in which he selflessly served the journal. I am delighted to pass the honor of serving as editor-inchief into his able hands for the coming semester. Finally, I would be remiss not to thank professor Joshua Mitchell for his practical and ideological support of the journal. I am personally grateful for his mentorship and his encouragement to think rigorously and creatively, both inside and outside of the classroom.
Hannah G. Schneider Editor-in-Chief
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ABOUT THE FORUM
The University Joshua Mitchell
T
he Winter 2014 issue of Utraque Unum now before you, in which thoughtful undergraduates from Georgetown University have written about a broad array of ideas, ancient and modern, which ought to concern thoughtful citizens everywhere, prompts the question: what is the particular excellence of a University? Here at Georgetown, and elsewhere around the United States, we often hear reference to “our community,” or occasionally, to “our University community.” Seldom do we hear, simply, “our University.” Why might this be so? What is to be gained by referring to a university as a “community”? To whom, moreover, would this act of renaming appeal, and why? I suspect Tocqueville might answer that in the democratic age, with its never-ending rush to perfect the world, we are apt to look at all ancient institutions, with their long-standing traditions, protocols, and formalities, as obstructions that stand in the way of this grand perfectionist project. By renaming the University a “community,” are we not liberated from old constraints? Into “community,” after all, we are able to interject our deepest longings, and authorize a remaking of an institution we find so stale, unmalleable, lifeless and stolid. This is not only happening in universities, of course. Think of the ways we increasingly talk, not about our churches, synagogues and mosques, but rather about our “religious communities.” Do we not, in speaking that way, provide a warrant for making them into something other than what orthodoxy would declare them to be? Tocqueville thought that the democratic age was
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here to stay, and that we ought not to fight it tooth-and-nail. He also thought, however, that democratic man tended to go too far; and that for the democratic age not to end badly, some effort to avoid the perfectionist impulse would be necessary. Let us focus, then, on the university. What is its peculiar excellence? By itself, independent of the modifications we might wish to bring to bear, what is it constituted to do? Today, we increasingly hear that a university should provide students with “skills,” and that what they learn ought to be measurable. I do not doubt that in some domains of knowledge this aspiration is well-founded. I do not think, however, that a university can long remain a “university” without a more capacious and less measurable aspiration as well, namely, that its members understand themselves to be actively involved in the only institution in the known universe committed to the civil discussion of ideas of the sort that bear on the question: how are we to live well? Teaching “skills” that are measurable, I fear, sets our sights much too low, and makes of a university less than it is constituted to be. In teaching “skills,” do we not tacitly invite our students to retain their prejudices, whatever they might be? And in purporting to measure “learning,” must we not rule out that kind of knowledge that cannot be rendered on a numerical scale? There, too, we set our sights to low, and make our universities at best, Think Tanks. That is, we make them into something they are not. This issue of Utraque Unam, like all the others, is concerned, in varied ways, with ideas about
| Joshua Mitchell
how to live well. However the reader responds to the conclusions that each authors reaches, he or she will have to acknowledge that in these pages
is to be found a more noble and capacious understanding of the task set before students in this most hallowed of institutions, the university.
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THE FORUM
Lactantius & Religious Freedom Louis Cona
L
actantius, a fourth century Christian scholar and apologist, played a pivotal role in the rise and development of Christianity. His teachings helped secure the development of the young and emerging Christian faith. Lactantius’ views are best expressed in his most influential work, The Divine Institutes, in which he established the early groundwork for a methodical exposition of Christianity and advocated for religious freedom on behalf of this persecuted minority. In The Divine Institues, written between 303 and 311, Lactantius contrasts the inefficacy of pagan beliefs with the truth and reasonableness of Christianity. Although it was originally directed at pamphleteers who assisted in the persecution of Christians, Lactantius developed The Divine Institutes as a robust work capable of silencing all opponents.1 The Institutes sets itself against the demoralized Roman culture, emphasizing the revelation of Christ as a new era ushering in freedom, peace and prosperity. What is most striking about Lactantius’ work is that his arguments and understanding of freedom, namely, religious freedom, were revolutionary for his time. His awareness of the reality of Christ’s Incarnation and his understanding of human nature and the proper ends of government, all converge into a consistent and provocative call for robust religious freedom and a virtuous society. His views not only impacted the freedoms of ancient Rome, but also the modern era’s understanding of freedom. The Divine Institutes are cited in John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris and the Second Vatican Council’s Dignitatis Humanae. The recogntion of his work, both in
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and out of the church, demonstrates the importance of understanding his arguments in order to confront the challenges of ensuring religious freedom today. Believed to be born in Numidia, Lactantius was originally a pagan and spent his early life as a teacher of rhetoric. As his reputation grew, he became a professor of rhetoric at Nicomedia at the request of Emperor Diocletian.2 It is likely that he converted to Christianity, at the cusp of the upcoming Christian persecution, after his appointment to Nicodemia. As a practicing Christian, it became extremely difficult for Lactantius to remain a public teacher and he was shortly dismissed. He quickly descended into poverty, losing his previous stature and reputation. In order to survive he became a teacher of Latin for local students. As the persecutions continued, he left Nicomedia until about 313. It was only due to his friendship with Emperor Constantine that he was pulled out of obscurity and in his old age appointed as a Latin tutor to the Emperor’s son Crispus3. Many believe that through his friendship and advisory role, Lactantius greatly influenced Constantine’s religious policies concerning toleration and Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. Lactantius wrote The Divine Institutes in the period between Diocletian’s Edict and his appointment to Constantine’s court. The work emerged in what was likely a very brutal and dangerous time for the small Christian community. Lactantius not only responded to the false accusations and heinous persecutions of Christians, but also advocated for a change in Roman society, culture and government. Arguing
| Louis Cona
for full and unrestricted religious freedom, he contrasted the immoral and false Roman culture with the reasonable and virtuous nature of Christianity. Ultimately, Lactantius’ arguments demonstrate how Christian values have contributed to the freedoms that many enjoy today. With the goal of liberating Romans from their false pagan religion and philosophy Lactantius pointed them to the truth of Christianity. He argued that Christianity entails belief in one God, common brotherhood, virtue, justice (fairness and piety) and peace. Using his skills as a rhetorician, Lactantius presented aspects of Christianity that were very attractive to Roman society and he argued that Christian ideals would actually perfect and complete Roman culture. Appealing to his Roman audience with a philosophical discussion on the nature of God, Lactantius scathingly attacked pagan belief in multiple gods, arguing that, “no intelligent man who can do the sums would fail to see that there is only one, the God who founded it all in the first place and who now controls it with the same virtue with which he founded it.”4 He continued by asserting that, “God is therefore one, given that nothing else can exist without a power equivalent to his.”5 Belief in one God became the foundation for his advocacy of religious freedom. Expanding upon this, he utilized the paternal nature of God to justify worship to Him and respect of neighbors. He argued that since everyone is a child of God, there is a duty to respect Him and one another as siblings united under Him—and from this, he rendered all men equal: God who created human beings and gave them the breath of life wanted all to be on a level, that is, to be equal, and he established the same conditions of life for everyone, creating all to be wise and pledging them all immortality; no one is cut off from God’s celestial benevolence.6 Without this understanding of religion, there is nothing holding back the state or individuals
from persecuting others. Religion by its very nature, as argued by Lactantius, creates a fraternal brotherhood and therefore governments and individuals must respect others with dignity. He continues, “all were born under the same God in the same state and all are bound by the rights of brotherhood.”7 This statement reveals the innovative nature of Lactantius’ work, as the same claims resurface centuries later. Lactantius, however, goes on to argue that all are bound to worship this one God and have a duty to respect Him and his creation. Those who do not fulfill this duty will be punished. Lactantius writes, “the wicked who still persecute the good in other parts of the world will pay full measure for their evil to the Almighty one.”8 Lactantius’ argument is original because he does not provide a defense of Christianity from traditional sources, but rather, presents a coherent argument that appeals to his Roman audience. He chooses to present the nature of Christianity as the basis of his arguments for religious freedom, and hopes to build a civilization based on this nature. In fact, the very nature of Christianity supports human freedom—and it is this claim that serves as his point of departure. It is important to note that Lactantius does not wish to destroy Roman civilization, but conversely, he wishes to build Roman civilization on the basis of Christianity. Romans took pride in their culture of “Romanitas,” a Latin word meaning “Roman-ness.” However, during Lactantius’ time, Romanitas was based on pagan beliefs, causing justice and wisdom to suffer due to its falsity. Lactantius sought to appeal to the core of these beliefs by emphasizing their relation to the Christian narrative. For example, we know that the Romans valued religious contributions in the public sphere and that they understood how religion was intimately connected with other parts of civilization. Similarly to this, Lactantius believed that true religious freedom includes the liberty to bring one’s values and beliefs into the public square in order to influence society. In essence, this is what he wanted Christianity to do: he wanted Christianity to influence
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Roman society and create true justice, which would lead to piety, equity, wisdom and peace. In order to build Romanitas on Christian values, it was necessary for Lactantius to demonstrate the truth of Christianity. In Book I, which is appropriately titled, “False Religion,” Lactantius heavily emphasizes the significance of truth both for the individual and for society. He argues “there is no sweeter food for the soul than the knowledge of truth.”9 He believes that Roman society, to its detriment, has abandoned an authentic search for truth and has lost respect for it. Lactantius notes that in Greece, philosophers used to be held in high esteem for their quest of truth and the well being of man. This high regard for truth brought with it a virtuous people. He continues, “the very word virtue and the power of it had so much weight with them that in their judgment it contained in itself the prize of the supreme good.”10 Unfortunately, Lactantius believed that the Romans abandoned this. Some believed that truth could be found in themselves, but Lactantius argued that truth “cannot be grasped by the intelligence and the senses that serve it.”11 In other words, truth cannot be attained by human capacities—instead, it must be revealed to man through the Christian religion and specifically in the Incarnation of Christ. Lactantius argued that revelation and faith perfect reason, and elevate it to heights where it could not reach without it. Wisdom and religion go together and enhance one another. He writes that, “[when] wisdom is linked with religion in an inseparable bond, each is bound to be true, because in worship we need to exercise intelligence—we must, that is, know what we are to worship and how— and in exercise of our intelligence we must worship that is, we must fulfill what we know and in real earnest.” He blames Roman philosophers for separating wisdom and religion. Additionally, due to their persecutions of Christians, Romans do not live in the truth, which causes instability, violence and unrest. He writes that, “few take advantage of this bountiful gift from heaven; the truth is wrapped in obscurity.
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Learned men despise it since it lacks suitable champions while the ignorant hate it because of its natural austerity.”12 Living in the truth is difficult and entails discipline, however it is noble and beneficial for both the individual and society. In light of this, he urged Romans to look to Christ who is the embodiment of wisdom and religion for his life, passion, and death, teach man how to endure suffering and live a virtuous life. Lactantius developed his call for religious freedom in this virtuous life with a discussion of free will. He argueed that free will must be respected in all times and circumstances. Human beings are by their very nature free. In order to authentically live and contribute to society this freedom must be protected. He tied free will into the proper worship of God, highlighting that if people do not want to be reluctantly obeyed, how much more will God despise reluctant worship? Man must be free to make his own choices in order to be fully committed. Forced worship or actions do not create authentic commitments. In order for a society to be healthy, people must freely worship and live without molestation from others. Furthermore, Lactantius argued that Christianity respects the freedom of man. He goes as far back as to the Fall to imply that even Adam and Eve had freedom, but used their freedom to make a wrong choice.13 Christ was a teacher, not solider, and he guided man to the truth through his preaching and sacrifice on the Cross. People must follow the example of Christ and reject violence. He states, “there is no need for violence and brutality: worship cannot be forced; it is something to be achieved by talk rather than blows, so that there is free will in it.”14 Respecting the freedom of man also guarantees the freedom of religion. Lactantius believes that religion is so closely united with the nature of man that any protection of freedom falls short if it does not entail full and unrestricted worship. He writes, “nothing matters more in human affairs than religion and that it ought to be defended with
| Louis Cona
every endeavor.” And further, “religion must be defended not by killing but by dying, not by violence but by endurance, not by sin but by faith: that is the contrast between bad and good, and in religion the practice must be good and not bad.”15 Here Lactantius clearly called for the unforced freedom of worship and peaceful means of persuasion and argument. He urges toleration to give way to open debate and peaceful discussion before making judgments about any belief, writing: “we beg these people, nevertheless, by the law of humanity if possible not to condemn before they know the whole story.”16 Christians must also defend their religion by respecting peace and freedom. Lactantius’ arguments have had a profound impact on both the ancient and modern world. His call for unrestricted religious freedom was fulfilled in Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313 AD, which proclaimed toleration for all religions, paving the way for Christians to worship “freely and openly, without molestation.”17 Additionally, the Western world owes much of its development and respect for human life, religious liberty, and the poor to Lactantius’ exploration of Christianity. The new “Romanitas” built on Christian values have propelled the West to great heights and has changed the way society views (sophia) wisdom, justice (iustitiæ) and the human person; however, the modern world faces new challenges as the West deliberately overlooks Christian contributions in its development. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union omits any mention of Christianity and God18 and the preamble to the Treaty on European Union merely “draws inspiration” from the “the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person, freedom, democracy, equality and the rule of law.”19 Lactantius’ arguments show the uniqueness of the Christian understanding of the human person, freedom, and equality. The European Union and others in the West are indebted to the contributions of
Christianity and have instead adopted secular values, choosing to overlook the religion that has sustained the free world. Lactantius is just as important now as he was during the Christian persecutions of the 4th century. His arguments must be restored and the contributions that Christianity has made on behalf of human freedom must never be forgotten. It is noteworthy that the Catholic Church has revived Lactantius’ teaching in the Divine Institutes to address the modern world. John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris and the Second Vatican Council’s Dignitatis Humanae both cite Lactantius in their decrees. Issued by Pope John XXIII on April 11, 1963, Pacem in Terris, was the first papal encyclical to be addressed to “all men of good will” rather than being addressed exclusively to Catholics.20 Similar to the writings of The Divine Institutes, Pacem in Terris was written during a time of extreme turmoil. The Cold War was beginning to escalate with the rise of the Berlin Wall a few years prior, and the Cuban Missile Crisis occurring only a few months before its publication. Again, similar to Lactantius, John XXIII calls for the use of argument instead of force, and stresses the dignity of human life and freedom. Furthermore, his discussion on rights and duties demonstrate how the Christian understanding of man contributed to the development of these concepts. In fact, Pope John begins his encyclical by establishing the nature of man writing, “God created man ‘in His own image and likeness,’ endowed him with intelligence and freedom, and made him lord of creation.”21 The pope continues with rights language that is strikingly similar to Lactantius’ language, writing that, Any well-regulated and productive association of men in society demands the acceptance of one fundamental principle: that each individual man is truly a person. His is a nature, that is, endowed with intelligence and free will. As such he has rights and duties, which together flow as a direct consequence from his nature. These rights
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and duties are universal and inviolable, and therefore altogether inalienable.22
involves their recognition and respect by other people.25
Unlike the European Union, Pope John was not afraid to acknowledge whence these rights and duties are derived. He stated, “when we consider man’s personal dignity from the standpoint of divine revelation, inevitably our estimate of it is incomparably increased. Men have been ransomed by the blood of Jesus Christ. Grace has made them sons and friends of God, and heirs to eternal glory.”23 Again, this is similar to Lactantius’ call for religious freedom from the paternal nature of God. If these similarities are not enough, Pope John goes out of his way to specifically cite Lactantius,
And further, that when “society is formed on a basis of rights and duties, men have an immediate grasp of spiritual and intellectual values, and have no difficulty in understanding what is meant by truth, justice, charity and freedom. They become, moreover, conscious of being members of such a society.” It is clear that the arguments presented by Pope John XXIII in Pacem in Terris are made in a similar spirit as the arguments set forth by Lactantius in The Divine Institutes. However, Pope John was able to make these arguments with 2,000 years of history and teaching to guide him. Lactantius produced his arguments well before a coherent theory on rights or freedom was ever established—further demonstrating the revolutionary nature of The Divine Institutes. Confronting the modern world was one of the primary goals of the Second Vatican Council. This remarkable time in Church history, produced several documents discussing Church teaching on a wide range of topics, among them emerged the Declaration on Religious Freedom, or better known by its official Latin title, Dignitatis Humanae. The document “develops the doctrine of recent popes,” including John XXIII, “on the inviolable rights of the human person.”26 Among these is the “right to religious freedom,” which has its “foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself.”27 The Council declares that all men should be free to pursue truth, and once the truth is known, man must be free to adhere to it. The document continues, “it is in accordance with their dignity as persons—that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility—that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth.28 Recall that the pursuit of truth was central to Lactantius’ defense of Christianity over and against the false pagan beliefs. He also
Also among man’s rights is that of being able to worship God in accordance with the right dictates of his own conscience, and to profess his religion both in private and in public. According to the clear teaching of Lactantius, “this is the very condition of our birth, that we render to the God who made us that just homage which is His due; that we acknowledge Him alone as God, and follow Him. It is from this ligature of piety, which binds us and joins us to God, that religion derives its name.”24 John takes up Lactantius’ argument for freedom by asserting that the nature of both man and the Christian religion require freedom of worship. John also follows the approach of Lactantius by stressing the equality of mankind and the duty to respect others who are united as children of God. He writes, Today, on the contrary the conviction is widespread that all men are equal in natural dignity...man’s awareness of his rights must inevitably lead him to the recognition of his duties. The possession of rights involves the duty of implementing those rights, for they are the expression of a man’s personal dignity. And the possession of rights also
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| Louis Cona
argued that the “demands of truth,” that is, the worship of God and the practice of faith, must be unrestricted by the government or other individuals. The document states that it is in the government’s interest to promote religious freedom, asserting that “government is also to help create conditions favorable to the fostering of religious life, in order that the people may be truly enabled to exercise their religious.”29 More importantly, Dignitatis Humanae, argues that religious freedom is intrinsically tied with the Christian faith: It gives evidence of the respect which Christ showed toward the freedom with which man is to fulfill his duty of belief in the word of God and it gives us lessons in the spirit which disciples of such a Master ought to adopt and continually follow.30 The Catholic Church’s official declaration on religious freedom is remarkably similar to Lactantius’ defense and promotion of Christianity in
The Divine Institutes. Both highlight the importance of Christianity in the freedom of man and the dignity of the individual, and both respect the freedom of man to pursue the truth unmolested and without coercion. While the obstacles facing religious freedom may change over time, the human heart never changes. The search for truth, justice, and peace is the goal for each generation. Finally, it is of extreme importance to study the history of religious freedom and analyze the major thinkers who have impacted the world since ancient times. As Lactantius’ arguments show, it is in society’s best interest to safeguard religious freedom. In order for our freedoms to continue to be secure, however, each generation must educate itself and understand the development of these freedoms that are intimately tied with human peace and happiness. Louis Cona is a junior in the Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences studying Government.
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THE FORUM
Morality and the Mortal God ZongXian Eugene Ang “Before there was any government, just and unjust had no being, their nature only being relative to some command, and every action in its own nature is indifferent; that it becomes just or unjust, proceeds from the right of the magistrate. Legitimate kings therefore make the things they command just, by commanding them, and those which they forbid, unjust, by forbidding them.” —Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, 164231
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he English philosopher Thomas Hobbes has long been an enduring figure within the rich tradition of political philosophy. In endeavoring to answer the perennial question of politics—how human society ought to be organized—Hobbes prescribed an absolutist form of government based upon his notoriously bleak analysis of human nature. His most famous work, Leviathan, depicts a government, or in his terms, a sovereign, with “the use of so much power and strength conferred on him that by terror thereof he is enabled to conform the wills of them all to peace at home and mutual aid against their enemies abroad.”32 Of particular interest was his referral to the sovereign as a “Mortal God.”33 In conferring his ideal sovereign with an almost-divine quality, Hobbes highlighted the superlative authority that his sovereign should possess. At the same time, this analogy with God may create an unintentional link between divine command theory and the moral authority of Hobbes’ sovereign. Just as God may ordain what is moral, Hobbes’ sovereign—as a “Mortal God”—may likewise decide what is good and bad, or just and unjust. In fact, many scholars have granted that Hobbes’ sovereign exhibited the related concept of legal positivism, in which the law’s validity
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is determined by “its sources, [and] not its merits.”34 This concept is expressed most evidently in De Cive, which is another of Hobbes’ major work on political philosophy that preceded the Leviathan and shared many of its ideas. In it, Hobbes wrote, “Legitimate kings therefore make the things they command just, by commanding them, and those which they forbid, unjust, by forbidding them.”35 From this, Hobbes seemed to assert that the validity of any law is solely dependent on the command of the sovereign, and not determined by any other factors, namely concepts of the good that are independent of the sovereign. That said, seeing Hobbes as a legal positivist provides an overly-simplified perspective of his philosophy and discounts the influence that his laws of nature exert on his ideal sovereign. These laws of nature can be construed as rational constraints on the sovereign, since they are derived from reason. Yet, it is more appropriate to consider these laws of nature as moral constraints, since the reasoning process that gives rise to them is ultimately informed by Hobbes’ conception of morality. Although Hobbes sees morality—the concept(s) of the good—as indeterminate social constructs based upon our desires, his account of human nature does provide
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a meta-ethical framework that informs the character of his laws of nature. Hence, as these “laws of nature” cannot be divorced from morality and yet determine the legal validity of the sovereign’s commands, Hobbes cannot be said to be a legal positivist. In order to understand the claim that Hobbes was a legal positivist, we must discern Hobbes’ conception of human nature and how this leads him to advocate for his absolutist sovereign, the “Mortal God.” Human nature, according to Hobbes, can be summarized according to the “two maxims of human nature” he outlined in the epistle dedicatory of De Cive: “one arising from the concupiscible part, which desires to appropriate to itself the use of those things in which all others have a joint interest, the other proceeding from the rational, which teaches every man to fly a contra-natural dissolution.”36 In other words, Hobbes believed that the two primary characteristics of humans are our inherently covetous nature and our ability to reason. This covetous nature, which Hobbes described as “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” in Leviathan,37 becomes problematic when we consider that Hobbes believed that humans are generally equal. In De Cive, Hobbes writes of the “brittle frame of [the] human body” and how it allows for “even for the weakest man to kill the strongest.”38 Given this equality in the capacity of man to hurt other men, when two men desire the same thing—which they cannot enjoy in common—they will naturally seek to destroy the other to fulfil their insatiable desire.39 As such, this inherently covetous nature of men leads to a state of war—“a war as is of every man against every man.”40 However, man’s ability to reason will allow him to escape from this state of war. Hobbes writes of future goods as “a work of reason.”41 From this, in order to ensure the state of peace, Hobbes advocates for the formation of a commonwealth through a “covenant of every man with every man” such that everyone will give up their individual right of self-governance to
a particular sovereign.42 This results in a sovereign whose absolute authority is derived from the consent of every man in the commonwealth. In fact, Hobbes went as far as to assert that anything less than absolute power for the sovereign was akin to an infirmity of the commonwealth that would lead to its weakening and dissolution.43 As a result, Hobbes conferred the sovereignty a set of twelve rights, which can be construed as a sweeping series of immunities and powers.44 These rights range from an immunity of the sovereign against the forfeiture of his sovereign power, to complete control over the domestic and foreign policy of the commonwealth. Here, what Hobbes calls the “seventh right”—the right of the sovereign to establish the civil laws of the commonwealth— comes into play. To Hobbes, civil laws were the rules imposed on the subjects of the commonwealth “for the distinction of right and wrong, that is to say, of what is contrary, and what is not contrary to the rule.”45 Since Hobbes defined the sovereign as the “sole legislator” in the commonwealth,it is within his purview to make “the distinction of right and wrong.”46 This is corroborated by what Hobbes’ writes in De Cive: “[W]e have also shown that in a civil state the laws were the rules of good and evil, just and unjust, honest and dishonest; that therefore what the legislator commands, must be held for good, and what he forbids for evil; and the legislator is ever that person who hath supreme power in the commonweal, that is to say, the monarch in a monarchy.”47 Indeed, all these align with the legal positivist perspective on Hobbes’ philosophy. As Jean Hampton asserts, “This is a positivist position, because law is understood to depend on the sovereign’s will. No matter what a law’s content, no matter how unjust it seems, if it has been commanded by the sovereign, then and only then it is law.”48 Moreover, in transferring their individual right of self-governance to the sovereign, the subjects of the commonwealth effectively become “author of all the actions and judgements of the sovereign instituted.”49 In other words,
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this concept of authorship that Hobbes invoked justifies the absolute obedience of the subjects to the sovereign, for it makes no sense for them to disobey their own commands. As a result, the subjects are apparently obligated to obey the sovereign’s laws, regardless of the substantive content of those laws. Nevertheless, Hobbes did allow the subjects of his commonwealth a limited scope for disobedience. He writes that “every subject has liberty in all those things the right whereof cannot by covenant be transferred.”50 These rights that cannot be transferred or renounced are those rights of actions that compromise the individual’s own life and the means of preserving it.51 As such, Hobbes grants the subjects of his commonwealth the liberty to disobey the sovereign if he commands them to kill, wound or maim themselves, or to do anything else that will compromise their own lives.52 Since the subjects are not obliged to obey certain commands of the sovereign, these laws are invalid. The legal positivist position is therefore untenable in this case, given that it is clearly a factor separate from the sovereign’s will that determines the validity of those laws. As a matter of fact, Hobbes hints that only the commands that are aligned with “the end for which the sovereign was ordained” have obligatory value, and by extension, legal validity.53 Since the end of the sovereign is the state of peace, Hobbes implies that the sovereign can only establish laws that are targeted towards achieving or sustaining peace. Those commands that do not target peace are inevitably rejected by the subjects, and thereby cannot be considered valid laws. This perspective ties in with the framework of natural laws that Hobbes outlined. The laws of nature are general rules derived from reason that forbid actions which are self-destructive to one’s own life or the means of preserving it.54 Given our inherently covetous nature and our equal capacity to hurt other men, then, “there can be no security to any man (how strong or wise soever he be) of living out the time which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live.”55 This
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gives rise to Hobbes’ first and fundamental law of nature: “that every man ought to endeavour peace, as far as he has hope of obtaining it, and when he cannot obtain it, that he may seek and use all helps and advantages of war.”56 As the rest of the laws of nature ultimately concern the endeavour towards peace, Hobbes’ framework of these laws of nature can thereby structure the legislative role of the sovereign. For Hobbes, the sovereign of the commonwealth does not have complete and arbitrary power to set laws, as he is constrained by the laws of nature that aim to achieve and sustain the state of peace. Since this inclination for peace is the outcome of the rational impetus for self-preservation, Hobbes’ framework of natural laws should be understood as a rational constraint on the sovereign. With the legal validity of the sovereign’s commands dependent on these products of reason, the legislative omnipotence of the “Mortal God” becomes simply a myth. Yet, while the laws of nature—forged by the impetus for self-preservation and the resultant inclination for peace—do constrain the legislative authority of the sovereign, these supposed products of reason have their fundamental basis not in human reason, but in morality; they are ultimately informed by Hobbes’ notions of the good, and its antithesis, the evil. According to Hobbes, reason can be construed as the “conceiving of the consequence of the names of all the parts to the name of the whole, or from the names of the whole and one part to the name of the other part.”57 Thus, reason is not a monolithic process but an additive or subtractive process that involves a few parts. In regards to our impetus for self-preservation, this process is akin to addition: our impetus for self-preservation is the sum of not only the consequences of our covetous human nature, but also the consequences of the good. In other words, our covetous human nature will only impel us towards self-preservation if we factor in the good as part of the reasoning process. Hobbes confirmed this when he defined the good as “the object of any man’s appetite or
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desire.”58 Since what we desire is the good, our covetous human nature and the good becomes inseparable. This concrete relationship between desire and the good implies that the reasoning process that stems from our covetous human nature must involve the good. Hence, the good is the fundamental basis for the constraints—the laws of nature—on the sovereign’s legislative authority. However, Hobbes’ conception of the good is arguably pluralistic. As he wrote in De Cive, the differing “inclinations” of men will lead them to different desires—“where what this man commends, (that is to say calls good) the other undervalues, as being evil; nay, very often the same man at diverse times praises and dispraises the same thing.”59 Furthermore, Hobbes explicitly discounts the notion of an overarching ultimate good in Leviathan: “For there is no such […] Summum Bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers.”60 Thus, the various conceptions of the good engendered by our desires can be deemed as irreducibly plural, with no unifying quality. This pluralistic conception of the good therefore poses a problem for framing the laws of nature as a moral constraint. If there are many differing yet valid conceptions of the good, how is it, then, that this plurality—of the conceptions of the good—will always leads to the singular impetus towards self-preservation? To begin addressing this problem, Hobbes suggests that instead of focusing on the good, we should focus on its antithesis, the evil, which is defined as “the object of [our] hate and aversion.”61 Hobbes states that despite the plurality of the conceptions of the good, “[a]ll men easily acknowledge [the state of war], as long as they are in it, to be evil, and by consequence that peace is good.”62 While Hobbes did not acknowledge the existence of a Summum Bonum, he granted that there is a Summum Malum, namely, death. After all, if one dies, there is no way that he can achieve the good, no matter what it is. The pluralistic conception of the good can therefore be subsumed under the antithetical yet singular
conception of the greatest evil. Hence, while the good itself is plural, there is an overarching moral structure based on evil in Hobbes’ philosophy: the fear of death—our greatest fear—is the source of all morality. As Leo Strauss elaborated, “death—being the summum malum, where there is no summum bonum—is the only absolute standard by reference to which man may coherently order his life”63 Rather than utilizing a pluralistic conception of the good, our reasoning process incorporates a singular conception of evil such that we always seek self-preservation and by extension, peace. More specifically, our reasoning process involves a meta-ethical framework derived from the plurality of the good and based upon the conception of the greatest evil as death. Thus, in order to avoid this greatest evil, man will exercise his reason to prioritize the good of self-preservation above all the other conceptions of the good within the plurality of the good. Indeed, the relationship between the laws of nature and the good lies in the meta-ethical framework based upon the fear of death. Thus, as Hobbes declared in Leviathan, “the true doctrine of the laws of nature is the true moral philosophy.”64 In this case, since the laws of nature have a moral basis as shown, Hobbes’ philosophy aligns more with natural law theory than legal positivism. According to natural law theory, as described by H. L. A. Hart in The Concept of Law, “there are certain principles of human conduct, awaiting discovery by human reason, with which man-made law must conform if it is to be valid.”65 This corresponds exactly with Hobbes’ philosophy: the only valid laws that the sovereign can issue are those that do not violate the laws of nature, which are products of reason derived by considering both our covetous human nature and the meta-ethical framework that deems death as the greatest evil. As a result, the laws of nature should be considered as “immutable and eternal” moral constraints on the “Mortal God.”66 Consequently, Hobbes’ philosophy is often associated with legal positivism because the
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sovereign still has wide-ranging legislative authority despite the laws of nature acting as a moral constraint. As Mark Murphy suggests, “[i] t is the weakness of the restraint that the natural law places on a sovereign’s commands that gives Hobbes’ legal theory a false appearance of positivism.”67 He explains that this is because “a typical natural law theory, such as Aquinas’s or Finnis’s, provides a catalog of human goods much richer than Hobbes’s, and as a result provides a correspondingly longer list of ways that a norm could violate these goods and therefore be denied legal validity.”68 Moreover, there are limited disincentives against the sovereign’s violation of the laws of nature, at least in the mortal realm. While the subjects are not obligated to adhere to the sovereign’s commands that violate the laws of nature, there is not much else that they can do. The sovereign is immune from rebellion as Hobbes’ declared in Leviathan: “they that are subjects to a monarch cannot without his leave cast off monarchy and return to the confusion of a disunited multitude, nor transfer their person from him that beareth it to another man, or another assembly of men.”69 Ultimately, the sovereign is answerable only to the “Immortal God.”70 While the sovereign may violate
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| ZongXian Eugene Ang
the laws of nature without significantly risking his hold on the sovereignty, the conclusion that Hobbes provides is clear: the legal validity of a sovereign’s civil laws is wholly dependent on the laws of nature, regardless of the consequences of invalid laws. On the whole, then, Hobbes’ sovereign possesses near-absolute power, through the set of rights conferred to him. In particular, his monopoly of the right to establish the civil laws of the commonwealth may give the impression that this “Mortal God” possesses legislative omnipotence; however, this is in fact an illusion— the sovereign is bound by the laws of nature to ensure peace. These laws are not only the products of our reasoning process, but also the meta-ethical framework that deems death as the greatest evil. They are not the products of an omnipotent and out of touch Leviathan, as Hobbes is typically attributed to putting forth. The legal positivist label therefore cannot be applied to Hobbes; morality and the “Mortal God” are inseparable. ZongXian Eugene Ang is a sophomore in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service studying International Politics.
