No Continuing City; E. Opitz

Edmund A. Opitz "-__ "-'~-::"':iiiI::-::~----iiil-·f••:. l~~~ NO ~~ --~ . :"\\ \bs-'~, i; ~~::'"'' dCONTINUING \. \CITY pi: ~··'The Paradox of a Christian Society BENEDICT of Nursia pictured the ideal monastery as ((a little state, which could serve as a model for the new Christian society." Those who respond to the call of monasticism and draw apart from secular society are to undertake a new community based upon the bond of fellowship set forth in The Rule of St. Benedict. The discipline of the Order was so rigorous as to make the Spartans appear hedonists by comparison. ((The life of a monk," Benedict writes, ((should be always as if Lent were being kept. But few have vir tue enough for this," he adds sadly, ((and so we urge that during Lent he shall utterly purify his life, and wipe The Reverend Mr. Opitz is a member of the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education, a seminar lecturer, and author of the book, Religion and Cap italism: Allies, Not Enemies.

out, in that holy season, the negli gence of other times." The ((negligence" to which Bene dict referred might crop up any time, for example, when it came a monk's turn to do kitchen work. Servers are urged to ((wait on their brethren without grumbling or undue fatigue." As an inducement to good behavior they are awarded an extra portion of food. But what about wine? ((Godgives the ability to endure abstinence" to some; the others are rationed to a pint a day. Benedict yields this point reluc tantly. ((Indeed we read that wine is not suitable for monks at all," he writes. ((But because, in our day, it is not possible to persuade the monks of this, let us agree at least as to the fact that we should not drink to excess, but sparingly." 73 74 THE FREEMAN February No monk is permitted to call any thing his own. ((He should have nothing at all:" reads the Rule, ((neither a book, nor tablets, nor a pen-nothing at all. For indeed itis not allowed to the monks to have bodies or wills in their own power."

But the instinct for ownership some times broke through this prohibi tion, and the abbot is instructed to search each monk's bed frequently for concealed private property. ((And if anything is found belonging to anyone which he did not receive from the abbot, he shall be subjected to the most severe discipline." Life within the walls outdoes na ture in the harshness of its struggle for existence and only the most fit are permitted to enroll. HWhen any new comer applies for admission," reads the Rule, Han easy entrance shall not be granted him." He must persevere in knocking at the gate, and if he is ((seen after four or five days to endure with patience the insults inflicted upon him, and the difficulty of entrance, and to persist in his demand, entrance shall be allowed him ..." But the new man must then pass time in each of several decompres sion chambers lest he get the spiritual equivalent of ((the bends."

He stays a few days in the guest cell, then graduates to a novice's cell under the surveillance of an elder brother who tells him of ((the harsh ness and roughness of the means through which God is approached .... " After two months of this the Rule is read to him. If he doesn't falter ((again he shall be tried with every kind of endurance." Six months of this and the Rule is again read to him; four more months and another reading. And then, after Hhe shall promise to keep everything, and to obey all the commands that are laid upon him: Then he shall be received in the congregation; knowing that it is decreed, by the law of the Rule, that from that day he shall not be allowed to depart from the monas tery, nor to free his neck from the yoke of the Rule, which, after such long deliberation, he was at liberty either to refuse or receive." Even after this rigorous culling of the unfit the old Adam continued to reassert itself, in ways noted above, and even in physical violence among the monks. This is the implication of Rule LXX: ((No one shall" take it upon himself to strike another with out orders."

Benedictine Influence Such is the discipline of one ear nest and successful. effort to fashion a society of and for saints. It endures to this day. Benedictine monks con,;, verted England. The important Clunisian reformation of the tenth century stemmed from the Benedic tine Abbey at Cluny, France. The Cistercian Order was a twelfth,;, century offshoot. The influence of 1978 THE PARADOX OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 75 these movements on western culture was immense. ~~By degrees," says Newman, writing about Benedict, ~~the woody swamp became a her mitage, a religious house, a farm, an abbey, a seminary, a school of leam iug and a city." Let us turn from the sixth century to the sixteenth, from the historical reality of the Benedictines to a liter ary artist's dream-to Rabelais' exuberant ideal construct of a soci ety of gentlefolk, the Abbey of Theleme. Gargantua is the hero of Rabelais' masterpiece. He is a mighty leader in battle-among other things-and with the help of friends emerged victorious from the Picrocholian War. His friends deserve a reward for their help, and what is a more _ suitable gift for a knight than a castle? This will hardly do for Friar ~rohn of the Funnels, however. Why not, in this case, find a suitable lnonastery and make Friar John its abbot? ~~But the monk gave him a very peremptory answer, that he would never take upon him the charge nor government of monks.