THE FORUM
American Individualism and Its Discontents Amanda Wynter
W
hen asked what she believed to be the most pressing social issue in Western society today, Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian playwright and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2004, responded, “isolation is one of the greatest problems, an ever-growing obstacle to political solidarity.”71 With her observation, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Dewey might agree. Presenting us with the “isolated man” and “lost individual” respectively, both predict and foresee this “ever-growing obstacle” and offer different yet inextricably linked solutions. However, much like knowledge of the day’s temperature is necessary in order to dress appropriately, necessary is the knowledge of the political and sociological temperatures surrounding the isolated man, to our ability to appropriately address his problems. Here, Michael Oakeshott proves a prescient meteorologist. Oakeshott conceptualizes this temperature in what he calls “Rationalism” and its monopoly on the collective psyche—and fortunately, this prediction comes not without counsel. By diverging paths, Tocqueville and Dewey circumscribe Oakeshott’s advice of “taking the next step”72 and affirm his charge that politics, like man, requires something more. As democratic providence drives society further towards equality, Tocqueville fears for the psychological toll it will take on the individual. Rendering all societal ties unnecessary and priding individual success over the collective, we find man lost in isolation from his friends, family, and neighbor. Beginning with the reduction of differences, “no man is different from his
fellows,” and can therefore participate equally in the government and live freely in society.73 Acting separately and individually everyone can enjoy the daily goings-on of their life without the interference of duties and obligations to anyone but themselves. Tocqueville asserts, “equality daily gives each man in the crowd a host of small enjoyments,” and that “the charms of equality are felt the whole time and are within the reach of all; the noblest spirits appreciate them, and the commonest minds exult in them.”74 Not only does man take pleasure in these enjoyments but he purports to live in a world solely made up of them. We are told that all men are created equal and so equal are the opportunities to acquire money, land, and happiness. Because of this “truth,” no longer do we have obligations to help our neighbor, let alone those strangers who are the least among us. Ties that once held the natural classes of society together are—like the bonds of human affection—made “wider but more relaxed.”75 What exactly does this look like? Perhaps it manifests itself in concern for the general welfare of a nation, combined with a disregard— and in some cases distaste—for the policies that bring equality to all because they do so at the expense of prosperity for some. Making an insightful observation about where the American job market could be headed, Tocqueville states, “nobody’s position is quite stable,”76 rendering the incessant fear of losing one’s prosperity a constant state of being. Might this fear incite an increasingly “rugged individualism,” leading men to care not about one another, but treat one another as strangers? Tocqueville would not be
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surprised at the evidence for this provided by today’s socioeconomic climate. As both the impoverished and wealthy convince themselves that equality will save them, democracy will continue to break “the chain and free each link,”77 and force man further into isolation. Refusing to acknowledge the realities of inequality—not in potential, but in circumstance—the isolated individual lacks the perspective to conceive of solutions to his problem. Fastened to his selfsufficient sphere, his gaze directs him to different methods and procedures that have proven to be lacking in result. The enervation of social links—be they official obligations to coworkers, or a salutary kindness among strangers—serve as testament to the secondary consequence of man’s isolation. Operating in spheres distinct from one another, isolated individuals serve their own gods and measure by their own standards. Skeptical of ideas beyond the reach of their touch, “men do not want to think beyond tomorrow.”78 With their spheres surrounding them, individuals become obsessed with their prosperity. Fortunately, the American delights in his self-interest as it connects to the self-interest of others. “Rightly understood,” as Tocqueville ordains it, self-interest grounds man’s morality in his temporal relationships rather than an eternal goodness. Religion slowly phases out of his sphere and leaves him with “little faith in anything extraordinary and an almost invincible distaste for the supernatural.”79Although he urges us not to forget that religion gave birth to the English colonies, the isolated man sees no need for its authority. This turning of man, in and towards himself, cuts him off from the outside and obscures everything tangential to his interest. Without religious experiences to connect him to others, and the decrease in opportunities for him to interact with others, the individual wanders the streets alone, subject to the will of the wind.80 No longer do we regard each other in relation, or as a collective. Man’s feigned attempts at nationalism and camaraderie are pummeled by the demands of economic advancements and
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encourage him to submit to greater autonomy and further self-aggrandizement. Writing almost one hundred years after Alexis de Tocqueville publishes the first volume of Democracy in America, John Dewey observes a world in which Tocqueville’s fears are not only realized, but exponentially so. Identifying flaws with America’s corporate nature and rampant individualism, Dewey labels his theoretical specimen the “lost individual,”81 and with him, explores very similar incongruities that Tocqueville does, albeit through a different lens. “Towards the great community”82 we march, espousing creeds that no longer match our realities. But where does this march begin? When we remember the age of the pioneer, we are reminded of the open lands and bountiful resources of the unconquered America. Landing on the shores of the new world, people were given free reign to explore, farm, and reside. With a taste for expansion and private gain, our situation called “for [the] assertion of complete economic determinism.”83Combined with that determinism was “the ideal of equality of opportunity and of freedom for all,” creating a creed that would cease to function in a world growing ever scarce. America stood for self-creation, self-improvement, and self-growth, all while claiming to ensure those ideals for everyone. Because there existed so much land, everyone was promised success, and for a long time, everyone was able to achieve it. Unfortunately, the natural capital that characterized the new world was not bottomless. In fact, it was barely that deep. Soon, “squatters”—people without formally recognized capital—were claiming their right to land and recognition, and were doing so at the expense of the wealthy. By occupying a portion of someone’s land, farming and creating sustenance, these squatters altered the manner in which capital was obtained. With “free” land diminishing, people began demanding for those who had, to give. This imbalance of order required the state to step in and create means for these people to acquire land, and therefore created “preemption.”84 One can argue that this
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was the first step in the direction of our diverging creed. No longer could everyone have everything. The state had an interest in making sure that everyone had at least something. Here, “American Individualism” was truly born. Individuals were required to confront each other in a market where resources were scarce, and every move settled their fate. This American spirit, as Tocqueville tells us, was circumscribed by religion. With puritan beginnings, moving forward into many denominations, Dewey notes that “the spiritual factor of our tradition, equal opportunity and free association and intercommunication” constituted our creed. Unfortunately, it has been “obscured and crowded out” by what he calls a “pecuniary culture.”85 The men who were once fueled by religious aspirations to build a land on which to worship freely has allowed for his love of the material to overcome his love of God. “Nowhere in the world” Dewey says, ”at any time has religion been so thoroughly respectable as with us, and so nearly totally disconnected from life.”86 This individual has translated his passions for equality under God into a passion for equality under the capital state. These individuals, as a collective, were once connected by their wish to exploit and harness the land for their religious freedom, told to care for one another, because they are brothers and sisters in the eyes of their creator. This social responsibility was eventually coupled with the temporal sphere of corporatism and self-improvement. To their—and sadly our own—dismay, the American creed became double, speaking one way and acting another. Speaking equality and compassion but working to ensure that some do not achieve—working to ensure that some are crowded out and obscured. America’s individualism responded to this duality by recreating itself wholly in the image of corporateness, rather than compassion. The old creed’s “promise of a new moral and religious outlook” was never attained, and in place a new individualism took root. Rather than pretend that equal individuals ruled and prospered here, “a perversion of the whole ideal
of individualism” set in.87 Individualism was no longer tied to the interest of the collective. Slow and patient progress towards an end goal of happiness and religious prosperity was catalyzed by the need for efficiency and speed, rendering the individual and his work quantified, mechanized, and standardized.88 With the onset of the Industrial revolution, this individual became what Heidegger refers to as “standing reserve,”89 mechanized and placed under rule of the large industries but in charge of their own welfare. Though positive results were rendered in an increase of decently prosperous people, “rugged individualism [was] praised as the glory of American life. But such words have little relation to the moving facts of that life.”90 Again, the American individual—under the impression that all of his hard work would propel him into the wealth and prosperity that his creed espoused—was met with the harsh facts that there simply was not enough wealth to ensure equality. Further, in an attempt to equalize the ability to achieve that wealth, technique and the application thereof pervaded all areas of life. “How to” and “steps to success” describe not only the means by which we accomplish specific tasks, but describe the way we view all spheres of life. “Technique” Dewey observed, became an end in itself because the dissonance between our ability in speech, and our ability in practice was so striking, and the lost individual required a surefire way to achieve his goals. Dewey asks the modern and lost individual: “Where is the wilderness which now beckons creative energy and afford untold opportunity to initiative and vigor?91 Because the unlimited landscape previously able to sustain American individualism is now limited, the “creative energy” must be redirected. Where the goals were clearly religious freedom and economic sufficiency and prosperity, the unknown goals of today’s individualism leave the lost individual desultory. Without a fixed goal towards which to rapidly progress but countless techniques with which to aimlessly progress, the old individualism became a new
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individualism—the individualism that plagues us today. In chapter four, entitled “The Lost Individual,” of Individualism Old and New, Dewey describes “the loyalties which once held individuals, which gave them support, direction and unity of outlook on life, have well-disappeared.”92 We can follow this process into modern America. Not only is this a function of the increased concern for personal gain, but with the secularization of the American psyche—although one can argue that the process has been less a secularization, and more a becoming ignorant of that which is natural—we no longer feel obligated to those less fortunate. In order for the least of us to be recognized, the individual will have to “assume a responsibility from which [he was] previously exempt.”93 When religion was at the helm, and one’s interest simply was the interest of the whole, one needn’t be conscious of this fact because steps were taken to ensure that prosperity was built into the framework of society. This ceased to be the case with the rise of the lost individual and his groundless world. He is now lost in a sea of other individuals, all concerned with their respective spheres. The two individuals illustrated by Tocqueville and Dewey are parallel, if not one. The lost individual, caught in the midst of his corporate obsession with material gain, has turned himself inwards, concerning himself only with that which urges him on. However, this urge is not an “eruption” from the outside or above. This urge is self-referential, comparable only to himself. Liberalism, for its benefits and strides, has placed man in a world without a ground. Dewey despairs because the liberalism of old was one of “definite intellectual creed,” one that believed in a “thought-out social philosophy, a theory of politics sufficiently definite and coherent.”94Far from a critique of “liberalism” as a whole though, the man whom Tocqueville and Dewey present is definitely a function of liberalism gone awry. Tocqueville posits: “it would seem that human opinions were no more than a sort of mental dust open to the wind on
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every side and unable to come together and take shape.”95 Stating his concern for the individual in this age, he refers directly to the lost individual of modern liberalism that Dewey criticizes. Considering the rejection of a religious guide and by extension, a concrete moral foundation, Dewey laments, “the lack of secure objects of allegiance, without which individuals are lost, is especially striking in the case of the liberal.”96 Lest we believe that the problems posed by this individual are distinct to the 20th century, we are privy to this individual in recent analysis of the political sphere, as well as in our friends and family everyday. In Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty commends the Left for its abandonment of any fixed reference and its ability to change course at a moment’s notice. Although he is more critical of the exact manner in which the political Left does this, he wishes to affirm the lost individual, and his ability to roam aimlessly.97 Self-referential and proud of it, Rorty represents—on a public level— the type of person that we meet every day. Whether Tocqueville would associate this meeting with the heart enlarging capacity he encourages, we can speculate, but we do know that he is weary of their mode of operation. Those individuals that live in spheres of their own creation, that require no firm ground on which to stand, are the individuals that both Tocqueville and Dewey hope to expose and reform. But, what exactly propelled the lost and isolated individual into the world of isolation and materialism, and how do we stabilize the speed with which he flies? Michael Oakeshott provides an enlightened account of the “intellectual fashion”98 that bred the lost and isolated individual. His version of this man is the “Rationalist.” The climate in which the Rationalist appears eerily resembles the conceptions of America that Tocqueville and Dewey depict, and with this climate, we can better prepare for future storms and perhaps alter the atmosphere in which we currently live. Pragmatic, general, universal, and certain; the age of the individual requires these traits from its people and their actions. Tocqueville
| Amanda Wynter
warns against the American tendency towards “general ideas” where Dewey highlights the general standardization of thought that fills the minds of lost individuals. Oakeshott might contend that as time passes—and we acquire more means and methods—our character becomes “cruder and more vulgar.” We opt for techniques that ensure our individual success and remove any strain of uncertainty from our lives. Unfortunately, along with uncertainty, we rid ourselves of the intangible, abstract, and poetic. Desperate for certainty, the rationalist atmosphere fosters an appreciation for “greater precision and its alleged demonstrability.”99 The preference for technical knowledge—knowledge that renders exact results by following a set of rules—displays an attempt to place all power in the hands of the individual. Unable to “imagine a problem which would remain impervious to the onslaught of his own reason,”100 this individual arrives at the “conclusion that everything in the world can be explained and that nothing passes beyond the limits of intelligence.”101 Speaking directly to one another, Oakeshott and Tocqueville bemoan the prevalence of this individual and his overconfidence. In this instance, Dewey takes a slightly different view of our tendency to problematize that that requires no solution. He submits that it is only when we view our situation as a problem that the idea of any solution becomes genuine.102 It is clear that Oakeshott is concerned less with a solution’s sincerity and more with its source: “The deeper motivations which encouraged and developed this intellectual fashion are, not unnaturally obscure; they are…certainly closely allied with a decline in the belief in Providence: a beneficent and infallible technique replaced a beneficent God; and where Providence was not available to correct the mistakes of men, it was all the more necessary to prevent the mistakes.”103 Here, Oakeshott alludes to the foundation of the modern move: namely, the move away from an external authority or reference. Both Tocqueville and Dewey note this move, referring to it as troubling or problematic, respectively.
Again in concordance, Tocqueville and Oakeshott remark that the individual in a “society or a generation which thinks what it has discovered for itself is more important than what it has inherited,”104 is want to “seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason for things.”105 Their wish for a “beneficent and infallible technique” overshadows their inability to prevent chance and the unexpected. Where the religious man finds solace in his uncertainty because the only certainty is his faith, the isolated individual must search for a method or idea that will explain the world in certainty. As technological advancements are made—and Dewey encourages us to extend open arms to these advancements—the desire and persistence for certainty intensifies. Applying this insatiable need for method to the real world, Dewey describes the modern American’s “vast development of technological resources that might bring security in its train has actually brought a new mode of insecurity.”106 Our materialism requires a constant concern with never having enough, and because we have rejected that which brings ultimate security, we are stuck in limbo between a promised answer and an insufficient question—between security, and the hope for ultimate certainty. Revering religion for its “rule over the heart without support,”107 Alexis De Tocqueville emphasizes the importance of the “salutary yoke” that it engenders. The coming together that occurs through the work of religious mores should be “free from political prejudices,” ensuring that the political and economic change of the tides has little to no impact on religion. This was Tocqueville’s hope, or rather, his prescription. He observes this by way of the Puritans, and subtly submits that this is the proper alignment of religion and politics. Each person will be moved by its tenants, but so internally that it needn’t be uttered. Mores, he alludes to, are those habits of the heart that require no laws, they require no speech. However, their power is derived from the ultimate authority to which they obey. Preserving these mores would require the preservation
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American Individualism and Its Discontents |
of certain understandings about the man, the universe, and his place within it. When we look at the isolated man, surrounded by his desires and techniques, we observe his inability to connect with others. Derived completely from within, the individual fails to recognize the authority in anything outside of himself. Tocqueville believes that the salutary habits that form through religious rituals and adherence draw man out of himself and into the community. When temporal goals cease to consume the mind, man is free to pursue unqualified goods—those goods analogous to Oakeshott’s “contemplative thinking.” Individualism would cease to be the only or primary mode of experience. Instead, man’s heart would be ruled by one that directs the many modes. Wishing to restore America’s creed so that it no longer rings double, Dewey views the ways to do this in cultural terms. In the spirit of Tocqueville, Dewey declares that the lost individual needs “equality and freedom expressed not merely eternally and politically but through personal participation in the development of a shared culture.”108 For Dewey this shared culture is one that focuses on solving the problems that social inequalities reap—produced by the misalignment of our materialist creed and increasingly scarce resources—with innovative
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applications of science and technology. He thinks this to be “but the extension of our natural organs of approach to nature,” and that by employing them, “with the understanding of their possible import,”109 the lost individual will find his bearings again. It is less clear whether Dewey accepts the role of religion or would encourage its diffusion back into the spirit of America. Perhaps all that need be recognized revolves around his concern for the unity of spirit and action, and that his middle way views technology as that action. The isolated individual will always incline towards the intangible. Her inclination towards that which lies outside the sphere of methodology and precision is “the only permanent state of mankind,”110 and she will always be inclined back to it. Her inquiry into what “works” in the world will inevitably lead her to ask: what is good in the world? Her orientation can lead her to science or to religion; but I think that Tocqueville would argue that this is a false dichotomy reinforced by the democratic age. Keeping both voices in mind, the isolated individual can begin a conversation, allowing for each voice to contribute when necessary. Amanda Wynter is a senior in the Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences studying Political Philosophy.
THE CHAMBER
The Nexus between Religious Homogeneity and Political Stability Su Lyn Lai
P
olitical theory has long postulated a positive relationship between religious homogeneity and political stability. By creating societal cleavages that unravel the threads from which the fabric of society was woven, religious plurality destabilizes states. On the other hand, a common religion can foster shared values that facilitate social cohesion, thereby accounting for the positive relationship between religious homogeneity and political stability. Nevertheless, quantifying religious homogeneity using the Herfindahl index reveals that many of the observed politically stable countries in contemporary times are not religiously homogeneous. Conversely, the countries in which most citizens share a common religion are in fact the most politically unstable ones. That said, it cannot be assumed that the data indicate a causal relationship between the levels of religious homogeneity and political stability within a country. Factors such as good governance and political maturity could have allowed religiously heterogeneous countries to enjoy greater degrees of political stability in spite of their religious pluralism. At the same time, the forcible separation of religion and state in religiously homogeneous countries could threaten political stability, given the absolutism in religion that leaves no room for compromise with a secularized political system. The index for religious homogeneity used in this paper was created by employing the Herfindahl Index, which was originally developed to
test the concentration ratio for firms in markets. This index can measure the probability of any two individuals selected at random in the country sharing a religion. The formula is H=∑(S12 + S22 + S32 + … Sn2), where H is the value of religious homogeneity, S is the percentage of the population subscribing to a particular religion, and n is the number of religions subscribed to in the country. A larger value indicates a higher probability that these two random individuals share a religion, and hence points to a more religiously homogeneous population. In order to compute the level of religious homogeneity in each state using this formula, the statistics of the religious compositions of each state were collected from the CIA World Factbook, which obtains its data from official country censuses.111 On the other hand, political stability has been defined qualitatively in this study without using a definitive index. It is seen as the dependent variable and is assessed only when the country’s religious homogeneity index is adjudged to be particularly high or low. A country which possesses stable political structures and institutions that have survived without major conflict is considered politically stable. In addition, party change is not indicative of unstable politics unless such power-transfers also involve significant shifts in policy and changes to government institutions. Generally, coups and popular revolutions count for significant instability, while rigged elections with the intervention of external
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The Nexus between Religious Homogeneity and Political Stability |
political agents or factional politics count for minor instability. The levels of religious homogeneity of a broad range of states were computed using the Herfindahl Index and compiled in Figure 1. The results show a general correlation between religious homogeneity and political instability. Moreover, the states that exhibit higher levels of religious heterogeneity generally do enjoy greater political stability. In order to assess whether these results debunk conventional political theory about a positive relationship between religious homogeneity and political stability, it is therefore necessary to account for both correlations: the one between religious homogeneity and political instability, as well as that between religious heterogeneity and political stability. Starting with the correlation between religious homogeneity and political instability, one should note that many of the religiously homogeneous countries according to the index have prominent religious institutions that are so insistent on imposing their values unconditionally onto the society-at-large that they are often considered fundamentalist or absolutist. This is not to say that religious homogeneity causes this prevalence of absolutist religious institutions; rather, it is merely easier for such institutions to obtain support in a religiously homogeneous society than a religiously heterogeneous one. Given the prevalence of such prominent and even powerful religious institutions in religiously homogeneous societies, religion tends to hinder concessionary action whenever conflict between political action and religious doctrines arises. This phenomenon is well-documented in research, for instance, by the political theorist Bhiku Parekh, who found that religion’s characteristics of being “absolutist, self-righteous, arrogant, dogmatic, and impatient of compromise” has led to its potential to “easily destabilize society [and] cause political havoc.”112 While the statement cannot be generalized to describe all forms of religion, it remains a commonly observed description of some prominent religious institutions. The potential for political instability
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resulting from powerful religious institutions is further exacerbated in a community where a single religion is concentrated and where religion is separated from the state. As a result, the religious institutions become sidelined from the decision-making process and are prevented from effecting any change in secular policies to align them with their own view of the absolute truth. Given religious homogeneity, then, there would be a critical mass of people to support the perspective of the dominant religion, giving it sufficient force to destabilize the political system. Hence, both the absolutist nature of certain religious institutions and the secularization of politics in religious homogeneous countries contribute to the greater political instability observed in those countries. For instance, Egypt, a country with a homogeneity index of 0.818 in this study, is considered highly religiously homogeneous, with a large proportion of the population identifying itself as Salafi Muslims, a movement within Sunni Islam, with which the Muslim Brotherhood identifies itself. Despite Egypt’s religious homogeneity, Egypt has certainly failed to achieve political stability, as the revolution in 2011 has shown. Although the roots of the current conflicts in Egypt should not be solely attributed to religion, the strong support for the Muslim Brotherhood, which has “a wide following in the slums of Cairo,”113 meant that religion was still a significant factor in the political dynamics of the country. The involvement of the Muslim Brotherhood in “the street demonstrations of the Kifaya movement, …[the] debate on political reform and [its] successful [contest of] parliamentary elections”114 under the ambit of promoting a way of life based upon Islamic principles would have collated popular religious sentiment and enabled them to act in strong opposition to the government, thereby promoting political instability. Apart from fomenting political instability internally, religious homogeneity may also do so externally in other states. When there is a dominant religious group in a country sufficiently strong to influence the country’s foreign
| Su Lyn Lai
policy, inter-state conflicts may be incited when that country’s foreign policy aggravates interstate religious fault lines. After all, it is only in a more religiously homogeneous country that the state and its foreign policy would be identified as supporting a single religion overwhelmingly. An example of inter-state conflict which can be attributed to religious homogeneity in the involved countries is that of Pakistan and India. While the two countries were divided into separate states almost 70 years ago, bilateral relations between them are still strained due in part to the conflicts between Muslims and Hindus in the Northeast of India, particularly in the region of Kashmir. The majority Muslim population of Pakistan and the majority Hindu population of India view each other with suspicion, creating antagonisms that perpetuate inter-state conflict and political instability. Nevertheless, a greater degree of political stability has been observed in religiously homogeneous countries where the institutions of religion and state maintain compatible beliefs and principles. One country in particular stands out; as noted by the Council on Foreign Relations, “it is difficult not to notice that Saudi Arabia avoided significant upheaval during the political uprisings that swept the Middle East in 2011,”115 allowing it to be hailed as a “paragon of political stability.”116 This view is corroborated by the Centre for Strategic International Studies: Every crisis in the Middle East since the time of Nasser has led to a new round of speculation about Saudi Arabia and the future of the monarchy. Yet, it has now been more than half a century since that speculation began and Saudi Arabia has not changed its regime. As other countries in the region have shown all too clearly, a history of stability is no guarantee for the future, but it is important to note that Saudi stability has been the product of the fact that its government has dealt with each wave of change by making the reforms that are critical to maintaining popular support.117
The aim of utilizing Saudi Arabia as an example is not to show that religious homogeneity results in political stability, but to show that religious homogeneity is not a barrier to political stability as long as religious institutions and the state government work in tandem and hold similar values. The excerpt from the Centre for Strategic International Studies also serves to highlight an important feature of politically stable nations: a strong, flexible government. In fact, good governance can help account for the correlation between religious heterogeneity and political stability. Religiously heterogeneous countries are politically stable due to a self-selecting process. Those that survived the test of time and continue to exist today are simply the countries that had a government which could maintain the state’s integrity in spite of religious pluralism. Indeed, two circumstances emerge from religious conflict in a religiously heterogeneous country: the country either breaks up and forms independent states along ethnic and religious lines, or it evolves to form a government adept at handling religious conflict and preserving social and political stability. Historical examples abound which demonstrate the first circumstance; countries which have proven incapable of managing a pluralistic society and have hence broken up include, among others, Yugoslavia and, later on, Serbia and Kosovo, Indonesia and East Timor, and most recently Sudan and South Sudan. Despite the creation of more religiously homogeneous societies after the separation of those states, most of these states continue to exhibit political instability, which can generally be explained by the factors mentioned about in the discussion on the correlation between religious homogeneity and political instability. Nevertheless, most of the examples referenced here are recent examples, and the nascence of the states may be a factor of instability, since the governments are still searching for a firm footing. On the other hand, countries which have been able to overcome a violent or conflict-ridden
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The Nexus between Religious Homogeneity and Political Stability |
Country
Homogeneity Index
Country
Homogeneity Index
Afghanistan
0.980
Pakistan
0.941
Algeria
0.980
Philippines
0.859
Argentina
0.884
Portugal
0.914
Australia
0.461
Saudi Arabia
0.805
Bangladesh
0.810
Singapore
0.255
Bhutan
0.620
Slovakia
0.727
Bosnia and Herzegovina
0.420
Slovenia
0.519
Brazil
0.851
Somalia
0.998
Egypt
0.818
South Africa
0.655
Finland
0.723
South Sudan
NA
Germany
0.521
Sudan
0.555
Iceland
0.802
Sweden
0.532
India
0.667
Switzerland
0.654
Indonesia
0.770
Syria
0.820
Iran
0.961
United Arab Emirates
0.437
Iraq
0.941
United Kingdom
0.541
Ireland
0.845
United States
0.632
Italy
0.726
Uruguay
0.689
Lebanon
0.509
Venezuela
0.961
Malaysia
0.415
Vietnam
0.731
New Zealand
0.436
Zimbabwe
0.620
Figure 1 past to create a cohesive society of religiously distinct communities now stand as pillars of stability. This stability is not a result of religious heterogeneity, but the result of good governance which achieved stability in spite of—and not because of—the religious fault lines within those countries. In a study by sociologists Gary Bouma and Andrew Singleton on the management of religious diversity, they assert that a stable pluralistic society “involves both the deliberate and unintentional actions and decisions entered into by religious groups, public
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and private organizations and governments”118 and that maintaining it requires “appropriate political involvement,” which plays “an instrumental role in a successful religiously plural society.”119 In other words, good governance facilitates political stability by fostering harmonious relationships between the various elements in civil society. Perhaps, by according various private organizations, including religious organizations, the right to fulfill their own political goals and objectives on the condition that they do not compromise others’ right to the same, the
| Su Lyn Lai
government can help to maintain political stability in a religiously plural society. Holding one of the lowest values in the index of religious homogeneity, Singapore stands out as an example of strong government holding a religiously pluralistic country together in a “strict state-enforced doctrine of religious harmony.”120 Political strength is also quoted in this study as a primary factor contributing to religious cohesion and stability within India. The country’s choice to adopt “religious neutrality as a key feature of its constitution and the cornerstone of the strategy for nation-building…secur[ed] for India both stability and democracy.”121 In both of these countries, religious conflict played a significant role in their pre-independence history, influencing both intra-state and inter-state conflict. Singapore and India were plagued by internal religious and ethnic riots, and at the same time, they attained their independence after the separation of existing states along ethnoreligious lines: the partition of the British Indian Empire into India, Pakistan and subsequently, Bangladesh, and the dissolution of Malaya into Malaysia and Singapore. These examples demonstrate that the theory that religious heterogeneity causes social and political instability was accurate in the absence of a strong government. Yet, once the governments in each of these countries found their footing, they both successfully incorporated religious tolerance and harmony into their legislation, making it a core part of their governing strategy. As a result, they could overcome the instability which initially accompanied their religious plurality and establish politically stable states. The political maturity of the electorate is another important factor in the establishment of a religiously heterogeneous yet politically stable state. In such states, citizens—religious or not— will choose to put aside religious affiliations to elect parties and support policies based on logical principles, therefore constructing a society that is relatively immunized from the sectarian biases of religion. The historical theorist Frank Ankersmit observes that “a politically naive
electorate will see any difference between itself and its representatives as an impermissible distortion,”122 which would lead to conflict and hence instability while a “politically mature electorate will know how to find the juste milieu”123 or balance between the ignorance and apathy of a politically indifferent electorate and a conflictseeking naïve electorate. Such political maturity is usually found in countries where any religious affiliation is uncommon—for instance, Sweden, Germany, and New Zealand. These three countries have more than 25% of their population declaring themselves as non-religious. At the same time, they have considerably low religious homogeneity index values which indicate a religiously heterogeneous society. All three, too, can be considered extremely stable democracies: Sweden and New Zealand have not undergone a regime change since 1905 and 1872 respectively, while Germany is often held up as a model of political stability since its reunification in 1990. A correlation between these three characteristics of irreligiosity, religious heterogeneity and political stability may thus be established. That said, it is premature to conclude that irreligiosity itself accounts for political stability. Instead, it should be seen as a symptom of a much broader phenomenon: an increasing level of economic development based upon capitalistic free-market principles. After all, the three countries highlighted above have strong market-based economies and heightened material standards of living for their people. Hence, since a market-based economy operates upon the premise that people tend to act in a rational way that maximizes their welfare, the advent of such a market-based system in those countries might have encouraged people to act precisely in such an economically rational manner to increase their material standard of living. In the process, conflict will become less useful and cooperation will become more attractive, resulting in greater political stability. In conclusion, it is now clear that the conventional theory about a positive relationship between religious homogeneity and political
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The Nexus between Religious Homogeneity and Political Stability |
stability has not been reversed in any way. Instead, extenuating circumstances have prevented this theoretical relationship from materializing in the world today, resulting in the empirical observation of a positive correlation between religious homogeneity and political instability, as well as religious heterogeneity and political stability. The circumstances which have prevented theory and reality from converging contain a fundamental difference between the context in which the theoretical relationship was envisioned and the context in which these states exist today: the extent of the integration of religion into politics. While religious homogeneity can theoretically lead to shared experiences, beliefs, and consequently stable political outcomes, this is based on the assumption that religious beliefs can be translated into political change. In the increasingly
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secular governments found today, this translation often does not occur. As a result, political instability ensues, especially in religiously homogeneous countries where there would be a greater number of people in favor of translating their dominant religious beliefs in policies. Moreover, in examining the correlation between religious heterogeneity and political stability, no causal link between the two phenomena can be drawn. Instead, other factors, namely good governance and the political maturity of the populace, especially in civil society, have allowed religiously heterogeneous countries to flourish in spite of their inherent propensity to conflict. Su Lyn Lai is a sophomore in the Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences studying Government and Economics.
THE CHAMBER
Marriage and the Constitution Andrew Schilling
I
s defining marriage between a man and a woman a violation of the United States Constitution? It will probably be a few more years before we see a judgment on this question from the Supreme Court.* That said, the trend among the state courts and lower federal courts is clear: traditional marriage statutes violate constitutional guarantees of equality and due process. This impression has left an imprint on the American political imagination, as a growing number of Americans now think that the redefinition of marriage is inevitable. Yet, is the answer so clear? Nothing in the United States Constitution requires that states change their traditional marriage policies. In deciding this case, one must be aware of the extent to which the Supreme Court has typically recognized marriage as “a social relation subject to the State’s police power.”124 However, this tradition has never indicated that the “powers to regulate marriage are unlimited notwithstanding the commands of the Fourteenth Amendment.”125 Marriage regulations containing “suspect classifications,” such as the race-based one at issue in Loving v. Virginia, are subject to “the very heavy burden of justification which the Fourteenth Amendment has traditionally required of state statutes” that are deemed discriminatory.126
*This essay was written before the announcement of the Court's opinion in US vs. Windsor, and the editors leave it to readers to compare and contrast the position of this paper with the outcome of that case.
Many contend that traditional marriage statutes trigger a similar form of heightened review, if those statutes, like the antimiscegenation laws at issue in Loving, contain a suspect classification. On their face, traditional marriage statutes seem to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. This idea has picked up some traction among lower courts. Of course, these statutes never explicitly refer to “sexual orientation.” But it is true that traditional marriage statutes eliminate marital designation to couples on the basis of sexual orientation. Simply because traditional marriage statutes employ sexual orientation-based classifications does not automatically invalidate those laws. Only those “classifications which are invidious, arbitrary, or irrational offend the Equal Protection Clause.”127 To determine the validity of certain classifications, the Supreme Court has typically relied upon different forms of constitutional review. It is clear that sexual orientation warrants a heightened level of constitutional scrutiny—the same level as sex-based classifications. Sexual-orientation-based classifications, like sex-based classifications, are subject to intermediate scrutiny, since sexual orientation, like sex, is “not fungible; a community made up exclusively of one is different from a community composed of both.”128 Hence, the issue presented is whether states have “exceedingly persuasive reasons” for withdrawing the designation of marriage to same-sex couples. They have the sole burden of showing that the marriage statutes serve “important governmental objectives and that the discriminatory means employed are substantially related to the
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Marriage and the Constitution |
achievement of those objectives.”129 Proponents of the traditional marriage statutes have listed several important governmental objectives justifying the use of sexual-orientation-based classifications. These are: the promotion of procreation within married households; proceeding with caution; protecting religious freedom; and preventing children from being taught about samesex marriages in school. Other state courts have considered governmental interests such as the conservation of resources and the promotion of stable opposite-sex marriages.130 Throughout the Supreme Court’s marriage jurisprudence, the recognition of the “fundamental” nature of the marriage right has developed in tandem with the important governmental interest in promoting procreation within marriage itself. In Skinner v. Oklahoma, the Court stated: “marriage and procreation are fundamental to the very existence of the [human] race.”131 In Loving, it implicitly linked marriage with procreation in describing marriage as “fundamental to our very existence.”132 In Turner v. Safley, it included in our rationale the “expectation that [marriage] will be fully consummated.”133 In Griswold v. Connecticut, the Court found it “difficult to imagine what is more private or more intimate than a husband and wife’s marital relation[ship].”134 In Reynolds v. U.S., it held that “no legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth…than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the idea of the family, as consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman…the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization.”135 In Maynard v. Hill, it concluded that marriage “is an institution, in the maintenance of which in its purity the public is deeply interested, for it is the foundation of family and of society, without which there would be neither civilization nor progress.”136 The lower court decisions bear absolutely no hint of any consideration of this long series of precedent acknowledging the “fundamental” nature of marriage as inextricably
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linked with procreation. Yet, it is “exceedingly persuasive” that maintaining and promoting that link constitutes an important governmental interest.137 The issue presented here is whether traditional marriage statutes are substantially related to the end of procreative marriage. They are substantially related to advancing the promotion of procreation within marriage by mere fact that they preclude same-sex couples—couples that cannot procreate—from receiving the marital designation. To confer the marital designation on same-sex couples would by entailment diminish the link between the “fundamental” nature of marriage and procreation—a link the importance of which the Supreme Court’s own jurisprudence has recognized. The issue is not that traditional marriage statutes cause more opposite-sex couples to procreate accidentally or irresponsibly. The issue is whether those statutes are substantially related to maintaining marriage’s “fundamental” nature as an institution in which couples procreate. Common sense tells us that it does. It is “exceedingly persuasive” that at the core of traditional marriage statutes’ operation and design is the important governmental interest of honoring a proven successful family structure in which couples are encouraged and expected to procreate.138 The common rejoinder to this argument— and the one advanced by some lower Courts—is that states already permit same-sex couples to adopt children, and permit heterosexual couples to marry without any consideration of their capacity or intention to procreate. The implication is, of course, that procreation and marriage are already unattached, and that endowing samesex couples with the marital designation does nothing to either repair that link or erode it further. But the people of the United States could rationally permit the adoption of children by same-sex couples and other behavior on personal liberty grounds while still harboring reservations about giving the same designation to same-sex couples as it does to opposite-sex couples.
| Andrew Schilling
Nevertheless, that states permit certain behavior that may erode the link between procreation and marriage does not necessarily strip away their ability to take measures maintaining, protecting, or restoring that link. The reform may take one step at a time, addressing itself… to the problem which seems most acute to the legislative mind. The legislature may select one phase…and apply a remedy there, neglecting the
others.”139 Nor does it necessarily gainsay any marriage regulation justified on the grounds of promoting procreation within marriage. As long as traditional marriage statutes are substantially related to protecting the link between marriage and procreation, they pass intertte scrutiny. Andrew Schilling is a senior in the Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences studying Government.
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THE SANCTUARY
A System of Love Understanding “Faith” through Newman and Balthasar Christopher Cannataro
O
ne of the most complex theological concepts is the act of faith; specifically, the relationship between the will and intellect in assenting to the truth claims of a particular faith.140 Among the greatest thinkers on this subject is Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism, whose theory concerning the convergence of probabilities offers us a strong argument to reasonably assent to that which cannot be perceived empirically.141 Newman’s understanding of faith as an act involving both will and intellect, when juxtaposed with the prayerful meditations of Hans Urs von Balthasar on faith as experience, allows us to see the act of faith as a “system of love.”142 In this system of love, the act of faith is not a purely intellectual exercise, but becomes a transcendental choice to accept and live out God’s love. This paper endeavors to explore Newman’s convergence of probabilities, the relationship between intellect and will according to Newman, and will synthesize Newman and Balthasar’s theories of faith in order to establish the structure of faith as a “system of love.” Newman’s first two propositions, understanding the essential premises of the convergence of probabilities and the intrinsic relation between intellect and will, go hand in hand. The former requires an understanding of the treatment of the “God” question throughout the centuries. The revelation of the incarnate Logos, the tradition of the disciples that followed Him, and the Gospel accounts that came out of that tradition serve as the initial presuppositions for
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the convergence of probabilities, since accepting that revelation without proper intellectual investigation is neither authentic faith nor sufficient for the intellect (and, by extension, reason) to ultimately accept.143 To bridge the intellectual gap and provide reasonable grounds for the intellect to accept this revelation as true, great thinkers designed their own arguments for God’s existence and provided deductive explanations of doctrinal truth using the language of Greek metaphysics. They did so ultimately to construct rational explanations for revelation and to underpin their ultimate thesis that the God of Christianity exists, eschatologically erupting in history in the person of Jesus Christ and continuing throughout time (transcendentally) to lead humanity into truth.144 Arguments for God’s existence include St. Anselm’s ontological argument and the five ways of St. Thomas Aquinas,145 while the Greek metaphysical language which explains doctrine philosophically can be seen in the theological debates and ultimate resolutions at Nicaea and Chalcedon.146 In addition to these philosophical explanations, the Gospels and the tradition of the Catholic Church can serve as data to support one’s conclusion that the Christian God exists, since their founding is underpinned by seeing and believing in the incarnate Logos, Jesus Christ. Prior to Newman’s time, no thinker had elucidated an approach that could encompass all these arguments under one overarching theory. By doing so, Cardinal Newman sought to show that all of the aforementioned data that proved
| Christopher Cannataro
God’s existence is not disjointed and partitioned, but rather harmonious in nature; he realized that the vast array of arguments for the existence of the Christian God was not as strong as the aggregation of these arguments. This product of Newman’s genius became known as his theory of the convergence of probabilities.147 To understand the second proposition requires one to know the reasons why Newman created the convergence argument. No person of faith can have certainty of the propositions of his faith, because no one can be certain of things unseen.148 However, a person of faith has certitude that those unseen truth claims are indeed true. The distinction is subtle; for Newman, there must be a rational underpinning for that certitude, and the strongest underpinning for him was allowing all of the data of God’s existence to converge and aggregate, with each argument taking a relative weight in the calculation.149 Yet this still is not enough to establish certitude, for certitude also requires an act of the will to overcome the leap of faith and assent to the proposition at hand.150 The convergence of probabilities endeavors to satisfy the intellect as much as possible; unfortunately, the intellect will never be fully satisfied, for it will relentlessly pursue an a priori rationale for propositions.151 Furthermore, the convergence is meant to sway the will to overcome the intellect’s inability to accept the existence of God as definitely true by giving assent or making an act of renunciation.152 The scope of Newman’s argument concerning the act of faith can be extended beyond simply an aggregation of philosophical arguments and revelation-based data of tradition and scripture. One point that also needs to be taken into account is the significant role a personal experience of God has in the act of faith, which brings us to Balthasar. A personal experience of God causes an internal transformation, and therefore provides an overwhelming piece of data in Newman’s convergence of probabilities. This internal experience more easily allows for the will to assent to the truth claim and certitude to be established, thus taking a significant weight in the
convergence calculation. Newman himself had an experience at the age of fifteen, when he realized only two things for which he had certitude: he and God exist.153 Hans Urs von Balthasar, writing in the twentieth century, also articulates the importance of experiencing the aesthetic nature of God and how it leads to faith.154 von Balthasar suggests that one way to experience Christ is through, in his words, “the total image of the Church, which is the community of faith that both is now a living reality and that once lived as an historical reality.”155 For Balthasar, it is through the Church that one can have an experience of Christ and His beauty, an experience which can give the Will the necessary underpinning to act in renunciation.156 Further, and most importantly, von Balthasar makes the claim that another way to experience Christ’s beautiful, kindly light is to see him mediated through our neighbor, our fellow-man.157 Our fellow-man, by living out the Catholic call of discipleship and love, mediates the love of Christ in the present moment. This connection with God is the most visceral and tangible experience of Christ’s intrinsic beauty which we can experience, Balthasar argues that it can take “the loose threads of faith” and transform them “into a perfect weave.”158 It is this connection in which we see the most compelling evidence for the will to assent. An onus falls on those who have experienced Christ mediated by the Church and our fellowman and have also assented to the Truth. This burden is for us to mediate the light of Christ to our fellow-man by following the call of Christ to love. von Balthasar claims that faith “is at each instant tested through the senses, and, if it is authenticated as faith, it immediately receives its sensory corroboration. For love that is practiced contains the ability to demonstrate itself as the truth.”159 This powerful statement means that, when we live out our faith and love our neighbor, we are mediating God’s love, and therefore mediating His Truth. This fundamentally makes faith a system of love, because if personal experience assists the
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mind to assent to faith, and that personal experience involves God’s love, love obviously has an integral part in the structure of faith; in fact, love fundamentally underpins it. Furthermore, von Balthasar shows that love, as part of faith, is systematic; once one feels the love of God and assents to the truth of the Christian faith, he becomes more aware of his orientation as a child of God to serve as a mediator of God’s love, a symbol through which Christ is radiated. This is part and parcel of the Christian understanding
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of evangelization; if Catholics proclaim the Gospel and live out Christ’s call to love, others will feel this love in their lives, and may even experience faith, leading them to assent to the truth as well. Clearly, faith is so much more than giving the intellect satisfaction through a movement of the will, but a “system of love” through which all are transcendentally united. Christopher Fitzpatrick Cannataro is a junior in the McDonough School of Business studying Accounting.
THE SANCTUARY
Interfaith Dialogue and Ethics of Authenticity Aamir Hussain
I
n The Ethics of Authenticity, Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor claims that defining oneself in comparison to others is a central component of authenticity, or being true to one’s inner self or beliefs.160 He argues that modernization has created a hyper-individualistic spirit, which he calls “radical anthropocentrism,” that leads people to define their identities in a vacuum; as a result, social cohesion has weakened and individuals are often unaware of how their inner selves fit into society. Since, according to Aristotle, humans are “social and political animals,” Taylor argues that hyper-individualism constitutes a deviation from true human nature, i.e. human authenticity.161 Taylor’s solution to this problem is to recognize that human life has a “fundamentally dialogical character,” and that individuals can better define various components of their own identities through “dialogues with significant others.”162 Although Taylor mainly discusses dialogue and identity as abstract concepts, his ideas bear striking similarities to the real-world practice of interfaith dialogue understood as “formal conversation between individuals of different religious/spiritual backgrounds with the goal of understanding each other’s beliefs.”163 In this essay, I aim to describe the conditions necessary for effective interfaith dialogue and how such dialogue functions as a practical application of Taylor’s philosophy. Interfaith dialogue can enable individuals to better define their own spiritual identities, and learn how their beliefs mesh with others in society.164 This process can help avoid the hyper-individualism and breakdown of social cohesion—the latter of which Taylor
calls “social atomism”—that negatively characterize modernity.165 In order to begin any productive dialogue, individuals must understand which aspects of their identities are meaningful. Identity is often defined as the collective set of characteristics that comprise the self. The individual cannot unilaterally declare that an aspect of one’s self has the most “meaning” since this deeper significance is only conferred by the other. Absent the other, there is no way to distinguish the most significant among the near infinite characteristics that comprise one’s identity. For example, an individual might be a 21 year-old Muslim man with black hair. Without an other, the individual cannot assume that his age, his gender, his religion, his hair color, or other aspects (e.g. his DNA) would be the most significant in any given situation. Indeed, Taylor argues that identity traits “take on importance against a background of intelligibility… a horizon.”166 After “meaning” is established, defining oneself “means finding what is significant in [one’s] difference from others.”167 For the purposes of this analysis of interfaith dialogue, I define a “horizon of significance” (with regards to religion) as a religion’s core beliefs that inform an individual’s religious identity. For the purposes of this paper, I assume that there is no rational basis for having faith, or for following one religion over another; I assume that faith and religious identity inform an individual’s authentic self. According to this view, interfaith dialogue allows individuals to more clearly determine the most significant aspects of religious belief that set them apart from others.
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For example, a dialogue between a Catholic and a Baptist would establish that the belief in Jesus’s resurrection is central in Christianity’s horizon of significance, though this similarity does not help the partners distinguish their religious identities from each other.168 However, discussion of a related significant concept, salvation, would reveal important differences: while Baptists believe salvation is found only through acceptance of Jesus as the Savior, Catholics believe salvation to be the fruit of a combination of faith, God’s grace, and good deeds.169 By articulating specific differences such as the above, the dialogue participants will then be able to understand the most significant components of their religious identities that set them apart from others. In contrast, it would not be authentic for these dialogue partners within the Christian tradition to claim mutual distinction based on a concept that lacks significance within the Christian horizon, e.g. affirming Muhammad as a messenger of God (a Muslim belief). Since interfaith dialogue helps uncover meaningful differences between religious traditions, it can also help individuals better articulate the important components of their own faith identities. In this way, interfaith dialogue fights social atomism, the breakdown in social cohesion which Taylor claims results from modernization. Individuals can build relationships with others through interfaith dialogue as long as participants are eager to learn about each other’s differences while holding true to their own beliefs. Social atomism involves “[centering] fulfillment on the individual” and is entrenched through society’s trend towards “impersonal and casual social relationships.”170 However, if interfaith dialogue leads one to define one’s faith identity as distinct from that of another person, logically this means that one cannot define one’s faith identity only on an individual basis. Consequently, a person’s affiliations with others become necessary for the intangible process of self-definition. Since self-definition is an ongoing process, the hope is that individuals will deepen and strengthen these affiliations with
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others over time. Therefore, interfaith dialogue may help restore interpersonal relationships central to individual identity and in doing so, restore the authenticity of human nature based on social cohesion. Although interfaith dialogue can effectively counter social atomism, participants must take care to avoid what Taylor calls “radical anthropocentrism”: the hyper-individualism that characterizes modern society. The purpose of interfaith dialogue for the individual is to gain a deeper understanding of other people’s horizons of significance without compromising his or her own beliefs. In practice, this ideal is often not fulfilled, and Taylor writes that the slide to anthropocentrism is “a negation of all horizons of significance.”171 When discussing potentially divisive topics like religion, it is often tempting for individuals to suppress their core beliefs in order to avoid difference or discomfort. For example, many Orthodox Jews follow kosher dietary restrictions based on laws from the Old Testament. If a Jew were to begin disregarding these restrictions only because she felt embarrassed when a dialogue partner expressed skepticism about Jewish tradition, this would constitute radical anthropocentrism.172 She would be “neglecting or [delegitimizing] the demands that come from beyond [the individual’s] desires or aspirations” (in this case, the “demands” are religious laws).173 This suppression of a horizon of significance is antithetical to human authenticity because denying difference removes an opportunity for one to define oneself as distinct from others. Both sides should instead use this disagreement over dietary laws as an opportunity to articulate their distinctive faith identities, and affirm their different horizons of significance (i.e. the most significant aspects of their own beliefs). Remaining true to one’s horizons of significance is also useful because it emphasizes the differences between various “options” of identity that allow for authenticity. Taylor argues, One of the things we cannot do, if we are to define ourselves significantly, is to suppress
| Aamir Hussain
or deny the horizons against which things take on significance for us…In stressing the legitimacy of choice between certain options, we very often find ourselves depriving the options of their significance…Authenticity can’t be defended in ways that collapse horizons of significance.174 In this specific case, the “options” are various religious identities. Although religions may have similar views in some areas, they disagree on a variety of other issues. For example, Buddhism and Islam, despite holding similar moral guidelines, are very different with regards to belief in God. For Islam, belief in a singular deity, Allah, and submission to Allah’s will is the most important pillar of faith; in contrast, Buddhism centers on the elimination of suffering from one’s own life through the Eightfold Path. This path consists of essential guidelines for virtuous living such as proper speech and proper thoughts, among others. In most denominations of Buddhism, belief in a deity is irrelevant to one’s personal quest for nirvana, i.e. the permanent elimination of suffering.175 Although dialogue participants may likely find several areas of common ground, religious disagreements are what constitute the “significance” of different faith identities, and suppressing religious difference essentially deprives each faith identity of its uniqueness. In the previous example, a Muslim would learn that her religion is distinct in its belief in God’s oneness, while a Buddhist would learn that his tradition is unique due to its emphasis on personal actions rather than divine intervention. Both sides do not need to accept the other’s belief as true; instead, they should view their dialogue with one another as a way of clarifying their own beliefs while gaining a better understanding of the religious other. To put it bluntly, this often means “agreeing to disagree,” and refraining from imposing one’s religious truth claims upon the other (i.e. proselytizing). Therefore, interfaith dialogue partners can avoid radical anthropocentrism by striving to learn each other’s horizons of significance
without either compromising their own beliefs or imposing their beliefs on others. My experiences with interfaith dialogue also demonstrate the practical effectiveness of the goals and intent of Taylor’s ideal of authenticity. As a former president of Georgetown University’s Interfaith Student Council I organized and participated in many interfaith dialogues. During these dialogues, I noticed that the value of community service is a common horizon of significance in virtually all religious traditions, and therefore constitutes an excellent platform for recognizing similarities across different faiths. Many religions believe in serving the poor, healing the sick, and advocating for the disenfranchised; thus, people of various religious and non-religious backgrounds can unite around these common activities and goals. Once these areas of common ground are established, it becomes much easier for participants to articulate their differences from each other and engage in self-definition. For example, for the past few years, Georgetown students of diverse spiritual and religious backgrounds have met to distribute sandwiches for the homeless population in Washington, D.C. While doing this service work, these students discussed each religion’s stance on social justice and in the process, gained a deeper understanding of the uniqueness of their own traditions and, from their perspective, the religious other. Another observation is that dialogue participants often become close friends even if they diverge sharply on religious doctrines; this can be explained by the participants’ desire to understand religious difference through sustained interpersonal relationships. Finally, after an interfaith dialogue, virtually all participants consistently report both a greater understanding for various religious horizons of significance, and more confidence in articulating their respective faith identities. Western society is currently experiencing a crisis of faith that jeopardizes the ideal of authenticity with regard to religious identity. Many residents of developed countries consider organized religion to be hypocritical, irrational,
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or anachronistic, and an increasing number of people view their religious affiliations as “purely instrumental.” As a result, they have difficulty clearly defining their religious identities.176 Interfaith dialogue is especially useful in these contexts since, if conducted properly, it can counter some negative characteristics of modernization. Firstly, interfaith dialogue helps individuals to distinguish the most meaningful aspects of their faith identities in relation to others in society, thus preventing social atomism. Next, by emphasizing and embracing religious difference interfaith dialogue avoids the “negation of all
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horizons of significance” that constitutes radical anthropocentrism. As individuals build strong interpersonal relationships and better define their own religious identities through interfaith dialogue, they come closer to the ideal of authenticity with regards to religious belief. By defining one’s faith identity through conversations with others, one exemplifies human life’s “fundamentally dialogical character.”177 Aamir Hussain is a senior in the Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences studying Government and Theology.
THE SANCTUARY
A Tale of Two Cities The Dialectic of Law and Grace and the Political Realism of Martin Luther’s Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms 178
Caleb Morell I have written more splendidly and profitably of civil authority than any teacher has ever done (except perhaps St. Augustine) since the times of the apostles. In this I may glory with a good conscience and with the testimony of the world.179 —Martin Luther I am almost inclined to boast that since the time of the apostles the temporal sword and government have never been so clearly described or so highly praised as by me. Even my enemies must admit this.180 —Martin Luther
F
ew historical figures can be considered more polarizing than Martin Luther. Living from 1483 to 1546 in Germany, this “great reformer” fostered both admiration and indignation; respect and disdain. In part, these varying responses result from his theological claims, but also because of the difficulty in recognizing the “real” Luther.181 Scholars of Luther often note inconsistencies in Luther’s writings, which is particularly true of his political writings. In fact, even during his own time, contemporaries called Luther’s political stances contradictory.182 However, those who emphasize such a dichotomy between Luther’s theological and political writings often fail to comprehend how Luther’s theology informs his political writings, which is the topic that this paper will address. This paper seeks an affinity between Luther’s political principles and his theological convictions. Attempting to make sense of Luther’s political theory without regard to his theology is
senseless; instead, placing the two side by side reveals a strong affinity between the two. Upon studying Luther’s theological doctrine of the relationship between Law and Grace it becomes apparent how his theology informs his political writings on his “Two Kingdoms” doctrine. The theological tension between Law and Grace warrants a necessary political tension between the Temporal and Spiritual Kingdoms, which informs the relationship between these Two Kingdoms in Luther’s political theory. Understanding the relationship between Law and Grace, the Old and New Testaments, reveals that the apparent dissonance between Luther’s theological and political writings stems from a misunderstanding of the focus of Luther’s theological project. This theological understanding helps make sense of Luther’s later writings Against the Peasants and Against the Jews. For Luther, Christ’s coming did not remove the need for the Law completely, but revealed man’s inadequacies to fulfill it and the need for Christ
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A Tale of Two Cities |
to satisfy the claims of the Law in their place. Whereas the peasants employed Christ’s coming as an excuse for licentiousness and abandoning the law completely, the Jews denied the inadequacy of the law to justify man. Both positions are diametrically opposed to Luther’s views, which helps explain even if it cannot excuse his subsequent virulence against them. Before the relationship between the Law and Grace can be discussed and fully comprehended, the reasons for the necessity of this relationship as part of Luther’s thought must be explained. Luther’s theology begins by conceiving of mankind as divided between the righteous and the wicked. In the salvific language of Old Testament imagery, the wicked are those spiritually enslaved in bondage in Egypt. The righteous are those spiritually set free from bondage on their way to the Promised Land. Conceiving of mankind as divided in these two parts intermixed until Christ’s return forms the basis for ruling the wicked with the law and the righteous by grace. Luther’s binary distinction between the righteous and the wicked consists of two components, both of which result from the fall of man in Genesis: (1) a corruption of the will and (2) a corruption of reason. Exploring the first aspect, the corruption of man’s will, begins with the fall. While man once enjoyed perfect fellowship and harmony with God, man has since been separated by Adam’s original act of rebellion against God. Since sin is rebellion against God,183 the saturation of sin consists of “... an inclination to evil, a distaste for good, a boredom with truth and wisdom, an attachment to error and darkness, a hatred and avoidance of good works, an onrush towards evil.”184 Sin has been passed down from Adam as an intrinsic part of Fallen Man who is now “contaminated by sin.”185 Consequently, the will of man is by nature so corrupt that “…Human nature, in itself and apart from grace, is so evil that it neither thanks nor worships [God].”186 The primary outworking of Man’s sinful nature rests in his ambition for glory.187 Such pride and self-seeking expresses
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itself in man’s “desire to wipe out sin by its own power;” a desire Luther was all too familiar with from personal experience.188 The corruption of reason, the second aspect of Luther’s anthropology, only compounds Luther’s pessimistic view of human nature. The plight of man is so severe that man cannot by natural reason discern the spiritual truths of God. As a result of the fall, the presence of sin cannot be limited to one aspect of man; rather sin permeates everything, including man’s rational faculties.189 Consequently, man’s reason is unhelpful in coming to salvific knowledge of God.190 Contrary to the teachings of the schoolmen of his time, Luther’s pessimistic view of man’s innate rational faculties lowers his understanding of what can be achieved by natural reason and furthers the need for divine intervention.191 For Luther, reason “cannot show or find the way or the path that will lead from sin and from death to righteousness and to life…”192 Thus Luther’s theological anthropology places man, in his reason and his will, at odds with God and confines all of humanity to spiritual bondage in Egypt. The plight of man, evidenced by mankind’s tendency toward wickedness and rebellion coupled with his inability to discern the things of God by natural reason, warrants Luther’s two distinct functions of the law: (1) first to restrain sin and protect the righteous by keeping the wicked in check, and (2) secondly to bring men to despair from their inability to fulfill the law and to seek God. Together, these two aspects of the law form the foundation for understanding the relationship between Law and Grace. The first function of the law—to restrain the wicked—is solely pragmatic. Following Old Testament imagery, the first function of the law is similar to chains that bind the slaves in Egypt. Slaves are not internally bound as a result of these chains; rather the chains are necessitated by the internal corruption of the will demonstrated in Luther’s anthropology; without the law’s restraining power, chaos would break out. Luther’s pessimism is akin to Hobbes’s state of
| Caleb Morell
nature when Luther writes, “If God did not sustain governmental authorities with His power, Mr. Everybody (Herr Omnes) would kill all of them,”193 Luther’s nearly paranoiac fear of “Herr Omnes” fosters an expectation of disorderly conduct without the law: Now I have frequently taught that the world neither should nor can be governed according to the Gospel and Christian love; it should be governed according to strict laws, with the sword and with force. So it must be done, because the world is wicked and accepts neither Gospel nor love but acts and lives according to its caprice if it is not compelled to behave by force... [Without force] everybody would take what belongs to the other, and such a mess would develop that no one could exist because of the other.194 These laws, whether civil or divine, place bounds on human freedom for the sake of order; laws serve to keep the slaves bound in Egypt.. For this reason a harsh sword must be placed in the hands of the political rulers: to punish disobedience and restrain wickedness. The second function of the law—to bring men to despair from their inability to fulfill the law and to seek God—corresponds to man’s need to be made aware of his bondage and illustrates Luther’s convictions of the inadequacy of reason. Slaves in Egypt must first be made aware of their sinfulness. However, a slave in Egypt cannot by his own power overcome his bondage. Externally imposed bonds and laws, however well they are followed, will never bring man to justifying faith in God, but they can bring man to a place of despair so that he may then turn to God and repent. The limitations of human reason are such that man would remain ignorant of the extent of his corruption without the law of God. Because of sin, Luther contends that each is predisposed to vainly “think that he is right” apart from God.195 Although natural man may have some knowledge of the truth of God—“the Ten Commandments are written in the hearts of
all men”—man’s obedience to God’s law cannot come through reason apart from revelation: “it must be taught by the Holy Spirit alone.”196 More than anything men need to be made aware of their need for God, a task impossible for reason alone. Luther explains the limits of reason in his first disputation against the antinomians:197 So great is the corruption and blindness of human nature that it does not see or sense the greatness of sin. To be sure, all men naturally have a certain knowledge of the Law; but it is very weak and obscured. Therefore it was and is always necessary to hand down to men the knowledge of the Law, that they may know the greatness of their sin, the wrath of God, etc…198 Reason has a distinct sphere of competence when pertaining to external things of this life, but reason commits a grave error when it traverses into spiritual matters because they can only be discerned by faith through the Spirit. Natural or unregenerate reason can provide a framework for the earthly sphere of existence, but can do nothing to inform man of the heavenly reality.199 While reason possesses no intrinsic evil, it must be restricted to its proper place. Slaves in Egypt can be taught by unregenerate reason to better bind themselves, but they cannot by aid of unregenerate reason set themselves free from sin. A few observations can be made on the differences between these two functions of the law. The effects of the first—restraining the wicked— are external, while the effects of the second—to incur despair—are internal. The first often takes political form while the second takes a more religious bent. The first can more readily be identified with the Old Testament, while the second plays a more prominent role, on a Lutheran reading, in the New Testament. The first function fits more readily with Luther’s general ideas when he speaks of “the Law” while the second is more readily identified with his writings on “Grace.” But like the Law and Grace, both functions of the law play vital parts.