~For how shall I be able,' said he, ~to rule over others, that have not full power and command of myself? If you think,' continued John to Gar gantua, ~that I have done you, or may hereafter do you any acceptable service, give me leave to found an abbey after my own mind and fancy.'" This was done, and we are given a Renaissance man's vision of a model community. The Thelemites had but one rule: Do What Thou Wilt. ~(All their life was spent" writes Rabelais, «(not in laws, statutes, or rules, but accord ing to their own free will and plea sure." This did not mean that Rabelais countenanced a lax hedonism; it means that Rabelais had confidence in the gentleman and his code: HBecause men that are free, well-born, well-bred, and con versant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and spur that prompteth them unto virtuous ac tions and withdraws them from vice, which is called honor. Those same men, when by base subjection and constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside from that noble disposition by which formerly they were inclined to virtue, to shake off that bond of servitude wherein they are so tyrannously en slaved; for it is agreeable to the nature of man to long after things forbidden, and to desire what is de nied us."

In order to get this kind of a per son for his abbey, Rabelais practiced an exclusion almost as rigorous as that set forth in the Benedictine Rule. The inscription on the great gate of Theleme warned off ((. . . religious boobies, sots, imposters, ... bigots." Rabelais wanted no ~~attor neys, barristers, nor bridle champing law-practitioners;" no 76 THE FREEMAN February Husurers, pelf-lickers, . . . gold graspers, coin-gripers. . .. Here enter not, unsociable wight, humorsome churl. ..." . But the red carpet is rolled out for others. ((Here enter you, and welcome from our hearts, All noble sparks, endowed with gallant parts .... Here enter you, pure, honest, faithful, true, Expounders of the Scriptures, old and new; Whose glosses do not plain truth disguise .... Strange doctrines here must neither reap or sow, but Faith and Charity together grow." The net result is that at Theleme, ((Sound bodies, lined with a good mind, Do here pursue with might, Grace, honor, praise, delight."

Mere Freedom-Only That The vision is an enchanting one, and even Albert Jay N ock was moved to enthusiasm. ((The lover of freedom," he writes in his essay on Rabelais, Uthe disbeliever in a dull and vicious mechanization of the human spirit, its debasement and vulgarization of life's abiding val ues, will nowhere find a more abun dant consolation and encourage ment than in this vision of the humanists. Nowhere, we believe, is there a more elevating, convincing, and wholly sound conception of human nature's possibilities when invested with no more than mere freedom-only that." Let it be granted that the vision of Benedict of Nursia and the Rule it inspired reflected a saint's nature and met, to a significant degree, the needs of spiritual athletes for whom life is a period of probation only, and the delights of the world a snare for the soul. Rabelais, on the other hand, although consciously within the Christian heritage, was most at home in that wing of it which em bodied those elements of Chris tianity whIch have been called the last creative achievement of classi cal culture. As a humanist, he pro jected the vision of an ideal society which reflected the new awareness of what a marvelous creature man is at his best-Uhow like a god"-in habiting a world only a little less wonderful than himself.

Thus we have, in theory, taken care of those constructed along heroic lines-the saints and the gen tlefolk. What about the rest of us, who are neither saints nor heroes, and who have been forced to concede that the gentleman's code-while it works well on the tennis court or in the drawing room-does not fully meet the demands of life on all its levels? What about the run-of-the mine citizen? It was possible to dis count him in classical political theory, whose most enduring ex positor, Aristotle, could not conceive of a civilization without slavery. But Christian social theory cannot take this way out. As every man is pre cious in God's sight, so every man must signify in any Christian ~978 THE PARAOOX OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 77 sociology, and he must signify in terms of the Christian understand ing of man-a creature who is out of joint with his true nature, who has to negotiate a fallen world, and who must await another order of reality to attain his own fulfillment.

I take it to be a distinguishing feature of Christian sociology that it is non-ideological and anti-utopian. I would call a social theory ~~ideolog ical" which views man in terms of only one of his aspects; which takes account only of man's material needs; or regards him as a purely spiritual being; or stresses his ra tionality, or his instincts, or what ever, at the expense of his whole ness. It is obvious that man is a creature of many facets, but violence is done if the wholeness of man's nature is ignored or denied. Social Heredity A social theory is Hutopian" to the extent that it assumes that man's felicity is attainable in time and within history by a simple reliance on the natural harmonies, when these are uncorrupted by the artifi cial institutions of civilization. ~~Man is born free," cried Rousseau, Hand is everywhere in chains"-fas tened on him by the societies he has fashioned. Actually, society is man's native habitat. Society is as natural to man as water to a fish-neither organism could survive without its natural environment. As a creature of his genes man is a mere an thropoid; his ~~social heredity" -ab sorbed and learned one generation from another-makes him human.

Harmony, according to the uto pians, is to be attained in one or the other of two directions; by anarch ism or collectivism. That is to say, we might achieve an ideal society if the arrangements between people were the result of freely contracted relationships based on each man's rational calculation of his own self interest or advantage. Or, on the other hand, social harmony might be attained by the political imposi tion of a rational plan from the top down which put every man through his paces, according to the superior wisdom of a ruling elite. In contrast to the position of the utopians---whose dubious premises and faulty reasoning can be used equally well to justify either anar chism or collectivism-man, as he is understood in Christian thought, has his citizenship in two realms, not one after the other, but concur rently. The natural sensory world engages him, obviously. It is an es sential part of his environment which he shares with the animals; but man is the only animal who participates also in a non-spatial, non-temporal environment. This means that so ciety has a more than natural and social significance; it is part of the cosmic scheme.

Our economic needs could not be 78 THE FREEMAN February met if we tackled them individually; and fellowship with others is a ~e mand of our natures. But society has a significance beyond the meeting of our creaturely need for bread and our social need for fellowship; by a just ordering of social life we are, as Augustine put it, ~~schooled for life eternal." City of God The contemporary Anglican theologian, V.A. Demant, writes, ~~perhaps, only because man is not in the Kingdom of God has he to make civilization, but the effort is made because of the pull of his Patria in the Eternal World impels him to make a frame of life which upholds him when he is in via on earth." This point is, of course, the theme of Au gustine's City of God, and I quote from Book XIX. uEven the heavenly city, therefore, while in its state of pilgrimage, avails itself of the peace of earth, and, so far as it can without injuring faith and godliness, desires and maintains a common agreement among men regarding the acquisi tion of the necessaries of life, and makes this earthly peace bear upon the peace of heaven; for this alone can truly be called and esteemed the peace of the reasonable creatures, consisting as it does in the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God and of one another in God."

Christian social theory is at odds with most secular social theory, but this is not the only difficulty; it has intramural problems as well. Yield ing to those who demand a Single, Simple Formula, Christian social theory may become a parody of itself in one or the other of two direc tions-material or spiritual. Al though Marxian communism is a purely secular scheme of salvation on the social level alone, and within time, there are some who have seen no incompatibility between com munism and Christianity. A more common parody of the full-bodied Christian position is that which vaporizes it into a cloying spiritual ity. The former seeks to resolve so cial problems without reference to man's spiritual nature and needs; the latter stresses the inner life as if there could be a healthy spirituality apart from a righteous ordering of human relations. When things are right the inner, spiritual life ofindi viduals is ~~in play" with the struc tures of their social life. Josef Pieper has said that the western culture of Christendom might be characterized as ~~theologically grounded worldli ness."