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Distinguishing between these two functions of the law turns out to be central to understanding Luther’s political theology. While good and just civil laws fulfill the first function of the law—to restrain wickedness—civil laws cannot satisfy the latter function of bringing man to an awareness of what is missing. Luther allocates the first function to civil and temporal authorities through “magistrates, parents, teachers, laws, bonds and all civil ordinances.”200 However, the second function of the law, which “doth nothing else but reveal sin, engender wrath, accuse and terrify men, so that it bringeth them to the very brink of desperation,” cannot solely lie with temporal authorities.201 As seen in Luther’s view of the corruption of human nature, slaves in Egypt need the first function of the law to restrain their wickedness, yet these bounds never set them free; at best, they can only reveal the slave’s bondage. For Luther, the dual functions of the law are primarily negative in nature. Obedience to laws can at best restrict evil and incur desperation, but never bring salvation by justifying the sinner before God. This place of desperation in personal experience is essential to prepare a person to be ready to receive the Gospel.202 To bring a person to a place of psychological desperation at their inability to satisfy the righteous claims of the law “is the proper use of the law, and here it hath an end, and it ought to go no further.”203 Following this reasoning, slaves in Egypt are not set free, in a spiritual sense, by their dutiful submission to slavery, nor by their further accumulation of chains. While the law may cause men to negatively “recognize their ailment,” it provides no positive remedy to set the slave free from bondage in Egypt.204 The fundamental implication of this is Luther’s this-worldly division between carnal and spiritual realms. Since obedience to temporal laws cannot bridge these realms, both carnal and spiritual realms will always exist in the world of time. Here we arrive at Luther’s distinction between the Law and Grace. So important was the difference between the Law and Grace that Luther called it “the height of knowledge in
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Christendom.”205 Since, unlike earthly laws, God’s law must be fulfilled “in your very heart, and cannot be obeyed if you merely perform certain acts,”206 the plight of man is twofold: “[1] First, men do not recognize their ailment; [2] secondly, they do not know how to use the remedy.”207 The work of Grace responds to these two dilemmas by first bringing an awareness of what is missing, through (1) confrontation with God’s law, and (2) providing a means of salvation. The twofold work of the Gospel responds to the twofold work of the law by first, “revealing sins and… pronouncing guilty those who were righteous in their own eyes,” and second, proclaiming the good news of God’s forgiveness, “through which the Father of mercies freely (gratis) gives to all people peace and righteousness and truth.”208 The law, which “wants to have (something) from us,” brings man to a place similar to Luther’s own experience of despair (Anfechtungen), but cannot bring man further.209 The gospel, in contrast, “exacts nothing of us; rather it gives freely and enjoins us to hold out our hands and to take what it offers.”210 As St. Paul writes in Romans, For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: That the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.211 As the Hebraic Law of the Old Testament could bring man to a place of desperation, but could venture no further, temporal government can employ its force to a certain point but no more. At this point, the message of the Gospel that brings grace must step in. According to Luther, the message of the Gospel is both simple and incomprehensible: “the man called Jesus Christ, true God and man… died for our sins and was raised from the dead for our justification.”212 Luther’s view of salvation is substitutionary since it consists of an
| Caleb Morell
exchange: man’s sin for Christ’s righteousness, man’s punishment for Christ’s reward, man’s death for Christ’s resurrection. The beauty of the Gospel for Luther consists of what it reveals about God’s love because of the cost God incurs in extending forgiveness of sins. Our salvation costs us nothing. Nonetheless it has cost God something; it has cost Him so much that His only Son had to become man and redeem us.213 Through Jesus Christ’s life and death, God the Son willingly submitted himself to metaphoric bondage in Egypt so that all who put faith in Him might be set free to live as pilgrims in the Wilderness in this life in anticipation of final fulfillment in the Promised Land in the next life. Now that the relationship between Law and Grace has been discussed, the relationship between Luther’s theology and politics can be addressed. We know from Luther’s theology that the Law (in a theological sense), although inadequate to secure man’s salvation, has a function it must complete. In the same way in Luther’s political writings, temporal rulers or governments, although unable to make one Christian, have a task to complete in establishing a law that reflects God’s law. This is the essence of Luther’s doctrine of the Two Kingdoms as elaborated in On Temporal Authority (1523). Both Temporal rulers (government) and Spiritual authorities (churches) have a role to play in an individual’s salvation. By reflecting God’s law in their rule, temporal governments allow the two functions of the law to do their work in restraining the wicked and incurring desperation, conviction, and guilt. Although inadequate on its own, the government can pave the way for the church to step in with the message of grace and forgiveness. Thus, as the messages of Law and Grace are related yet distinct, the works of the Two Kingdoms are related, but must also remain distinct: Therefore care must be taken to keep these two governments distinct, and both must
be allowed to continue their work, the one to make people just, the other to create outward peace and prevent evil doing. Neither is enough for the world without the other.214 Where the law falls short, grace and the gospel step in. Where the government ends, the church begins. With an understanding of the dual functions of the law and the Gospel, the political implications of Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms can now be discussed. On the basis of whether or not one has been justified by faith in Jesus Christ, all men are divided into two classes: “... the first belong to the kingdom of God, the second to the kingdom of the world.”215 The necessary dual processes that emerge from Luther’s this-worldly division consist of (1) convicting man of sin through just laws and (2) providing the message of the Gospel, and require two distinct institutions. Moreover, both institutions “must be permitted to remain,” meaning that they must co-exist.216 Temporal authorities must seek to establish just laws to restrain the wicked, to protect the righteous and to convict sinners of their inability to fulfill the precepts of God. Spiritual authorities must first bring men to despair of their inability to fulfill the law and then preach the message of the Gospel to bring hope and life. Each is accountable to God to fulfill their responsibilities without trespassing on the rightful jurisdiction of the other. Distinguishing between the functions of temporal and spiritual authorities allows Luther to lower his expectations for what can be achieved politically by governments while raising expectations for what can be accomplished spiritually by churches. For Luther, temporal authorities exist to enforce the first function of the law to protect the just by punishing the wicked; rather than establishing just laws to justify men, “God wanted to have government” so that “life in the world might go on in an orderly manner.”217 As Luther famously wrote, “Temporal authority and government extend no further than to matters
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which are external and corporeal.”218 The measure of a good government is neither the number of Christians, nor the degree of spirituality, but on its ability to establish and enforce just laws. In Luther’s case, laws can only be deemed “just” insofar as they restrain the wicked, protect the righteous and convict the ungodly of their sin. The task allotted to spiritual authorities is to provide the message of Grace and the Gospel. While Christians have no need of the Law, Luther is adamant that temporal authorities must rule with stringent laws and not with the Gospel since society will never consist solely of Christians. However, Luther’s pessimism about human nature produces an impasse: since rulers abuse power and subjects misuse freedom, which should be granted greater autonomy? While Luther placed definitive bounds on the authority of civil governments, the precise balance between despotism and leniency is more difficult to pinpoint. During his lectures on Genesis he cynically remarks, “In the state you will find it to be true that almost invariably the poorest statesmen administer it.”219 Yet at the same time Luther remains equally concerned by the prospect of too much leniency: “... Pray for our government that the devil may not turn us into a mob… God does not want the common rabble (der gemeine Pöbel) to rule.”220 Thus, Luther seems caught between endowing power and freedom to either wicked subjects or to wicked rulers. This political tension between despotism and leniency too must be seen as linked to Luther’s theological understanding of Law and Grace. As has been noted, in a spiritual sense, the Law of the Old Testament performs two functions: restraining wickedness and convicting of sin. While the message of the Old Testament’s emphasis on the Law is rendered insufficient by the New Testament’s message of grace and forgiveness, it is not rendered useless. Its function remains to prepare people for the message of the gospel. Finding a political balance between despotism and leniency is the equivalent of holding the Law and the Gospel in a dynamic tension.
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As with the Law and the Gospel, the temptation to err politically on the side of despotism (the Law without the Gospel) or on the side of leniency (the Gospel with no Law) is an everpresent threat. The failure to maintain a balance politically, for Luther, reflects a failure to understand the theological relationship between Law and Grace. This theological failure is the crux of his response to the German Peasants’ Revolt (1524–1525) in his vehement tract Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants (1525). Scholars and critics often contend that Luther’s call for the princes to quell the German Peasants Revolt can be used to justify authoritarian governments.221 After all, Luther’s charge to “stab, smite, slay whoever you can” seems to contradict his principles of grace and forgiveness.222 However, Luther’s emphasis on maintaining both Law and Grace suggests a continuity in his thinking that explains even if it cannot excuse his writings. For Luther, the peasants’ demands ignore the necessary functions of the Law. Emphasis on grace, forgiveness and freedom outside of the functions of the Law, undermines the message of the gospel. For Luther, the New Testament fulfills but does not negate the Old Testament. Both Law and Grace must continue for the preservation of society and the furtherance of the Gospel. To conclude, Luther’s realism regarding human nature warrants his two uses of the Law and limits his expectations for what can be achieved politically. Temporal government can no more fully establish justice than the Law can bring salvation. Temporal government can at best administer the first function of the law—punish the wicked and protect the just—but can do nothing to justify and make righteous. So convinced is Luther of temporal authorities’ inadequacy that one ought to be surprised when governments are not corrupt: In government as in all other estates, there are always more of the wicked than of the pious. It is not to be supposed or hoped that we shall ever have an entirely pious
| Caleb Morell
government; nay if good government or a beneficial use of power is to be had at all, it must come as a gift of pure grace or by special prayer and merit... we must wonder and thank God when it does not wrong us and do us injustice.223 Indeed, due to the difficulty in ever finding or maintaining a just government, Luther writes, “[a] wise prince is a rare bird indeed.”224 Laws and institutions can never suffice to create a perfect society, which is neither possible nor a safe goal in the world of time. Rather, Luther’s distinction between the righteous and the wicked precludes any attempt to establish a Christian kingdom in this world, thus legitimizing the divorce between the distinct functions of temporal authority and spiritual authority into Two Kingdoms. Since, as Luther writes in On Secular Authority, “the wicked are always far more numerous than the pious,” society must be ruled by the Law and not the Gospel.225 Luther’s thisworldly division between the righteous and the wicked dismisses any possibility for this-worldly utopianism. Instead, the scope of Luther’s expectations of government is not salvation, but limited to “keep the world from becoming worse,” to keep wickedness in check “at least in part,” and “to keep everything from perishing.”226 The
Law must rule politically through Government, while the Gospel must rule through the Church. While political theologies have often contained binary categories of this world and the next, Luther reshapes political philosophy by establishing a this-worldly divide between carnal and spiritual realms. Similar to St. Augustine’s two-city cosmology, Luther’s cosmology consists of Two Cities (or Two Kingdoms) that continuously interact in history.227 The world is not ruled solely by Law or by Grace. Instead, both the Law and Grace are necessary in Luther’s cosmology. The Law must rule through Temporal Authorities and the Gospel must rule through Spiritual Authorities. The tension between them may not be pleasant, but it is necessary for the preservation of society. When considered outside of their theological underpinnings, Luther’s political writings can and have been twisted to suit other interests. Yet any attempt to wrest Luther’s political writings from their theological foundations will lack the consistency and clarity they can only possess when fit in the overall structure of his dialectical understanding of the world rooted in the relationship between the Law and Grace. Caleb Morrell is a sophomore in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service studying International History.
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THE ARCHIVE
The Rise and Fall of Doubt The Development of the Office of the Promoter of Faith in the Canonization Proceedings of the Roman Catholic Church Peter Prindiville
S
ince Christ’s crucifixion, exemplary holy men and women have led lives in imitation of Him. Throughout Church history, the Roman Catholic Church has recognized these holy people as special and worthy of praise and reverence. Although the formal recognition of sanctity by the Holy See—a process called canonization—has taken varying forms at different periods in the history of the Church, it has undoubtedly become centralized in the Roman Curia, the central bureaucratic organ of the Vatican. This process of centralization has led to the formation of a canonization procedure that is organized, bureaucratic, and juridical in nature. This procedure took a particularly organized form in the sixteenth century with Pope Sixtus V’s creation of the Congregation of Rites in 1587.228 The proceedings of the Congregation in canonization matters were similar to those of a court case: a petition was brought before the tribunal, a canon lawyer defended the cause of the holy person, and another prosecuted the cause, attempting to argue why this holy person should not be recognized as a saint. This prosecutorial position was called the Office of the Promoter of Faith. The Office of the Promoter of Faith played a startling role in the proceedings. The promoter was charged with examining the documents of the petition and witnesses. He would then raise questions surrounding the legitimacy of the petitioner’s sanctity.
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Pope John Paul II eliminated the Office of the Promoter of Faith in 1983, removing its extraordinary powers and forming a new Office of the Promoter of Faith. This new Office of the Promoter of Faith, however, does not hold any of the duties of the previous Office of the same name, but rather conducts general theological research surrounding the cause. John Paul II reformed both the Code of Canon Law and the norms for the canonization. In his Apostolic Constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister, he radically altered the long-standing bureaucratic tradition of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, which had assumed the authority and norms of the Congregation of Rites in canonization matters in 1969. Without the promoter of faith, the church lacks the institutionalized safeguard of doubt in the bureaucratic processes of canonization. Like many Church institutions the Office of Promoter of the Faith was initially organic and informal but became increasingly institutionalized over time in response to the needs of particular circumstances, before being dissolved by John Paul II. This paper will substantiate this claim by examining the early historical developments of the Office prior to the 1917 Pio-Benedectine Code of Canon Law and Pope John Paul II’s 1983 reforms of the canonization procedure, elimination of the Office, and the resulting fall of the safeguard of doubt. Although the centralized legal processes that examine the reputation for sanctity of a Servant
| Peter Prindiville
of God emerged in the late sixteenth century, their roots are found much earlier in the history of the Church. The veneration of martyrs in the early Church originated with the spontaneous devotion of the Christian people and suggests an instinct to honor and venerate those who had led lives marked with extraordinary holiness.229 Later, bishops began to exert authority in these matters and investigated sanctity to sanction formal veneration. These episcopal examinations took varying forms and degrees of thoroughness.230 As early as the fifth century, a procedure of certification was consistently utilized throughout the Roman church. Although the procedure developed considerably, early and late medieval procedures--episcopal and papal--indicate a specific intention: to verify through examination the sanctity of a proposed Servant of God. Beginning with the case of the Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg in 993 and continuing throughout the Middle Ages, the papacy gradually asserted increasing authority over the procedures of canonization and began to establish a rudimentary papal canonization process. The resulting processes and norms influenced the formal codification procedures in 1917, and thus are important to the development of the Officer of the Protector of Faith and the inclusion of an institutional safeguard of doubt. During the reign of Gregory IX, consultation became an essential part of the process. A contemporary historian of the pontiff noted the new value of bureaucratic, procedural, and evidential integrity in the process: “they will be done exactly, faithfully and prudently,” with special attention to the “the articles and interrogations,” of the pope’s consultants in the tribunal.231 This marks the first mention of a formal juridical examination-based process in matters of canonization. Although the process was rapidly developing, it was spread over a few different Curia offices, causing bureaucratic complications. The sixteenth century saw a renewed centralization within the Catholic Church that mitigated these bureaucratic complications within the Roman Curia. With the establishment of the
Congregation of Rites in 1588, the canonization process was centralized in one office of the Curia. Inheriting the statutes and institutional traditions of times past, the congregation became the primary bureaucratic body for canonization matters in the Roman Curia until the mid-twentieth century. Urban VIII, in the larger context of his bureaucratic reforms, instituted wide-ranging alterations of the Congregation of Rites from 1631 to 1634. He mandated the presence of the unique form of the procurator fiscalis, an officer who was charged with preventing crime and upholding ecclesiastical law within tribunals, at all canonization tribunals.232 This required a sitting member of the canonization tribunal of the Congregation of Rites to ensure the juridical integrity of the proceedings and to protect against misguided decisions. This new position was charged with raising objections if he thought the integrity of the tribunal was compromised in any way. At this point, we can properly speak of an “Office of the Promoter of Faith.” Informed by the historical developments outlined above, the 1917 Pio-Benedectine Code presents a highly centralized and juridical canonization process with all authority for adjudicating canonization cases placed with the Roman Curia. The Code outlines the precise process in detail, noting the roles and duties of each participant. It also outlines, for the first time, the role and rights of the Office of the Promoter of Faith, establishing two phases in the process of adjudicating a canonization case: a local Ordinary Process and the Roman process. The Code clearly defines a promoter of faith at both the local and apostolic tribunals. In Chapter 2, Section 4, the Code defines the role of the office at the local ordinary level: It is for the promoter of faith to prepare straightforward interrogatories [that are] merely historical [and] that do not look to elicit a given certain response from those interrogated, but which are suitable for eliciting the truth on those articles proposed
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by the postulator and that are shown to the judge, who is bound by secrecy. It is, moreover, for the same promoter to ensure that witnesses by office are cited and to raise opportune exceptions; but the judge can by office seek witnesses even without a request by the promoter of faith or over his objection, although [the promoter] must be informed.233 Later in the same section, the Code discusses the role of the office in the apostolic tribunal at the Congregation of Rites. Thus, the Office of the Promoter of Faith, a collective canonical role that encompasses the participant promoters of faith in both the local and apostolic tribunals, is charged with three important duties: calling and questioning witnesses; ensuring the juridical legitimacy of the proceedings; and, most importantly, raising any doubts and objections he may have regarding a case. Thus, there is centralized power in the Roman Curia throughout the formal information gathering stages of the canonization process. Although other members of the local ordinary tribunal are appointed by the ordinary from the legally-trained priests of the local jurisdiction, the promoter of faith, following the promulgation of the edict of Canon 2043, must be appointed by the Congregation of Rites in Rome. Canon 1587 specifically refers to the rights held by interrogators in tribunals regarding ecclesiastical property. It states that if “the promoter of justice or the defender of the bond [two interrogators in these proceedings] is not cited, the acts are invalid unless he, even though not cited, actually participated.” 234 Thus, the promoter of faith must be, at least, summoned to all meetings, lest the findings and acts be made invalid. The right of the promoter of faith to be knowledgeable of every piece of evidence and party to all actions within each step of the process of canonization is canonically protected. This considerable authority is unique among the other actors in the local and apostolic tribunals.
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For the first time in the development of canonization proceedings, doubt holds a central and legally protected institutional role. The promoter of faith also has considerable control over the progression of the proceedings. There are multiple canons that require the approval of the promoter of faith before the proceedings can advance. If, at the insistence of the promoter of faith, there are factors within the writings of a Servant of God’s case that are not “entirely consistent with the faith,” a copy is sent to the pope for approval to proceed further.235 Even at this moment, however, the promoter of faith maintains remarkable autonomy in the process. The following canon states, The favorable judgment of the Roman Pontiff does not bring with it approval of the writings, nor does it in any way impede the Promoter general of faith and the consulters from being able and required to propose objections in the discussion of the virtues taken from the writings of the Servant of God.236 Thus, the promoter of faith not only has canonical authority, but also a canonical command, to disagree with a decision of the Supreme Pontiff. These extraordinary institutional safeguards not only promoted juridical legitimacy, but also preserved the importance of doubt in the proceedings. The second historical period of the present examination begins in 1917. The 1917 Pio-Benedectine Code of Canon Law, with its institutional safeguards of doubt in the canonization process, was the law of the church until the considerable 1983 reforms of Pope John Paul II. On January 25, 1983, John Paul promulgated a revised Code of Canon Law. He released the Apostolic Constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister that reformed the canonical canonization process on the same day. These revisions had practical implications for the canonization process and the role of the promoter of faith. No longer are the processes of canonization enshrined in the code of law of the church, but instead form a supplemental
| Peter Prindiville
document issued by the pope. John Paul’s Apostolic Constitution Divinus Perfectionis Magister is the standing “special pontifical law” on the matters of canonization. Not only did John Paul reform the legal basis for canonization proceedings, he also mandated considerable institutional reform of the processes of canonization. In his 1983 Apostolic Constitution, he changed the method by which information is gathered and also reformed the constitution of the apostolic tribunal, namely eliminating the Office of the Promoter of Faith as it was envisioned in the 1917 Code. The new Office holds very few of the previous Office’s duties. There is no mention of preserving the juridical legitimacy of the proceedings or of presenting causes for doubt; the new promoter of faith is merely a theological advisor tasked with assisting the cardinal-priest members of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in their proceedings. In addition to reforming the duties of the office, the new process completely removes it from the local inquiry phase.237 The new process also lacks the institutional safeguards that allowed the promoter of faith to halt proceedings if he was not satisfied with their progress. On account of John Paul II’s reforms, doubt no longer is enshrined in a canonically protected office. Furthermore, the role is not assigned to other remaining offices in the proceedings. Not only has the Office of the Promoter of Faith been eliminated, but also has the importance of juridical legitimacy through doubt.
In the opening of his Constitution, John Paul II wrote, Most recent experience, finally, has shown us the appropriateness of revising further the manner of instructing causes and of so structuring the Congregation for the Causes of Saints that we might meet the needs of experts and the desires of Our Brother Bishops, who have often called for a simpler process while maintaining the soundness of the investigation in matter of such great import. This historically significant office, which developed in response to calls for reform and juridical legitimacy over hundreds of years, was removed in the name of efficiency and simplicity. It is impossible to say that the Office of the Promoter of Faith will be forever a remnant of a Code of times past, but its rise and fall have impacted the development of the canonization process. As the church continues to adapt to the changing times, the canonization process will grow to address the needs of the church. It will maintain, however, a singular age-old mission: to recognize the exemplary holy men and women who have led lives in imitation of Christ as special and worthy of praise and reverence. Peter Prindiville is a senior in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service studying International History.
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THE ARCHIVE
The “Genocide” Controversy A Historical Re-Reinterpretation of the Ukrainian Famine (1930-33) Joshua Schoen
T
he Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, often called the Holodomor, is one of the more complex subjects of Soviet history. Its controversy stems from its connection to political and identity issues that still persist in modernday Ukraine. The perennial issue that plagues the debate is whether or not the Holodomor can be classified as genocide. Inevitably, any person who uses the term genocide to describe an event wishes to draw comparison to the Holocaust. But because of the peculiarity of the Holocaust few examples truly match the definition of the travesty that occurred. This paper is an attempt to answer the question of whether the Holodomor constituted genocide. First, it presents the generally agreed-upon facts surrounding the events. Next, it considers the views of a number of scholars who have penned their opinion on the debate, assesses the nature of Stalin’s role, and examines whether his policies fit the definition of genocide. Finally, it suggests how we should treat the Holodomor in its historical context. The breakthrough in scholarship regarding the famine that occurred in Ukraine in 1932-33 came with Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow (1986), which was one of the first books to recount its horrifying events in detail. Since its publication, access to Soviet archives has increased, leading to even more detailed literature on the subject. Given the research conducted at both Yale and Harvard, there is now no question
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that the blood of millions of people is on the hands of the Soviet regime. But was the famine a deliberate act fulfilling the requirements of genocide, comparable to the Nazi extermination of the Jews? Conquest has been criticized for not calling the famine an act of genocide.238 To answer this question, the facts must first be examined. If one had to point to the roots of the Holodomor, it would be the intermingling of the threat of war with the Ukrainians’ fears of economic instability which led to the abrogation of the New Economic Policy. By 1928, the rapid expanding cities were outstripping the available food supply, largely because even the NEP failed to provide the necessary incentives for economic exchange. It was based on the Soviet ideal of “food for tractors,” the exchange of farm equipment and consumer goods from the cities for grain from the countryside. In these circumstances, the homo economicus peasantry began “hoarding” their grain. Essentially the Communist system was trying to cheat the invisible hand of the market, and given that they had limited “carrots” they began to use “sticks.” That is to say, they saw no point in delivering it to the State in exchange for commodities they did not value. The grain crisis of 1928 unwound all of the liberal policies, particularly in what had now become the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. It was this impasse that paved the way for the systemization of the Stalinist State, an autarkic
| Joshua Schoen
alternative to capitalism that extracted tribute from the peasantry in order to develop a Soviet Union based on heavy industry. As Naimark points out, the war scare and the impasse over grain gave rise to a “breakneck and widely violent attempt by Stalin to steer the economy in a different direction and to save the Bolshevik Revolution.”239 In place of the NEP, Stalin unveiled his Five-Year-Plan. In the first months of 1930, fully half of the Soviet peasantry were forced into hastily constructed Kolkohzi, or collectivized farms.240 The goal of the program was to break the will of an independent peasantry and force them to provide grain at a lower price to the State, which would then sell the grain abroad and use the proceeds to purchase the materials required for rapid industrialization. As property was requisitioned from the kulaks, the peasants would often destroy their inventories rather than allow the State to get its hands on them. Not only that, but the inefficiency and misery of the Kolkohzi further reduced the incentives for the peasants to work, and this at the very time that the demand for tribute from them was increasing. “Between the end of 1932 and the summer of 1933, famine in the USSR killed, in half the time, approximately seven times as many people as the Great Terror of 1937-1938.”241 In 1932 the famine took on a new “national characteristic”: it was artificially strengthened to teach a lesson to peasants who refused the new socialist serfdom. Stalin became even more paranoid, in August 1932, in a letter to Kaganovich he wrote “we may lose the Ukraine.”242 In May Stalin gave the peasants a simple choice: “he who does not work, does not eat.” However Stalin did not give the peasants much of a choice, as he wrote to the Ukrainian Central Committee authorizing any means necessary “for collecting grain from collective and private farms or for delivering grain to state farms.”243 Given these demands, Communist officials continued to requisition grain far beyond the peasant’s ability in Ukraine to sustain themselves. That in turn led to massive starvation on the level of millions. It is important to note that Stalin seemed to believe
that the famine was a necessary consequence of achieving the state’s goals, while at the same time beating the Ukrainians into submission. Overall, 4-7 million Ukrainians died as a result of the forced collectivization and the brutal state policies that exacerbated the famine. Neither this paper nor most other historical accounts can fully describe the terror and grief of the Ukrainian famine. But was it genocide? The term “genocide” has important political and other implications and should not be used loosely. To do so can weaken the profound historical meaning of what happened to the Jews, homosexuals, and Gypsies during the Holocaust, and later to the Tutsis of Rwanda. Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide this way: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.244 There is no question that of all of the peoples of the Soviet Union, the Ukrainians bore the brunt of Stalin’s collectivized terror. However, whether Stalin aimed to eliminate the Ukrainians as a people is doubtful. If his intent was to totally destroy the Ukrainians through famine, why would he have made the clandestine attempt to purchase grain for them?245 Secondly, as Kuromiya points out, “if Stalin had intended to kill millions (and particularly the Ukrainians), he could have prepared a justification for
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it just as he had for wholesale collectivization and dekulakazition.”246 While he did indeed indiscriminately demand quotas for arrests of “enemies of the state” and exiled and executed millions, the very fact that he targeted the peasantry indiscriminately suggests that Stalin was concerned to break the back of the Ukrainian resistance, to force the Ukrainians into submission, rather than to eliminate them as a people. It is true that Stalin’s terror particularly targeted Ukrainians, whether in their homeland or in the Volga. Ivan Maystrenko, the editor of the leading Odessan newspaper, describes two villages on the Russo-Ukrainian border. In the village on the Ukraine side all the grain was requisitioned, but in the village on the Russian side, only a reasonable quota was required.247 In addition, in 1932 Stalin reintroduced the system of “internal passports” specifically to prevent peasants from fleeing to the cities, where there was still an adequate supply of food. In the month of February 1933 alone, the OGPU arrested 220,000 Ukrainian peasants attempting to flee their villages, sent 190,000 back to their homes, and de facto condemned to death 30,000 who were sent to the gulag.248 The Kremlin was well aware of what was happening and by some accounts the toll of the famine contributed to the suicide of Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, in 1932.249 Most scholars agree that there was indeed enough grain available to feed everyone – about three million tons. But even by 1933, 1.8 million tons was still exported abroad from Ukraine.250 Stalin committed mass murder, but did he do so in order to eliminate the Ukrainians? In Stalin’s Genocides, Naimark argues that this is exactly what Stalin did. Naimark buttresses his argument by claiming that the original proposal made by Raphael Lemkin (who went on to coin the term “genocide”) to the League of Nations in 1933 included crimes not only against racial and religious collectivities, but also against social and political ones. Naimark goes further, arguing that because the Soviet plan of dekulakization aimed at a hated entity, namely the kulaks, which it aimed to exterminate, it can be deemed genocide.