A Bedrock of Faith If man is more than a natural and social being it follows that the prob lems emerging on these levels can not be resolved, or even understood, on these levels alone. The disloca tions that bedevil us on the politi cal and economic level cannot be 1978 THE PARADOX OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 79 cured at that level because they stem from a malady rooted on the spiritual level; they are surface manifestations of a distortion of our beliefs and our system of values. Our society was originally founded on the bedrock of a spiritual faith, and today we must again probe be neath the surface to that same bed rock. But the purpose of going down to bedrock is not to stay there; it is to build from there! Every Christian believes in spiritual values, but not necessarily in the kind that are vacuum pack aged; not in the kind that· become the private jewel of some connois seur for his solitary ecstasy. The path between altar and marketplace has always been a two-way street.

Jesus' summary of the law was two fold: love God and love your neighbor, balancing ethical expen diture by spiritual income. It con veys something like a half truth and a whole error to label man a spiritual being. He is, in fact, a spiritual being who eats, feels the cold, and needs shelter; a being whose nature demands fellowship with his own kind. True spirituality cannot exist apart from sound think ing' just dealing, and efforts to im prove the quality ofhuman relation ships. We have gone through a period when large numbers of people shared a belief that we could solve just about every human problem by political action. This is, of course, absurd. But it is a sorry reaction to this absurdity to subtract one's weight and influence from such healthy forces as are now at work in social and political life. This mood of retreat and resignation is a dubious kind of spirituality. In reality it is a new ((failure of nerve," and a critic has written caustically about those so afflicted: ~~Ha ving abandoned genuine thought about problems especially the new problems that cannot yield to old formulae and incantations-they luxuriate in the feeling of greater purity and spirituality than their fellows."

The Ancient City If we reduce spirituality to a kind of private fancy it is easy for us to think of religion and politics as two distinct spheres, as separate as church and state. Such a view would have been incomprehensible to the ancient Greeks. The classic study of the religious and civil institutions of ancient Greece and Rome is The Ancient City by Fustel De Coulanges. ((The foundation of a city," he writes, ~(was always a reli gious act ... A city was like a little church, all complete, which had its gods, its dogmas, and its worship .... Neither interest, nor agreement, nor habit creates the social bond; it is this holy communion piously ac complished in the presence of the gods of the city." It was a social 80 THE FREEMAN February system ~~where the state was a reli gious community, the king a pontiff, the magistrate a priest, and the law a sacred formula; where patriotism was piety, and exile excommunica tion; where individual liberty was unknown; where man was enslaved to the state through his soul, his body, and his property." Chris tianity, on the other hand, ~~taught that only a part of man belonged to society. . . . The mind once freed, the greatest difficulty was over come, and liberty was compatible with social order."

It is risky to generalize thus about a complex civilization like Greece which underwent several changes of character over the centuries, so let us use Socrates as a type case. Er nest Barker, in his Political Thought of Plato and Aristotle, writes ~~The laws of his country were to him (Socrates) a sacred thing. . . . For him there was no rule of natural justice outside the law ... what is just is simply what is commanded in the laws." Barker goes on to say that ~~To a State like the ancient State both church and State in one-any new religious beliefs, or disbeliefs, resulting in the formation of hostile groups of opinion, were in reality dangerous._" The ancient society, in other words, represents the fusing of religion and politics into a unitary state, leaving little elbowroom for the exercise of individual initiative. ~~The victory of Christianity," wri tes Fustel, ~~marks the end of ancient society. . . . It was not the domestic religion of any family, the national religion of any city, or of any race. It belonged neither to a caste nor to a corporation. From its first appearance it called to itself the whole human race." Such a religion was bound to have momentous polit ical consequences. Christianity created a new kind of individualism.

After some fifteen centuries of its influence, ~~The Englishman .. ," G. G. Coulton writes, Hcould carry his own atmosphere with him every where; he was self-sufficient avec sa Bible et son Anglaise." Encounter and Tension The enlargement of the idea of God, from a family, urban or tribal deity into a Being with universal attributes, developed the kind of re ligious institutiona church which must forever confront politi cal institutions in an atmosphere of encounter and tension. The history of Europe is in large measure polarized between the two powers; sword and scepter, crown and miter, Empire and Papacy. Such a dualism is fatal to the idea of the monolithic state. The effect of this polarity is to decentralize power and disperse au thority. There is no-other way to deal with the root problem of poli tics-the governance of power. In addition to the division of authority between Empire and Papacy, power 1978 THE PARADOX OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 81 was further fragmentized among numerous kings, counts and lesser officials.

In practice, then, during much of the history of Europe, power got itself deadlocked; with the result that there was widespread practice of what might be called ~~interstitial liberties" by the people. Men were free in the spacious nooks, crannies and crevices of European society long before the law moved up to recognize specific freedoms. We had to wait till the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for a developed philosophy of freedom.! But just about as that occurred, Christianity as conscious faith lost its hold on men's minds and loyal ties, and we began to slide back toward a kind of pseudo-theocracy, or tttotalitarian democracy," which, in modern communism and fascism, amalgamates religion with politics and succeeds in debasing both. Poli tics, in the collectivized state, is a sheer power struggle with no con cern for the ends of justice and free dom. Religion, in the collecti vized state, must be forced into state ser vice as an opiate of the people. Om nipotent government cannot abide a IThe history of the Eastern Church and Empire is another story. Christopher Dawson writes: cCThe Byzantine Church became so closely bound up with the Byzantine Empire that it formed a single social organism which could not be divided without being destroyed.

..." The Making ofEurope, p. 57. uni versal religion; it must construct its own domesticated variety of sec ularized religion. And thus we complete one of those enormous spirals of history. Reli gion, ethics and politics are once again wrapped up in one package, as they so largely were in Greek specu lation. The individual Greek could hardly conceive of ends for his life outside his Polis. Aristotle's remark that ttman is a political animal" might be translated ~~man is a crea ture found only in city-states." Beyond Society With modern men it is different. Our pilgrimage has brought us to a different turn on the spiral of his tory and we know that we have a potential that projects us beyond so ciety. We have acquired a sophisti cation which will not permit us to be reabsorbed into our societies with out inner tension and conflict. This is one result of our centuries of en counter with Christianity. We may be anti-or non-Christian but never theless its effects have leaked into our lives to shape the modern psyche in the region of the values and prem ises we take for granted. Our mood is mostly Christian, whatever creed or philosophy we profess.

This may sound like a call for a religious revival, and, in a sense, it is just that. But a mere revival of religion is not what we need, unless the religion which is revived under82 THE FREEMAN February stands that· man exists for ends be yond society and beyond history Augustine's two cities again. Nor will this sort of a revi val be ac complished by mere exhortation. Perhaps it will not happen at all so long as men expect to wring utopian results out of any kind of political or economic action. There are political implications in the concept of spiritual liberty; the practice of justice is urged upon· us as a religious imperative, and the relevance of the Christian religion to American institutions has been spelled out many times. But where does economics fit in? At first glance, economics appears to deal solely with the provisioning of our material and creaturely needs and to have no religious significance.

This is a misreading of the situation, I believe, so let me say a few words about economics. Economic Activity Fundamental to Human Existence Economic activity is fundamen tal to human existence. A Robinson Crusoe could get along without politicking, but ifhe did not work he would die of hunger and exposure. Emerging from economic activity are the concepts of rights to property and claims to service around which many political battles are fought. Economics, on the surface, deals with prices, .production and the op erations of the market as determined by the buying habits of every one of us. In reality, however, economics is concerned with the conservation and stewardshi p of the earth's scarce goods; human energy, time, mate rial resources and natural forces. These goods-in-short-supply are our birthright as creatures of this planet. Use them wisely, as natural piety dictates and common sense confirms-that is providently and economically-and human well being is the result. Ignore the realities in this area, as we have done in our time, and a host of evils follows. We might be able to live with economic ills if we didn't think we could cure them with political nostrums, but our political efforts aimed at mopping up the conse quences of economic mistakes head us in the direction of the Total State.

Every collectivist ideology-from the Welfare State idea to totalita rian communism-is strung on a framework of economic error. People are prisoners of their beliefs, and so long as they cherish a wrong under standing of economics they will be appealed to by one form of collec tivism or another. But when they embrace sound economics, collec tivism will cease to be a menace. All creatures take the world pretty much as they find it, save man. Man alone has the gifts which ena ble him to entertain an idea and then transform his environment in 1978 THE PARADOX OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIETY 83 accordance with it. He is equipped with needs which the world as it is cannot satisfy. Thus he is compelled to alter and rearrange the natural order by employing his energy on raw materials so as to put them into consumable form. Before he can do much of anything else, man must manufacture, grow, and transport.