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However, as Naimark and others also recognize, “the kulak” was never really a political or social group, but rather a Soviet construction.251 Given the circumstances, Stalin distrusted the Ukrainian peasants, but he also distrusted peasants in general. Without justifying the regime’s actions, it can also be noted that the prospect of foreign threats was likely an important factor in pushing the Soviet Union to rapid industrialization by any means necessary. Moreover, this was not the only time in history that a famine was caused by a governmental lack of empathy for suffering. The historical-economic study of the 1942-3 Bengal Famine by the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen describes a crisis that echoes the one experienced in the Soviet Union ten years earlier. With the Japanese poised to invade India, Churchill ordered the destruction of the Bengali fishing fleet and the stockpiling of food for the soldiers.252 The famine that broke out was, according to Sen, essentially a failure of the colonial government to provide for the citizenry, a failure that stemmed from its lack of accountability. Likewise, Irish textbooks claim that the nineteenth-century potato famine was a case of “hunger, disease and criminal mismanagement.” 253 The case should be made that Stalin committed criminal mismanagement, and he should be seen as a massive violator of human rights. But as in the cases of Bengal and Ireland, the starvation in Ukraine, on the Don and the Volga, and in Kazakhstan should be seen as leipocide, killing by abandonment, not as genocide, the murder of a people.254 Collective suffering can often help to define collective identity, and perhaps that is why the Ukrainians desire to compare their suffering to that of the Jews. It may be granted that in their degree of horror, the Shoah and Holodomor are the same; however, the issue of intention to exterminate distinguishes the two events as separate (albeit closely related) cases. Joshua Schoen is a senior in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service studying International Politics.
THE ARCHIVE
Monumental Warning, Guilt, and Invisibility Sofia Layanto
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t is easy to understand why governments and groups invest millions building monuments to commemorate positive things, such as military victories or great leaders. But why does Germany spend so much money erecting monuments and memorials to the biggest, ugliest blot on their history? The Holocaust was an especially traumatic event in German history, yet Berlin is dotted with Holocaust monuments and memorials along all its streets and intersections. The official opening of the 2005 Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin shows that monuments are still being erected 60 years after the Holocaust. Considering the great deal of time, effort and thought that goes into the designing processes, it is clear that this issue deserves more attention. Monuments are complex creations. They are physical objects, yet do not exist in a vacuum devoid of meaning. In fact, the major aspect of their existence is derived from the social realities constructed around them and from their psychological significance. Monuments are generally built for commemoration, or as “something that serves to preserve memory or knowledge of an individual or event,” and they generally reflect how pasts are represented, remembered or forgotten.255 The most common reasons for commemorative memorials of tragic events are to recognize the significance of the event, honor the dead or act as some kind of tribute to the sacrifices made. However, this essay will discuss three other reasons for monuments to tragedies: to avoid repeating them, to keep guilt fresh, and to help forget and move on.
After precursory issues on different views of the purposes of monuments, three main explanations deserve examination in greater depth. The first states that monuments to tragedies are erected to help people remember, and so to avoid its repeat. The second claims that monuments are erected to force people to remember their guilt. The third goes in the opposite direction, and argues that monuments are created to allow people to forget both the event and their guilt. As social constructs, monuments cannot be examined without overlaps into other humanities studies— history, psychology, memory and even politics— and so this essay will also briefly address those aspects. The design, creation and response to a few tragic monuments will be covered, although this essay will focus mainly on the Holocaust as a significant historical event with the greatest number of monuments and memorials. Monuments to tragedies are often built to move the event into permanent public consciousness so as to avoid repeating the things that happened. Monuments for remembrance are physical ways in which people attempt to keep events from fading into oblivion as time erodes their significance, as shown by countless memorials to now obscure skirmishes or people of the past. However, monuments in public spaces have an “ability to direct attention to larger issues,” representing not only an event but the circumstances that brought about that event.256 Julian Bonder points to this when he says that monuments to tragedies bring up the question of, ‘how could this happen?’—forcing people to think about the issues behind tragedies.257 Often, tragic monuments are erected as a way of declaring, ‘we
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reject this forever’—it becomes a physical manifestation of the rejection of the principles, powers, and ideals behind the tragedy itself. In the case of the Holocaust, this would be a rejection of Nazism, genocidal racism and systematic execution. Holocaust memorials are then ways of sealing that rejection of ideals and doctrines into the public identity, and cementing it there as a permanent warning to keep future generations from repeating mistakes of the past. Monuments also achieve this purpose in a second way, by directing attention to the victims and promising to protect them in the future. By recognizing the violation of the victims’ rights, monuments also reaffirm their rights and symbolize the stand a group, government, or society takes to defend them. The Memorial of the Murdered Jews of Europe officially claims both these aims in the Bundestag Resolution of 1999, which states “to keep alive the memory of…inconceivable events in German history and admonish all future generations never again to violate human rights, to defend the democratic constitutional state at all times, to secure equality before the law for all people and to resist all forms of dictatorship and regimes based on violence.”258 Another more controversial view, made prominent by Martin Walser claims that monuments to tragedies are built to keep guilt fresh, mostly for political reasons. At the beginnings of this view is the phenomenon of German collective guilt, which was actually fuelled by an Allied initiative at the end of World War II. The Psychological Warfare Division embarked on a propaganda campaign which aimed at “developing a German sense of collective responsibility,” using radio broadcasts and posters with slogans such as “These atrocities: Your Fault!”259 This campaign influenced both Germans and the rest of the world, who have found it difficult to separate the German identity from the branding of the “evil” Nazis in World War II. The perpetuation of this guilt depends, in part, on preventing the trauma of the Holocaust from fading into the distant past, and the plethora of monuments and memorials Germans are confronted
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with in Germany on a daily basis serves this purpose. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe caused a stir with its sheer size and central location—near the Reichstag, Bundestag, Brandenburg Gate and embassies—which made it impossible for Berliners to ignore. A great number of other monuments, such as the Jewish Museum in Berlin, with the Hall of Faces, Garden of Exile, and Holocaust Tower, were pushed through by the Jewish population “to convey a specific message to the non-Jewish German population.”260 Some have argued that the guilt has been used to manipulate Germany and make it feel as if it owes the world something; in October 1998, Walser claimed that Auschwitz had been used as “a routine threat, a tool of intimidation, a moral cudgel,” and condemned the “exploitation of our disgrace for present purposes.” An extension of this view is that Holocaust monuments are built to fuel remembering of American guilt, to sustain support for Israel and the immense volume of military and monetary aid provided to them each year.261 Also addressing the issue of German guilt is the third view, which argues that monuments are built to allow people to forget things. Robert Musil once wrote, “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument. They are no doubt erected to be seen—indeed, to attract attention. But at the same time they are impregnated with something that repels attention…”262 First, this argument explains that monuments are created to bear the burden of memory and allow it to pass out of the public conscience.263 Commemorating a monument to something seals off the memory and emotion of dealing with it from the people, providing a comfort to them just by “knowing the monument exists, doing the memory-work for them.”264 It lets people feel as if, by recognizing something through a memorial, they have fulfilled their obligation and can move on. In Argentina, mothers of victims protested the creation of the Monument to the Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism out of the underlying fear that it would dull the need to pursue justice and accountability for the wrongs
| Sofia Layanto
committed.265 One of the paradoxes of a monument is that it “turns pliant memory into stone,” transferring the guilt of the people into a static object and moving an interior memory into an exterior memory.266 Second, it points out that this exterior memory is then forgotten as “everything permanent loses its ability to impress”; by placing these memorials in places where they are passed by every day, people stop noticing them and the events they represent.267 One example of this practice is the design of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, where there are no plaques or inscriptions anywhere—intentionally leaving the memorial “open to interpretation,” which often robs the monument itself of meaning. Markus Wachter from a German newspaper found that there was very little connection to the Holocaust itself, with some people picnicking and sunbathing on the stones and little children playing hide-and-seek.268 On a more positive note, there are also people arguing that the process of creating memorials helps people to confront and get over their memories and guilt. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe seems to be a case in point—the effort and debate that such a massive project on the memorialization of such a sensitive topic spawned over 800 design entries by 528 teams of artists and architects. In the time it took to take a proposal and complete building the memorial, James Young observed that “the process has already generated more individual memory-work than a finished
monument will inspire in its first ten years.” This monument was not built for the Jews, who rejected it, saying, “We did not ask for it. We do not need it.”269 It was a project largely by and for the German people, as the monument’s architect, Peter Eisenmann, confirmed in an interview: “it is part of the process of getting over that guilt. You cannot live with guilt.”270 This “process of engagement with the community” allowed Germans to privately wrestle with the Holocaust, publicly debate about it, and create something in the culmination of all their efforts that helped them leave their guilt and move on.271 The three alternative explanations for the creation of monuments to tragic events should now be clear. The first shows how tragic monuments serve to prevent a repetition of events by publicly rejecting its values, and promising to protect the victims. The second affirms that monuments are created to sustain public memory, but for the purposes of exploiting the guilt of perpetrators and other parties. The third argues the opposite, that monuments are erected to “bear the burden of memory,” although conceding that sometimes the process of conceiving, designing, and deciding on the monument allows communities to confront the event and get over the emotions, facilitating a healing process. Sofia Layanto is a sophomore in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service studying International Political Economy.
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THE PARLOR
From the Unity of Two, The Diversity of One Eve, The Tragic Hero in Paradise Lost Though both Not equal as their sex not equal seemed: For contemplation he and valor formed, For softness she and sweet attractive grace: He for God only, she for God in him.272
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n art historian looking at a replicated print of Leonardo Da Vinci’s original painting The Starry Night might hesitate to qualify the image as anything other than comparably imperfect to the original; the scholar reading John Milton’s Paradise Lost might hazard that Eve is Adam’s inferior. Indeed, there is validity to the claim that anything distanced from the original image is weathered by degrees of imperfection, and so, while Adam was made in God’s image, Eve was merely created for Adam, from the rib of Adam. Conventionally, many would argue that Milton seems to assume the misogynistic voice of the seventeenth century British society in which he lived and wrote by relegating Eve to the inferior position in Eden. Milton confronts a paradoxical dilemma when gendering Eve as feminine and when portraying her as the tragic hero of his poem by having her eat the fruit after numerous demonstrations of virtuous activity, pure innocence, and logical reason. In analyzing Milton’s discussion of marriage in the poem, one notices that Eve’s desire for individuality—bolstered by lack of self-knowledge—is what ultimately prompts her to eat the fruit; for this reason, she becomes the protagonist of not only the fall from Paradise but also the redemption of man. Milton does not
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Beatriz Albornoz
condone Eve’s original sin, but he does encourage a reading of the poem that is uniquely feminist in its original rendering. Although Adam was created first in Milton’s poetic adaptation of the Bible’s Genesis, Eve is the first to recount her origination in Eden in Book IV of Paradise Lost. Eve begins this recollection by paying homage to Adam: O thou from whom And from whom I was formed flesh of thy flesh And without whom am to no end, my guide And head, what thou hast said is just and right.273 As readers, we enter Eve’s psychological framework through her very first spoken lines in the poem and are immediately thrust into the mindset of subservience. In fact, it is Eve’s obedience to Adam’s “head,” or intellect, that seems to most sharply differentiate her from him. While this is certainly in line with the conventional reading of Eve as inferior to Adam and Milton’s misogynistic choice to author her as such, the psychological narrative Eve presents the reader is far more revealing and worth consideration.
| Beatriz Albornoz
Having given praise to Adam, Eve then continues by remembering how she first awoke in Eden: “Much wond’ring where / And what I was, whence thither brought and how.”274 Eve is immediately thoughtful of herself, her surroundings, and her existential purpose—albeit a very nascent existential purpose. Her curiosity inevitably prompts her toward the “clear / Smooth lake”275 where “With unexperienced thought”276 she gazes at an illusion that delights her. Eve’s experience with the reflected image in the lake is a clear reinterpretation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses where Narcissus becomes enthralled by his own image: There was a pool, limpid and silvery… The boy lay down, charmed by the quiet pool, And, while he slaked his thirst, another thirst Grew; as he drank he saw before his eyes A form, a face, and loved with leaping heart A hope unreal and thought the shape was real. Spellbound he saw himself, and motionless Lay like a marble statue staring down.277 Where Narcissus “pined with vain desire”278 after the image in full recognition that it is a reflection of himself—“The image is my own; it’s for myself / I burn with love”279—Eve, by significant contrast, does not understand that the image in the water is merely a reflection of her own face. This is evidenced by the fact that she does not assign the appropriate feminine pronoun to the image but instead refers to the image as “it.”2780 Eve, still seeking answers about who she is and why she is in Eden continues to contemplate the “it”—to the very point where she might reach the same vain self-love that Narcissus held for himself—until the Voice apprehends her from doing so. The Voice instructs Eve that the image she sees is actually herself, and then immediately redirects her to Adam, “He / whose image thou art,”281 so that she may bear his children
and birth humanity in turn. Eve’s self-conception is recast through the lens of Adam, and inevitably, this marks her psyche and confuses her self-perception. Led by the Voice, Eve sees Adam and recalls: “Yet methought less fair, / Less winning soft, less amiably mild”282 than the image she saw in the lake. The salient feature of this statement is twofold: the term “methought” denotes Eve’s own recognition of her first independent thought, and Eve’s immanent and noteworthy capacity for self-love over Adam is underscored. Eve eventually yields to Adam, and while Milton’s lines clearly indicate that she does so because she becomes convinced that man’s wisdom and grace is superior to her own feminine beauty, it is psychologically profound that her “meek surrender”283 is preceded by such a palpable desire for self-knowledge. Eve is stunted in her search for self when the Voice leads her away from a broach with self-identity towards the external object of identification, Adam; this latent desire within Eve to individualize herself will prompt her to more fervently assert herself later on in the poem. Eve submits herself to Adam from this moment forward: “God is thy law, thou mine. To know no more / Is woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise.”284 In Book IV, therefore, Milton presents us with the psychological version of Eve’s origination in Eden, but in Book VIII, Adam provides us with her physical creation in Paradise: “The rib He formed and fashioned with His hands / Under His forming hands a creature grew, / Manlike but different sex.”285 God begins to form Eve from the rib in Adam’s side only after Adam requests a partner with whom he can share in the qualities distinctive of human beings. God grants Adam his request for a companion, and says: Thus far to try thee, Adam, I was pleased And find thee knowing not of beasts alone Which thou hast rightly named but of thyself, Expressing well the spirit within thee free.286
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In other words, God tested Adam by creating him first as a solitary individual and is proud of Adam for recognizing the salient feature within himself that makes him unique from the beasts around him: his free will. Adam was able to arrive at this knowledge because he was alone and therefore, contemplated himself as markedly distinct from the animals and plants in his midst. In this more physical portrayal of Eve’s creation therefore, the most poignant suggestion offered is that self-knowledge factors critically into one’s own individuality, whereas in Eve’s psychologically revelatory account, the lesson derived was that she exists to cohere with Adam. Adam is able to formulate what classifies him as human, but he has not yet arrived at the concept of gender; this cannot occur until Adam has met Eve and observes her femininity as a characteristic foreign to his own masculinity: “Woman is her name, of Man / Extracted.”287 Adam admits to Raphael in Book VIII that he was first taken aback by Eve’s beauty, and admits a lacking in his own nature to the abundance of her feminine charm. However, just as brazenly as Adam commends Eve for her feminine appeal, he goes on to say: For well I understand in the prime end Of nature her th’inferior in the mind And inward faculties which most excel, In outward also her resembling less His image who made both and less expressing The character of that dominion giv’n O’er other creatures.288 Adam’s remarks portray Eve dimly, and in fact, it seems that any seed of reason, wisdom, or knowledge withers if implanted in the barren soil of her nature. Thus, by postulating Eve’s intellectual inferiority to him, Adam inevitably cleaves the genders (all the while asserting himself as male). Instinctively, one may conclude that these lines mark Milton as anti-feminist, or perhaps, as large a supporter of the inferior
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status of the female as the men in his society. What effectively salvages Milton, and Adam in turn, from this conventional reading is Raphael’s persuasive advocacy for marital union. The gendered cleavage initiated by Milton through Adam seems to be rehabilitated by the unifying love of their marriage. Ironically, it is Satan who details the first external appreciation of Adam and Eve’s prelapsarian marital bliss. In his famous soliloquy in Book IV, upon spying Adam and Eve for the first time, Satan describes the two: “So hand in hand they passed, the loveliest pair / That ever since in love’s embraces met.”289 His description is invariably tinged with romance, and Milton’s choice to have Satan—the greatest proponent of evil, hate, and solitude—admire the wedded pair is decidedly meaningful: if Satan himself can yearn after their bliss, then their marriage is truly perfect. Once more, Satan is made vulnerable as he belies his hateful nature to admire the young couple’s union: “Sight hateful! sight tormenting! Thus these two / Imparadised, in one another’s arms, / The happier Eden.”290 The use of the transitive verb, “Imparadised” gives greater emphasis to their union and securely ensconces Adam and Eve within their own idyllic state; marriage becomes the blissful microcosm within the larger Paradise. Furthermore, Satan coins their unity “The happier Eden,” and in this regard, suggests that marriage entails a love so pure and profound, nothing can exceed it in value. The characterization seems hyperbolic, but it serves Milton’s end of depicting Adam and Eve’s nuptial love as entirely perfect and admirable. For as much as Adam and Eve’s marital bliss is explicitly detailed, Milton also employs subtle physical gestures to reinforce the harmony of their union. For example, when Eve first meets Adam, hesitates to join him as instructed, and then quickly yields when won over by his “manly grace,”291 she recalls: “With that thy gentle hand / Seized mine, I yielded.”292 These gestures characterize their “youthful dalliance,”293 and inevitably the pair consummate
| Beatriz Albornoz
the bonds of their marriage in the purest act of connubial bliss; here, Milton most fervently praises the sanctity of marriage: “Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source / Of human offspring, sole propriety / In Paradise, of all things common else!”294 These acts are pure, untainted, and beautiful because they are characterized by innocence and virtue. In light of the meaning Milton places behind these innocuous physical acts, it is especially intriguing, therefore, that the turning point of the poem—the Fall in Book IX— is initiated by Eve releasing Adam’s hand and going off on her own. Milton regains control of the narrative at the beginning of Book IX and puts forth a striking declaration: I now must change Those notes to tragic: foul distrust and breach Disloyal on the part of Man, revolt And disobedience.295 Most notably, Milton heralds a change in the style of the poem to “tragic”; in full awareness of this transition, Milton wittily employs the word “heroic”296 multiple times in the remaining lines of his opening authorial narrative in Book IX. This is significant because it indicates Milton’s earnest attempt to reconcile his overwhelming epic with tragedy. Albeit difficult for Milton to “change / Those notes to tragic,” he is actually only echoing his first few lines of the poem: Of Man’s first disobedience and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world and all our woe With loss of Eden till one greater Man Restore us and regain the blissful seat.297 Furthermore, he can confidently execute the tragic within epic style because in the Poetics, Aristotle explains: “All of the parts of an epic are included in Tragedy; but those of Tragedy
are not all of them to be found in the Epic.”298 As such, Book IX must adequately uphold the characteristics of the tragedy: “A tragedy, then, is the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself”299 and “Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life, of happiness and misery.”300 For as strong a proponent of marital bliss as Milton is, it is all the more noteworthy, therefore, that Book IX introduces the first marriage argument between Adam and Eve; it seems that even at the threshold of the Fall, this “fall” from grace is comparably damaging. While marriage certainly assists in equalizing Adam and Eve, conventionally, Eve is consistently perceived as inferior to Adam and all the more, purposefully cast by Milton as such. Milton redeems her once more, however, by having Eve be the one to suggest a novel, almost capitalist concept: divide the labors of administering over Eden for the ends of efficiency. Eve comes to this intelligent decision after reasoning that “their work outgrew / The hands’ dispatch of two, gardening so wide,”301 and therefore, Milton redoubles the possibility that Eve has intellectual prowess independent of Adam. Eve is commendable, but also the initiator of a much larger, brewing issue: Adam takes concern with their separation because he believes she will be more susceptible to temptation if left alone. In expressing this concern, Adam strikes a nerve in Eve that comes to be poignant and even explosive: “But that thou shouldst my firmness therefore doubt / To God or thee because we have a foe / May tempt it I expected not to hear.”302 The key word employed in these lines is “firmness” because it reveals the psychological dimension of Eve first revealed in Book IV and so excessively fractured throughout the poem when she is repeatedly characterized as nonintellectual and, therefore, inferior to Adam. Eve feels belittled and betrayed by Adam and is noticeably hurt by the insinuation that she would be so frail as to have her “firm faith and love”303 undercut by some unknown foe. Adam, still tempered by the virtues of purity, love, and goodness,
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attempts to assuage Eve’s hurt, but in testament to her self-proclaimed “firmness,” Eve touches on a paradigmatic concept in the poem: If this be our condition thus to dwell In narrow circuit straitened by a foe Subtle or violent, we not endued Single with like defence wherever met, How are we happy, still in fear of harm?304 Eve puts forth a resounding argument for freedom, and she qualifies this freedom as the expansive opportunity to explore, experiment, and express oneself independently and fearlessly. In fact, she innocently expresses a sophisticated idea first introduced by Milton himself in Areopagitica: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”305 Previously, we examined how Adam was able to formulate himself as human by pitting himself against the beasts and fauna of Eden; here, we see Eve devise the essence of human virtue further echoed in Areopagitica: “Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world, so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth.”306 She feels she has no choice but to test the waters, so to speak, and Eve is affirmed in this supposition by virtue of the fact that she never fully had the opportunity to self-conceptualize her own identity at the moment of her origination in Eden—at the moment the waters presented her with her own image. Indeed, Eve was stunted in this regard, and now, presented with the opportunity to stand alone firmly, she is confident and understandably eager to do so. Therefore, “from her husband’s hand her hand / Soft she withdrew”; Milton has given us the reverse subtle gesture that initiates both Eve’s independence and the fall.307 Following this symbolic gesture, Eve is acquainted with the serpent, Satan. For as much as
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she asserted the strength of her own willpower, Satan deems her as intellectually inferior as previously determined in the poem: “The woman opportune to all attempts, / Her husband (for I view far round) not nigh, / Whose higher intellectual more I shun.”308 Satan clings to the rhetorical tool, pathos, to persuade Eve through appeal to her emotions, and he is successful in doing so because women are characteristically attuned to their emotions more so than to reason. Specifically, Satan complements Eve by using language that manipulates her psychological framework: “Wonder not, Sovereign Mistress, if perhaps / Thou canst, who art sole wonder… Fairest resemblance of thy Maker fair.”309 Satan’s intentional use of words like “Sovereign,” “Sole,” and “Fairest,” leads Eve to believe she is indeed an individual and not only that, but also capable of a superiority previously compromised by her inferiority to Adam. “Into the heart of Eve his words made way.”310 and consequently, Eve is not intellectually susceptible to temptation, but rather, emotionally frail due to her subjugated self-perception. Indeed, even after the serpent has slithered its way into the recesses of her psyche, Eve employs reason to intellectualize the circumstances: “What fear I then, rather what know to fear / Under this ignorance of good and evil, / Of God or death, of law or penalty?”311 What Eve expresses here is consistent with what Aristotle discusses in his Nicomachean Ethics: “Now each man judges well the things he knows, and of these he is a good judge.”312 Eve only knows not to eat from the tree because it will cause death, but here, she rightfully sees that the serpent has eaten and not died, and so she is confused. She does not know, however, the difference between what is good and what is evil; indeed, the tree is paradoxical in nature: “And next to Life / Our death, the Tree of Knowledge, grew fast by: / Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill”313 which directly echoes Areopagitica once again: “And perhaps this that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say of knowing good by evil.”314 Eve chooses to eat the fruit
| Beatriz Albornoz
not because she intentionally chooses evil over good but because she is motivated by a desire to assert herself: “And render me more equal and, perhaps, / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior: for inferior who is free?”315 Thus, Eve, no longer the inferior, has freed herself by chancing death for the sake of virtue. After eating the fruit, Eve actually begins to feel an even sharper adrenaline for life, and so it almost seems that the entire threat of death is nullified. Ultimately, however, a figurative death is conveyed through Adam and Eve’s fall from innocence, and from the imposition of punishment by the Son. For Eve, however, this “death” is more baptismal than terminal:
“Though all by me is lost, / Such favor I unworthy am vouchsafed, / By me the promised Seed shall all restore.”316 Eve, in free self-acceptance of her role as mother of mankind, has shed the cloak of inferiority and rises within a purpose of duty. Where once the seed of wisdom withered in her barren nature, now the seed of life grows perennially fertile in her womb so that one day, “One greater Man / [can] Restore us and gain the blissful seat.”317 Indeed, “she for God [in us all]”318 falls and rises, inferior made free. Beatriz Albornoz is a senior in the Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences studying English and Philosophy.
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THE PARLOR
Illustrations of Don Quixote Art and Music Since 1605 Maria Teresa Roca de Togores
N
ineteen hundred five marked three hundred years since the publication of the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote in 1605. In 1905, a community of prolific Spanish novelists, playwrights, and musicians collaborated to organize national festivals and exhibitions commemorating the 300th anniversary of Cervantes’ novel. Inspired by the movement called the Generation of 1898, which explored and criticized the effects of the Spanish American War, these exhibitions marked the novel’s consistent fame since its publication as a marker of Spanish culture and literature. The audiences who attended these exhibitions were able to rediscover the multiplicity of interpretations and representations of Don Quixote both in Spain and in other European countries. In 1927, a new group of poets, novelists, and essayists called the Generation of ’27 worked thoroughly to reconstruct the Spanish image of Don Quixote after it had been modified upon entering the imaginations of other European cultures. The various appropriations of Don Quixote on display at the 1905 festivals attested to the fact that this work of literary genius has, indeed, penetrated the European imagination; images of Don Quixote and its characters abound not only in literature, but also in text illustrations, tapestries, paintings, and music throughout Europe between 1615 and 1958. From its original publications in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote traveled quickly across Europe. In the art world, international conceptions
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of Don Quixote first arose in the internationallyprinted, illustrated editions of the text. Throughout the novel itself, Cervantes actually prefigured this international appropriation of his work, as he suggested that Don Quixote would be widely represented in pictorial art; this likely spurred European printing houses on to begin adding images to their editions of Don Quixote.319 Since 1618, printing houses in England, France, Germany, and the Netherlands have published Don Quixote both in Spanish and in their respective native languages; along the way, these publications have gradually included more illustrations. Each country cast the characters of Don Quixote in the imagery of its own culture. The first illustrated version of Don Quixote published in Brussels in 1662, for example, includes “humorous images of the novel and [places] the action in a Flemish scenery and with human types who have little in common with the Castilian reality.”320 Thus began what could be identified as a European casual competition between printing houses to find out whose illustrations were most original, artistic, and also authentic and accurate to the book. Even though other European countries were perhaps taking on a task that could have been better accomplished by Spanish printing houses, “it was not until the last third of the 17th Century that a generation of brilliant [Spanish] writers decided to place on the market quality editions that could compete with publications abroad”— editions that offered authentic, Spanish images of the characters of Don Quixote.321 These editors
| Maria Teresa Roca de Togores
collaborated with the Real Academia Española to create what was considered the best illustrated edition of Don Quixote ever published in Spain. These efforts resulted in the 1780 edition, which was completed in collaboration with Madrilian priter Joaquín Ibarra. Antonio Carnicero and other Spanish artists illustrated this four-volume version of Don Quijote, which quickly gained international renown.322 Arguably, the only real competitor to Carcinero’s 1780 illustrated volume was a French edition of Don Quixote published between 1833 and 1888, which was illustrated by Gustave Doré. Unlike many other artists, Doré contributed significantly to the transformation of the existing comic image of Don Quixote. His series of three hundred and seventy illustrations retrieves the humor of the novel quite accurately, transmits the psychological and social message of Cervantes, and “consecrates… the character’s romantic metamorphosis.”323 Cervantes prophesied not only the text illustrations but also the tapestries that would depict his work: in the novel, Don Quixote’s squire Sancho Panza predicts that his master’s feats will be reflected in the best tapestries worldwide. Initially essential pieces of furniture employed to insulate European houses and palaces, tapestries became works of decorative art coveted by all Royal Families. Since the fifteenth century, their manufacture has undergone continual improvement. The eighteenth century saw the manufacture of two prominent series of tapestries inspired by the adventures of Don Quixote. These two series—produced in Spain in 1722 and in France in 1794—“provided their vision[s] of Don Quixote, and contributed to its acceptance from the aesthetic and moral authority granted by the fact of [their] belonging to the most important noble families and even to the kings.”324 The processes of manufacture of these two sets of tapestry illustrate the cultural rivalry between Spain and France; although the Spanish cloths were manufactured first, there remains uncertainty about which set was first designed.