His creaturely needs man shares with the animals, but he alone employs economic means to satisfy them. This is an enormous leap. up ward, for by relying on the economic means man becomes so efficient at satisfying his bodily hungers that he gains a measure of independence from them. And when they are as suaged, he feels the tug of hungers no animal ever feels: for truth, for beauty, for meaning, for God. A Means to All Our Ends Whatever may be man's capacities in the upper reaches of his nature-to think, dream, pray, or create-it is certain that he will attain to none of these unless he survives. And he cannot survive for long unless he engages in economic activity. At the lowest level economic action achieves merely economic ends: food, clothing, and shelter. But when these matters are efficiently in hand, economic action is a means to all our ends, not only to more refined economic goods but to the highest goods of the mind and spirit. Add flying buttresses and spires to four walls and a roof, and a mere shelter for the body develops into a cathedral to house the spirit of man.

There are two schools of thought which incline to dismiss economics, but neither has much excuse for being except as a protest against the errors and onesidedness of the other. On the one hand are th~ economic determinists, who argue as if man were merely a soulless appendage to his material needs. For them, the modes of production at any given time decree the nature of man's in stitutions, his philosophies, and even his religions. Economics, under this dispensation, will lose its inde pendence and become a mere tool of the State. On the opposite side of the fence is a school of thought which appears to regard it as a cosmic calamity that each soul is sullied by connection with a body which must be fed and kept warm. Spiritual purity vlill not be attained until there is deliv erance from this incubus; but until that happy day let us try to forget that man has creaturely needs which only the products of human labor can satisfy . Nothing in this scheme disposes men to pay any attention to economics! But there is a third way.

The mainstream of the J udeo Christian tradition is characterized by a robust earthiness which makes it as alien to the materialism of the 84 THE FREEMAN first of the above alternatives as to the disembodied spirituality of the second. Soul and body are not at war with each other, but are parts of our total human nature. It is the whole man who needs to be saved, not just the soul. Creaturely needs are, therefore, legitimate; and being legitimate they sanction the economic activities by which alone they can be met. They cannot be met by political action. The market economy presupposes a moral order, and it needs a framework of law to punish breaches of the rules. But granted this institutional frame work economic activities are self starting and internally regulated. Political action which goes deep er into economic life than main taining the Rule of Law commits the injustice of giving economic advan tage to some at the expense of others.

Christianity is a religion of world and life affirmation. It includes the dimension of eternity but it is not ((other worldly." It can therefore ex tend diplomatic recognition to the A Dangerous Paradox temporal order and respect the in tegrity of its political and economic rules while insisting at the same time that ultimate felicity is not to be attained by any conceivable im provement of that order. Utopia is not within its purview. Contemporary social and scien tific theory is now at least open ended toward this idea, having shed the utopian expectancy of last cen tury. Theories about people and things are no longer expected to hang together with the neatness of a proposition in Euclidean geometry. The rationalist may demand that life conform to his verbal formula tions of it, but reality refuses to be thus coerced. Anyone can draw up a blueprint for an ideal society com posed of bloodless abstractions who are expected to perform like pup pets. But when we deal with man in all his concreteness, the rules must be tempered with artistry. In reli gious terminology, this artistry is the practice of the traditional reli gious virtues of mercy, compassion and charity. ® IDEAS ON LIBERTY WE must beware of the dangers that lie in our most generous wishes.

Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellowmen the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. LIONEL TRILLING Scott D. Palmer ~ The 1\ Exploiters ONE of the most dangerous economic myths of our time is the notion that the relative affl.uence of the Western industrial nations is somehow re sponsible for the grinding poverty of the so-called ((third world." Accord ing to this view, greedy Western businessmen who invest in under developed countries ((exploit" the inhabitants by paying them starva tion wages and draining their coun try of its natural resources. The ef fect of this double exploitation, so the liberal doctrine goes, is to reduce a once happy and prosperous people to slavery and abject destitution. As a solution, we are told that the ill gotten wealth of the richer nations, especially the United States, must Mr. Palmer is a doctoral student in philosophy and economics at Indiana University.