In 1716, Charles-Antoine Coypel was commissioned by the Gobelins Manufactory in Paris to be the artist in charge of painting cardboards for the French tapestries. Between 1717 and 1797, Coypel produced nine series of tapestries based on the cardboards he had painted between 1714 and 1751 of the adventures of Don Quixote.325 In his tapestries, Coypel depicted Cervantes’ characters in the style of the French society of the time. The cardboard images “recall the Rococo style of the fête galante,” a painting style that represented a “graceful, usually aristocratic scene in which groups of idly amorous, relaxed, well dressed figures are depicted in a pastoral setting,”326 which was very much in vogue in France at the time.”327 Because French culture fascinated the rest of Europe, other monarchies across the continent began to mimic French fashion and refinement. Indeed, the Gobelins tapestries of Don Quixote “testify how Louis XIII and Louis XIV disseminated Don Quixote... from Northern to Southern Europe.”328 Thus, the Gobelins tapestries framed Don Quixote in a French identity and also served as a means by which French high culture spread throughout Europe. Meanwhile, as Coypel continued to paint his French Quixote, Philip V of Spain founded the Royal Factory of Tapestries in Madrid and ordered a series of tapestries of Don Quixote.329 In 1747 Royal Factory of Tapestries “had knitted twenty four tapestries of The Story of Don Quixote to decorate the summer palace of Philip V and Isabella Farnese in San Ildefonso.”330 The Spanish tapestries differed from the French because they portrayed the Spain that Cervantes knew. Coypel’s illustrations reflected “a lot more of Versailles during the reign of Louis XV than of seventeenth century Spain”331 given their aristocratic feel and fête galante pomposity. By contrast, the scenes in Spanish tapestries—designed by Procaccini, one of the architects of the Royal Palace of San Ildefonso—set the novel in “luminous outdoor scenes”332 and depicted the characters with “more human and real features.”333 The distinction between the French highsociety refinement and Spanish low-class, rural
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authenticity demonstrates the different ways in which both countries understood Cervantes’ work, and stands as yet another example of the timeless rivalry between Spain and France. The Gobelins tapestries represent the work of Cervantes filtered through a French Rococo lens; they reached not only the French public but also the broader European high-culture spheres. Tapestries from the Madrid Royal Factory, in turn, educated mostly private viewers on the real texture and meaning of Cervantes’ novel in the context of his time. Hence, the reputation of these two series of tapestries competed in the European courts, but for very different reasons, demonstrating the skill of tapestry craftsmen and the artistic versatility of this novel. Perhaps even more so than the scenery of Don Quixote represented in the tapestries, the character of Don Quixote himself has inspired international artists throughout centuries. His figure has generated a wide array of artistic representations that have tried to capture the mystery and depth of his character in personal and private settings. In the first chapter of the first part of Don Quixote, Cervantes physically describes his main character as “close on to fifty, of a robust constitution but with little flesh on his bones and a face that was lean and gaunt.”334 Leaping in time between 1799 and 1958, the various paintings that will now be analyzed highlight the individual figure of Don Quixote as a character with a deep and complex psychology characteristic of the post-Romantic period. By the end of the eighteenth century, Romanticism emerged as a reaction to Classicism and to the Enlightenment philosophy that governed Europe for approximately one hundred years. This literary and artistic current focused on the individual as the master of his own self and in harmony with nature. Since the end of the 18th century, numerous European artists understood the character of Don Quixote to be Romantic in essence; consequently, they employed the figure of Don Quixote to embody the individualistic Romantic philosophy.
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Spanish painter Francisco de Goya completed a drawing in 1799 entitled The Sleep of Reasons Produces Monsters,335 which is, according to French scholar Jean Caravaggio, “an astonishing work, one of those to have most creatively represented the knight.”336 In this drawing, Don Quixote, thin and scrawny as described by Cervantes, sits at a desk and points to a book. Under the table lies the “greyhound for the chase” mentioned by Cervantes.337 His sword, symbolizing chivalry, rests nearby. Over his head float beasts and maids born in his dreams, which emerge from his bristly hair. This drawing is one of the first personal representations of Don Quixote. Indeed, Goya was one of the first Spanish Romantic painters, and his representation of the nobleman can arguably be considered a catalyst for subsequent Romantic representations of Don Quixote. French painter Eugène Delacroix, author of the allegory of the French Republic, Liberty Leading the People, painted Don Quixote in His Library in 1824.338 Here, Don Quixote “does not appear as a lonely reader: one can distinguish the priest, the barber, and the housekeeper behind him,” who discuss how to cure him or to prevent him from committing more follies.339 The irritation that the viewer observes in Don Quixote’s face reveals the disharmony between the Romantic world he cultivates in his thoughts—which would come to be defined as “quixotic”—and the real world of the other characters who do not understand the idealistic nobleman. Ten years after Delacroix, German artist Adolph Schrödter painted Don Quixote Reading Amadis of Gaule.340 This depiction of Don Quixote exemplifies the Romantic spirit: the man on the margins of the society that corrupts him, absorbed by his chivalric fantasy, and in peace in his solitude. Schrödter´s Quixote is “under the lines of an emblematic character, a sort of allegory of the solitary genius which creation remains misunderstood and common.”341 French artist Gustave Doré’s depiction of Don Quixote perhaps best represents the Romantic image of Cervantes’ character that so many have
| Maria Teresa Roca de Togores
tried to capture.342 This print, which is included in the series of illustrations previously discussed, depicts Don Quixote in his library, sheltered by books. As in Goya’s drawing, Don Quixote here appears overwhelmed by the characters that lead him into madness. Medieval knights with armor, swords, shields, helmets and horses; dragons and villains kidnapping maids who have to be rescued by Don Quixote—even the head of a giant on the floor—haunt Don Quixote. In Doré’s work, most of the figures carry a monstrous or even demonic aspect. All these figures surround Don Quixote and attack his lucidity; he fights not only to defend his honor as knight, but also to find inner harmony within the anguished fantasy of post-Romanticism that Doré portrays in his drawings. The representations by Goya, Delacroix, Schrödter, and Doré are directly connected to the Romantic and Post-Romantic movements, and they capture more than simply the character and his madness. They also call upon Cervantes’ repeated explanation of his own character: Don Quixote was a sane crazy man who lived tormented by his deliriums, his fantasies and by the search of something more important—namely, his own identity. Two Spanish artists from the mid-twentieth century further contributed to Cervantes’ legacy. In 1955, Pablo Picasso produced a simple lithography representing Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the Manchegan plains.343 With unadorned lines, Picasso reproduced in this small drawing many iconic features of the Spanish culture: Don Quixote’s tall and skinny figure stands under a high and blazing sun falling over the rough plains of La Mancha, with windmills in the background as only population. In the left foreground, a round Sancho rides his old donkey. Don Quixote dominates the image. Twice as large as Sancho, he wears the barber’s tray, a pointy beard, and his shield; his long spear nearly blends in with the paws of his skinny but strong horse, Rocinante. Only a few years later, in 1958, Salvador Dalí created a series of four paintings which represent
different moments from the adventures of Don Quixote. Using smashed bread-crumbs dipped into ink, Dalí painted these through the French method of Tachisme, which “feature[s] the intuitive, spontaneous gesture of the artist’s brushstroke”344 and gives a more modern flair to the paintings:345 One of them compares Don Quixote to Minerva. Four black stains representing a windmill’s blades sit on top of him, and are taken way by a cloud evoking an angel. The second depicts Don Quixote in the battle field under Dulcinea’s protection. In the third one he appears crawled up, his spear piercing him as if killed by his madness. In the last one, he admires a scene representing the golden age.346 Dalí’s paintings depict various understandings of the complex psychology of Don Quixote, including his eagerness to defend a nebulous ideal though it may cost him his life. He does so through the image of Don Quixote’s spear piercing him. Metaphorically, his spear represents his madness his madness and his identity as a knight. These also kill Alonso Quijano—Don Quixote’s real identity—when he discovers that Don Quixote has been a product of his imagination. Dalí’s paintings also portray Don Quixote’s idolatry of a woman who in reality is only a peasant and whose virtue only exists in his dreams by presenting her as a protective Virgin. Another of Dalí’s painting depicts Don Quixote contemplating the Manchegan plains, which represent the Golden Age of ancient civilizations for which Don Quixote longs. This same Golden Age, in fact, served as Cervantes’ inspiration in writing Don Quixote, which stands as a criticism of the society of his time. Don Quixote also sparked much musical creativity during the Romantic period. The depth of personality and meaning of Cervantes’ characters allowed for composers to explore the psychological multiplicity of the novel and to represent those concepts is the abstract environment of
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the musical art form. Two compositions of the Romantic period – Richard Strauss’ symphonic poem Don Quixote, and Manuel de Falla’s Master Peter’s Puppet Show – contribute to “the knight’s musical fortune, which asserts itself all the more so as it is diversified.”347 Strauss introduced Don Quixote to the music of Romanticism with an 1897 symphonic poem entitled Don Quixote. The piece is divided into “a prologue, depicting the Don’s descent into madness… followed by a theme and ten variations portraying his adventures and an epilogue describing his death.”348 Throughout the piece, a cello and a viola—as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, respectively—engage in dialogue, telling the story of the cunning knight. Before he composed his Don Quixote, Strauss looked to Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner; these two figures’ understanding of the metaphysical inspired him to explore increasingly abstract ideas in his music. In his Don Quixote, however, Strauss’ composition underwent a radical transformation: he returned to classical forms inspired by Brahms and Mendelssohn and used musical language to cover the manifold Romantic and phsycological aspects of Cervantes’ novel. Following the influence of Post-Romanticism, Strauss carried the anti-idealism “on a literary work much more straightforward in its critical aims than Nietzsche’s texts.”349 He detached his style from the metaphysical Wagnerism he had followed earlier, now reflecting “a psychological subtlety worth of Mozart.”350 Strauss’ music became more affective, more melodic, and less violent, thus better reaching his audience’s sensibility. Strauss composed Don Quixote while his master, Alexander Ritter, experienced the disheartening effects of old age. Consequently, in his Don Quixote, Strauss created a “striking parallel between the tragic delusions of Cervantes’s Quixote and the unhappy idealism of Alexander Ritter… like the character, Ritter was obsessed with an outdated mode of idealism and he lived in semiretirement, buried in his books.”351 Moreover, his adoration for Cervantes’ novel “drew from Strauss some of his happiest melodic
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inventions, notably the Dulcinea theme… and a dazzling display of thematic transformations on the various Don Quixote motifs.”352 The beauty of Strauss’ composition demonstrates his ability to transport Don Quixote from Doré’s drawings into music, thus capturing the essence of the novel and its characters in the uniqueabstract of musical art form. Strauss’ Quixote captures not only the psychological force of Romanticism but also the complex psychology of the character of Don Quixote. The cello dramatizes Don Quixote’s descent into dementia. Each subsequent variation, as well as the exchanges with the Sancho and Dulcinea themes, represents Don Quixote’s deliriums. Thus, Strauss lends musical personality to Don Quixote’s psychological experiences and manages to reassert the essential characteristics of Don Quixote: “deranged Don Quixote may be, yet his mind possesses an inner logic of its own and his fantastic visions have an emotional reality that those around him can neither conceive nor comprehend.”353 Early twentieth century Spanish musicians took on the same cultural responsibility of portraying Don Quixote as did Picasso and Dalí. Along with the Generation of the ’27—an artistic movement lead by Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti and Miguel Hernández, among others, to transform and promote Spanish culture in Spain and abroad—there existed another group of musicians known as the Group of Madrid or the Group of the Eight. Manuel de Falla stood out from the group as a consequential promoter of the ‘real’ image of Spanish culture. De Falla himself attended the Madrid festivals of 1905 commemorating the 300th anniversary of the original publication of Don Quixote. The strong Spanish spirit of these festivals inspired de Falla to explore the nationalistic roots, the history, and the customs of the most authentic and rural Spain in order to compose the music that brings to life the episode of the puppet theatre of Master Peter, which can be found in the second part of Don Quixote. De Falla knew how to combine in this puppet opera “the growing
| Maria Teresa Roca de Togores
cult of Don Quixote as a symbol of national identity”354 with the Modern Movement of the Spanish nationalism after 1898, “taking frangments from modern works by Debussy, Stravinsky, Albéniz and Ravel,” who also promoted nationalism in their respective countries.355 The overture of de Falla’s Master Peter´s Puppet Show honors the Spanish Renaissance and Baroque periods and “mirrors Cervantes’s literary borrowings, which… include the conventions of chivalric literature.”356 De Falla borrowed from the Spanish musical tradition of these two periods. Tambourines and the traces of dulzainas—traditional Spanish wind instruments in the oboe family—recall the traditional Aragonese Jotas dances and allude to the popular musical styles that existed during Cervantes’ time (and that probably inspired specific parts of his work). Moreover, Master Peter’s Puppet Show honors the classical Spanish opera form of the Zarzuela and street-cries. These various popular art forms, “which [de Falla] had known since childhood”357 Cast this piece as one of the utter representations of Spanish musical culture, and “place [it] on the international scene [as] a nonadalusian approach to Spanish music.” Thus, Cervantes’ Don Quixote has traversed Europe, taking on forms and cultures foreign to its original text. During its first century of renown, the text inspired artists to represent and revitalize its characters especially in visual art;
however, the depth and miltuplicity of themes encapsulled in Don Quixote encouraged artists and musicians of the eighteenth century to aspire to greater artistic representations of both the novel and the character. Consequently, Coypel, Schrödter, Delacroix, Picasso, and Dalí, among many others, appropriated Don Quixote into their respective media and cultures by viewing the text through the lens of the artistic movements that influenced them. Finally, the complexity of Don Quixote has rendered Cervantes’ work suitable for adaptation into even the more abstract form of music. Musicians such as Richard Strauss and Manuel de Falla have employed their compositions to elevate Don Quixote and Sancho Panza even further than visual art, ushering the characters into the transcendental realm of music. Through the centuries, Cervantes’ Don Quixote has been one of the most fascinating works of literature ever writen. Many have explored and appropriated its characters and have transported them into all art forms; yet, the strong themes and psychological implications of the novel remain constant in all its different reinventions. Even today, Don Quixote continues to inspire artists worldwide with its immortal and chameleonic essence. Maria Teresa Roca de Togores is a junior in the Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences studying Government and American Musical Culture.
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THE PARLOR
Reflections on Storytelling Metaliterature in the Decameron
Irene Kuo
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iterature as a form of reflection appears in both religious and secular medieval works as a means of challenging and reconstructing established modes of thought. In Boccaccio’s Decameron, the act of storytelling conveys profound truths and contradictions about reality by drawing attention to the constructed nature of literature itself. By departing from the tradition of the didactic exemplum, Boccaccio exposes the indefinable character of fiction and its role in forming representations of culture that illuminate one’s understanding of existing world structures. By straddling the ambiguous space between fiction and reality, literary works like Boccaccio’s Decameron uniquely manage to transcend predefined concepts of reality and offer new insights where other media in the Middle Ages failed. Even with this particular, expressive freedom, however, literature acknowledges its own limited nature as man-made construction. In so doing, literature comments on itself and identifies itself as a vehicle of thought to be questioned, recognizing that there exists a fine line between the making of what one deems factual history versus imagined tales. Narrative structures thus strive to imitate and to reinterpret reality, as well as to demonstrate the precariously multifaceted meanings embedded within the act of storytelling. Even as such structures risk leaving open the floodgates for a countless variety of meanings, they achieve a greater purpose in exposing the arbitrariness that often attends acts of interpretation. Boccaccio engages in this metaliterary act within the Decameron, affirming the role of self-reflection in unveiling the truths that underlie literary constructs.
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In Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling, professor of philosophy Richard Kuhns discusses the manner in which literature surpasses both the limitation of human mortality and the superficiality of appearances. Kuhns recognizes the cultural implications of literary works, which perpetuate themselves in spite of their authors, who remain chained to the limitations of their human mortality. He thus understands Boccaccio’s Decameron, written in the context of the plague, as the outpouring of a desire to survive imminent, human death and perhaps to reach a kind of cultural immortality in the realm of ideas. In reference to such restraints imposed by reality, Kuhns discusses the “bankruptcy of reality,” a term through which he asserts that reality in itself is lacking, and, more importantly, that it actually competes with literature in the determining of truth.358 Although he does not directly suggest that literature is a means of critical selfreflection, Kuhns suggests that literature can transcend the restrictive logic of reality and create liminal spaces that allow for the questioning of established thought. On the topic of literary liminality, Kuhns also perceives the use of masks and magic in literature—uncanny elements he considers natural to and constitutive of dreaming—as elements that enable spaces of interpretative ambiguity in their ability to express inner feelings and thereby uncover latent thought. Accordingly, Kuhns reflects on the illuminating function of the disguises adopted by duplicitous story characters, who, in their evident lying and mischief, do not simply highlight falseness, but also intimate certain truths to the reader about the real world. As Kuhns writes, “It is not a
| Irene Kuo
case of simply ‘reading a story’ and laughing or sensing irony; it is a challenge to the maskingunmasking ability of the receiver by whom the stories are seriously entertained”; Kuhns thus recognizes the way in which Boccaccio encourages the audience to inquire into truth exposed by such irony.359 On one level, it appears paradoxical to attribute discovery of truth to stories such as that of Ser Cepparello in the first tale, which clearly depicts a case of dishonesty and false sainthood. On a deeper level, however, an implied claim emerges from the very act of swindling—namely, that storytelling can be used as a means of deception. The underlying implications of Ser Cepparello’s act of obvious fraud therefore orients the reader to interpret what lies beneath the deceptively straightforward, “masked” narrative. As a result, Kuhns’ concept of masked narratives in the Decameron demonstrates how the text encourages readers to read between the explicitly stated lines and to reflect upon the world with the awareness that appearances do not necessarily amount to reality. In the same vein, Millicent Joy Marcus addresses the Decameron in her book An Allegory of Form by elaborating on the subversive qualities of Boccaccio’s storytelling techniques. First, she distinguishes the Decameron as a departure from the rigid didacticism of the exemplary tradition, a status that liberates the work from subjection to “absolute interpretive systems” and makes room for a “non-dogmatic fictional space.”360 Like Kuhns, Marcus uses the example of Ser Cepparello and the implications of the frame established by Panfilo, one of the more starry-eyed members of the company of storytellers, in his narrative. Through a close reading of this particular tale, Marcus demonstrates how Boccaccio undermines the moral value of the tale and the validity of Panfilo’s divine invocations.361 The notoriously depraved Ser Cepparello of his tale, for example, who becomes fatally ill during his travels, takes advantage of the trusting friars who agree to hear his last confession, and proceeds to tell them lies about his life that portray him as a virtuous and pure man; moreover, upon his death,
he reaches a status of sainthood as a result of his lies.362 In addition, Marcus also discusses the effect of the framing device, drawing attention to the way in which various levels of narrative authority and readership in the Decameron reveal the inevitable issue of human credulity amidst false appearances and lies. As frame narratives, or stories told within a larger story, the tales of the Decameron not only constitute a third level of reality in addition to that in which the Brigata, or company of storytellers, resides, but also that of our own as readers of the entire collection. In this sense, the Decameron’s own layered, narrative structure makes inevitable the difficulties of distinguishing truth from fiction. Accordingly, Marcus determines that Boccaccio not only subverts his and Panfilo’s own narrative authority by highlighting human naiveté, but also demonstrates how literature calls into question its own legitimacy by offering “[an] analogy between pandering and literature.”363 By establishing this parallel between deception and storytelling, literature divulges its own fabricated making, along with its natural potential for deceit. Panfilo’s narrative unreliability is further reinforced by his questionable claims that God would not ignore the innocent prayers addressed to false saints. Panfilo’s flawed arguments readily expose a gross and arrogant logic that attempts to ascribe events caused by human actions directly to God’s will. Even as the narrator consciously weaving his tale, Panfilo himself is misled by his own spurious reasoning.364 Boccaccio’s usage of framing in the Decameron thus delineates varying degrees of gullibility ranging from the deceived parishioners, Panfilo, the storytelling Brigata, and even Boccaccio himself, to the readers of the Decameron. As Marcus notes, “Narrative thus serves to undercut its own mechanism...[by showing the] deceptive quality of fictive creation and the power of fiction to expose its deception”; Marcus reasserts that storytelling goes hand in hand with the interpretative act of reflection.365 Literature thus transcends a portrayal of the known world, laying bare its own artificial workings to communicate that the
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Reflections on Storytelling |
exercise of creative power exposes both truths and falsehoods. In his article “The Modality of Moral Communication in the Decameron’s First Day, in Contrast to the Mirror of the Exemplum,” literary critic Timothy Kircher examines a different means of reflection—a “speculum”—manifest in the Decameron. Kircher defines the traditional exemplum as that which provides a form of Christian moral guidance, such as narratives of the lives of saints, in light of which man can engage in self-reflection and thus correct his moral shortcomings. Kircher observes that the Decameron, unlike traditional moralizing texts, discredits the didactic function of the exempla, encouraging instead “a more sceptical readership.”366 By presenting tales that deliberately evoke moral qualms, Kircher argues that the Decameron seeks to heighten the reader’s awareness. He further refers to Emilia’s short tale of Fresco and his vain and ill-tempered niece whose uncle admonishes her not to look at her own reflection in the mirror if it upsets her to look upon unpleasant people.367 Drawing on the theme of self-awareness in the tale, Kircher assigns a symbolic value to the image of the mirror, and more specifically, the meaning of “speculum” in terms of the exemplum. Kircher’s concept of the “speculum” thus functions as a self-reflective mode of interpretation in the Decameron, which fosters closer scrutiny of the text and exposes deeper truths as a result. The need for this sustained line of questioning surfaces in the case of Ser Cepparello’s false sainthood, the tale of Frate Cipolla’s questionable worship of relics, and the rebuke against vanity in Emilia’s tale.368 Moreover, Kircher proposes that the tales create “a different type of ‘mirroring,’ engaging the active participation of Boccaccio’s readership as a second Brigata.”369 By implicating the readers in this self-reflective practice of storytelling, the tales bring to light the necessity of an individualized manner of reading and interpreting in which the reader becomes personally invested in the truthseeking process. Characterized as an indefinable genre separate from the Christian exemplum,
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the Decameron stands as a secular literary work that eludes established systems of interpretation and promotes self-reflective modes of reading to delve further into the pursuit of truth. In The World at Play, literary scholar Giuseppe Mazzotta also addresses the marginality of literature as crucial to the Decameron; he analyzes the manner in which this condition enables the work to suspend prevailing notions and social structures. Mazzotta notes that the Decameron does not provide a form of escapism, but rather offers an alternate means of reflecting upon reality that occupies a privileged space outside of established systems of thought, which he defines as a “condition of marginality, of provisional separation from historical structures, a place for secular literature.”370 He further observes that the act of reflection allows readers themselves to reorganize their worldviews and to therefore understand new truths about the surrounding world. Mazzotta’s analysis of the tale of Ser Cepparello echoes those of authors who acknowledge the essentially literary nature of history-making. Ser Cepparello’s ability to transform his entire record of corruption into a perfectly convincing account of confession reveals a dangerous tendency of literature: to embed fictions within historical reality.371 In this way, Mazzotta also understands storytelling to be a mode of reflection whose end lies in unmasking or reinterpreting values deeply ingrained in societal views and upheld as historical fact. Upon noting that literature “can only perform its service of demystification by being in an alienated region,” Mazzotta argues that the storytelling elements in the Decameron free themselves from predefined notions of interpretation, such as moralizing Christian doctrine, in order to challenge societal values.372 In addition to focusing on the interaction of historical truth and story as addressed in the Decameron, Kuhns elaborates on the methods by which stories become believable, legitimate realities in themselves. He first refers to the observations of psychologist D.W. Winnicott, whose work on child development through “object relations” has led him to categorize stories as “transitional
| Irene Kuo
object[s].” This analogy from the study of psychological development studies clarifies how the process of storytelling conjures up worlds complete with their own cultures, characters, and events; such a process thus works in parallel to children’s transition from an identity inextricably linked to that of their mother’s, to an understanding of their own personal identity. Kuhns then defines the imagined, cultural elements of stories as style structures that nurture particular meanings that stand apart “from doctrines and sets of arguments to a way of living.”373 By way of such stylistic structures, which tailor these constructed worlds to their own particular sets of meanings and interpretative systems, stories realize their own truths and realities. He ultimately notes that language serves a double function in literature: it serves to both obscure and expose reality as it forms these alternate worlds. Kuhns’ insight into these style structures furthers the understanding of storytelling as a process that both imitates and reconstructs the known, familiar world. Kuhns also refers to the tragic love story of the princess Ghismonda and her lowborn lover Guiscardo to critique the social laws of the story world that parallel social hierarchies in the real world.374 In this tale, Ghismonda’s father Tancredi, the prince of Salerno, kills her daughter’s “unworthy” lover in a seeming victory, only to ultimately cause Ghismonda’s defiant suicide.375 The tale not only mirrors these prejudices and social relationships, but also calls attention to the glaring incongruities apparent in these social structures through Ghismonda’s insightful commentary. As Ghismonda criticizes her father’s decision to “accept a common fallacy rather than the truth,” she exposes the unwarranted injustice shown to those of low rank.376 In doing so, she initiates a process of change that culminates in her father’s public display of repentance and recognition of their marriage. By depicting social structures in the story world which parallel the existing, social prejudices of the non-story world, the tale of Ghismonda and Guiscardo establishes a connection that allows these fictional structures to
creatively redefine a flawed, established world precisely by deforming, hiding, and reconstituting that world.377 These analogous narrative structures in both familiar and fictional worlds provoke the reader to perceive not only the similar ways in which reality, story, and history are story are constructed, but also the ways in which they are deconstructed and redefined. Boccaccio’s Decameron exposes the tricky art of “world-making” and the very tenuous truths and realities that such narrative creation presupposes. As the members of the Brigata take turns to tell their tales, they fashion their own contained realities, in which we perceive particular systems of thought which parallel in some ways, our own familiar world, but represent the countless, alternative values that might also be valid. In so doing, they also render transparent the creative mechanisms that underlie the creation of a reality, allowing us to question—as privileged readers inside and outside its substantive being—the absolute truth of this reality. Boccaccio’s literary work thereby complicates the experience of narrative, as it brings to light the fabricated nature, and consequently precarious position, of socalled historical truths. As in the tale of Ser Cepparello, one may misuse such creative inventions for the purpose of deception and trickery. By calling attention to the literary origins of his narrative reality, however, the Decameron rejects not the notion of truth, but rather our ability to reach total certainty of it. In this way, Boccaccio strives not to arbitrarily affix truth onto certain beliefs or standards, but rather to provoke his readers into engaging in their own critical inquiries into the question of what constitutes truth. By inviting the readers to participate in the self-reflective experience of storytelling, the Decameron not only undermines the authority of dogmatic systems of thought, but also affirms that every individual has the capacity to expose the fault lines of reality and to uncover the deep truths which make up the foundation of our understanding. Irene Kuo is a junior in the Georgetown College of Arts & Sciences studying Comparative Literature.
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THE CLOCK TOWER
“An Intense Interrogation of Self” An Interview with John Glavin Michael Fischer
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ew figures at Georgetown carry the same longstanding gravitas as Dr. John Glavin, professor of English and Director of the Georgetown Office of Fellowships, Awards, and Research (GOFAR). Holding a Ph.D. and M.A. from Bryn Mawr College, Dr. Glavin captivates the attention of both student and administrator alike as an undergraduate alumnus and forty-five year member of the faculty, and Fellowship Secretary and Director of the Carroll Fellows Initiative. His diverse roles and vault of experiences color his perspective. “I see everything in terms of arcs,” he relates. His intellectual pursuits, his teaching, his initiatives, his understanding of the university – for Dr. Glavin, they all consist of interwoven goals and stages, ever adapting, changing, and reinventing themselves. His corner office in New North mimics its inhabitant: well-worn volumes of Victorian literature reside on shelves, framed on one side by the latest ergonomically-friendly standing computer island. Though his third-floor windows offer vistas of northwest campus, his desk faces away from the light: he admits in humor that he has no desire to encroach upon the private lives of Harbin’s freshmen who are his neighbors across the patio. Like Dr. Glavin himself, his office is a blend of the traditional and the innovative, of looking back while blazing forward. From his easy chair, he tells me of the Georgetown of yesteryear. It is the change in “style” that he has noticed the most: the Jesuit character of the university, he recalls, produced
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a certain type of self-discipline, motive, and way of living—an “intensive interrogation of self”— that has struggled as the Jesuit community has diminished. He frankly admits that the dwindling number of Jesuits on campus, as well as the community’s move from the center of campus at Ryan Hall to the outskirts at Wolfington, was a significant loss, even if economically inevitable. Nevertheless, the Jesuits who remain—few but “brilliant”—are “heroic,” by Dr. Glavin’s estimate. The Jesuits remain ever popular and make so much of a difference in so many lives, yet the numbers are the numbers. Dr. Glavin has little confidence in efforts to preserve that Jesuit style by making people “Ignatian” – placing the onus of the Jesuit identity of Georgetown on lay faculty and administration instead of Ignatius of Loyola’s direct clerical descendants. “That conflicts with the basic notion of academic freedom,” he affirms, “and in an increasingly secular world, it is unlikely that you will find many who will take up that burden.” Nevertheless, Dr. Glavin feels that the addition of new perspectives and the increase in diversity of thought has significantly benefited the Hilltop, both among students and faculty. As the university changes in identity, so too the Hilltop changes physically, and Dr. Glavin sighs at the “disappearance of campus” and remembers fondly how open the Hilltop once stood, how many trees once graced the lawn, and how wide the woods grew. Certainly, Dr. Glavin recognizes the need for more buildings, noting how constraining such limited space is
| Michael Fischer
for the current university administration. Yet, Dr. Glavin worries about the present loss of “solitude and silence” at Georgetown, where every space is filled and every noise is a neighbor. A necessary change, perhaps, but one that loses “a certain dimension” of the university life. Yet the most noticeable transformation, Dr. Glavin claims, is found in the students themselves. The Georgetown of Dr. Glavin’s youth, he relates, was a university of “tremendous homogeneity”: all male, nearly all Catholic, and largely all elite. With the opening of the college to women, the increased presence of students of non-Catholic or no faith, and the prioritization of full-need scholarships in recent decades, a greater diversity now exists at his Alma Mater. In one sense, such transformations have left certain aspects of the university untouched: he asserts that though the religiosity of the school has lessened, Hoyas take religion seriously, both academically and outside the classroom, in a way that his colleagues do not find at many other colleges. All the same, the consequences of such heterogeneity outweigh the vestiges of sameness: the Church year no longer defines the calendar of the University, and the past decades’ economic trends have molded how students approach their education. Hoyas today are more “risk averse,” he argues – citing the increased need for student loans and the decrease in postgraduation prospects – and so students are “anxious” to ensure their investment pays off. The university is no longer about fostering intellectual “leisure”: the student now wants and needs to study “English and something else.” The change in students’ demands has driven change in instructing supply. “People are more committed to standing up for non-utilitarian approaches to old education,” Dr. Glavin comments, particularly the hesitation many faculty members have had to new career-minded methods of teaching (especially long-distance learning). Dr. Glavin supports integrating technology into the process of education, but he and his colleagues argue that education cannot merely be an “information transfer.” When technology
distracts from the engagement of professor and student, or when it serves as a crutch, it becomes a problem. Yet, the ideal for true learning remains “two minds meeting in discourse,” and when technology resolves the shortcomings of the traditional classroom and facilitates such a meeting, then for Dr. Glavin it is a welcomed addition to the University. This learning discourse takes place in his own scholarship. He describes his field of study as “the afterlife of texts;” while his materials range from Victorian literature to film screenplay writing, Dr. Glavin sees all his intellectual work as unified in the idea of “adaptation.” Change and reinventions pervade his courses and his writings: early texts, like Shakespeare, become nineteenth century novels; Victorian novels, like Dickens, become twentieth century feature films. Each new adaptation, Dr. Glavin proposes, opens a new opportunity for the material to engage its context. Literary studies have become cultural studies: no longer is the dichotomy made between the aesthetic and the historical, the words themselves and their author. By focusing on how each text interacts with its culture and future cultures, scholars return substance to materials “thinned out” by past, narrow methods of interpretation. I ask Dr. Glavin if, given this new emphasis, literature should remain classified as a liberal art. He is emphatic about it: the study of texts is key to the successful understanding of the liberal arts, for only following much habituation and experience will students appreciate and be able to “take seriously complex texts.” For him, it is at the heart of Georgetown, and he lives out that philosophy in the classroom, emphasizing exercise over explanation, practice over lecture. Adaptation takes practice; one can only reinvent with what one has familiarity. In Dr. Glavin’s mind, his programs provide students the opportunity to “explore their own capacity to create”: he wants each Hoya to graduate with the mantra: “I want to be a creator, not a consumer, of knowledge.” Yet, he confesses, his studies of English adaptation are not the heart
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“An Intense Interrogation of Self” |
of his commitment to the liberal arts: that honor belongs to the Carroll Fellows program. And so, our conversation finally arrives at the heart of Dr. Glavin’s work at Georgetown, one of his proudest programs: the Carroll Fellows Initiative. Described on the program’s website as “Georgetown’s flagship opportunity for its most academically talented and ambitious undergraduates,” the Carroll Fellows fosters a small undergraduate community of scholars, researchers, and leaders who are “thinkers who do.” Outside of the two-semester Forum course, it is hard to pin down exactly what it is the Carroll Fellows do, because the diversity of the undergraduate fellows and the fluid nature of the program lead to a kaleidoscope of varying experiments, methods, projects, and efforts. For Dr. Glavin, this fluidity is the program’s strength, for it therefore regularly fills in missing niches for students at Georgetown. Furthermore, Dr. Glavin mentions that as undergraduate research becomes more and more a focus at Georgetown, the Carroll Fellows will need to rethink and tinker with the program in order for it to meet the needs of the next generation of Hoyas. Twentyfive years from now, he hopes the Carroll Fellows “will look nothing like it looks like now” or else “it will fail.” Regarding this need for adaptability, Dr. Glavin ensures that the Carroll Fellows Initiative constantly responds to feedback. When some complain that the program is wrong to focus on applicants’ high school records and have Hoyas apply in their freshman year, Dr. Glavin admits that it is a “telling criticism.” He weaves a narrative of the admissions process dating back to the program’s birth in 1997, detailing different methods and approaches, but concludes that, in the end, the Carroll Fellows themselves pushed
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for the early application: they had reflected that the program helped them “make sense of their first year.” And the ever popular remark about the “cult of John Glavin?” Dr. Glavin smiles. “I wish John Glavin could just vanish,” he admits, for the “spirit of John Glavin” is “too important” right now to the program: nevertheless, he is wary that his departure could create “a loss of coherence” within the Initiative. “I fight hard against the cult of John Glavin,” and he points to “the mentoring by older students” as “a really remarkable feature” of the Carroll Fellows, one he hopes will continue to expand in the future. For Dr. Glavin, Georgetown is a university “whose aspirations constantly exceed its means, and which phoenix-like renews itself from near collapse” again and again. Every fifty years or so, the Hilltop “reinvents itself” to meet current challenges, such as the expansion of the endowment and the quest for the next hundred acres. Adaptation, change, and reinvention: the spirit of the man and his Alma Mater find mutual ground on which to stand. In some ways, Dr. Glavin is a paradox. He is both the well-versed and impassioned guide of a famous Jesuit Heritage historical tour of campus as well as the founder of some of Georgetown’s most cutting-edge programs. He is a man who could only exist at a place like Georgetown: traditional but innovative, versed in the past but entrepreneurial in spirit, working at an institution that clings to a rich heritage but always has its eyes on the next horizon. And in that sense, he is not as much a paradox, but a Hoya through and through. Michael Fischer graduated from the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service in 2013 with a degree in Political Economy and Classical Studies.
THE CLOCK TOWER
Opening the Vault Unleashing Georgetown’s Hidden History Kevin D. Sullivan
T
he metal vault door creaked open, letting light into a cold, stone room deep in the bowels of Healy Hall. Mountains of gold coins, jewels, and silver chalices covered the floor. Well, not exactly. But visiting the Healy Vault this summer did expose me to a few of the Hilltop’s hidden treasures; over 20,000 artifacts maintained by two University curators are kept in various locations across campus. They exist not only as a record of Georgetown’s own rich history but also as a tangible sign of Georgetown’s role in the history of the world. Inside the vault was a large collection of Smithsonian-worthy artifacts. I saw, among other rarities, a cannonball unearthed during the construction of Healy; a “haunted” cradle that once held Georgetown’s fifteenth president; hand-woven silk vestments worn by Jesuits celebrating the first Catholic masses in colonial America; cavalry sabers from the Civil War; and souvenirs from post-war Germany that Fr. Edmund Walsh, S.J. brought back after attending the Nuremberg trials, sitting on a shelf next to his old opium pipe. Just upstairs, in the seldom-visited Carroll Parlor, treasures “hidden in plain sight” dot the beautifully decorated room. “Georgetown medals,” given to the greatest achievers from each class in the various liberal arts majors and made of real gold, lie gleaming on glass shelves. A mosaic-covered table from the Vatican stands in one corner, while General Custer’s West Point uniform and a lock of George Washington’s hair sit inconspicuously in various cabinets. Why were these artifacts given to Georgetown? Certainly not that they might gather dust
in basements—no, these artifacts were meant to animate the spirit of Georgetown “for generations to come.” That is to say, the contents of Healy vault, Carroll Parlor, and many other forgotten locations are the links in a chain, real symbols that tell the narrative of our Alma Mater’s essence expressed in different ways throughout human history. These “missing links” can and should anchor our dear University in times of identity crisis. Georgetown faces one such schizophrenic identity crisis right now. The Jesuit presence is fading, and we are scrambling to find ways to keep the Jesuit tradition not only alive, but as an animating spirit. The “both into one, utraque unum,” paradox of a liberal arts college and “elite research university” is reaching a boiling point. The guiding light of our Catholic intellectual tradition shines brightly, but it needs more faculty and students to carry it forth from the secluded areas of Campus Ministry and the Theology Department. Without a healthy appreciation of the challenges, failures and triumphs of “Georgetown past,” and without knowledge of our common purpose, our community will become uprooted; we will forget what it means to be men and women for others, and we will scatter like dust before the educational and ideological fads of the day. In order to combat the forces that threaten to render our communal past meaningless, Georgetown should make three significant, but feasible, changes. First, it must make a greater effort to share the treasures and memories of its alumni; many of the artifacts were given in the explicit hope that future students would find
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purpose in them. Carroll Parlor is precious but insufficient—there needs to be a dedicated display area for the pieces that have found their way into boxes, locked cabinets, and basement vaults across campus. The collective memory of alumni should also be unleashed—creating a better outlet for alumni-student engagement on pressing Georgetown issues would open the “human vault” of alumni memory and experiences. In the past, the College Journal specifically brought alumni into the conversations of the publication, in much the same way that this journal does. The recent alumni-student petition against the horrendous Northeast Triangle dormitory design in favor of a more traditional stone and brick design was another bright spot. Second, the University must offer more interdisciplinary seminars on the history of our Alma Mater, showing how Georgetown history relates to various areas of academia. The School of Foreign Service will offer one in the fall of 2014—a course on Georgetown’s unique role in American international relations—at the insistence and encouragement of a student-alumni partnership; yet, one is not enough. Imagine how inspiring it would be for students in each of the major disciplines to learn about the Hoyas who were pioneers in those very fields. Many of our peer institutions have such courses despite their more limited histories. Finally, Georgetown must add a stronger and more in-depth history component to New Student Orientation, for multiple reasons. Our newest students need an earlier opportunity to discover how Hoyas-past both drew from and poured into the wellspring of Georgetown, so that they might ascertain their own unique places in the University’s community. Furthermore, the great “catchphrases” that dot campus banners and campus media remain but abstractions apart from their historical contexts. “Cura personalis”— care for the whole person—and “contemplation in action” did not just appear out of thin air as Georgetown transitioned into a modern American institution of higher learning—four hundred
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years of tradition ground them. Many Georgetown Jesuits, long forgotten, devoted their lives to bring such concepts, stemming from the Gospel, into reality. Implementing these recommendations—giving students a stronger sense of Georgetown’s past, and of their place in Georgetown’s present—will teach Hoyas two great lessons. First, it will teach them that what happens on our Hilltop truly can influence the world. Early students from our once-fledgling academy, like William Gaston and George Kavanaugh, went on to be among America’s most influential Catholic statesmen despite Catholic discrimination in the early 1800s. After the devastation of the Civil War, Georgetown united the Blue and Gray to build a new common heritage and rise from the ashes of terrible war. Following World War I, Fr. Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., founded the School of Foreign Service, in the face of immense Jesuit opposition, to train Catholic diplomats to guide morally sound and just foreign policy as America was rising to global prominence. In today’s rapidly changing arena of American Catholic higher education, Georgetown has pioneered the way for discussions reaffirming the necessity of a pluralism ”centered” around the Catholic tradition and discerning how a Catholic university can continue to bring the Church to the world and the world to the Church. Understanding this paradigm will lead students of all faiths to return from their Washington ambitions and to re-engage themselves within Georgetown’s hallowed walls, in order to serve the world better. Second, implementing these recommendations will teach Hoyas that they are part of a “community of souls,” composed of Hoyas-past, present, and future. While the items in the vault are made of nothing more than wood, metal or stone, their true value is found in the common identity they provide to generations of students. With pluralism becoming an increasingly important cornerstone of the Georgetown experience, we need to recognize the past that we inherit when we are adopted into the Georgetown community.
| Kevin D. Sullivan
A respect and reverence towards the history of our Alma Mater is crucial to its continued flourishing. Many years ago, while exploring the vault, Fr. G. Ronald Murphy, S.J., had an experience that altered his perspective of the University entirely. Murphy came upon a piece of metal covered in dust and lying on the ground. That piece of metal, made from the iron of the ships that carried the first Jesuits to America, is the cross that now hangs in Dahlgren Chapel. Used in the celebration of the first Mass in the English-speaking
New World, the “St. Clement’s Island Cross” is a real symbol of the mission we have inherited and are heir to. Let us not only dare to imagine what else lies behind vault doors, but zealously bring it to light. Successfully charting our future depends on understanding the triumphs and dangerous shoals of our past. Kevin D. Sullivan is a senior in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service studying International Political Economy.
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THE CLOCK TOWER
On the Disposition of All Things Reflections for Hoyas from Georgetown Legend Father James V. Schall, S.J. “But you have disposed all things by measure and number and weight. For with you great strength abides always; who can resist the might of your arm? Indeed, before you the whole universe is as a grain from a balance, or a drop of morning dew comes down on the Earth.” —Book of Wisdom, 11:20-22. “The heart has its own order; the intellect has its own, which is by principle and demonstration. The heart has another. We do not prove that we ought to be loved by enumerating in order the causes of love; that would be ridiculous.” —Pascal, Pensées, #283.
I.
At the end of every Liturgical Year, the readings at Mass or in the Office often refer to “the end of things.” The best book on these obscure but ultimate topics is probably Josef Pieper’s The End of Time. But we frequently come across passages in the philosophers, in Scripture, in or literature that somehow put things together. The Fourth Canon of the Mass, when carefully attended to, is a remarkable explanation of how things fit together. I think too of St. Paul’s famous passages at the beginning of Ephesians and Colossians. In Ephesians, we read: “God chose us in him before the world began” (1:4). And in Colossians, “In him (Christ), everything in heaven and on earth was created…. He is before all else that is.” (1:16-17). To be “before all else that is” means: 1) that we are not ourselves God and 2) that we are initially, in God’s order of creation, before creation itself. God did not first intend creation then us, but us then creation. As I read such brief passages, I am struck by their insightfulness. They assume that we can
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think, or at least provoke us to wonder: “What can such things mean?” Catholicism is ever a thinking revelation. These sentences expect us to know the meaning of words and the intelligibility of concepts that are used to describe what is. If we are “chosen” before the world began, we logically conclude that we must be more important than the world itself taken to mean everything in the world but us. We also see that, in the intention of God, we are more important than the many good creatures that follow our being in the order of things.378 That is to say, the world, the cosmos, comes forth as something that is not God, that is good, that is subject to the purpose of our own existence. We notice, moreover, that we did not “choose” to exist. We are “chosen” to exist, each of us. For a finite being to himself “choose” to exist would mean that he existed before he existed, something in principle unthinkable. And if we are created “in Christ,” we must have some relation to the sort of being that
| James V. Schall, S.J.
Christ is Himself in His humanity. We are his “image.” Nothing else in creation is His image in the same way, even though all things are “disposed” to be what they are. Each thing has its own gravity, its own weight, or measure, or number. What else is it that we look for in our research but how things differ from each other, how they are related, similar. In the case of beings with quantity, as Plato taught us and Pope Benedict reminded us, we can express these relationships in mathematical terms. Still, there are, as Pascal said, things that are quite true that we cannot “prove” as if they were material bodies. Just because, from my studies of literary and philosophical authors, I can give a list of reasons why someone, including myself, might be loveable, it will not follow that therefore I am loved as a result of some automatic scientific formula or understanding. Something basic of me or any person stands beyond any analytic description of what I am. And what most stands apart is “that I am,” not just what I am, a human being and not a god or a toad.
II.
Here, I want to follow nine verses of the Book of Wisdom, Chapter 11:20 to 12:2. The Book of Wisdom, though not unique in this, does show many glimmerings of philosophy and the way that philosophy and revelation come together. To begin with, things are “disposed.” They do not just happen. This disposition does not mean that there is no chance or accident in the universe. Chance, however, is always reduced to the crossing of purposes, whether in the case of particles or human willing agents. Augustine and the medieval writers were fascinated with the notion of measure, weight, and numbers. Since things are what they are, we can figure out secondary causes, real actions that are not exclusively God’s actions. The greatness of God consists, in part, because He could create real beings which could themselves cause other things to happen. The greatness of God is that He made a world that was not simply Himself. Rather He created a world in which true events happened because
they were chosen to happen by real agents that were not themselves God. We can investigate, understand, and categorize these events. Through an image about the strength of God’s arm in the Book of Wisdom, we are alerted to the possibility of resisting this power. We could not do this opposing if we were only chance, if we had no real power of our own. But if God is still more powerful than we, it gives us hope that our errors and sins are not the last word in the universe. Two great images are given to us. We are to look on the world as one side of a balance scale. On one side is the whole cosmos, on the other but a grain of sand or a drop of dew. We are told that they still balance. The size and complexity of the world are no real rivals to God, but they are not nothing either. We are next told that God has “mercy” on us, precisely because He can “do all things.” He can do all things that are “do-able.” He cannot do contradictions. The power and knowledge of God do not reduce what is not God to nothing or to a meaningless insignificance. God’s power is shown in the bringing forth of things, in bringing them to what He intended them to be. Next we are told that God “overlooks our sins.” Why does He do this? He does it in order that we might “repent” them. Presumably, if He did not overlook them, He would have to deal with them with justice immediately on their execution. He would not be a God of mercy, one who could wait for us to grasp what we are doing and see the truth of things, even in wicked things we ourselves put into the world. Still talking to God, the writer of the Book of Wisdom tells us that God “loves all things.” We exist first because God loved us, not the other way around. We did not first exist, and then God decided to love us. That is our way, our human way, of coming to love. We must first exist for someone to see us, to come to love us. God’s love is a creative gift; ours is a gift already in being, not created by us. God’s love is the cause of our existing. And He knows that we are the beings who can love others if we choose to do so. Real love is never just a passion; it always is also and
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All Things |
primarily a choice. This teaching even applies to God Himself. He overlooks our sins “that we may repent.” He gives us a chance, space. That too is what time is about. That is what the world is about; what our cities are about. They are places in time waiting for our actions, for our repentance, for our return to order. God “loathes” nothing that He has created. We recall the hymn in Daniel, the one that says “Sun and moon, bless the Lord; ice and snow bless the Lord,” we see that all things that are, by their very existence, are the results of God’s blessing. There is no sin in creation short of man. Yet, all other things exist for man’s sake, to make his life possible and fit. His life is made not just for this life but for “eternal life.” If God “hated” something, the Book of Wisdom further tells us, He simply would not have created it. Every being that exists is good. Nothing can remain in existence itself unless what causes what is in the first place decides to continue its being. All things are “spared” because of God. Everything that exists calls attention to that part of itself that makes us realize that we did not cause our own existence. The first thing we realize about ourselves is that we do not cause that which is ourselves either to be or to be what we are. In all things we find the touch of what is not themselves. They are all called from nothingness. Already here too in the Book of Wisdom we have hints of the Holy Spirit. He is the one in the Godhead who vivifies and sanctifies. If we offend, which we have the freedom and power to do, God reacts, usually gradually, “little by little.” It is good to be “reminded” of our sins, of our wickedness. This is why we live in time. God, once He creates us, cannot go back on His word. His word is at the origin of each of us, willed from before the foundation of the world. All the alternatives to God that we can choose are themselves good, as Augustine taught us. But we can reject God by choosing any of them apart from God’s order, which is also our good. If we could not do this, we would not be worth paying attention to. We are offered the friendship of God. “I no longer call you servants, but
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friends.” Love that is not free is not love, including divine love, especially divine love. This is the lesson of the Book of Wisdom’s brief nine verses.
III.
Recently, my Dominican friend, Father Innocent Smith, called to my attention the following passage from Aquinas: Good is the cause of love, as being its object. But good is not the object of the appetite, except as apprehended. And therefore love demands some apprehension of the good that is loved. For this reason, the Philosopher (Ethics, IX, 5, 12) says that bodily sight is the beginning of sensible love and in like manner the contemplation of spiritual beauty or goodness is the beginning of spiritual love. Accordingly, knowledge is the cause of love for the same reason as good is, which can be loved only as known (I-II. 27. 2).
Smith said that this passage struck him as simply riveting. I found it that way too. We cannot love a thing unless we know it as good. Aristotle reminded us that there is such a thing as intellectual pleasure.379 This pleasure follows from knowing the good as good. Only when we know the good can we really love it. This is why we are rational animals. As Pascal said, we can know things, their weight, time, and number. But we can also know things immediately and love them because we know them. We cannot give a scientific proof of what is not subject to scientific method, that is, of what is not expressed in numbers, weight, or measure. Love is not material but spiritual. That is why it is so powerful in its beginnings, in its completion, and, yes. in its betrayal. The object of love is what is known as good, not just what is good. It does not strike us as good until we know it. God “overlooks” the sins of men that they might “repent.” He does not say that they are not sins. He affirms that they are sins. This knowledge is why we have reason and commandments to inform us what they are. But God also knows that “all these beautiful
| James V. Schall, S.J.
things,” as Augustine called them, can lead us away from Him if we choose to let them. God loves all the things that are. If He hated them, He would not have “fashioned” them to be what they are, rooted in their very being and origin in His own being, power, and mercy. God’s spirit is in all things. The beings that can and do sin are “rebuked” little by little in the hope that they will repent. What is it to repent for free beings? It is finally to know what is good and to reaffirm it over against our act which implicitly denied its whole good. This time of repentance is what the mercy of God gives to us. We would be justly condemned from the start, but, unlike the angels, the kind
of beings we are needs time and experience, experience of the effects of the loves we betray in our sins. If this greater love does not lead us to repentance, nothing will or can. God is merciful in His wisdom, but He cannot and will not make what is free to be not free. In the end, we either repent or we are left to our own self-loves, the loves whose objects remain good, but only apprehended as “our” good, not the good as such, His good, in which we are created and chosen, “before the world began.” James V. Schall, S.J. served as a professor of political theory in the Department of Government at Georgetown University from 1978 until 2012.
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Endnotes The Forum 1
Healy, Patrick. “Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 8. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. 30 Apr. 201. <http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/08736a.htm>.
2
Healy, Patrick. “Lucius Caecilius Firmianus Lactantius.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 8. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. 30 Apr. 2013 <http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/08736a.htm>.
3 Ibid. 4
Lactantius. The Divine Institutes. Translation and Introduction by Anthony Bowen and Peter Garnsey. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007. Print: 62
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid., 310-311.
7
Ibid., 327.
8
Ibid., 59.
9
Ibid., 60.
10
Ibid., 57.
11
Ibid.
12
Ibid., 57.
13
Ibid.,156-157.
14
Ibid., 320.
15
Ibid., 321.
16
Ibid., 281.
17
Edict of Milan: Lactantius, De Mort. ed. 0. F. Fritzsche, II, p 288 sq. (Bibl Patr. Ecc. Lat. XI).
18
“Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union,” Official Journal of the European Communities (18 December 2000), http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf.
19
“Preamble to the Treaty on European Union,” Official Journal of the European Communities (18 December 2000), http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf.
20
“Pacem in Terris: Fifty Years On,” last modified April 11, 2013, http://www.news.va/en/ news/pacem-in-terris-fifty-years-on.
21
John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, Paragraph 3
22
Ibid., 9.
23
Ibid., 10.
24
John XXIII, Pacem in Terris, Paragraph 14.
25
Ibid., 44.
26
Dignitatis Humanae, Paragraph 1.
27
Ibid.,
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28
Ibid., 2.
29
Dignitatis Humane, Paragraph 6.
30
Ibid., 9.
31
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Sterling Lamprecht (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949), p. 129.
32
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994), p. 109.
33 Ibid. 34
John Gardner, “Legal Positivism: 5½ Myths,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence 46, no. 1 (2001): 199.
35
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, p. 129.
36
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, p. 5.
37
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 58.
38
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, p. 25.
39
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 75.
40
Ibid., p. 76.
41
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, p. 58.
42
Ibid., p. 109.
43
Ibid., p. 210-211.
44
Ibid., p.110-115.
45
Ibid., p. 173.
46
Ibid., p. 174.
47
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, p. 128-129.
48
Jean Hampton, Hobbes and the Social Contract Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 107.
49
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 112.
50
Ibid., p. 141.
51
Ibid., p. 82.
52
Ibid., p. 142.
53
Ibid., p. 142.
54
Ibid., p. 79.
55
Ibid., p. 80.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid., p. 22.
58
Ibid., p. 28.
59
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, p. 57.
60
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 57.
61
Ibid., p. 28.
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62
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, pp. 57-58.
63
Ibid.
64
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 100.
65
H. L. A. Hart, The Concept of Law, second ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 186.
66
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 99.
67
Mark Murphy, “Was Hobbes a Legal Positivist?,” Ethics 105, no. 4 (1995): 872.
68
Ibid.
69
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 111.
70
Ibid., p. 109.
71
Griehesl, Marika. Interview with Elfriede Jelinek. Interview November 2004. Nobelprize. org.
72
Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and other political essays, (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 396. “We are not concerned with a society which sprang up yesterday, but with one which possesses already a defined character and traditions of activity. And in these circumstances social achievement is to perceive the next step dictated or suggested by the character of the society in contact with changing conditions.”
73
Alexis De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, (New York: HarperCollins, 1969), 503.
74
Ibid., 505.
75
Ibid., 507. This pattern is evident in America’s fixation on global initiatives and international charities that allow for us to reach out to those in distant lands, rather than to those we can see and touch. Although much compassion is fostered by these links, the accountability is less intense, simply because of the distance.
76
Ibid. Discussed later, Tocqueville does not wish to go back to those links, for they were harsh and disinterested, but rather, to recreate the feelings that produced the links, albeit in a new way that takes into account the equality of the democratic age.
77
Ibid., 508.
78
Ibid., 548. However, on the next page, Tocqueville reminds us that “they can hardly keep their thoughts always confined within the precise limits of this life and will always be ready to break out through these limits and consider what is beyond.” How then do we do foster this consideration? Tocqueville places the onus on the government to “give men back that interest in the future,” and in doing so, closely aligns with Dewey’s wish to incite the modern American to consider the problems of today worth effort tomorrow. They differ on the medium with which to accomplish this.
79
Ibid., 430.
80
Ibid.
81
John Dewey, Individualism Old and New, (New York: Prometheus Book, 1999) p.26
82
Ibid.
83
Ibid., 6. Dewey is unfortunately unclear about his opinion about this determinism. On the one hand, he dislikes the rampant materialism that spawns from it, but at the same time,
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wishes for it to fuel the scientific advances that he hopes will reinvigorate the American spirit. The line he might draw is hazy. 84
Hernando De Soto, The Mystery of Capital, (New York: Basic Books, 2000),113. De Soto outlines the economic trend of materialism and individualism in order to elucidate the transfer of capital throughout American history. He concludes that our laws and procedures for acquiring capital were shaped—quite similarly to Tocqueville—by the habits and mores. He refers to them as the “law of the people”, urging developing countries to shape their economies in this way.
85
Dewey, Individualism, 9. This Pecuniary culture is subject to a rampant materialism that consumes any efforts to progress.
86
Ibid., 7. Dewey’s treatment of religion is spotty, at best. His call for a new or civic religion is borderline humanist. His tone in Individualism Old and New alludes to his distaste for our double creed, and would imply at least a respect for the role that religion plays, rather than a preference for its exact tenants.
87
Ibid., 8. This reference tends to place Dewey in the light sympathy towards religion, where in other places, he seems to discourage it.
88
Ibid.,12.
89
Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: From Being and Time to The Task of Thinking, “The Question Concerning Technology”(New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 332. This refers to Heidegger’s fear that man will be reduced to a moving part in the machine of modern technology. If he does, “he comes to the very brink of a precipitous fall.”
90
Dewey, Individualism,18. Striking similar to the observation that “if thought is to make sense it must in some way accord with the real-life conditions that it articulates,” found in Joshua Mitchell’s Fragility of Freedom. This accord is tantamount to making real steps and creating real change, rather than simply figuring and refiguring the theoretical possibilities of “inidividualism.”
91
Ibid., 40.
92
Ibid., 26.
93
Ibid., 23.
94
Ibid., 30. This is surprising, as Dewey often speaks of finiteness with disdain, but his preference for a defined agenda illustrates his cohesion with Tocqueville even further. While they both retain ideals in theory, they recognize that in order to function, they must make small concessions to accommodate the reality of politics. Dewey cannot realistically operate on an indefinite platform like Tocqueville cannot realistically bring his aristocratic virtue to America. They both settle for secondary options.
95
Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 433.
96
Dewey, Individualism, 30. “I do not think it is fantastic,” Dewey says, “to connect our excited and rapacious nationalism with the situation in which corporateness has gone so far as to detach individuals from their old local ties and allegiances but not far enough to give them a new center and order of life.” Interestingly, Rorty encourages just that, claiming that Dewey wished to sever the Left from any definite ties to the old order.
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Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999), 29. “Dewey’s way of restating, in philosophical terms, Whitman’s claims that America does not need to place itself within a frame of reference.” I would argue that in fact, Dewey did wish to place us in a frame of reference, because our aimless and unbound liberalism did not render any results. Perhaps Rorty misinterpreted Dewey’s wish for a “new” allegiance for the complete destruction of allegiance at all.
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Oakeshott, Rationalism, 23. “What in seventeenth century was ‘L’art de penser’ has now become Your Mind and how to use it, a plan by world-famous experts for developing a trained mind at a fraction of the usual cost.” Although writing in the 1930’s Oakeshott predicts the modern man’s obsession with “self-help” and mastery of the mind. Instead of tactile learning through hands on experience, we wish to medicate ourselves, numb the difficulties in life with a lesser form of experience.
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Ibid., 11. This could not be more evident than on a college campus where calculating GPA and percentage scores render what is considered an accurate representation of one’s education. Oakeshott claims that rationalism has and will continue to pervade every area of human experience, and its prevelance here only speaks to that fact. College campuses are breeding ground for lost individuals, concerned with only their personal and measurable gain, rather than the gain that cannot be calculated.
100 Ibid., 10. 101 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 430, Tocquevile seems to grasp the “pragmatist move” made by his contemporary, William James. Because Dewey notes James as an inspiration and influence, it is important to see where Dewey’s thoiught and Tocqueville’s thought matches up. Though a pragmatist, Dewey bares the marks of someone skeptical of its detached claims. 102 Dewey, Individualiam, 16. Dewey’s focus on social justce and social inequality leads him to prefer concrete “solutions” that will render clear evidence of progress for that inequality. Here he takes Oakeshott’s advice to always “take the next step” in politics, rather than lie dormant, waiting for the ultimate answer to theorize its way into existence. Found in his essay “The Political Econmy of Freedom.” 103 Oakeshott, Rationalism, 23. Without explicitly stating it as his own religion, Oakeshott laments the decline in general of a religiosity, an sees its negative effects on the already weakened psyche. Rationalism replaces religion and enervates the many modes of experience that he finds necessary. 104 Ibid.,23. 105 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 429. 106 Dewey, Individualism, 28 107 Tocqueville, Democracy, 47. Delineating the spheres that the Puritans so masterfully carved out for both religion and politics, he claims that religion, unlike politics, requires no support from man, and should not be entangled with the factors in life that do—factors such as politics. When religion becomes entangled with politics, it will eventually also require support, for its transcendent nature will be temporalized and stripped of its strength to withstand the “coming into being and passing away” of the political world. 108 Dewey, Individualism17. Here, Dewey, although much more tactile than Tocqueville, reaches into the intangible, echoing 515 of Democracy in America: “Feelings are renewed,
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the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed, only by the reciprocal action of man one upon the other.” 109 Ibid., 49. 110 Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 296.
The Chamber 111 Where data were not available regarding extremely rare religions in countries, which would total no more than 4% of the population, these religions were grouped together as “Others” and assumed to be statistically insignificant in the calculations. In addition, if the country is found to have a state-sponsored religion in which 100% of the population is assumed to subscribe to that religion, then the data would be considered inaccurate and other sources such as scholarly articles and news references would be utilized to estimate the country’s religious composition. There are obvious limitations to this approach, such as the potential inaccuracy of the data when individuals hold a religion officially but do not practice it, when states which forbid irreligiosity result in inflated numbers for particular religions, or when wildly varying data exists between different sources. There is no feasible way around such sampling difficulties and this study simply seeks to use the most accurate data available in each case. 112 Bhiku Parekh, “The Voice of Religion in Political Discourse,” in Religion, Politics and Peace, ed. Leroy S. Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), 72. 113 Zaid Hassan, “Four Reasons Why Egypt’s Revolution Is Islamic,” Religion Dispatches, February 3, 2011, http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/guest_bloggers/4167/ four_reasons_why_egypt%E2%80%99s_revolution_is_islamic_. 114 Ibid. 115 Richard Haass, foreword to F. Gregory Glause III, “Saudi Arabia in the New Middle East,” Council of Foreign Relations Special Report, no. 63 (2011): vii. 116 Abdul Nabi Shaheen, “Saudi Arabia a paragon of political stability,” Gulf News, September 23, 2010, <http://gulfnews.com/news/gulf/saudi-arabia/ saudi-arabia-a-paragon-of-political-stability-1.686064> 117 Anthony Cordesman, “Understanding Saudi Stability and Instability: A Very Different Nation,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, February 26, 2011, <http://csis.org/ publication/understanding-saudi-stability-and-instability-very-different-nation> 118 Gary Bouma and Andrew Singleton, “A comparative study of the successful management of religious diversity: Melbourne and Hong Kong,” International Sociology 19, no. 1 (2004): 13. 119 Ibid., 15. 120 Tsun Hang Tey, “Excluding Religion from Politics and Enforcing Religious Harmony – Singapore-style,” Singapore Journal of Legal Studies (2008): 118. 121 Subrata Kumar Mitra, “Desecularising the State: Religion and Politics in India after Independence,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, no. 4 (1991): 759. 122 Frank R. Ankersmit, “Representational Democracy: An Aesthetic Approach to Conflict and Compromise,” Common Knowledge 8, no. 1 (2002): 35.
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123 Ibid. 124 Loving v. Virginia 388 U.S. 1 (1967). 125 Id. at 7. 126 Id. at 9. 127 Clements v. Fashing 457 U.S. 957 (1982). 128 Virginia, at 533 [quoting from Ballard v. U.S. 329 U.S. 187 (1946)]. 129 Virginia, at 533. 130 Varnmum v. Brien 60. 131 Skinner v. Oklahoma, 541. 132 Turner v. Safley, 12. 133 Griswold v. Connecticut, 96. 134 Id. at 495 (Goldberg, J. concurring). 135 Reynotlds v. U.S. 98 U.S. 145 (1878). 136 Maynard v. Hill 125 U.S. 190 (1888). 137 Virginia, at 532. 138 Virginia, at 532. 139 Williamson v. Lee Optical 348 U.S. 489 (1955)
The Sanctuary 140 For the purposes of this essay, the “act of faith” shall be defined as the ability for the “will” to persuade the “intellect” to give assent to that which is unseen (Hebrews 11:1). This movement will be discussed later in the piece, in terms of Newman’s “convergence of probabilities”. The assent to truth refers to the act of faith, in the sense that a revealed religion makes the claim to be “true.” Therefore, assenting to truth claims merely means making an ‘act of faith.’ It is worth noting that the “act of faith” encompasses two different senses of the word “faith” – fides qua credo and fides quae credo. Fides qua credo is a personal act of faith, translated “the faith by which I believe.” This is more faith in a ‘subjective’ sense. The fides quae credo includes the necessary truth claims of the faith, translated as the “faith that I believe.” 141 Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) was a British convert to Catholicism. Prior to his conversion, he served as a tutor at Oriel College Oxford and played an integral role in the Oxford Movement. His greatest works included the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, The Grammar of Assent, and The Idea of a University. Newman founded the first Catholic University of Ireland. The theory of the “convergence of probabilities” as is found in Apologia Pro Vita Sua, argues for an assent to belief via an aggregation of arguments for the existence of God, and assmes these arguments to be probabilistic in nature and that these probabilities can be reasonably ‘calculated’ in some way. The word “reasonably” is also crucial in Newman’s theory of the “convergence of probability,” as Newman believed that the “act of faith” must also be rational, the will involving the intellect in its assent. 142 Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) was a Swiss theologian and Catholic priest, who is considered one of the greatest contributors to Catholic thought in the 20th century.
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143 Logos is a Greek term usually translated as “Word” when used in the phrase “Word of God” in the New Testament (see John 1:1-14). In this context refers to the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ. Faith that is ‘authentic’ means faith that is formed by reasoning that the claims of the faith are “true.” This refers to the fides quae credo. 144 Rahner, Karl “Oneness and Threefoldness of God in Discussion with Islam” [“Oneness and Threefoldness”], TI xviii, 105-121. 145 See St. Anselm’s Proslogion for the “Ontological Proof; See Summa Theologia for the five ways of St. Thomas Aquinas.” 146 The Councils of Nicea and Chalcedon constitute two principal doctrines of the Church, the doctrine of God and the doctrine of Christ, respectively. Metaphysical language of the Greek ancients including hypostasis, prospon, ousia and physis were used to help philosophically explain revelation. 147 Newman, John Henry. “History of My Religious Opinions up to 1833.” Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Ed. Wilfrid Ward. London: Oxford UP, 1931. 122-23. Print. 148 Newman draws a distinction between “certainty” and “certitude.” “Certainty” refers to claims that are a priori, for example “the leaf on the tree is green.” “Certitude” is having faith in something that cannot be given a priori. “Certitude” need not be religious, for the claim “I know the sun will rise tomorrow” is a claim from “certitude,” not “certainty,” for it is not given a priori that the sun will rise tomorrow. See: Newman, John Henry. “History of My Religious Opinions up to 1833.” Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Ed. Wilfrid Ward. London: Oxford UP, 1931. 122-23. Print. 149 Newman, John Henry. “History of My Religious Opinions up to 1833.” Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Ed. Wilfrid Ward. London: Oxford UP, 1931. 122-23. Print. 150 This refers specifically to the inability of the ‘intellect’ to assent to that which is not a priori or axiomatic. When the claim the ‘intellect’ (reason) investigates is an a priori (the leaf is green), the ‘intellect’ can be satisfied, for ‘certainty’ is established. The gap, when in the situation of that which is not empirical, is filled and can be overcome only by the ‘will’ in the ‘act of faith,’ establishing ‘certitude.’ For example, there is no certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow, however we have certitude that it will rise. This certitude can be established through the ‘will,’ and the time before it is established is the ‘gap.’ 151 Ibid., 122-23. Print. 152 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, vol. 1 of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 7 vols., ed. Joseph Fessio, SJ and John Riches (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1982-89); originally Shau der Gestalt in Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Aesthetik (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1961f). 418. Print. 153 Newman, John Henry. “History of My Religious Opinions up to 1833.” Apologia Pro Vita Sua. Ed. Wilfrid Ward. London: Oxford UP, 1931. 105-110. Print. 154 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, vol. 1 of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 7 vols., ed. Joseph Fessio, SJ and John Riches (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1982-89); originally Shau der Gestalt in Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Aesthetik (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1961f). Print. 155 Ibid. 420. Print. 156 Ibid. 417-425. Print.
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157 Hans Urs von Balthasar, Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis, vol. 1 of The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, 7 vols., ed. Joseph Fessio, SJ and John Riches (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1982-89); originally Shau der Gestalt in Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Aesthetik (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1961f). 423-425. Print. 158 Ibid., 423. Print. 159 Ibid.,423-424. Print. 160 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1991). 29. 161 Aristotle, Politics, trans. C.D.C. Reeve. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1998). I.1253a2. 162 Taylor, 32. 163 Interfaith Youth Core, “About the Movement: The Framework for Interfaith Dialogue.” Last modified 2012. Accessed December 8, 2012. 164 I use the term “spiritual” to encompass all aspects of religious and/or spiritual beliefs. Interfaith dialogue can occur between members of the same religion who differ on certain beliefs, or even the non-religious. 165 Taylor, 4-8. 166 Ibid., 37. 167 Ibid. 168 Encyclopdia Brittanica. Encyclopedia Brittanica, Inc., 2013. s.v. “Salvation (Religion).” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/520007/salvation (accessed December 18, 2013). 169 Encyclopdia Brittanica. Encyclopedia Brittanica, Inc., 2013. s.v. “Protestantism.” http:// www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/479892/Protestantism (accessed December 18, 2013). See also Encyclopdia Brittanica. Encyclopedia Brittanica, Inc., 2013. s.v. “Roman Catholicism.” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/507284/Roman-Catholicism. (accessed December 18, 2013). 170 Taylor, 59. 171 Ibid., 60. 172 Not all sects of Judaism follow kosher laws by tradition. This example only applies in the context of a person who believes that their dietary laws are a core aspect of their faith identity. 173 Taylor, 58. 174 Ibid., 37-39. 175 Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, “Islam.” Accessed November 18, 2012. http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/resources/traditions/islam. See also Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs, “Buddhism.” Accessed November 18, 2012. http://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/resources/traditions/Buddhism. 176 Taylor, 58. Also see Hollywood, Amy. Harvard Divinity School, “Spiritual But Not Religious.” Last modified 2010. Accessed December 9, 2012, http://www.hds.harvard.edu/ news-events/harvard-divinity-bulletin/articles/spiritual-but-not-religious. 177 Ibid., 32.
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178 This paper was originally written for a history seminar on Martin Luther with Professor Amy Leonard in the Spring of 2013 with the title “A Tale of Three Cities: Man’s Place in History in the Theological Foundations of Martin Luther’s Political Realism.” It has since been re-worked to its current form thanks to helpful conversations with Professor Joshua Mitchell, to whose own pristine scholarship on Martin Luther’s contribution to political theory in Not By Reason Alone (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), which relates the idea Law and Grace to the Two Kingdoms, my own work is grossly indebted. 179 WA 30 II, 110. Weimarer Ausgabe, D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesammtausgabe. 90 vols. Weimar, 1883 ff. Vol 30. II. Schriften 1529/30, 110. The initials ‘WA’ are used throughout to refer to the definitive Weimarer Ausgabe of Luther’s works (Dr. Martin Luther’s Works: Critical Collected Edition), which is cited by volume, page, and (generally) also by line. Where the vol. no. is obvious it is omitted. Most citations from the WA are taken from Ewald M. Plass’ translation of select passages from the Weimar Edition of Luther’s works as published in What Luther Says (St. Louis: Concordia Pub. House, 1959). These will be later shortened to “WA,” followed by the volume number and page number. 180 WA 19, 625. 181 Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther's Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999) 182 David Whitford notes Thomas Muntzer and Johannes Cochlaeus’ accusations against Luther (David M Whitford, Luther: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: T&T Clark, 2011) 109. 183 WA 42, 73. In his exposition of Gen. 2:9, Luther identifies Man’s disobedience of God’s command as the cause of the fall: “To be sure, Adam sank his teeth into the fruit; but in reality he sank them into a thorn, which was the prohibition of God and disobedience to God. This is the real cause of the evil…” 184 Thomas M. McDonough, O.P. The Law and the Gospel in Luther (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 28. From W.A. lvi. 312, 1-15 185 WA 18, 708. Luther explains the transmission of sin with a metaphor in his 1525 treatise Bondage of the Will: “Although God does not make sin, He does not cease to form and multiply that nature which, with the Spirit withdrawn, is contaminated by sin, just as if a craftsman were to make statutes out of poor wood.” 186 John Dillberger, Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings (New York: New York, 1961), 26. Luther’s Preface to his commentary on Romans. 187 WA 32, 162. Luther comments in a sermon in 1530, “Human nature always wants to have a finger in the pie, to carry off the glory, and to lay the first stone.” 188 WA 20, 670. 189 WA xviii. 761. 30-37. In De servo arbitrio (or Bondage of the Will), later cited as “Bondage”, Luther writes: “And this ignorance, and total scorn, undoubtedly, are not in the flesh and base affections but in the most eminent and noblest faculties in man where justice, faith, fear and knowledge of God should reign; yes, in the reason and the will, therefore even the faculties of free choice, and in the seed of virtue or in the very best which exists in man.” 190 WA 10 I, 1, 473 f. Luther spells out in no uncertain terms his contempt for human nature after the fall in his sermon on New Years Day 1522 on Gal 3:23-29: “That a man is able by the
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use of his natural powers to do so much that God will give him grace is a lie and a figment of the devil himself.” 191 Take for instance Erasmus, with whom Luther debated regarding the role of the will in Salvation. In Erasmus’ treatise “On the Freedom of the Will” he writes, “By Free choice in this place we mean a power of the human will by which man can apply himself to the things which lead to eternal salvation, or turn away from them.” E. Gordon Rupp; Philip S. Watson, Eds, Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1969), 10. 192 WA 48, 76. 193 WA 24, 586. From a sermonic exposition of Gen 33:1-20: “Let government be whatever it pleases, it is not of men; otherwise it would not be safe for one hour. If God did not sustain governmental authorities with His power, Mr. Everybody (Herr Omnes) would kill all of them... Therefore as far as you are concerned, continue to humble yourself and honor your government.” 194 WA 15, 306. 195 St. L. 13a, 1315 f. The initials St. L. in this paper refer to the St. Louis German Edition (“St. L.”): Dr. Johannes Georg Walch, Ed, Dr. Martin Luthers Saemmtliche Schriften (The Complete Works of Dr. Martin Luther) Concordia Publishing House, St. Louis 22 vols., 1885-1910. 196 WA 30 I, 192. 197 The antinomians contended that the law is unnecessary for the church. 198 WA 39 I, 361 199 Gerrish, B.A., Grace and Reason (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 26. Gerrish succinctly describes the subtle distinctions at hand: “We must carefully distinguish: (1) natural reason, ruling within its proper domain (the Earthly Kingdom); (2) arrogant reason, trespassing upon the domain of faith (the Heavenly Kingdom); (3) regenerate reason, serving humbly in the household of faith, but always subject to the Word of God. Within the first context, reason is an excellent gift of God; within the second, it is Frau Hilda, the Devil’s Whore; within the third, it is the handmaiden of faith.” 200 Dillberger, 139-140. 201 Ibid 144. 202 Roland Bainton eloquently describes Luther’s experience of Anfechtungen as a heavy despair of spirit: “… the most frightful insecurities beset him. Panic invaded his spirit. The conscience became so disquieted as to start and tremble at the stirring of a wind-blown leaf. The horror of nightmare gripped the soul, the dread of one waking in the dusk to look into the eyes of him who had come to take his life... These were the torments which Luther repeatedly testified were far worse than any physical ailment that he had ever endured.” Roland Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2009) 37. 203 Ibid, 144. 204 WA 47, 170. 205 WA 36, 25, 29 206 Dillberger, 21. From Luther’s preface to Romans.
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207 WA 47, 170. 208 WA 1, 113. 209 WA 40 I, 336 f. Cf note 25 210 Ibid. 211 Romans 8:3-4 212 WA 37, 27 f. From Luther’s Easter sermon on Mark 16:1-8 from 1533. 213 WA 17 II, 438. From a sermon on John 6:55-58. 214 Harro Höpfl, Luther and Calvin on Secular Authority (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 12. 215 Martin Luther, On Secular Authority, “Works of Martin Luther” (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1930), III, 234, 236. 216 WA 11, 252. On Secular Authority. 217 WA 18, 88. 218 WA 12, 334 f. 219 WA 42, 586. Lecture on Gen. 16:5. 220 WA 19, 625. 221 Oliver O’Donovan and Joan Lockwood O’Donovan Eds., From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought 100-1625 (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company: 1999), 581: “Luther’s spiritualizing of the church was counterbalanced by an extension of civil power; but with an extension invigorated and circumscribed by the theological rationale of the ‘priesthood of all believers.’” 222 E.G. Rupp and Benjamin Drewery, Martin Luther, Documents of Modern History (London: Edward Arnold, 1970), pp. 126. 223 WA 6, 72. 224 WA 11, 267 f. Similarly, in his exposition of Psalm 82 Luther writes, “In a word, next to the Gospel (ministry) or the spiritual office, no better jewel, no greater treasure, no costlier gift, no finer foundation, no more precious possession exists on earth than a government that administers and upholds justice” WA 31 I, 201. 225 WA 11, 252. 226 W 12, 675 f. 227 Evans, Gillian Rosemary, Ed., Augustine’s City of God (Penguin Books Limited, 2003). In contrast to the City of Man whose “institutions have one single aim – earthly peace” (878), “the Supreme Good of the City of God is everlasting and perfect peace... experiencing no adversity at all” (881).
The Archive 228 See Sixtus V. “Bulla Immensa aeterni Dei.” Bullarum Diplomatum et Privilegiorum (Agustae Taurinorum) 8 (1857). 229 Macken, Thomas F. The Canonisation of Saints. (New York: Benzinger, 1909), 45. 230 Blaher, O.F.M., Daminan Joseph. The Ordinary Processes in Causes of Beatification and Canonization. (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1949), 4.
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231 Hostensius. Commentaria et lectura in Decretalibus. (Frankfurt am Main: Vico Verlag, 2009), 45. 232 Baart, Peter A. The Roman court, or a Treatise on the cardinals, Roman Congregations [etc] of the Holy Roman church. (New York: Pustet, 1895), 105. 233 (Canon 2012 § 1, 2) 234 (Canon 1587 § 1) 235 (Canon 2071 § 1) 236 (Canon 2072 § 1) 237 Note the change in canonical terminology. Whereas the 1917 Code referred to the local information-gathering phase as the “Ordinary Process,” referring to the role and jurisdiction of an ordinary, the 1983 Code refers to this phase as “Inquiries to be Made by Bishops.” Although Divinus Perfectionis Magister says that those “who have the same powers in law” as bishops may also initiate proceedings, the Constitution still limits the breadth of individuals who can initiate proceedings, thus further centralizing canonization authority in the Roman hierarchy. 238 For example Yaroslav Blinsky takes umbrage at Conquest’s lack of discussion of genocide. See Bilinsky, Yaroslav. 1999. “Was the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 Genocide?” Journal of Genocide Research. 1, no. 2: 147-156, 150-152. On Conquest, see Conquest, Robert. The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. 239 Naimark, Norman M. Stalin’s Genocides. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010, 66. 240 Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York: Metropolitan books, 2007), 85. 241 Graziosi, Andrea. 2004. The soviet 1931-1933 famines and the Ukrainian holodomor: Is a new interpretation possible, and what would its consequences be?” Harvard Ukrainian Studies 27, no. 1-4: 97-115,8, http://search.proquest.com/docview/220865533?accountid=11091, 97. 242 See Kuromiya, Hiroaki. Stalin. Harlow, England: Pearson/Longman, 2005, 111-112. 243 Naimark, 85. 244 Resolution 260 (III) A of the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948. 245 Cited in Kuromiya, Hiroaki. 2008. “The Soviet Famine of 1932-1933 Reconsidered”, 666. 246 Ibid. 247 Conquest, 164. 248 Cited in Naimark 86. 249 A theory that Conquest has proposed. 250 Ibid., 88. 251 See Naimark’s Introduction. 252 See Sen, Amartya. 1983. “Chapter 6. The Great Bengal Famine”. 253 Quoted in Noack, Christian, Lindsay Janssen, and Vincent Comerford. Holodomor and Gorta Mór: histories, memories and representations of famine in Ukraine and Ireland. New York, N. Y.: Anthem, 2012, 13.
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254 Leipos comes from the Greek Word Leipo, which means to lack and the Latin suffix for death “-cide.” While one should not typically mix Greek and Latin roots I tried to keep to the origins of the word genocide, which comes from the word “genus” meaning tribe and the same latin suffix. 255 Julian Bonder, “On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments, and Memorials,” Places 21 (2009): 62. 256 Bonder, “On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments, and Memorials,” Places 21 (2009): 64. 257 Bonder, “On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments, and Memorials,” Places 21 (2009): 62. 258 Sharon Chin, “A Self-Serving Admission of Guilt: An Examination of the Intentions and Effects of Germany’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.” Humanity in Action Website: <http://www.humanityinaction.org/knowledgebase/225-a-self-serving-admissionof-guilt-an-examination-of-the-intentions-and-effects-of-germany-s-memorial-to-the-murdered-jews-of-europe>. 259 Herbert Friedman, and Franklin Prosser, “The United States PSYOP Organization in Europe During World War II,” Psywarrior.com <http://www.psywarrior.com/PSYOPOrgWW2.html>. 260 Chin, “A Self-Serving Admission of Guilt: An Examination of the Intentions and Effects of Germany’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.” Humanity in Action Website: <http://www.humanityinaction.org/knowledgebase/225-a-self-serving-admission-of-guiltan-examination-of-the-intentions-and-effects-of-germany-s-memorial-to-the-murderedjews-of-europe>. 261 Christopher Olver, “U.S. Foreign Aid to Israel: 2012 Congressional Report,” Journalists Resource: <http://journalistsresource.org/studies/international/ conflicts/u-s-foreign-aid-to-israel-2012-congressional-report>. 262 F.C. DeCoste, The Holocaust’s Ghost: Writings on Art, Politics, Law and Education. (Alberta: University of Alberta, 2000): 176. 263 Ksenija Bilbija, The Art of Truth-telling about Authoritarian Rule. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 2005): 32. 264 Cecily Harris, “German Memory of the Holocaust: The Emergence of Counter-Memorials,” Penn History Review 17 (2010): 12. 265 Bilbija, The Art of Truth-telling about Authoritarian Rule. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin, 2005): 32. 266 DeCoste, The Holocaust’s Ghost: Writings on Art, Politics, Law and Education. (Alberta: University of Alberta, 2000): 176. 267 Neil Senhauser, “Robert Musil on Monuments.” Website: <http://blog.selfportrait. net/2010/02/28/robert-musil-on-monuments/>. 268 Chin, “A Self-Serving Admission of Guilt: An Examination of the Intentions and Effects of Germany’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.” Humanity in Action Website: <http://www.humanityinaction.org/knowledgebase/225-a-self-serving-admission-of-guiltan-examination-of-the-intentions-and-effects-of-germany-s-memorial-to-the-murderedjews-of-europe>.
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269 Chin, “A Self-Serving Admission of Guilt: An Examination of the Intentions and Effects of Germany’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe.” Humanity in Action Website: <http://www.humanityinaction.org/knowledgebase/225-a-self-serving-admission-of-guiltan-examination-of-the-intentions-and-effects-of-germany-s-memorial-to-the-murderedjews-of-europe>. 270 Charles Hawley and Natalie Tenberg, “SPIEGEL Interview with Holocaust Monument Architect Peter Eisenman,” Der Spiegel, November 20, 2012. 271 Bonder, “On Memory, Trauma, Public Space, Monuments, and Memorials,” Places 21 (2009): 67.
The Parlor 272 John Milton. Paradise Lost. Edited by Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005), 4.295-99. 273 Ibid., 4.440-44. 274 Ibid., 4.451-52. 275 Ibid., 4.458-59. 276 Ibid., 4.457. 277 Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 63. 278 Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.466. 279 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 65. 280 Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.464. 281 Ibid., 4.471-72. 282 Ibid., 4.478-79. 283 Ibid., 4.494. 284 Ibid., 4.637-38. 285 Ibid., 8.469-71. 286 Ibid., 8.437-40. 287 Ibid., 8.496-97. 288 Ibid., 8.540-46. 289 Ibid., 4.321-22. 290 Ibid., 4.505-07. 291 Ibid., 4.490. 292 Ibid., 4.488-89. 293 Ibid., 4.338. 294 Ibid., 4.750-53. 295 Ibid., 9.5-8. 296 Ibid., 9.14, 25, 29, 40. 297 Ibid., 1.1-5.
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Note 323
298 Aristotle. “Poetics,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2001), 1460. 299 Ibid., 1460. 300 Ibid., 1461. 301 Milton, Paradise Lost, 9.202-3. 302 Ibid., 9.279-81. 303 Ibid., 9.286. 304 Ibid., 9.322-326. 305 John Milton. “Areopagitica,” in Paradise Lost, Edited by Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005), 350. 306 Ibid., 350. 307 Milton, Paradise Lost, 9.385-86. 308 Ibid., 9.481-83. 309 Ibid., 9.532-33, 538. 310 Ibid., 9.550. 311 Ibid., 9.773-75. 312 Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,” in The Basic Works of Aristotle. Edited by Richard McKeon (New York: Modern Library Classics, 2001), 936. 313 Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.220-22. 314 Milton, “Areopagitica,” 349. 315 Milton, Paradise Lost, 9.823-25. 316 Ibid., 12.621-23. 317 Ibid., 1.4-5. 318 Ibid., 4.299. 319 Frederick A. De Armas, Ekphrasis in the Age of Cervantes (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2015), 144. 320 Ministerio de Cultura, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Fundación Gregorio Prieto, Don Quijote ilustrado: modelos de representación en las ediciones españolas del siglo
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Note 325
Note 329, A
Note 329, B
Note 329, C
XVIII y comienzos del XIX (Madrid: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Fundación Gregorio Prieto, 2005), 11. 321 Ibid. 322 Antonio Carnicero, Illustrations of the edition of the Real Academia Española, 1780. 323 Jean Caravaggio, Don Quichotte, du livre au mythe : quatre siècles d’errance (Paris: Fayard, 2005), 134. 324 Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior, Don Quijote: Tapices españoles del siglo XVIII, (Madrid: Ediciones El Viso, 2005), 24-25. 325 Antoine Coypel and the Gobelins Manufacture of París, Entrance of Sancho in the Isle of Barataria, 1717-1797. 326 Encyclopeadia Britannica Online. s.v. “fête champêtre”, accessed December 22nd, 2013. 327 Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior, Don Quijote, 66. 328 Ibid., 202. 329 Real Fábrica de Tapices de Madrid, Collection of Tapestries of Don Quixote for Philip V (A.The adventure of the burial, B. Sancho tossed in a blanket, C. Don Quixote is knighted), 1722. 330 Sociedad Estatal para la Acción Cultural Exterior, Don Quijote, 220. 331 Ibid., 196. 332 Ibid., 234. 333 Ibid., 236.
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Note 335
Note 342
Note 338
Note 343
Note 340
Note 345, A
334 Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha (New York: The Viking Press, 1949), 25 335 Francisco de Goya, The Sleep of Reasons Produces Monsters, 1799. 336 Caravaggio, Don Quichotte, 91-92. 337 Ibid., 25. 338 Eugène Delacroix, Don Quixote in his library, 1824. 339 Caravaggio, Don Quichotte, 135. 340 Adolph Schrödter, Don Quixote reading Amadis of Gaul, 1834. 341 Caravaggio, Don Quichotte, 133. 342 Gustave Doré, A world of desorderly notions, picked out of his books, crowded into his imagination, 1863. 343 Pablo Picasso, Don Quixote, 1955. 344 Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Tachism”, accessed November 27th, 2013. 345 Salvador Dalí, Illustration for the xxxx edition (A. The combat, B. Dulcinea, C. The metamorphose of Don quixote, D. The Golden Age), 1958. 346 Caravaggio, Don Quichotte, 263.
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Note 345, B (left) and C (right)
Note 345, D
347 Ibid., 188. 348 Tim Ashley, Richard Strauss (London: Phaidon, 1999), 67. 349 Charles Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 201. 350 Ashley, Richard Strauss, 66. 351 Youmans, Richard Strauss, 203-204. 352 Michael Kennedy, Richard Strauss: Man, Music, Enigma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 126. 353 Ashley, Richard Strauss, 66 354 Nancy Lee Harper, Manuel de Falla: His Life and Music (Lanhman: Scarecrow Press, 2005), 213. 355 Ibid., 101. 356 Carol A. Hess, Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 207. 357 Suzanne Demarquez, Manuel de Falla (Philadelphia: Chinton Book Co., 1968), 123. 358 Richard Kuhns, “Introduction. Storytelling: The Bankruptcy of Reality,” in The Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 1.
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359 Kuhns, “Aspects of Storytelling: Dreams and Masks,” in The Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling, 53. 360 Millicent Joy Marcus, An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Consciousness in the Decameron (Saratoga: Anma Libri, 1979), 11-23. 361 Ibid. 362 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G.H. McWilliam (London: Penguin Books, 1995), 297. 363 Ibid. 364 Millicent Joy Marcus, An Allegory of Form, 11-23. 365 Ibid. 366 Timothy Kircher, “The Modality of Moral Communication in the Decameron’s First Day, in Contrast to the Mirror of the Exemplum,” in Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001): 1035-73. 367 Ibid. 368 Ibid. 369 Ibid. 370 Giuseppe Mazzotta, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 49-69. 371 Ibid. 372 Ibid. 373 Kuhns, “Aspects of Storytelling,” 53. 374 Ibid. 375 Boccaccio, The Decameron, 297. 376 Ibid. 377 Ibid.
The Clock Tower 378 See James V. Schall, The Order of Things (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007). 379 See James V. Schall, Reasonable Pleasures (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2013); On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs (Wilmington: ISI Books, 2001).
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